Pandora: Liminal Space Book 2

Chapter 26

"Doctor Caractacus!" The perky nurse at the front desk grinned when she saw him. "Great to see you! The class is almost ready to start, they were just waiting on you, so go right on in."

"Thank you." He walked into the room she indicated and found himself the subject of numerous stares from no one he recognized. The medical technician at the front of the class, a burly older man, frowned and pointed at a seat. Garrett sat.

"Let's get started." He stood behind a table covered with numerous bulky medical devices. "First off, before we get going with the hands-on stuff, I want to explain a few things to you. I assume everyone here knows that you can't put a natural in a Regen tank, give them injections of Regen or use any equipment on them that relies on Regen." He waited for his students to nod en masse.

"That being said, though, there are a lot of devices that you can safely use on a natural, and I'm going to show you how to work them. There's a medical locker in every wing of every floor of this ship, and each of these lockers is stocked with everything you're going to see today. Some of these will be unfamiliar to you, so pay attention while I go over how to use them.

"This," he held up a boxy thing with electricalpads attached to it, "is a defibrillator. It jumpstarts a person's heart bycharging it with an electrical current. You turn the machine on, stick thesepads on the guy's bare chest, and when it zaps you let it do its thing. If ittells you you screwed up, you rearrange the pads and try again. Red light meansdon't touch, because there's current running through it. Green light means youcan touch." He dropped it back onto the table, then moved on to the next device."This..."

The session stretched into five long, droning hours of boredom. As far asGarrett could tell it mostly boiled down to, "Apply pressure and call for help"if it was bleeding and "do CPR and call for help" if someone wasn't breathingor had no heartbeat. The devices were good if they were there but mostly,caring for a natural was too complicated for a layman. They all had to memorizethe number for emergency services on the ship, practice setting limbs andcaring for burns and doing chest compressions, and a lot of other things thatGarrett remembered having to learn as a child but never using. By the end ofthe five hours he was tapping his foot on the floor and struggling not to drumhis fingers. Fuck it, he needed out of here. He needed to be doing something.Or someone.

Less than two weeks away from Pandora and he hadn't been laid since the nightbefore they left Olympus. It was pitiful. So what if Jonah had been amazing?Garrett had slept with plenty of amazing people. Jonah wasn't his firstdrifter, either; he'd carried on a very satisfying affair for several monthswith the head of a drifter clan while he traveled with his father, helping himjuggle being a senator and an active Federation general. That had been rightafter he and Robbie had called it quits...three years of the good, the bad andthe ugly, and Garrett treasured every minute he'd had of the longestrelationship in his life to date, even if sometimes Robbie had frustrated himto the point of losing his temper. He hadn't spoken to Robbie, or Wyl, foralmost a week now...too long.

The class was abruptly ended, and Garrett leapt for the escape route, more thanready to kiss the infirmary goodbye. He didn't need to get his brain chemistrychecked today, he was done with the damn class, he didn't need a shot of Regen...

"But I don't like shots," a small, familiar voice whimpered pitifully frombehind a curtain.

"Gotta have it anyway, bucko," another voice, equally familiar but completelynot who it sounded like under any circumstances, replied.

It couldn't be. It just couldn't.

"It will only take a second," the female doctor's voice said soothingly. "Thenyou'll be all done."

"But it hurts."

"It didn't hurt your friend last time, did it?"

"No..."

"His friend?" the man's voice—not that man's voice, oh no—asked underhis breath.

"Doctor Caractacus. He and Cody met the last time Cody was in to get a shot,and they ended up getting theirs together."

"Daddy..."

"C'mere, bucko." Garrett heard a creak and shift as the weight on the infirmarycot changed. "Just relax, okay? I've got you. You're gonna be fine."

"You'll just feel a little pinch," the doctor promised. There was a small whinea moment later, then the noise of a band-aid being unwrapped and the softer,muffled smack of a kiss. Garrett intimately knew all of the sounds two bodiesmade when they connected, and this was a reassuring, gentle kiss, probably thefather's lips to his son's head. A moment later the doctor pulled back thecurtain, and Garrett saw what he had been sure he wouldn't see.

His one night stand, Jonah, sitting on a cot with Cody in his lap, both of themadmiring the Space Ranger band-aid that decorated his son's arm. The doctor sawGarrett first.

"Doctor Caractacus! Cody, look, it's your friend from before."

The two men's eyes met, and Garrett would have been hard pressed to say whichof them was more shocked. Jonah looked a little less put together than the lasttime Garrett had seen him, but anyone would be disheveled with a squirmy fiveyear old on their lap. His sandy brown hair was tied into a ponytail, butseveral hanks had been pulled free, and there were stress lines clearly visiblearound his eyes and mouth. He was a little paler than Garrett remembered, andclean shaven now instead of alluringly scruffy, but Garrett's stomach stillclenched with sudden want at the sight of him.

"Garrett!" Cody wiggled until his father put him down, and he crossed the fewmeters between them with a bouncy step, the pain of his shot forgotten. "Daddycame with me this time and it didn't hurt all that much, and look, I gotanother Space Ranger band-aid! This one is the purple Space Ranger though andhe isn't my favorite, and last time I got the green one and I like him better.Remember?"

"This is your friend?" Jonah asked in a slightly-strangled tone.

"Yeah Daddy, he sat with me and then we got shots. Are you getting one today?"

"Um, no," Garrett said, finally pulling his mind out of the memory gutter. Thelast thing he needed was to get an involuntary erection in front of a child."Today I had to come in for a class."

"Like a school class?"

"Exactly like that, except more boring," he confessed.

"That doesn't sound like fun."

"Oh, I don't know," Garrett drawled, looking straight at Jonah with slightlyhard eyes. "If I hadn't come in for my class, then I wouldn't have gotten tomeet your Daddy. Something tells me he can be a hard man to find." Not thatGarrett had tried to find him, he'd made himself resist, but the man had blownoff their morning after, and the almost inevitable prospect of more intenselyhot sex, with no explanation, and now he was here? It was too good anopportunity to pass up.

To his satisfaction, Jonah winced. "Doc, how about you check on Cody's earswhile we're in?" he suggested. "Maybe find him a red or green Space Rangerband-aid."

"Sure," the doctor said, a little mystified. She took Cody by the hand and ledhim over towards another partition. Garrett crossed his arms and stared atJonah, and Jonah stared right back.