Chapter 8: Glass in the Supply Room

The supply room had a metal shelf of glass jars, and I knocked one off it.

I wasn't trying to.

I turned too fast with my shaking hands, and a jar of cotton swabs hit the tile and burst.

I knelt to pick up the pieces and cut my palm open on the biggest one.

"Damn it."

I pressed my other hand over it and watched the blood come through my fingers.

The door opened behind me.

"Pru says you've been in here twelve minutes," Wyatt said.

"I'm restocking."

"With your hand bleeding on the floor?"

He crossed the small room in two steps, crouched and took my wrist.

"Let me see."

"It's a scratch."

"It's a laceration. Sit."

I sat on an overturned bucket, because there was nothing else.

He got gauze and saline and a butterfly strip from the shelf above my head.

He knelt on the glass-free side of the floor and opened my hand.

His hands were very gentle.

I had watched them put a tourniquet on a man's leg.

I hadn't known they could do this.

He held my wrist with one thumb on the inside of it, against my pulse.

"Talk," he said.

"It's nothing."

"You're shaking. Talk."

So I told him.

I told him about the roses, the license, the letter and the three pages I had signed in April without reading them.

I said it flat, and his thumb never moved from my wrist.

Keep reading free with an account. Start He Wasn't Ready to Share a Space, So I Gave Him the Whole City from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.