The only plausible explanation for this girl was that she was lying to protect someone. And her initial reaction when I'd asked what had happened in the waiting room narrowed down my list of suspects to one or two. I was going to take a wild guess and say she had someone in her life who liked to push her around.
"Really?" Dr. Hendricks asked, his voice laden with scepticism.
"Yes," she said firmly, eyes narrowing slightly like she couldn't quite figure out why nobody believed her.
"Were you present?" the doctor asked, turning on me. "You're the boyfriend?"
I resisted the urge to snort derisively. If I was her boyfriend, she wouldn't have been sitting by herself in the waiting room like a docile little lamb. She would have been the first one through those doors. Fuck that, if she was my girlfriend she wouldn't be here to begin with.
"No, I wasn't," I settled on saying through clenched teeth. "And yes, my name's Tyson."
"And your name miss?"
The doctor unwrapped her hand to reveal a deep gash, one that made my own look small by comparison. Shit, that had to hurt.
"Um. Noah. Noah Duke," the girl said, looking uncertainly at her hand.
I myself was watching it avidly, all the while repeating her name in my head.
Noah. Noah Duke.
What kind of parents gave their daughter a boys name?
Though, in all honesty, she did suit it.
"Um, is this normal? The amount of blood I'm losing?" Noah asked, slightly panicked.
Dr. Hendricks examined the cut more closely, and he frowned all over again.
"Well, you do seem to have lost a bit of blood, but once we get you stitched up you should be alright. Do you feel dizzy? Nauseated?"
Standing beside the bed, trying hard to disregard the fierce ache in my leg, I tuned the two of them out in favour of wondering when I could get out of here to have a smoke. Now that I'd admitted I was her boyfriend I couldn't very well just leave without her.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
To distract myself from how badly I needed one, I ran my gaze over the tiny medical booth and curled my lip in distaste. I'd been in this one before, a couple of months ago.
Derek had gotten himself into trouble with a guy who'd loaned him some money, and in retaliation, the guy thought it would be okay to take what he owed through damage of property. Specifically, my property. He'd smashed my car windscreen and the headlights with a baseball bat, and had been about to take out the side windows when I'd come out of my place to find him hard at work.
Enraged, I'd played his game way better than he had. I'd shattered everything not made of metal on his car, and I hadn't needed a bat to do it. At the time, it didn't occur to me that while using my booted foot was fine, putting my elbow and my fist through a window was a bad idea. That only came later when Dr. Hilliard had to pluck out all of the glass and disinfect the cuts before she stitched a couple back up. Without anaesthetic.
"Maybe you could help her relax. Offer her some calming words?"
Dr. Hendricks' words brought me back to reality and I glanced down with a peeved glare to see Noah right on the edge of the bed, trying to get as far away from the doctor with a syringe in his hand as she could without falling off. She was eyeing the needle like it was about to take her life away, not her pain away.
The Things I Do
Beginne am Anfang
