Page 69 of Sexting the Cowboy
Someone put the whole fairground underwater. Echoes vibrate through me.
The bullfighter flashes by in bright pants and steals the bull’s attention with a move I taught him when he was a teenager. The pickup man skims the edge of my vision like a saint on a horse. The horn blows. My ears ring louder.
The world shrinks and blackens. What the?—
Hands—many, too many—find my shoulders. The bell inside the bucket keeps going. It gets funny for half a second in the wrong way. Someone is talking at me. It sounds like a radio in the next room.
“—stay still, stay with me, I need?—”
I blink slow. The sky is surrounded by the loaded stands of people shouting. I think they’re shouting, anyway. Not real sure. My jaw works. No words come out. I put a hand up to wave off the fuss, and the hand is not interested in waving. It’s interested in gravity.
“Don’t move. Brick, can you hear me?”
It takes three tries to land my eyes on his face. Young. Straw hat. Panic he’s trying to hide. I give him a thumb that might be a thumbs-up, or it might be me counting to one.
Stretcher. The plastic flexes under me. Straps clip closed. My head is held like I’m a baby the size of a man. The sky slides by.
The dang bell keeps ringing.
They hustle me out under the rail, wheels taking ruts like bad jokes. I try to sit up, and the world booms no. I lie back and let the air touch my face. People talk at me. A small boy yells my name. His voice sounds normal. Everything else is rain on a metal roof.
The medic tent is shade and clean, and the kind of order that makes you want to close your eyes and pretend the rest of the world was a trick of the light. They wheel me inside, and the air changes shape.
Annie’s here.
“Jaden, I need vitals,now,” she says, and her voice goes straight through the water and into the center of me. Clear, precise, not calm because calm is a lie. It’s steady because steady is a discipline, and she has that in spades. “Brick, eyes on me.”
I try to make my eyes behave. They do elsewise. I wanna look at her. I always wanna look at her. But I can’t.
“Hey,” she says, and the word cuts a path through the ringing and makes room for sense. “Stay with me.”
“Doc,” I say. Or try. It sounds like someone else borrowed my throat. “I’m good.”
“You’re horizontal and glassy,” she says, not buying a single thing. “Your definition ofgoodis about to get smaller. Don’t talk. Blink for yes.”
I blink. It means yes, and also I just like doing what she tells me to do in here.
“Good,” she says. “Do not sit up.”
Sit up. Got it.
I lift my head a half inch off instinct, and she plants a palm on my sternum—gentle, implacable. “If you try to pull some macho bullshit,” she says, voice dry enough to snap, “I will strap you to this cot, head and all. Do you hear me?”
I can’t help it. I smile. Then I lie back because I like living and I like her, and both of those things want me to behave.
A blood pressure cuff hisses. Pulse ox kisses my finger and finds the red. Jaden moves like a man who knows where things live even when he’s not looking. Annie’s face is above me, and all the light in the tent chooses it like a destination.
She’s so pretty. Like an angel that wants to kick my ass for getting my ass kicked.
“Pupils equal and reactive,” she says, half to herself, half to us. “Brick. Follow my finger.”
I follow the world’s prettiest finger. There should be a ring on its neighbor two doors down. The ringing in my head gets quieter somehow.
“Any nausea?” she asks.
I consider it. “More like…loud.”
“Ringing?”
