Page 7 of Saving Noah

Would he look like an ass if he went ahead and left? Even after he’d told them he would stay? Yeah, that would be almost as bad as forgetting Trey’s name. He had to work on that shit. The last thing he wanted was to be like the majority of the doctors he worked with on a daily basis. They all seemed to suffer from an acute case of I’m-a-god syndrome, which led to their reputation as arrogant pricks. He didn’t have a problem with arrogance, but he hated the whole prick thing. More often than not, he wanted to punch most of them right in their faces. He refrained, but he damned well wanted to.

The double doors of the emergency room slid open and the EMTs came bursting through, pushing the gurney while applying pressure to stem the blood still flowing from an open wound on the patient’s forehead. From the amount of blood on the sterile white sheets, they weren’t having a lot of success. Head wounds often bled heavily; he didn’t feel a need to panic. With a cool confidence, he strode toward an open cubicle and motioned for them to wheel the patient inside.

“Right here, Wayne. I’m staying over to help Dr. Stevens.” He liked Wayne. The burly guy was not only hot, but a damned good EMT. He took his job seriously, and from everything Zach had seen, he treated everybody with respect. “Tell me what we’ve got.”

He glanced down at the patient and went from cool professional to terrified onlooker in zero point one seconds.John. His beautiful neighbor lay on the gurney with a deathly pale face coated in crimson blood, completely oblivious to the chaos of the hospital or to the thundering of Zach’s heart. Long black lashes rested peacefully against his cheeks. His usually pink lips were just as plump as ever, but they’d lost most of their coloring.

“You still with us, Doc?” Wayne asked gruffly, interrupting Zach’s stage one nervous breakdown and snapping him back to reality—a reality where it was his responsibility to bring all life back to John’s face.

“Of course,” he snapped, mad at himself but letting his voice take it out on Wayne. “Tell me everything you know.” He pulled on gloves and inspected John’s wound while he listened to what Wayne said, which wasn’t much since it appeared to be nothing more than a gash to the forehead. After relaying his orders to the nurses waiting close by, he asked Wayne, “John Doe? Didn’t he have any identification on him?” He continued to work on the injury, thankful the gash was small. He could close it with stitches so tiny the flesh would be almost perfect once it healed. “Wasn’t there anybody at the complex able to give you his name?” It wasn’t important…except to Zach. His annoyingly gorgeous neighbor deserved to be nicknamed something other than John Doe.

“Yeah…that’s his name. John Doe,” Wayne answered with a confused frown. When Zach looked at him like he was crazy, he continued, “This was called in by a private security firm. He has an alert bracelet he activated before he fell. They identified their client as John Doe.” Wayne shook his head. “I didn’t believe it, but when we checked his license for his age, it was right there in black and white. John Doe. That’s a horrible name. If your last name was Doe, why in this world would you name your kid John? In my world, that’s just cruel.”

John Doe? Seriously? An alert bracelet? What the fuck?

So many things didn’t add up about the man who’d captured his attention and, from the way Zach’s body responded, had no intentions of letting it go. While he gently swabbed the damaged area with a numbing agent, questions shot around his mind like a pinball machine. “He hasn’t woken up at all?” he asked Wayne, who was surprisingly still hanging around as Zach started his tiny stitches. Perfect stitches for a perfect face.

“Unconscious when we got there, and other than a few moans of discomfort, he hasn’t shown any signs of regaining consciousness. I checked his eyes, and he’s responding properly, but with a wound no more serious than he’s got, he should already be showing some signs of life.”

Wayne was right. Zach was about to go into panic mode again when he noticed John’s long lashes flutter. Ah, Sleeping Beauty finally decided to join them. Zach felt incredibly unprofessional, but every inch of him couldn’t wait to see those beautiful blue eyes. Suddenly, it was necessary it be his face John saw when he first opened his eyes. Zach had noticed John’s skittishness around people, so he wanted to ensure his patient didn’t feel threatened. Yeah, that was the only reason he gestured for everyone else to stay back as he leaned over John.

“Hey, John. Think you can open those eyes long enough to look at me? Come on.” He urged his patient’s compliance, hoping his smile came through with his words. If the others weren’t blind, and they weren’t, they saw him stroke John’s cheek with the tip of his finger. At the moment, he didn’t give a fuck what they thought about his bedside manner. He’d worry about it later, after he knew John was okay.

More fluttering of the eyelashes and then those gorgeous eyes opened with a lazy movement. Zach smiled a welcome to him and said, “There he is. You had me worried.” He could see the confusion in John’s eyes and then, with a switch which went straight to Zach’s cock, those eyes turned warm and happy as he focused on Zach. If he thought his cock’s reaction to John’s gaze was strong, it was nothing compared to what his heart did when John returned his smile. Not one of his shy smiles. He gave him a full-blown I’m-happy-to-see-you smile. The pitter pat of Zach’s heart switched to a gallop.

“Hey, Zachary,” he murmured and then licked his lips. “I know your name now. Your friend outed you last night.” John appeared to be trying to blink away the cloudiness and confusion inside his head. Zach doubted John remembered much at all about what happened or why he was at the hospital. “You fell and hit your head. It took a few stitches, but nothing major. You’ll be good as new in a few weeks.”

“Hit my head. Okay.” He frowned and took a deep breath before murmuring, “I think I have a crush on you.”

Zach blushed and grinned at the same time. John’s mind was still a bit foggy, but Zach told himself the fogginess caused by the loss of blood merely resulted in John dropping his guard and saying things he wouldn’t normally admit to.

John tried to reach up to touch the damaged spot.

“Easy, sweetheart,” Melia, the nurse assisting Zach, said with a smile while easing his hand back down to the gurney. “You’ve got an IV in your arm, and we don’t want to accidentally yank it out. How are you feeling?”

One second, Zach stood over John, basking in the crush comment. The next second, the entire situation went straight to shit. John’s blue eyes looked up at him with all sorts of sweet promises shining brightly, and then, when John heard the nurse’s voice, those sweet promises morphed into sheer terror. His head whipped around in the direction of Melia, and when his gaze landed on her face, John’s entire body trembled, and it wasn’t a tiny nervous tremble. He gave a full-blown, shake-the-entire-gurney tremble. His eyes scanned around him, growing wide and pupils dilating at an alarming rate.

Zach recognized the beginning stages of a serious panic attack. He had no idea what caused it, but it was coming. Fast. When John gasped for air and started struggling wildly, Zach knew it would be bad.

“Easy, John,” he coaxed while trying to keep his patient lying on the gurney. “You’re safe. I’m right here.”

John flailed wildly. Gasping. Begging for help with his eyes because no words could squeeze through his frozen airways. When he managed to rip his hand from Melia’s tight grasp, he grabbed for Zach and wrapped their hands together. Zach didn’t understand why panic attacks happened or all the logistics of one, but he recognized sheer terror when faced with it, and the wild look locked on John’s face was certainly terror.

Thank goodness Wayne had hung around because it took all his muscled bulk to keep John on the gurney. From having witnessed John’s gym workout, Zach knew his wiry patient was all lean muscle.

“Come on, John,” Zach urged as he held their hands together. “You’re safe. I’m right here. Nothing’s going to happen to you. I need you to breathe for me, okay? Focus on breathing.”

John shook his head wildly in an effort to let Zach know he couldn’t breathe. Tears streaked his face. Tremors shook his body. John gripped Zach’s hand tightly, and Zach could feel the wild thumping of his pulse beneath his fingertips. The vein at the base of his neck quivered and quaked.

“John! John! I’m looking for John Doe. An ambulance should have brought him in minutes ago. John Doe. Is he here?” The yelling voice drew Zach’s attention.

The hospital staff wouldn’t allow the man back there, so he told Melia to go get him. Jumping over protocol would be worth it if it helped calm his patient. He wasn’t leaving John for any reason. To the other nurse, he ordered a sedative for the IV. He didn’t want to sedate John but it might be his only option.

“You’ve got to do it, Doc,” Wayne said, answering Zach’s silent battle. “He’s going to hurt himself if you don’t calm him down.” To John, he said, “You’re good, little man. Everything’s going to be okay. Can you count for me? Do you count to help you calm down?”

How in the hell is Wayne an expert on panic attacks? More importantly, why didn’t I think of that?

John’s eyes glazed over. Zach wasn’t even sure he heard what Wayne said to him. The terror coursing through him appeared to be consuming every inch of his brain. The nurse returned with the sedative, Melia and the mystery man right behind her. Zach’s inner caveman roared with fury when he realized the man searching for John turned out to be John’s pimp. What is that bastard doing here? When the man tried to move to John’s side, Zach barked, “Get back!”

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