Free Web NovelChapter 338: The unconscious surgeon
Cyan
One second, Nick was looking up at me through the falling rain, his face flushed red and his lower lip split open, saying something my brain hadn’t even finished processing yet.
The next second, his entire body just gave out under me. His eyes shut fast, his jaw went slack, and he went completely still.
It was that sudden, heavy shift of a body that had simply stopped participating in the whole project of staying awake.
He went entirely limp beneath me, his head dropping sideways onto the wet gravel. Just like that, the unconscious surgeon was completely my problem.
The heavy storm had already started to die down, leaving nothing but a quiet, steady drizzle. The massive roar of the wind vanished, making the rooftop feel suddenly, entirely empty.
I stayed right where I was for a moment, still sitting across his ribs, just blinking down at him while the water dripped from my hair onto his pale forehead.
"—Oh," I said to the empty air.
I scrambled off him, my boots squelching in the wet gravel, and dropped to my knees beside his shoulder. I pressed two fingers against the side of his neck. The pulse was there, thumping hard and much too fast against my fingertips.
I slid my palm down to check his breathing, and the moment my skin brushed the column of his throat, I flinched.
The heat radiating through his damp shirt felt like a furnace that had been running at maximum capacity without a single day of maintenance for weeks.
"Oh dear," I muttered, my voice sounding small in the open air. "The strange animal has a fever."
I leaned over to look at his face properly. The split lip was bleeding into the rainwater, a dark smudge of red running down his chin, and a nasty bluish bruise was already starting to puff up under his left eye where my second punch had landed.
The fever flush was bright and hot high on his cheekbones.
But even with his eyes shut and his body completely checked out, his face still managed to hold onto that irritatingly composed, proper look he always carried around. It was like he was being snobbish entirely by accident, and it was inexplicably annoying.
I reached out and poked his burning cheek with one finger. "Hey."
Nothing. He didn’t even twitch.
I poked him again, a little harder this time, digging my finger into his shoulder. "Wake up, strange animal."
Still nothing. Nick remained thoroughly, stubbornly unconscious.
I straightened up, wiping my wet palms against my jeans, and reached into my coat pocket for my phone. The screen was smeared with raindrops as I unlocked it and hit the speed dial.
"Reggie is going to be so incredibly disappointed in me," I told the back of Nick’s head. He didn’t respond, which was honestly the most polite thing he’d done all afternoon.
The call went through, and it didn’t even get past the second ring before the line clicked open.
"Master Cyan," Reginald’s voice came through the speaker, perfectly level, perfectly calm, as if he were standing in a quiet library instead of answering a call from a chaotic twenty-something.
"Reggie," I said, clearing my throat and looking back down at the bleeding doctor. "I appear to have acquired a medical emergency."
There was a pause on the other end of the line. It was a very specific, heavy silence, the kind of pause that belonged to a man whose threshold for actual surprise had been permanently burned away by decades of dealing with my specific existence.
"...Again, sir?" Reginald asked, his tone dry enough to parch wood.
"Again," I admitted, spinning a piece of gravel under my boot.
"And where exactly are you located?"
"The hospital rooftop," I said, letting out a small, sheepish breath. I tapped my fingers against my knee. "Which is... I’m fully aware, a highly restricted area. Technically."
Another brief silence stretched through the phone. I could practically hear him adjusting his cuffs on the other end. "I shall be there shortly, Sir."
The line went dead. I dropped the phone back into my pocket and looked down at Nick again, his chest rising and falling in shallow, rapid hitches.
"He’s coming," I told him, sitting down on the wet concrete right next to his shoulder. I pulled my knees up to my chest, letting my back rest against the cold stone ledge.
"Don’t thank me, by the way. Actually, you know what? You’re welcome."
The rain was slowing down to almost nothing now, the dark clouds overhead looking spent, their long argument with the city finally concluded.
In the heavy, damp quiet of the roof, I tried my absolute best not to think.
But my brain didn’t care about what I wanted. It kept replaying the last ten minutes anyway, flipping through the images like a slide projector I couldn’t turn off.
I kept hearing Nick’s voice, the steady, unhurried way he had delivered every single piece of dirty information he’d dug up on me.
This man, this completely random doctor who should have been nothing but a minor nuisance, had dug through every single thing I had spent years burying in the dark.
He’d laid it on a table right in front of me without blinking, and without a single word of apology.
And then he hadn’t even tried to fight back.
When I snapped, when my fist had gone into his jaw, he hadn’t raised a hand. He’d just lay there in the pouring rain, looking up at me with that raw, exposed expression I still couldn’t find a proper name for.
I want you to look at me. Finally.
My jaw tightened, the muscles aching from how hard I was clenching my teeth.
I forced myself to look away from his pale face, focusing entirely on the rows of gray buildings across the street.
The city was much safer to look at.
I was absolutely, definitely not thinking about the kiss either.
The fact that I had leaned down and pressed my mouth to his without making a conscious decision to do it was something I was entirely ignoring.
My hands had moved before my brain had even drafted the instruction. And the fact that Nick, after about four seconds of standard, expected resistance, had actually kissed me back, thoroughly and without an ounce of his usual arrogance...
No. I wasn’t thinking about it. I stared firmly at a distant water tower on a roof three blocks away. The water tower was very interesting. I was deeply, profoundly invested in the architecture of that water tower.
The heavy steel rooftop door groaned open again, the sound of gravel crunching under solid, expensive shoes breaking the silence.
Reginald stepped out onto the roof. He stopped about five feet away, his eyes moving over the scene in a sweep that took exactly two seconds to catalog every single detail.
He saw me, soaked to the bone and shivering; he saw Nick, completely unconscious on the ground; and he saw the blood smeared across Nick’s nose and lip.
Then came the look. It was the exact same expression Reginald had been giving me since I was eleven years old, a look that very clearly said: Explain this immediately, and it had better be the best story you’ve ever told.
I scrambled to my feet, raising both hands in the air like I was being held up. "Before you say a single word. He is alive."
Reginald’s eyebrows didn’t move. The look merely intensified.
"I didn’t kill him," I added quickly, taking a half-step back. "I swear."
The old man didn’t move an inch.
"I only punched him a few times," I muttered, my voice losing its defensive edge and dropping into something much smaller. "Honestly."
"Master Cyan," Reginald said. The two words carried the immense weight of a man who had spoken them in that exact tone more times than he could count, and had never once found them sufficient to describe the sheer exhaustion of his job.
"It was his fault!" I insisted, gesturing wildly at the unconscious man on the gravel.
"Entirely his fault. He provoked me. He said things he had absolutely no business knowing."
Reginald closed his eyes briefly, letting out a long, slow sigh through his nose. "Of course he did, sir," he said, his voice dripping with the total resignation of someone who had stopped being surprised by my life years ago and was now simply logging the event for the permanent record.
"He also has a fever," I said, trying to redirect the conversation as Reginald opened his eyes.
"A really bad one. His skin is practically boiling. It seems like he’s been walking around sick for days and just hiding it. He was already completely exhausted before I..." I waved my hand vaguely at Nick’s face.
"Before I did that. So, really, if you look at the big picture, the punches are entirely secondary."
Reginald walked over, kneeling down beside Nick with the practiced, efficient movements of someone who had seen a great deal of trouble in his time.
He pressed his hand to Nick’s forehead, his expression hardening slightly at the heat coming off him.
"The man needs to be seen by a medical team immediately, Master Cyan." He looked up at me. "Can you manage his weight?"
I was already crouching down, grabbing Nick’s limp left arm and pulling it over my shoulders. "I’ve managed worse."
"That is demonstrably true," Reginald said without a hint of humor, helping me hoist Nick’s torso off the ground. "Though I must confess, sir, you do seem to collect them rather efficiently."
I grunted as I stood up, pulling Nick’s dead weight onto my back. The sheer physical size of him hit my spine all at once, making my knees wobble for a second.
"Jesus," I wheezed, adjusting my grip under his thighs while Reginald held his shoulder to steady us.
"He is so much heavier than he looks. How is he this heavy? He clearly hasn’t eaten a real meal in three weeks."
Nick remained completely limp, his chin hooked over my shoulder, offering absolutely no comment on my lifting technique.
"Incredibly rude," I muttered to the side of his head as I began trudging toward the door, my boots dragging against the wet gravel.
"Eat a sandwich occasionally, doctor. Normal human beings eat food. You’re like carrying a very large, very judgmental boulder." freewebnσvel.cøm
Reginald walked ahead, reaching out to hold the heavy steel door open for us. "Master Cyan. Perhaps a bit less commentary and a bit more movement would be wise."
"You’re right. Sorry," I grumbled, navigating the threshold and stepping back into the warm, yellow light of the interior stairwell.
"But for the record, he started it."
