I took off my jacket but couldn’t seem to get my shirt unbuttoned while I kept Bridgett from falling, so I ended up taking her into the shower with my clothes still on. She kept her arms wrapped around my neck as I filled my palms with liquid soap and ran them over her skin.
When I washed between her legs, she flinched and started crying again. I ended up holding her for a minute, not having any idea what I was supposed to do. Eventually, she steadied enough for me to finish.
Once she was rinsed, I stood her on the bathmat and tried to dry her off, but it wasn’t easy with one hand holding her up.
“I can do it,” she said with a scratchy voice.
I steadied her as she ran the towel around and then rubbed at her hair.
“Do you…um…do you have a hairbrush?”
I laughed and ran my hand over my closely cropped hair.
“I guess you wouldn’t, huh?” She smiled a little, but it seemed to hurt her busted lip.
She sat on a towel at the edge of my bed, wrapped up in my robe as she ran her fingers through the strands of brown hair. Her hair was a lot darker when it was wet, and I tried to force thoughts of another woman from my head for a while, but it
didn’t really work.
It never did.
I peeled off my wet clothes and hung them over the shower door. Once I was dry, I pulled on some clean ones and grabbed my phone.
“I could use a little help at my place,” I said into the phone.
“You get shot?” the voice on the other end asked immediately.
Franklyn Johnson might have been a doctor once, and he might not have been. No one ever called him Doc or anything like that – just Franklyn. Still, he knew how to take a bullet out of a leg, stitch people up, and do a lot of other emergency room kinds of procedures. He did stuff like that when Rinaldo’s people were hurt, and a hospital visit would end up causing questions.
He wasn’t expecting a beat up hooker at my place.
“She’s been through the wringer,” Franklyn said when he left the bedroom. He reached up behind his head and scratched at the overgrown, graying mop there, which reminded me of Christopher Lloyd’s character from Taxi. “I sedated her and gave her a morning after pill, but there isn’t much else I can do.”
“Anything more serious?”
“What, aside from the multiple rapes? What else do you think she needs?”
His eyes shot daggers.
“I found her, asshole,” I growled, and his look towards me softened a bit.
“Nothing permanent,” he finally said. “Well, not on the outside. I doubt she’ll ever be the same on the inside. No broken bones, no internal bleeding. Dehydrated a bit – make sure you get some more water in her when she wakes up.”
He left, and I went back inside to see how she was doing. She was asleep, and Odin was right there beside the bed, watching her.
“Are you finally going to make yourself useful as a guard dog?” I asked him.
He sneezed and then peered up at me through curly white hair.
“She’ll be okay,” I informed him, though I wasn’t sure why I felt the need to do so. Odin dropped down on the floor next to the bed, and I moved around to the other side to get in.
As soon as I lay down, the exhaustion hit me. My mind didn’t race from one horrific image to another but focused on the sweet scent of the woman beside me. I reached out and carefully wrapped my arms around her, making sure I didn’t cause additional pain.
With Bridgett nestled against me, I finally got some sleep.
*****
It was hours after I woke up when Bridgett finally came down from the sedative, but she fell back asleep almost immediately afterwards. I made her drink some water before she dozed off again and then just watched her for a while. When she woke up the second time, she seemed a little better, even with her black eye and bruised cheek.