Page 58 of Punchline
“Do you even know what shade of blue cornflower is?”
“Huh, no.” He looked at me with a deceptively wide-eyed, innocent expression. “I guess we should look it up, huh?”
I knew Carson was trying to distract me, and I appreciated the fact that it was working, but it was still a relief to get a text from Marek five minutes later that interrupted our journey of discovery through cerulean and cobalt.
Carson opened it, and his mouth fell into a flat, worried line. “They took him to thehospital.”
I got to my feet. “Let’s go, then.”
“I’m going to ride with Marek, I’ll meet you there.” He forwarded the text to me so I’d have the name of the hospital, and I took off.
It turns out it’s pretty easy to get through a crowd when you’re motivated and my size. It wasn’t the sort of thing I took advantage of often, but when I needed to bulldoze, nobody was going to stop me. I made it to my car in less than ten minutes, and ten minutes after that I was at the ER trying to get information from the nurse behind the desk about Ethan, which of course he didn’t give me.
Marek and Carson arrived a few minutes later. Marek looked… weird. Tired, which wasn’t unusual for after a game, but the hollows beneath his eyes were darker than I could remember seeing. He talked to the nurse for us, showed some ID, and then we were told to sit down with the understanding that when Ethan was available, we’d be taken to him.
Carson was hovering, opening his mouth and shutting it again in a way that showed he was nervous but not quite confident to talk about whatever was going on. That was weird, too—these two shared everything. Which meant the issue was over whether or notIshould be told.
“What?” I demanded in a louder voice than I meant. “What is it?” If Ethan was worse off than I thought, if there was some sort of complication or he’d hit his head too or?—
“I told him to fight,” Marek said, not looking straight at me. “He asked, but I was the one who told him to go ahead. Now his hand is broken.”
Oh. My ire died down almost immediately. “He wanted the fight.” I knew enough about Ethan to know that he had the spirit for fighting. He didn’t just want to know how to handle himself in case he got pulled into something; hewanted to be the one doing the pulling, watching out for his teammates when they needed him. Tonight they’d needed him.
“I should have said no.”
“You had a good reason for saying yes,” Carson blurted like he couldn’t stay quiet any longer. “With Keps and Mags out and that asshole gunning for worse because they were losing… ”
“You probably made his night by telling him to go for it. What happened at the end was just… ” I sighed. “An accident.” They happened. Shit, even Carson’s concussion had been an accident. I hadn’t meant to spike him like that; I’d overdone the move while I was hopped-up on adrenaline. I felt fucking awful about it, but he’d forgiven me. Learning to forgive myself was harder, but I was making progress there. “It sucks, but it was an accident. Ethan won’t blame you.”
Marek sighed, but his rigid posture relaxed a little as he swayed back against the seat. Carson gave me a relieved smile where his fiancé couldn’t see, then said, “I bet it won’t be long before we can see him.”
He was right. It wasn’t even half an hour later before we were shown into an exam room where Ethan was laid back on a bed, his right arm wrapped in thick bandages and pinned to his side by a sling. He also had a hazy look in his eyes that spoke of some serious pain medication. The haze lifted a little bit as he focused on us.
“Hiii,” Ethan said, a grin breaking out on his face as he tried to sit up.
“Ah-ah, not with that hand,” the nurse who was with him said when he apparently tried to use his right arm for support. “Remember, you’ve got to be careful with that hand for a while.”
“Mm. I do?”
“You do,” the nurse said patiently.
“Really?”
“If you want your fractures to heal well, yes.”
I worked my way over to his bedside as the nurse explained the prognosis—a comminuted fracture of the fifth metacarpal, which meant it had broken in two places. Luckily, it wasn’t displaced, and as long as he was careful with it he should be able to avoid surgery. “He’s looking at about four to six weeks in a cast due to the complex nature of the injury, though,” the nurse finished. “And it’s best that he not be alone for the next few days while he’s on the oxycodone.”
“He can come home with me,” I said.
Ethan looked at me with surprise. “Really?”
I sat down next to him. “Of course.” What, like I was going to let anybody else take care of my boyfriend right now?
“But I fucked up.”
I stared at him for a second before my mouth caught up to the fucking contortions my brain was doing. “No way.”
“I did, I was there!” he insisted, which was both sad and adorable. “I didn’t hit him the right way. You spent all this time teaching me how to hit people and I screwed it up, and youwatchedme screw it up, and now you’re going to get tired of me because I can’t fight right, and my hand really hurts, and I can’t even play hockey.”
