“Pretty much anyone with a penis.”
Ah, that cleared things up. I’d wondered, considering I could see how he felt about Fin. “Oh, well, we have similar taste then.”
He snorted. “You have no idea how right you are.”
Neither of us were going to touch that one. For now, we seemed to have a truce built around mutual survival. I could agree to that without argument for once.
He slid the needle into my skin again and I focused on keeping still. The urge to pull away from the pain was hard to resist. I concentrated on breathing in and out, careful to keep the inhale shallow so I wouldn’t mess up his work.
“Next time I ask if we can go home, can we just do that?” I asked.
He chuckled and then winced himself. “I wondered how long it would take you to get your I told you so in.”
“I got that in earlier,” I sputtered. “This one was just a follow up.”
He lay a couple of small pieces of tape across the wound and sat back. “All right, my turn. Are you able to do it or should I glue it and wait until I can get to a hospital?”
I huffed. “Glue was an option? Damn. I would have chosen that one.”
“Not for you. You were getting stitches whether you wanted them or not. Maybe glue, too. We’ll see what it looks like once you sit up.”
With both hands, he clasped mine and gently pulled me to sitting. I hissed out a breath and closed my eyes against it all, breathing heavily even though I did nothing more than haul my body weight forward.
“Okay. Your turn, I guess,” I whispered.
He handed me a curved needle, already threaded with a thick glossing black thread. Then he scooted forward so I could reach him without having to stretch myself forward. A long slice cut down his side, almost under his armpit. I helped push his shirt up onto his shoulder and then eyed the red seeping line.
“This is going to hurt,” I said, poising the sharp point against his flesh.
He angled the flashlight, and I dug the needle into one side of his skin, underneath, and then through the other side. It tugged, the needle not slipping easily but catching tight. I had to pinch the flesh to slide the needle cleanly with each pass.
He didn’t so much as flinch while I sewed his skin.
“I’m sorry that I’m not great at this,” I said. “You’ll likely have a worse scar than you gave me.”
When he took the needle back and slipped it into his field kit, exhaustion weighed his shoulders down, but his jaw held the same stubborn angle it always did. Like he didn’t know how to rest, even if he were offered the chance.
“What happened to Fin?” I asked.
He met my eyes, his height making it so he gazed down at me. While he glared, I gently pulled his shirt back down his shoulder and helped him slip his arm inside the hole.
“You didn’t feel it?” he asked.
“What?”
Shit. “I did something wrong, didn’t I?”
He slipped his kit into his cargo pocket. The etched lines around his eyes gave way to something else. Pity? Guilt?
When he met my eyes again, they were softer, less guarded. “It wasn’t your fault. I know that and when he wakes up, he’ll know that too.”
I dug my fingers into his forearm. “Just tell me what I did, please.”
“You were about to die,” he said, “and you yanked on the bond you had with Fin. You took too much too fast, and it caused a whiplash, like a wave slamming against a boat and then rebounding back outward. You took out everything, including us.”
I hung my head into my hands even though the motion burned through both my sides. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I only reached out and latched onto anything I could find. The magic was there, waiting, and I used it.”
He patted my arm gently, the nicest gesture he’d made toward me since we met. “Don’t worry about it. We’re alive for now, but we need to wake Fin and get him out of here. Regroup at home and come up with another plan.”