Page 29 of Sexting the Cowboy
She snorts. “And infections are worse than that…wait. You fell on purpose, didn’t you? That pretty doctor?—”
“Watch your mouth,” I say, but I can’t help the grin. “Point me to my doom.”
She grabs my wrist—careful of the slice, my smart girl—and tugs me along the back lane. It buzzes with the usual traffic. Livestock guys talking in short sentences, sponsors in clean boots trying not to step in anything, kids hauling coolers. The medic tent isn’t too far away, which is good because I don’t want half my clothes turning red.
Definitely not because I want to see Annie.
Blaze peeks around the flap like she owns the place. “Doc? Delivery!”
Jaden, the nurse with the good eyes and the better attitude, looks up first and then steps aside with a smile that says he knows exactly what he’s doing. “Come on in, Blaze. That looks like a good one.”
Then Annie turns, and the tent gets smaller.
She’s in scrubs again, hair pulled back, a little line between her brows that could be concentration or irritation. Her hands are gloved, steady. There’s a calm around her that doesn’t match the carnival outside. My shoulder steals her attention.
“Hey, Doc,” I say, trying not to sound like I’m proud of bleeding.
She takes one look at the arm and tilts her head. “Hey yourself. Sit.”
That voice. Not sweet, not hard. Just sure. I sit on the corner cot, and Blaze perches on a stool and makes herself ten percent smaller, which is as polite as she gets.
Annie peels back the soaked part of my sleeve and the cut opens like a mouth that wants to talk. “How’s your pain?”
“Don’t have any.”
Her eyes flick up. “At all?”
“Not in that patch,” I say, and tap the meat of my bicep with my clean hand. “Been numb there the better part of a decade.”
She studies the area with that laser look, like she can see the scar tissue under the skin. “Nerve damage?”
“More like God’s sense of humor,” I say. “Took a horn wrong in Amarillo forever ago. Lost some feeling. Comes in handy when the dirt has opinions. Doesn’t when I leak the red stuff and don’t notice.”
Blaze gives me asee-I-told-youface without using any muscles. Annie’s mouth does a not-quite smile. She’s hiding it from me, but not from herself. “Okay,” she says, all business now, the kind I like. “No tendon involvement that I can see. Range of motion?”
I roll the shoulder and flex the elbow like a man showing off without meaning to. “Not my first rodeo.”
“You say that at the rodeo, and you owe me a dollar,” she says, deadpan, and I bark a laugh that makes Jaden grin. But then hepoints to the sign on the wall that readsIf you say, “Not my first rodeo,” you owe us a dollar.
Fair enough.
She cleans—saline, gauze, the sting that means we’re not getting infected today—and I watch her hands. Small, strong. She’s precise without being precious, and I feel myself relaxing in increments I can count. Outside, a kid yells and somebody’s mother answers with the exact same vowel. Inside, it’s gloves and the soft rip of packaging and the rustle of her sleeve when she reaches. She’s carved out a tiny oasis of calm here, and that takes some doing.
“When did you last get a tetanus shot?” she asks.
“Last year.”
“You’re current. Smart in your line of work.” Her hip brushes my knee as she leans to get a better angle and my whole nervous system does a stupid little dance. It’s nothing. It’s a touch through fabric in a hot tent.
But it’s everything when I haven’t let anyone matter in a long time.
She’s close to me. Close enough to kiss. When her eyes dip to my mouth, I know what’s on her mind, because it’s all I can think about too. How soft her lips must be. How they’d feel on me. The slide of her tongue?—
“You going to be able to ride again tonight?” Blaze asks, the casual tone a lie. She’s watching me out of the corner of her eye like she’s not watching at all.
“Ask the pretty doctor.”
Annie doesn’t look up. “The pretty doctor says you’ll be fine as long as you keep the dressing clean and your ego in check.”
