“Can you handle blood?” he asks. “You’re not the type who faints, are you?”
The words could be condescending, but there’s no mocking in his tone. There’s only concern.
“I’m fine,” I manage through dry lips.
His smile is appraising, weirdly warming my stomach when he says, “My kind of girl.”
He turns a chair around and straddles it. Crossing his arms on the chairback, he says, “Wash it out with the water first. I’ll walk you through it.”
I stare at his broad back. Every muscle, the way he’s built underneath that tanned skin, is visible when he moves. A mere twitch reveals how perfectly his male form is cut.
There are no scars, no evidence of other bad things he’s done. There’s only that hole in his shoulder. The blood runs in a thin trickle down his flank and into the denim of his jeans. Here, in the light, I can see the dark patch that makes the blue seem black. How much blood has he lost? It must be hurting like hell. How can he sit there and act like it’s nothing but a bee sting?
He glances over his shoulder, looking like he’s taking stock of me, probably wondering if he’d need to threaten me with the gun to get me to cooperate. “Ready when you are.”
On closer inspection, I notice the thin layer of perspiration on his forehead. That’s why his hair looks wet. It’s not soaking wet but drizzling wet. He’s sweating. He’s feeling that gunshot, and it’s taking its toll. Yet he doesn’t as much as flinch when I soak a gauze pad in the soapy water and press it on the wound.
“Wash it until it runs clean,” he says.
I do my best, squeezing the water over the hole in his back until the bleeding is a pink dilution of blood mixed with water.
He hands me a pair of tweezers. “You’re going to have to pull out the bullet. It’s going to bleed a shitload when it comes out.” He shifts stacks of gauzes in packets labelled sterilized to the side. “Use this to press on the wound.”
Shit. Okay. I can do this. I mean, I could refuse and hope he’ll bleed out, but it looks like it’ll take a long time before he keels over, and he may just decide to shoot me before then.
He tears one of the packages with the gauzes open with his teeth and gives me a tilted, sideways smile. “You okay?”
My answer is faint. The sound scrapes in my throat. “Yeah.”
“You’re doing great, baby doll.”
I let the encouragement sink in as he gives me a bottle of disinfectant. I drench my hands and the tweezers and briefly close my eyes before stretching his broken skin between my thumb and forefinger.
“Can you see it?” he asks.
It’s there, a flash of copper buried inside red flesh. “Yes.”
“Good. That means you don’t have to cut me to get it out. Don’t be afraid to get a good grip.”
I try, but he sucks air through his teeth as the levers of the tweezers slip off the metal.
“Sorry,” I mumble.
“It’s all right,” he says in a strained voice. “Keep going.”
It takes a few tries before my hand starts shaking too much to get a good grip. I’m not going to manage. I’m being too gentle.
Gritting my teeth, I stop being careful and wiggle the tweezers deeper. I’m hurting him, but I keep going like he ordered until there’s a soft suction sound and the bullet pops free. In reflex, I catch it in my palm.
I stare at it. It feels unreal—that this tiny chunk of metal can kill a man, that I’m doing this, and that I’m here, held hostage to play nurse for my kidnapper. Opening my fingers, I let the bullet drop onto the table.
Like he said, blood pumps from the wound. The sight spurs me back into action. I grab the gauze, breathing as hard as I’m pressing it against his back.
“Here.” He hands me a toothbrush still in its wrapping and a bottle of saline solution. “Scrub it well. Make sure there’s no gunpowder left.”
The gritty tone of his voice speeds my actions. I rip open the toothbrush with one hand and drench it with the saline solution to do as he said.
It’s gory work, but what jars me more than his shredded skin and muscle is the pain I must be causing. Through it all, he doesn’t make a sound, not even a grunt.
I work as fast as I can. The quicker I do this, the sooner the agony will be over for both of us. As much as this must be physical agony for him, it’s mental agony for me to cause any living creature pain, even a hijacker and kidnapper.
When I’ve scrubbed as well as I could, I wash the wound with the clean water from the second dish and press another gauze on it.