Page 2 of Bottoms
“Fynn?” I asked, despite the rag covering my lips. Tanner had said Fynn wanted to talk to me. Maybe he just wanted to have a tea party.Maybe he just wanted to be part of the harem.
Nope.
I stopped that line of thinking by looking deeply into the hooded shadows of the face of the person in front of me, and I waited for the familiar feeling of panic. It was too dark to make out any features, but all the same, I knew it was Fynn. It was the same sure sense of knowing I had the moment he walked through the flames, cigarette held between his lips. There was a kind of pull about Fynn, but his felt like the call of death.
Fynn was a lure into the void, where the only thing you knew for sure was there would be no return.
My eyes tracked his slight movements in the dark. A small flame appeared, as if summoned to light the cigarette between his lips. They were curled into a smirk while he dragged in, lighting more shadows on his face in the amber glow of his cherry.
It was Fynn.
“Allk,” I mumbled, frustrated that he wasn’t moving. My heart was oddly steady and even. It was beating hard, but for once, not racing. I tried to bite at the gag, scrunching up my face to move the fabric.
“Don’t scream,” he said, taking a step toward me. His voice washed over me in an almost familiar way.
I froze as he yanked the strip from my mouth, throwing it to the floor.
“I patched you up the best I could before I went back to finish those guys. There was a fifty percent chance I didn’t drug you enough, and you would wake up before I got back. Didn’t want you screaming for help the whole time,” he said, but his tone was tender.
“I think I need to see a doctor,” I coughed out from my dry throat, deciding those as my first actual words to say to him. Not nearly as dramatic as his first words to me.
“I’ve already taken the bullet out and stitched you back up,” he said as his hand moved with a finger outstretched to touch my shoulder.
I jerked back, attempting to stay out of his reach, and his hand stopped midair. He eyed me warily, as if I might be the one to attack him. Which would be perfectly reasonable for me to do, considering he kidnapped me.
Possibly, saved my life. But if he ended up unaliving me, he wouldn’t get to keep that badge.
“There’s something wrong with my head,” I said, wincing against the screaming headache I earned from my sudden movement.
“That’s because you are leaking spinal fluid from the epidural I gave you,” he answered calmly.
As for my response, I had no idea how to do it calmly or how to do it without causing another massive spike in pain. If I laid flat on the bed, the pain seemed survivable, but leaking spinal fluid didn’t sound promising either.
“Should I bother to ask what sick and twisted things you did to me after you gave me a shitty epidural?” I sighed, squeezing my eyes shut. Tears had already welled in my eyes from the pain, but now they flowed out from me.
“You had several severe burns on the back of your legs. I was working with what I had, and like I said before, there was a good chance I didn’t have enough propofol. So, I used the last of the lidocaine and then finished you off with some fentanyl to make sure you didn’t wake up while I was cleaning those.” He pointed down to my legs. They felt somewhat filled with static, but they twitched when I told them to. There was a stiffness that I noticed in my skin. Whenever I tried to move, it pulled uncomfortably.
“So, you drugged me,” I sighed, turning to stare at the ceiling. Whatever Fynn gave me, it sure worked on my anxiety.
“Would you rather feel all of the pain?” he asked. His head tilted slightly while he analyzed me as I considered my answer, but his lips curled into a smile that suggested he liked the idea of me in pain.
“How long is it going to take to go away?” I asked, feeling a single hot tear fall down my temple and settle into the shell of my ear. He didn’t go through all this trouble of fixing me up just to kill me. Fynn had plans for me, and I imagined they would be even more painful than what I was experiencing now.
“The headache should be gone soon. I already gave you a blood patch after I realized there was a tear. Burns will take a month, most likely. Bullet wound, well, that’s the mystery injury. The skin should heal in a week or two, but we’ll have to watch for infection.”
I turned my head slightly, finding his features soft like his tone.
“We?” I asked, knowing he had just declared he had no intention of freeing me.
“We, my butterfly. We.” He smiled like he had been waiting to be a “we” person for a long time. Instead of declaring, “yeah, I’ll be there,” he gets to say, “we will be there.” I had a feeling the only thing I would be invited to would be my funeral. Fynn was precisely the type to make that a “we” event.
“Are you going to kill me?” I asked, simply as if discussing the weather. A calmness had swept over me, taking with it the last of my fight. His answer wouldn’t change the fact that I had accepted my own death.
“Not today,” he said with a smile. Mirroring his enjoyment of the joke about the end of my life, my lips threatened to pull up.
“Give me one more day of peace, and then I’ll take the pain,” I said, finally letting a slight smile loose. Honestly, I didn’t know what I was so excited about.
“I brought back more meds. You don’t have to feel the pain at all,” he said, leaving my side to grab a backpack. He set it down on the floor and pulled out vials, bottles, and creams. It looked like he had raided the inside of a hospital.
