Bad Case of Loving You

by Laney Cairo

  Jesus Christ, we were both awash with blood now.

  I ripped the catheter kit open and put it on the bed beside Heidi, who was starting to look a little shocky. Damn, but I didn’t want to be doing this, and I supposed Heidi probably felt the same way, too.

  The IV catheter went in first go. That was one of the advantages of general medicine; I’d spent all my training putting IV lines into people with dodgy veins. Kind of like anesthetics, only nobody had ever sued me.

  “I don’t suppose you’ve stolen some Ringer’s Lactate and a giving set, too?” I asked Matthew.

  He shook his head. “Sorry. No IV fluids at all. We’re actively discouraged from stealing expensive stuff.”

  Oh, yeah, that would be me lecturing them about the cost of stock.

  Now I had my hands free I checked Heidi over quickly. She was conscious, and looking panicked, so I nodded reassuringly. Pulse was fast and thready, but that could just be the fear and pain, not the blood loss.

  I checked her arm where Matthew’s hands were clamped so tightly over my poor green shirt that his knuckles were white. The shirt was soaked through completely and blood was seeping down her arm. Figure a cup in the shirt, another cup on the mattress, and one on the floor. She was going to be running out of blood volume soon.

  “How long?” I asked Matthew.

  “Four minutes,” he said.

  Damn, we had another five or so to wait for an ambulance.

  I grabbed the cleanest looking housemate and got him to hold Heidi’s legs up with his hands. Heidi was breathing fast now; hypovolemic shock was a bitch.

  We waited. I’d learnt something about detachment during my miserable ER rotation, and there was a certain comfort in finding that it was still there, just waiting for someone to bleed all over me.

  I looked at Matthew’s face. He was completely focused on Heidi, and it took me a moment to realise he was counting her respirations. I felt for her pulse in her wrist, and it was there still. Good, she hadn’t lost so much blood pressure that her peripheral pulses were gone.

  There were sirens outside. Sirens were good. Then two burly looking men in the St. John’s green uniform were kneeling down beside Heidi.

  “I’m a doctor,” I said. “There’s tendon and artery damage, vitals are off. I put an IV catheter in for you.”

  They took over, giving Heidi oxygen and doing something about fluid volume replacement immediately, then moving her onto their portable gurney.

  “I suppose you want me to ride with her, don’t you?” I said, knowing it was inevitable. No paramedic was going to turn down the chance to shift legal responsibility to a doctor if they could.

  When they lifted Heidi’s gurney up, I stood, my knees creaking, and tossed my keys to Matthew. He looked a bit shell-shocked, standing there shirtless, blood liberally smeared over him. Not quite what I had in mind for a date.

  He nodded and clutched the keys in his hand, and I followed the paramedics out into the London night.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Somehow, once I’d found Andrew’s old Morris, I wished that I’d mentioned that I hadn’t driven for several months, and that the last time I’d touched a manual car was when I’d sat my driver’s test. Good thing he didn’t have a fancy car.

  As I unlocked it, the streetlight showed the rust eating the door away, and I felt better. I could probably drive it into a fence, and it wouldn’t matter.

  I discovered I didn’t actually know the direct route to the hospital from my house, and was obliged to follow the bus route to get there. Hopefully it wasn’t too far out of the way.

  Once there, I smiled to myself and pulled into the multi-storey car park attached to the hospital and into one of the bays reserved for doctors. So this was what intellectual privilege felt like. I could get used to a guaranteed parking bay. Hell, I could get used to a car.

  I pushed my backpack out of sight behind the passenger seat, just to discourage anyone from stealing my laptop, and locked the car up. Casualty wasn’t that hard to find, and I had my med student ID with me, ready for the next day, so the sour-looking nurse on the Triage desk buzzed me through the security doors without even checking my name. More privilege. Personally, I wouldn’t have let anyone who had quite as much blood on their arms and trousers as I did into Casualty without a good explanation, but maybe it was a slow night.

  Or not. I stepped into a maelstrom and found myself pressed against a wall as I avoided being flattened by an X-ray tech pushing a trolley. I could tell they were an X-ray tech by the radiation monitoring tag on their uniform and the way they fluoresced ever so slightly. And the demented way they pushed the trolley.

  A nurse glared at me and said, “Who the fuck are you?”

  I held up my med student badge. “I’m looking for Dr. Maynard.”

  The nurse stared at me for a moment, and I could almost hear the cogs whirring in his head. “Oh,” he said. “In the staff room.” He pointed at a raised glass-walled room in the centre of Casualty.

  “Thanks.” I dodged the orderly wheeling an oxygen cylinder down the corridor, skirted the banked up row of patient-laden trolleys, stepped up into the nurse’s station and pushed the staff room door open.

  My head had built a picture of a soulless room with a coffee-ring-stained table and plastic chairs, but the staff room was obviously an administrative area, with long benches covered in stacks of X-rays and pathology printouts, lined with monitors and keyboards, lit by the fluorescent light of the X-ray screens.

  Andrew was seated at one of the monitors, feet up on the desk beside the keyboard, wearing hospital scrubs instead of the blood-soaked jeans and T-shirt I’d last seen him in. He looked up and smiled at me as I walked in.

  “Blake,” he said. “Thanks for coming to get me. Heidi’s going to be fine; she’s gone up to surgery already. Let’s get out of here before they have some kind of crisis and we wind up working.”

  He picked up a blue hospital plastic bag full of clothes and led me out of Casualty, chatting to me innocuously about his experiences as a medical student, and I figured that he was right; no one would pay any attention to me turning up to collect him caked in blood.

  In the corridor outside Casualty, I said, “Is Heidi really going to be all right? It looked like she’d lost a lot of blood.”

  Andrew nodded and smiled sideways at me as we pushed our way through a gaggle of relatives who were blocking the hallway.

  “She’s had a bag of Ringer’s Lactate and a couple of units of blood, just to make sure she’s up to surgery, then they emptied her stomach of pizza and beer and shipped her off to OR to have the tendons repaired. She didn’t need to have an MTP or anything. I’ve spoken to her mum on the phone, and she’s on her way down here. Want some food? I was planning on a decent meal, but I think I’m too hungry to wait for that.”

  I was hungry, and still kind of wired from the accident.

  “Sure,” I said, and we headed for the cafeteria.

  It was late enough that only one of the kiosks were still open, the obligatory junk food outlet, and I yawned and stretched and ordered the same as Andrew; the breakfast special.

  The dining area was mostly empty now, well after most people’s meal break, and I ate my plate of bacon, eggs and beans in a rush before I looked closely at the other people lingering over their meals.

  “Why are most of the people here homeless?” I asked Andrew.

  He bit into his toast and looked around the room. “Food’s cheap,” he said. “Security leaves them alone until it’s lock-up time.”

  I looked at the grime-caked man swathed in innumerable layers of clothing at the next table who was eating packets of sugar, and then at the sign over the drinking fountain. ‘This fountain is not a sink’. The sign had puzzled me on my first day here, but it kind of made sense that people would need to be told that now.

  Andrew smiled at me wryly.

  I handed him the keys in the car park and said, “You drive.

  You
don’t want to know what I did to your clutch driving here.”

  There was something about how Andrew looked at me as he took the keys that made my stomach lurch. “Security cameras,” he said, and he unlocked the car and got in, then leaned across and unlocked my door from inside.

  I slid down in my seat and put my feet on his dashboard, and Andrew leaned across and kissed me.

  “You okay?” he asked, and he touched my face gently.

  Was I okay?

  “Fuck, what if you hadn’t been there?” I said, and his fingers slid into my hair.

  “You would have done exactly what I did, except possibly for putting the IV access in. Heidi would still have been okay,”

  he said reassuringly, then we were kissing, slow, coaxing kisses.

  I melted. He tasted of bacon and egg and himself, and the metallic smell puzzled me until I realised it was Heidi’s blood I could smell on him, and on myself. That was a little creepy.

  His hand was sliding under my T-shirt, and across the flaking patches of dried blood on my chest, and it didn’t stop me from finding his cock through his scrubs.

  He pulled back a little shakily and I could see his teeth and lips shining in the car park lights. “How about we go back to my place and shower?” he said, and it sounded like a damned good idea.

  “You think we’ve had enough sex in a public place for one night?” I asked.

  Andrew chuckled and nodded. “Oh, yeah, let’s go somewhere private for a change.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  There was a real luxury in leaning back against the tiles and letting someone else scrub the dried blood out of my pores and the creases of my skin. Matthew’s hands were gentle, and there was nothing sexual about the slide of the wash cloth down my arm, but my body was miles ahead of us, taking each stroke of my skin and completely misinterpreting it, leaving me hard, stomach muscles fluttering as Matthew pressed kisses against my belly.

  When we’d come home, I’d cracked a bottle of chenin blanc for us, cranked the central heating all the way up, and had been standing here, under the stream of hot water, while Matthew drove me completely crazy, long enough that the taste of the wine was fading.

  Not a bad thing in itself, not when Matthew stood up again and kissed me, replacing the taste with his lips and tongue.

  Fuck, I could see the headspace he was in, feel it in his fingers as they brushed across my neck, pressing briefly against my carotid, thyroid cartilage, then larynx. “Go and make sure you’re clean,” he said, turning the shower taps off.

  “I’ll wait in the bedroom for you.”

  When I walked into my bedroom, Matthew was standing beside the bed, towel wrapped around his hips, his hair dripping still. The top drawer of the nightstand was open, and when he looked up from studying its contents, I knew my cover was blown.

  There wasn’t anything particularly incriminating there, no porn or toys, not with a pre-pubescent son that lived with me some of the time, but there was enough for Matthew to put the pieces together obviously.

  He undid his towel and tossed it on the bed, and he was rock hard and naked and so utterly gorgeous that breathing was difficult. He picked up one of the packs of gloves and undid it, laying the sterile package out on the nightstand. Part of my brain was still on the same planet as the rest of humanity because I noticed that he put the first glove on with the correct technique, sliding his hand in without touching the outside. The second glove went on right, too, fingers of the first hand inside the cuff, the quick wriggle of his hand, then the casual sorting out of fingers. There was a snap of latex on skin and I thought my knees would fail.

  Fuck.

  He tossed a strip of condoms onto the bed and pointed at his abandoned towel.

  I crawled every inch of the way.

  The mattress sagged under his weight, but I kept my eyes closed tight. I didn’t want to see him, didn’t want him to see me either; I was too naked for this.

  Latex-clad fingertips trailed softly up my spine and Matthew’s lips brushed over my ear, the damp tails of his hair tickling over my shoulder and neck. “Shh,” he said, and his fingers traced circles over my scapula.

  There was a way to do this, to surrender, and I let myself just feel Matthew’s fingers as they traced down my back.

  Trapezius, lattisimus dorsi, ridge of my scapula, teres major, teres minor, deltoid. He circled again and the tension ebbed out of me. Third circle, and my eyes were open and the tiny check pattern of my quilt and the rough ecru loops of the towel swam in front my eyes.

  “That’s better,” he whispered. “No one else will ever know about this, I promise you.” C2, C7, down my nuchal line, iliac crest, sacrum.

  Downy hair became coarser. I exhaled slowly, deeply, and the mattress moved again.

  I could wait.

  Click. That was the cap of the lube. Squelch. Oh, yeah.

  Long, long pause, and I could almost hear the rub of lube over latex as Matthew warmed the liquid for me. It made me smile.

  Matthew chuckled, this warm sound beside my ear, then he kissed my cheek and settled back onto the bed close beside me.

  The lube was cool, not cold, when Matthew trailed his fingers down the crack of my ass.

  His breathing was slow and deep in the quiet room, over the faint hiss of the central heating, and his fingers traced the ridged skin.

  Desire crept out, stood between me and the bedside light, casting its shadow over me, and one finger slid in easily.

  “Oh, fuck,” I said.

  I thought he’d make me turn over, make me even more vulnerable, but he didn’t. His finger see-sawed in and out and the towel was rough underneath me when I rocked my hips involuntarily.

  “You’ll hurt yourself,” he said, and he licked his tongue over my ear. Helix, triangular fossa, concha, lobule, tragus. Two fingers. He was right; rubbing against the towel was going to hurt. I stilled my hips while I could.

  The world shrunk in. I stopped being able to name the places that Matthew was kissing me, touching me. He didn’t touch me there, though there would soon be a time when he wouldn’t be able to avoid it. He was biting me now, moaning, too, and my back was slick with sweat. I could feel it trickling down my ribs.

  He changed angles, pulled back, slid in with three fingers.

  I started to fall apart, clutched at the bedding, ground down, and then back onto his hand.

  He stopped, added more lube one-handed, and it was cold and sharp and slippery and stinging and so fucking good.

  Matthew may have made a hell of a lot of noise earlier in the bar, but I was matching him now. This was beyond sexual, far too intense to only be about arousal or pleasure. This was all of me, and there was nothing else that did this to me.

  Four fingers now, and there was no way Matthew could miss hitting the right spot inside me, but he didn’t give me a chance to adjust, just pulled his hand back, bunched his fingers tight, and pushed back in.

  I yelled, top-of-my-lungs hollered, and was vaguely aware of Matthew laughing, then the pressure was over. I was completely overloaded with endorphins, blissed out, floating now, boneless, smiling beatifically, no doubt. F could keep his chemicals; they were no match for this place.

  I couldn’t come like this; hell, I couldn’t talk or move, could barely breathe, and Matthew slid his hand back out.

  “Wait for me,” he said, and he grabbed a condom and ripped the pack open while I rolled over, an inane smile on my face.

  Taking him was nothing, though he was still considerate enough to go slow, presumably just in case I was sore.

  I wasn’t; just kind of raw. There was a reason I had the very best lube there was in my drawer.

  I didn’t last, didn’t have a chance, just came the instant he was inside me and kissing me, and it was the sort of orgasm that was blinding in its intensity. I came with all of me, every pore, every cubic centimeter of air in my lungs, every drop of fluid in my body, came utterly and completely.

  It left me stupef
ied. I couldn’t do anything except grin back at Matthew and loop one anaesthetised hand around his neck and pull him down onto me.

  Matthew grimaced, bit at his bottom lip, lifted himself up a little on his elbows, and I got to watch his face, entranced, while he came.

  He slumped heavily onto me, making me grunt, “Oof,”

  then slid a hand between us to grab the condom as he slipped out.

  I could get both of my arms to move enough to wrap them around him as I let out a long breath. There wasn’t anything to say; there never was after sex like this.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Andrew was pretty much out of it, sprawled across the bed with a stupefied look on his face, so I kissed him and rolled off the bed. I bundled the gloves and condom up and dropped them in the bin in the bathroom, had a quick shower to rinse the lube off myself, and put Andrew’s bathrobe on.

  It smelled of him, more so than even his sheets, and I must admit I smiled and buried my face in the collar as I made my way down the stairs.

  Who would have thought that Andrew would be into fisting like that? Guess he wouldn’t want to wander around the hospital with a red bandana hanging out of his right pocket; someone would be bound to get it.

  The bottle of wine was still half full, so I gathered up the bottle and glasses, and my backpack, and went back upstairs.

  Andrew hadn’t moved, so I just let him be and stacked the pillows up against the bed head and opened my laptop. I’d started in on the revision questions, and was struggling with attempting to condense management of cystic fibrosis down to four paragraphs, when Andrew finally stirred.

  “Ngghh,” he said, and he rolled over. Fuck, he was beautiful, the way he looked at me.

  “Hey. You all right? Want some wine?”

  “Yeah.” I figured he was replying to both questions, and held out a glass of wine as he struggled to sit up.

  He spread the towel underneath himself and sat up against the bed head beside me, taking the wine. He looked out of it still, and I could understand that. It took a little while to get back to normal after a really intense fisting—after anything that intense.