The Hornsey Bay Chapters

Chapter 9 - There's a Boy in My Bed!

It's definitely a knife wound!

Jared has seen and treated enough stab wounds to be an expert at identifying them. It's not deep enough to have done any serious damage, though. It was a short blade of some kind, straight in and out. A clean wound.

Praise God!

A couple of stitches should take care of it nicely; he is more worried about the who and the why of the incident. Seeing his friend in this state makes his hands shaky, and for once, he is not as cool and collected while dealing with injuries as normal.

Ranger squirms, jerking away from him when his agitation causes him to use the needle with more aggression than he meant to. He is worried about the fact that Ranger seems to be lethargic and is drifting in and out of consciousness. He doesn't think it's due to blood loss only and suspects that his friend might have a concussion.

"You'd better start talking, or this is going to get a lot worse," he warns Ranger instead of instinctively apologising for hurting him more than he had to. He still tries to be much more careful, though.

"Jar, please-"

"No," Jared interrupts sternly. "Something is going on with you and has been going on for some time."

He carefully uses the needle driver to push the needle into the skin on one side of the wound and helps it out on the other side, using forceps. This is not the first time Jared has stitched up one of his friends. Hell, it's not even the second time, either. His buddies are rough enough to provide him with many opportunities to practice his skills since paramedics (especially volunteers) don't generally stitch up patients unless there's no other way. He learned how to put in sutures from his mother, the expert.

"You lurked in my flat last night, in the dark, talking about people following you. When I woke up this morning, you were gone. Then I get a weird voicemail from you, saying you're in trouble, and then you disappeared off the friggin' face of the earth for hours, and I couldn't find you anywhere..." His voice falters when anxiety caused by those hours overcomes him. He'd been going out of his mind until Alicia called. "And here you are now, beaten and stabbed! You've got blood - mostly not even your own - all over the clothes you borrowed from my closet, and you smell like a blooming brewery."

"I'm sorry about your tracks-"

"I don't care about the bloody tracksuit, Ranger!" Jared snaps, his heart constricting with dread. "What's going on?!"

Ranger hisses in pain, squeezing his eyes shut, but he doesn't answer; he stays quiet long enough for Jared to think that he'd lost consciousness again. He finishes the last of the three stitches required to close the wound, puts his tools away, and grabs the eye exam light from his kit.

Lifting one of Ranger's eyelids, he shines the light into his eye, watching the pupil contract. Ranger flinches, weakly trying to brush the intrusion away with his hand, but Jared firmly repeats the process with his other eye. His patient doesn't resist when his head, neck and ribs are subjected to a thorough examination too.

Jared is relieved to find that his friend has more cuts and abrasions but nothing life threatening and none that need sutures. He only needs to clean and dress them if required, which he does.

"You hit your head pretty hard, judging by that lump."

"I didn't hit my head," Ranger mutters, his voice barely audible. "A bottle broke on it."

Jared does not like the sound of that. The stiffness in his throat is gradually shifting to his stomach. Clearly, his friend hadn't been in a fair fight. Ranger usually comes out of those without serious injuries.