“Don’t touch.” Jamie swatted Grant’s hand away from the bandages covering his eyes.
“I can’t see.”
“You don’t need to see.”
“How’s Jay?”
“Still unconscious.”
“Rebecca?”
“Same.”
“Madelyn?”
“Stats are dropping.”
Shit. “How bad?”
“She’s lost a lot of blood, her heart is struggling to compensate for the reduced volume, and she’s at risk of going into shock.”
“What can I do?”
“Are you shitting me right now?” Jamie planted his hand on Grant’s chest, easily putting an end to his doomed-to-fail attempt to sit up. “You’ve done enough damage for one day.”
“That hardly seems fair,” he grumbled, still ticked about being treated like a pariah for doing what he’d been trained to do. What they’d all been trained to do. “Jay is the mission, and I put the mission first. All of you fuckers would’ve done the same.”
“Yeah, you’re right. But we would’ve had a rescue line attached. And if you’d given us five more seconds, you would’ve had one too.”
“Bullshit. You know as well as I do, Jay didn’t have five more seconds. Besides, Cody was on his way out the door. I just beat him to it.”
“Cody was secured with a monkey tail, buttnut. He couldn’t have jumped without switching his lines.”
Frustration building, Grant let out a disgruntled sound. “Well, I don’t see what the fucking problem is.”
“That’s the fucking problem,” Jamie huffed. “Now shut up and go back to sleep. I’m busy.”
Throat dry as a fish on land, he wanted a sip of water. Bad. Some pain meds would go a long way too. But too stubborn to ask for help, he elected to suffer in silence instead. Fuck, he couldn’t lie on this stretcher anymore. His head ached. His ribs ached. His back ached.
A cold chill shook his limbs. Man, he’d give his left nut to be able to roll over. Sleep on his side. Throw his arm around a pillow. Hug it tight. Pretend he had Gray cuddled next to him. Her warmth chasing his tremors away.
Chasing.
Chase.
Asshole. Dickhead. Black-eyed, jaw-twitching motherfucker married to the woman they both loved.
A heavy weight settled over his heart. An extra blanket added to the ones already covering him. “Here…” A pill bottle rattled. “It’s been over four hours. Take some more Tylenol.”
Too tired to respond, Grant executed an open sesame, and the bittersweet pills landed on his tongue. They started to dissolve immediately, and he struggled to swallow the gooey nuggets with a mouth drier than the Sahara.
“Water.” Jamie palmed the back of his head, lifting it just enough for him to drink from the bottle he had at the ready.
He sipped. He swallowed. He held in his groan as Jamie eased his broken melon back down. “Thanks, Doc. How long until we land?”
“About seven hours.”
“Seven hours,” he repeated through gritted teeth, disappointment rocking his resolve to tough it out lying flat on his back.
