His eyes were hazel, exactly as Trevor had predicted.
“Gigi?” Trevor finally remembered to speak, but winced at the soft pronunciation.
G.G., if he noticed it, didn’t seem to care. “I wonder if your grandmother is home?” His voice had not gotten less hoarse in the last few hours, although the sound wasn’t harsh, just husky. Maybe because he wasn’t shouting across the court this time. Or maybe he thought Trevor needed a gentle prompt.
Because Trevor was staring at him without speakingagain.
Trevor mentally slapped himself. “She’s always home.” He gave this useless answer and was saved from further embarrassment by Ellie, who came to stand at Trevor’s side and peer hopefully at the visitor. “Sit, Ellie,” Trevor ordered quietly, glancing down when her tail thumped against the floor in excitement. “Good girl,” he praised her, then looked back at G.G. “Oh, you’ve never met. This is Ellie. Her pedigree name is Eden Lane’s Lady Errol, because you know, breeder rules and how the name has to stand out, but the initials spell E.L.L.E. so…” Trevor, much like Ellie, was way too excited to have a visitor and it showed. He shut his mouth, met G.G.’s startled gaze, and tried again. “My grandmother is asleep. Can I help you with something?”
As he asked it, he consciously noticed the dark smears across the front of G.G.’s shirt, the pallor to his skin, and then, when G.G. turned to face him more directly, the line of blood across his cheekbone, the kind of thing that happened when someone with blood on their hands accidentally touched their face.
Which was when the rest of Trevor’s brain caught up with the striped dishtowel wrapped around one of G.G.’s hands, which G.G. was holding to his chest above his heart. “Oh shit. Are you okay? Come in.” Trevor waved Ellie back. “We’ve got a first-aid kit. I’m not sure if we’ve got anything for something major, but I can drive to…”
“That’s all right. Thank you.” G.G. spoke with polite formality, voice still rough, his hand almost definitely still bleeding. “I’ve got it.”
“Really,” Trevor protested, because no one wrapped a dishtowel around their hand and got that much blood on their clothes and showed up at their neighbor’s house for anything easily solved. “I can help. It’s no trouble. I can at least get you another towel.” And clean the blood from his face. And sit him down so he wouldn’t look so faint.
“Really,” G.G. echoed back to him, after a pause that went on long enough for Trevor to wonder if G.G. might faint for real. He held out his injured hand for a moment, and the towel was currently free of blood but whatever was beneath it probably wasn’t. “Really,” he said again, almost confused as he stared up into Trevor’s eyes. “I’m—I will be—fine. I’ve got it.”
“But you’re here.” Trevor was not arguing with an injured man. He was trying to get one of them to see reason. There had to be reason here someplace. He firmed his voice. “Let me take care of this.”
G.G. made a sound. Trevor couldn’t have classified it if he’d tried, but Ellie let out a garbled whine in response.
G.G. glanced down to her. “The hospital and Urgent Care are closed at this hour, so I’m going to the ER for stitches.” He spoke to the dog, then looked up again. “If there is a long wait, which I assume there will be” –there was a long wait at the nearest ER even without recurring pandemic waves of infections slowing things down— “I was hoping you or your grandmother could look in on my cats… cat… in the morning.” He cleared his throat. “It would just be to make sure she has food. She has a water fountain and the litter box is cleaned on a timer. She won’t like being alone but you don’t need to pet her if you don’t like cats….”
He trailed off at the end of his explanation, perhaps because Trevor was staring again.
“I didn’t realize you had cats—a cat,” Trevor offered, knowing better than to press when someone had to correct something like the number of pets they had. That meant a recent loss. “And yes, sure, of course. Do you have a spare key or a security code or anything else I’ll need?”
That stopped G.G. again. “Margaret has my spare key.”
As though Trevor could have known that. As though his grandma had ever once thought to mention that she was apparently trusted enough by their hermit crab neighbor to have a key to his house.
Trevor took a deep breath. “Okay,” he said carefully, in the calm, controlled voice of someone leading a shaking poodle into the vet’s office. “I can do that. But do you need me to call someone for you? Or drive you to the ER? It’s no problem. I mean that. It’s nice to have someone to sit with you while you wait in a hospital.”
G.G.’s eyes met his, less fierce the longer Trevor spent looking into them. G.G. didn’t seem ferocious anymore. He was tired and strained and more than a little confused, apparently by Trevor.
“They don’t want anyone in the hospital who doesn’t need to be there,” G.G. finally answered, huskier than before. Then he nodded. “But thank you.”
With that final display of manners, he stepped down from the porch to head back toward his house, bleeding and alone, like a shorter Batman with a striped dishtowel over one hand.
Trevor didn’t close the door until G.G.’s truck had left the court. Then he turned to look down at Ellie, who whined and rolled over to show her belly.
“That was as close to a hero’s sexy nemesis showing up at their doorstep bloodied and in need of help because they had nowhere else to go as I am ever going to get. That’s going to end up in the story, in one form or another.” He said this nonsense to his dog because he was shaking with the urge to do something and there was nothing to be done.
But he wasn’t ready to write or draw yet, so he grabbed Ellie’s leash and walked until he felt more settled and Ellie was so tired that she passed out in her dog bed moments after they got back.
He told Sky about the whole encounter in an email because that many messages would have lit up Sky’s phone and he wanted Sky to try to sleep at a normal time. Sky didn’t always, but having an adult job often meant needing to function during regular business hours, and if Sky didn’t enforce his own bedtime, that left Trevor to do it for him.
That was all Trevorcoulddo, despite any other thoughts he had about it or any schedules he might have penciled into the blue notebook that he thought of as Sky’s even if he’d never mentioned it to Sky himself.
Sky’s days and nights were not Trevor’s and Trevor shouldn’t assume they were. Trevor had created that boundary about nights in particular and was good about sticking to it. Sky hadn’t complained, but regardless, Trevor wasn’t going to get in his way. That was the whole point.
Not that it mattered, since, as if Sky had answered that email first thing before all his work stuff, Trevor woke up to a message.
You don’t have a nemesis. Your door would be the first place to go, not the last.
Trevor smiled into his pillow.
