“I fell hard,” Rusty said defensively, and Gem hummed.
“Well, hard or not, I can fix it.”
Brushing back his hair, he hunkered down, staring intently at the sole of Rusty’s foot. His silk robe parted, revealing his bare chest and the swirls of color painting the gray. Not for the first time, Rusty wished he wasn’t colorblind. He had a feeling red would be a nice color.
“What are you doing?” Rusty asked to distract himself as Gem aimed a small spray bottle at his foot.
“Clearing away the blood; I can’t see a damn thing through it,” Gem explained as his other hands moved over the medical supplies on the table. “There’slydocainin this too, so it will help numb it a bit so you won’t feel me digging the glass out.”
“You can just wrap it up,” Rusty said, hissing when the cold spray hit his raw flesh. “I can—”
“Stop whining, and let me work,” Gem interrupted, dousing Rusty’s foot until the towel he’d laid down as a barrier between them stained with blood. “I’m not wrapping up a dirty foot filled with glass and sending you home.”
“Do you even know what you’re doing?” Rusty demanded as two of Gem’s hands unzipped a packet, revealing sterilized instruments that made his blood run cold. “I don’t do well with this kind of stuff.”
One of Gem’s smaller eyes studied him. “What kind of stuff? Blood?”
“No, I’m fine with blood. It’s the…” Rusty pointed at the silver instruments of death. “Medical shit. I don’t do medical shit.”
“Oh.” Gem’s lower left hand pushed the satchel of medical instruments behind his back. “How about you close your eyes, and I’ll tell you when it’s over.”
Somehow,notknowing what Gem was going to do was worse, and Rusty swallowed thickly, a cold sweat breaking out across his scalp between his ears. “Uh, that sounds worse.”
“Hey, Rus, look at me.” Gem stilled his many arms and shifted all eight eyes to Rusty’s face. “Deep breath. Everything’s fine. And yes, I do know what I’m doing.”
“How?”
“I took almost two years of pre-med,” Gem said simply, turning most of his attention back to Rusty’s foot. Though that one, small eye remained locked on Rusty’s face.
“Pre-med?” Rusty said, unable to hide the disbelief in his voice. “Youwere pre-med?”
Gem’s features tightened as he carefully patted Rusty’s foot dry with a sterilized gauze. “Yes, and you don’t have to sound so godsdamned shocked about it. You knew I went to uni.”
“Yeah, but you never said you went for pre-med.”
Picking up an instrument that looked like tweezers on steroids, Gem furrowed his brow. “I highly doubt that. I talk about uni all the time.”
“The guys you fucked in uni, yes. What you studied, no—what are those?” Rusty asked, his foot jerking away on instinct.
Like Gem was expecting it, he tightened his grip on Rusty’s ankle to keep him steady. “They’re not scary. Think of them like fancy tweezers. I’m gonna use them to pull out the little pieces of glass.”
They looked too sharp to be tweezers, but Rusty didn’t want to be a sack. He banished the urge to kick Gem in the face and make his escape. Settling deeper into the couch cushions, he fisted his hands on his thighs until his claws bit into his palms and studied the swirls of color decorating Gem’s neck and chest.
To distract himself from the fancy tweezers coming toward his foot, he asked, “Why pre-med?”
“Runs in the family. Dad’s an optometrist, so as the oldest, I thought it was my birthright or some shit. Like, taking over his practice when he retires or whatever.”
“What’s an”—Rusty chittered in the back of his throat as the tweezers dug into the deepest cut—“op-optometrist?”
“Eye doctor,” Gem said as his lower left hand reached out to squeeze Rusty’s knee in comfort.
Another shudder rattled through him. “Gross.”
“Gross? It’s objectively one of the lesser gross medical fields. He rarely deals with blood and guts.”
“Blood and guts, I can handle,” Rusty panted through clenched teeth, hating the feel of metal digging under his skin. “Shit near my eyes—hard fucking pass.”
“Fair enough,” Gem allowed, thumb rubbing over Rusty’s knee. “Anyway, my sister was going to school for pre-med, and I thought my parents might be disappointed if I didn’t try too. So I did almost two years before finally admitting that I hated it.
