Accidentally His

by Brooks, Sarah J.

  The two men were fighting as Caleb threw a heavy punch that left Peter dazed. I’m pretty sure I was still screaming, but I couldn’t hear myself, I couldn’t hear anything. Even as Caleb stood over me talking to me and looking at my leg, I couldn’t hear him. It was like the world was shrinking so quickly I was about to disappear.

  Caleb grabbed me and lifted me into his arms as if he was carrying a single grocery sack. My head was hard to hold up, and I felt my eyes rolling into the back of my head as he lay me on the couch. Caleb grabbed one of the towels and wrapped it around my leg before I saw him take the gun off the hooks and go back outside.

  “Put your hands up,” Caleb yelled out at Peter. “Do it now or I’ll shoot you dead. I’m not messing around! Stop right there, or I’m going to shoot you.”

  There was no response. Instead, all I heard was a single shot. Caleb did what he said he was going to do, he shot Peter.

  The sound of the gunshot echoed through the woods. It was louder than I expected. I shook my head in denial of what had just happened. Peter had followed me into the mountains, he had tried to kill me, he almost did kill me, and now Caleb was going to go to jail for killing Peter. It was all too much.

  “Did you kill him?” I asked as Caleb set the gun on the table and knelt to look at my leg.

  “He ran away. I think I got him though, but I’m not sure. He won’t get far in this weather with an injury like that. He’s probably going to die in the woods.”

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have gone out. I thought I saw him earlier. Then I thought I was imagining it. I’m sorry,” I said as my speech started to become mumbled. “I was just so bored. I went for wood. He was there. I am sorry.”

  “You knew him?” Caleb asked with a questioning look on his face.

  “Yes, he wants to kill me,” I managed to say before I closed my eyes and felt like I was going to drift off to sleep. “He’s out of jail.”

  “Don’t you go to sleep,” Caleb yelled at me and grabbed my face to shake me back and forth. “This is serious, Jordan. You need to stay awake. Do you hear me?” He shook me until I opened my eyes again and looked at him.

  “I’m so tired ...”

  “Jordan, I’m going to have to stitch up this leg. It’s cut down to the bone. You’re in shock right now, so it’s the best time to do it. I don’t think you’ll feel much. I’m sorry.”

  I was confused why he was saying he was sorry. Everything was spinning, and I tried to keep my eyes open, but they kept closing. It was impossible to stay awake. I was so tired.

  Caleb grabbed a small box from under the sink. It looked like a tackle box, but I was pretty sure I was just hallucinating from the pain. Why on earth would Caleb need a tackle box to fix my leg?

  “Just wrap it up like I did to your hand. It will be okay,” I muttered.

  “No, Jordan, it won’t. You’ll bleed out, and this thing is going to get infected if it stays open. I can see your bone.”

  “You can what …” I made the mistake of sitting up to look at my leg. He was right. I could see the bone. I’d never seen anything like it before. It was like an out of body experience as I tried to hold myself up and look at my leg that I couldn’t even feel anymore.

  The longer I looked at my leg, the sicker I started to feel. My stomach grumbled, and I fell back onto the couch with just enough time to turn my head toward the floor as I vomited. My head spun, my heart pounded. I couldn’t stay awake any longer. It was all too much.

  “This is going to hurt,” Caleb said with only a moment of warning before he put some sort of liquid on my leg that made my whole leg come back to life.

  “Shit, what is that?” I screamed out in pain. “It hurts. It’s burning. What did you do?”

  Anger filled me, and I looked up at Caleb with the nastiest expression I’d ever had. I hadn’t been in pain, and now I was. Whatever he’d just put on my leg made it feel like it was on fire. It was horrible. I couldn’t take it.

  “It’s disinfecting the wound before I stitch it up,” Caleb said without turning toward me to comfort me at all. His expression was that of a man who had a job to do. He pressed the towel back around my leg and knelt down as he held a needle and a piece of fishing line in his hand.

  I shook my head in disbelief as I watched him lean down closer to me. “What are you doing?” I yelled at him. “Get away from my leg. You can’t do that.”

  Caleb didn’t even look at me. I watched as he moved his hand up and down and looking like he was working, but I couldn’t feel my leg any longer, so I really had no idea. Finally, Caleb was so engrossed in whatever he was doing that I closed my eyes. I had to rest. I couldn’t do it anymore.

  Chapter 16

  Caleb

  She didn’t move her toes when I ran the back of the spoon over them. That was a bad sign. There was a natural reflex in the foot that should have moved them. It was a good sign that she’d been in pain when I cleaned out her wound, though, at least she was still feeling pain.

  Somewhere while I was stitching up her leg, Jordan passed out. I wanted her to stay awake, but at least while she was sleeping she wasn’t moving around, and I could concentrate on what I was doing.

  I’d never had to stitch someone up before. The feeling of the needle going through her skin was disgusting; I never wanted to feel that sensation again. At least I knew for a fact that becoming a doctor was not on the horizon for me.

  As Jordan slept, all I could think about was that the guy who had attacked her was going to try to come back. If he was injured, which I thought he was, he wasn’t going to go too far from the house. He’d likely been sleeping in the shed, and that was why we couldn’t get the door open. There wasn’t another place for him to get out of the weather.

  It was crazy that this guy knew Jordan and had found her up here. He looked familiar to me, though, and the more I thought about him, the more it was bugging me that I thought I knew him. I’d only seen him for a minute in the light from the house shining on him, but I definitely had seen him before.

  “Am I alive?” Jordan asked as she started to wake up a little.

  I was sitting on the floor where I’d cleaned up her vomit from earlier and then put a bucket and towel down just in case she was sick again. I couldn’t leave her side while she was sleeping; I was terrified by how deeply she’d been sleeping.

  “Yes, you can sleep now. Just tell me if you need anything.”

  “Water, I feel like I need water.”

  “I think that’s good. Yes, let me get you some water. You need to stay hydrated.”

  I filled a cup and brought it over with the one straw I had in my house. It was an extra that had been in the fast food bag from one of my trips into town. I wasn’t normally a big fan of fast food, but sometimes it was fun to grab a meal and bring it back to eat in the cabin.

  She took the tiniest of sips and then pulled away. “I can’t,” she winced as the water went down. “I’m going to throw up.”

  “No, you’re okay. We will just take a tiny sip every couple of minutes. It will stay down,” I reassured her.

  It was going to take all day to get her to drink this one cup of water at this rate, but it was necessary. Her body had been through a lot and staying hydrated was all I could do for her right now. Somehow, I had to get her down the mountain and to some help. Her leg was badly injured. The ax had gone through the muscle, and it looked like she had a broken bone as well. Luckily, the bleeding had stopped, but I was pretty sure she was going to start getting sick if I didn’t get her some help. She couldn’t feel her foot, and the wound was only barely shut from my poor suture job. I didn’t know how we were going to get down, but we definitely needed to do it.

  “Did he cut it off?” she asked.

  “What? Your foot?” I laughed a little.

  “Yeah.”

  “No, it’s still there. Are you in pain?”

  “Yes, but not as much as you would think. Why can’t I feel my foot then? If it’s still there
?”

  “It is still there, and I’m not sure why you can’t feel it. The ax did some major damage. You’ll need an expert to take a look at it soon.”

  I stroked her hair out of her face as she drifted in and out of sleep. Even in the midst of the terror she had just been through, Jordan looked so beautiful that I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Every now and again, I’d hold the straw up to her mouth, so she could get another sip, and we went on like that for hours until the sun rose again in the morning.

  The scene in front of the house was like something out of a horror movie. A large puddle of blood soaked the ground at the bottom of the stairs. In the distance, I saw another trail of blood that went off into the woods, that had to be from me hitting the attacker with the shot I fired.

  The bloody ax was still on the ground near the steps, and I walked down and was about to grab it before I stopped myself. This was a crime scene. This ax had been used to nearly kill Jordan. I decided not to touch it. As soon as we could get to some help, I would call the police and send them up here, so they could gather evidence.

  “Caleb!” Jordan screamed, and I ran back inside.

  “I’m here, I’m here,” I reassured her.

  She opened her eyes for only a brief moment as I put the straw up to her lips, and she sucked in another small sip of water. As soon as she knew I was there for her, she drifted back to sleep.

  The makeshift tourniquet that I had placed just below Jordan’s knee seemed to be loosening up, and I was about to tighten it when I realized the bleeding had stopped. If Jordan stayed still, I was pretty sure I could leave the compression fabric off her leg and let the circulation go through again. The problem with all of this was that I had no idea what I was doing. I was trying not to harm her, but I could have been doing all the wrong things.

  “How is my leg?” Jordan asked later that evening when she woke up again.

  “You’re going to have an epic scar.”

  “Did you loosen the tourniquet?”

  “Yes, a little,” I replied as I sat on the coffee table in front of her.

  “You need to loosen it for a few minutes every hour but then tighten it back up if there’s bleeding. I think that will help so I don’t lose the leg.”

  “You’re not going to lose it,” I said without any confidence at all in what I was saying.

  She smiled at me as if she knew I was totally lying. It was a possibility that she was going to have some major damage down there. It was probably a possibility that she’d lose it too. I really didn’t know anything about it. For all I knew, she could get it stitched up and be just fine. I had to be positive and think of the best possible outcome.

  “Tell me about you,” Jordan asked as she adjusted herself on the couch and looked up at me with her big eyes.

  “Not much to tell.”

  “Please, Caleb. The pain is starting to set in; I need you to distract me.”

  “I’ve got some pain medicine around here I could give you. Let me go check.” I started to get up, but she grabbed my hand and pulled me back. “Or I could get it in a little bit. Hmmm, what do you want to know?”

  “Anything. “

  “Well, I’ve been living up here for about two years. I used to be an engineer …” She didn’t seem entertained at all by these things that I’d already told her. “My parents think I’ve gone insane and make my brother meet with me once a month to check on me.”

  Jordan smiled at this new piece of information. “You have a brother?”

  “Yes, Jeff, and he’s super responsible, and nothing like me at all.”

  “Does he look like you?”

  “Yes, almost identical. He’s one year older, and a lot of people used to think we were twins. With my long hair, we didn’t look the same, though. Plus, I’m in shape, and he’s got a bit of a beer belly.”

  “More,” Jordan said as she closed her eyes. She looked really happy lying there listening to me tell her about my life. Talking about myself wasn’t at all something I liked to do, but I did like that Jordan looked comfortable at that moment, and I was willing to keep talking if that meant she could get some rest.

  “My brother is a financial advisor. He was the one who first told me to invest in Bitcoin. I honestly didn’t know much about it at all. I was just working my regular nine-to-five job and decided to start buying up the coins. Jeff never really said how much to invest, and I didn’t know I was putting more money into it than other people. I didn’t understand how volatile that market was at all.”

  “So how many Bitcoin did you buy?” Jordan asked without opening her eyes.

  “A lot. I bought ten times as many as anyone my brother was advising. He actually thought I was going to lose a lot of money on them and at one time told me to sell. The only reason I didn’t sell was that an intern came to work at our office, and he started talking about the technology behind cryptocurrency, and I began to understand it more.”

  “So, you’re rich?”

  I slid off the table and sat on the ground in front of Jordan again while I handed her the straw to take a sip from. Her milky skin looked especially pale, and her breathing was slow and labored. There was a calmness that surrounded me at that moment, though. Jordan was a really strong girl. She was going to make it through this thing; I knew it. The only thing I had to figure out was what I was supposed to do to facilitate her making it through the whole thing.

  “I can live comfortably,” I replied. “Are you still in pain?”

  “Yes, but I’m so tired too. I think I can go back to sleep. Is it okay to go back to sleep?”

  “I don’t know.” I laughed. “I do think I need to figure out a way to get you down the mountain. It’s going to be impossible with the truck, though. There’s just too much snow.”

  “Kiss me,” she said as she winced in pain.

  “You’re in pain. I’m not going to kiss you. Let me get the pain pills.”

  “Kissing releases endorphins that can ward off the pain naturally. Just kiss me, you jerk,” she said and tugged me toward her.

  Jordan wrapped her arms around my neck and roughly kissed me. At first, it seemed so unnatural to be kissing her at a time like that. She was in pain; she was hurt. I felt like I was somehow taking advantage of her.

  “How’s that?” I asked.

  “Okay, go get the pain medicine.” She laughed.

  I hopped up and grabbed the old bottle of pills from my medicine cabinet. I had been given them when I dropped a log onto one of my toes while building the cabin. I’d only taken two or three of the pills and then felt well enough to continue without taking any more of them.

  “How many?”

  “Two,” Jordan said as she read the bottle. “But I’m afraid I’m going to throw them up without eating something. And I’m afraid I’m going to throw up anyways.”

  “How about a bite of an apple first? Maybe a couple of bites?” I asked as I grabbed an apple and cut it up for her.

  Being a caretaker wasn’t really my thing. I honestly couldn’t remember a time when I’d actually been around someone who was sick, and I was the person in charge of caring for them. When we were younger, my brother was always the one who would help out if our mother was sick and our father was at work.

  Even when my ex-girlfriend had been sick with the flu, I didn’t come over and offer to help her. I ordered her some food to be delivered and sent some flowers. At the time, that seemed like a really romantic thing to do since I was busy working, and I didn’t want to get sick myself. But as I was caring for Jordan, I felt a level of compassion that surprised me. I was willing to do whatever she needed just to make her more comfortable.

  After eating a little bit of the apple, Jordan took two pain pills, but she still looked like she was in a lot of pain. Her face was tight with tension, and her hands clenched as she started to take deep breaths in and then let them out again.

  “How long do these take to work?” she asked as she held her breath.

  �
��I’m not sure, maybe twenty minutes. Is there anything else I can do?”

  “Yes,” she said and grabbed my hand and slid it down her pants. “And kiss me while you do it.”

  “What?” I asked totally confused by what was going on.

  “Make me orgasm. It will release the endorphins.” She grabbed me by the shirt with her free hand and pulled me down to her.

  “I don’t want to hurt you. Maybe we should just wait for the meds to kick in?”

  “Kiss me,” she ordered.

  Being forced to kiss someone wasn’t all that sexy, but I did as she asked. When I felt her body start to relax a little, it was reassuring that whatever I was doing was actually helping her. It was extremely confusing for my body, though. I was rock hard with excitement even as I worried terribly that I was going to do something that would cause Jordan more pain.

  She held my hand against her and started moving her hips up and down until I finally started to play with her body. Under no circumstances would I have suggested fingering her while she was in the midst of trying to recover from such a heinous injury. It seemed very counterintuitive, and I wasn’t happy about it at all.

  “Is this okay?” I asked as she started to moan a little.

  “Yes, keep going. The pain is getting better.”

  I did as she asked and kissed her while my fingers continued to play. She was soaking wet with excitement, so at least I knew her body liked what I was doing. “Did you read this somewhere?” I asked as I pulled away. “I mean it seems like something that might have been in one of those magazines like Cosmopolitan.”

  “Yes,” she groaned and pulled my lips back to hers. “Less talking and more moving.”

  “Okay, but I want to go on the record as saying this was all your suggestion. I had no part in this.”

  “Shhh,” Jordan said and went back to kissing me. With her good leg she was pushing herself up and down a little, so her body rubbed against my fingers in just the right way. I was afraid of getting too rough with her, but Jordan was on a mission and continued to thrust her hips hard against me.

  “Yes,” she moaned. “Right there.”