Page 28 of Bobby Green
Lance shook his head and sighed. “Yeah. Let me get you fixed up first, Reg. We’ll go over and give her meds.” He grimaced sourly at Bobby. “Junior here can probably work wonders with a three-point restraint.”
“Don’t hurt her,” Reg begged, and Bobby told him he’d try. Inside he was wondering how huge this woman had to be to level a buff guy like Reg, but that was before he saw the festering knife woundunderthe shirt and realized the stakes here were pretty damned high.
Reg followed orders like a pro.
At first Bobby was terrified he’d have to hold the man down, but Lance told Reg to hold still and he did. Bobby stayed for moral support, stroking Reg’s sweaty hair back from his face, holding his hand when Lance irrigated the wound and when he gave shots. When they were done, he helped change the sheets and gave Reg one of his own clean T-shirts and pairs of boxer shorts to wear. Reg grinned—a weak, tired grin—and made a crack about Bobby having pretty big shorts to fill.
And then he curled up on the clean sheets and fell asleep.
Bobby stared at him for a moment, his heart as sore as it had been in his entire life.
“He needs someone to look out for him,” he said, half to himself.
“Well,Iobviously suck at it,” Lance said bitterly, throwing his supplies into a specially marked bag for hazardous waste. He’d worn gloves and used cleanliness protocols the whole time. Bobby felt a bit of awe for a guy who could do what Lance had just done to Reg’s wound.
“You got distracted,” Bobby said, letting some of his resentment go. What was going on with Reg had obviously been going on for a long time. Situations like that—you never knew when they’d take a spiral to the left. “My friend’s dad, he got injured by a hay baler—had been using it his whole life. Lost concentration for one minute. Life’s like that sometimes.”
Keith’s dad had gotten mean. Was that why Keith hadn’t wanted to be tender or real? Was his dad why Keith had never wanted to acknowledge what they were doing, even to himself?
Suddenly Bobby didn’t care.
The guy whose hand he’d just held didn’t give a shit about gay or straight. He just wanted people to help him when he needed it. He just wanted company in a life he saw as going nowhere.
Bobby’s life wasn’t going much further. Bobby might as well.
But Lance hadn’t followed what was in Bobby’s head. “You shouldn’t have promised him about his sister,” he said unhappily. “You have no idea what you got us in for.”
“That bruise on his face told me a whole lot,” Bobby retorted. “What medication are we giving her, exactly?” He looked back over to the bed to see what Reg was doing, but he was out. He couldn’t hear this conversation or be embarrassed that it was being held without him.
“She’s paranoid schizophrenic,” Lance said. “And when she got hold of the knife last week, she’d stopped taking a pretty stiff cocktail of antipsychotics. Reg has been trying to get her on it again, but she’s damned smart. I think he has to literally scrub the sedatives against her teeth to get her to swallow them, and usually when he’s done there, she’ll take the rest. But it’s not easy, and it won’t sit right. You’ll be putting a tiny woman into a three-point restraint and shoving shit down her throat. I had to do it during my psych rotation, and I’m telling you, Veronica is as bad as it gets without tying her to the bed and putting a needle in her arm so she has to take her cocktail by IV.”
Bobby swallowed but held firm. “Then maybe we should get there by eight so we can get her before the last batch wears off.”
Lance shook his head and then told Skylar—hulking, good-natured surfer-blond Skylar—to keep an eye on Reg.
“Yeah,” he said seriously, channel surfing from the couch. “I’ll make him some more juice and keep an eye on his temp. I’ll call you guys if anything changes.”
“Do that,” Lance said shortly, making to leave.
Bobby couldn’t just go. He ran back to the bedroom for a minute so he could squat down by the head of the bed. “We’re going to take care of your sister,” he said softly. “But that’s ’cause you want us to. Not ’cause she’s more important than you, okay?”
Reg opened sleepy eyes. “Thank you,” he said, smiling slightly. “I totally owe you.”
“Naw.” And then, because he was in this house where guys fucked other guys sometimes for pleasure and sometimes for money, he leaned forward and kissed Reg’s forehead. Reg couldn’t call him queer or expect Bobby to suck his dick. He did, in fact, just snuggle down under his blanket and shiver.
“Nice,” he whispered. “Bye, Bobby.”
“Back in the morning. Ask the guys if you get hungry.”
“Skylar’s a good guy. Eight-inch cock—but he fucks real sweet.”
Bobby let out a shocked laugh, but Reg was already back asleep. He was going to have to get used to Reg reciting porn stats on his friends. It wasn’t a way Bobby had ever thought of relating with the world.
VERONICA WASunexpected.
Lance let himself in with a key, and they found her sitting at the kitchen table, staring blankly into space. A tiny woman with way too much graying brown hair falling in her eyes, she wore old pajamas, stretched and faded thin. Her eyes fell on Lance—tall, tanned, dark-haired, blue-eyed Lance—and something sparked in them, something almost girlish.
“Hi, Veronica,” Lance said smoothly. “I hope you don’t mind we let ourselves in?”