Page 26 of Nicks and Cuts

As silently as he could in boots that he didn’t bother taking off, he crept toward the kitchen.

No sign of a fight and no more blood.

“Dante!” He didn’t set the helmet down.

“Bathroom,” Dante called back from his end of the house.

Shannon exhaled, knowing he was not going to find Dante getting railed by the neighbor, and if that’s what was happening, Dante wasn’t his boyfriend, so it didn’t matter. He strode through the kitchen and down the corridor. It was only then that he hesitated. Dante had sounded calm. It was only him who was worried about the blood. He knocked on the open bedroom door. “I saw the blood. Are you okay? Do you want me to come in?”

“Um…”

That was never a good answer.

“Mostly,” Dante said. “You don’t need to do anything. I have the first-aid kit.”

Shannon rolled his eyes. “I’m coming in.”

Dante was sitting on the edge of the bath. The reason Shannon had seen no more blood was that Dante had taken the hand towel out of the mudroom and it was now lying bloody on the bathroom floor. He was holding another towel to his forearm, and the first-aid kit was sitting on the vanity.

“This is your definition of mostly fine?” He washed his hands, opened the first aid kit, and pulled on a set of gloves. “If you move that towel, is it going to gush or is it just a trickle?”

“It’s a slice about three inches long that lifted a flap of skin and is bleeding but not gushing.”

“And you did it in the workshop?”

“Blade snapped. A one in a million accident.”

Shannon lifted an eyebrow. “If I had a dollar for every time I heard that, I would be a millionaire. Guess I should be glad you didn’t slip and land on something unfortunate.”

“I thought that was just an Internet joke.”

“I wish.” He shook his head. “It would be better if they just admitted to feeling horny and wanting something up their ass, but no, they tell the most unoriginal lie about how they ended up with a candle or a bottle or something worse…I’m going to take a look, and you are not going to argue with me if I say you need to get stitches. Agreed?”

“I have duct tape and superglue…they use superglue to close wounds all the time.”

Shannon glared at him. “You may not have noticed, but we’re not in a war zone, so there will be no temporary patches to get you back out and fighting.” He put his hands on the towel, and Dante released his grip on it. “So is this the worst injury you’ve gotten knife making?”

It was so easy to slip into fact-finding conversation while keeping somebody calm and distracted. It’s what he was good at.

“I think it’s the worst cut. But I’ve had some nasty burns, including flicking hot metal on myself. But on the scale of a cut to needing pins and metal in my femur and hip, they’re pretty low on the list.”

“You must have some very interesting X-rays.” The cut was about three inches and had indeed lifted a flap of skin. Dante had given him a good assessment, and he had been very lucky it hadn’t gone deep.

“I do. Do you want to see them?”

Shannon smiled. “You know I do. Okay…the bleeding is a lot less as it’s not soaking through the towel. I’m assuming you’ve already cleaned it out?”

“Yes, that stung pretty bad.”

“So if you get stitches, it’s going to heal up a lot faster, and you’ll probably keep the flap of skin. If you don’t, and you just cover it, it’ll take longer to heal, which is a risk for infection, and that flap of skin might dry up and peel off so you end up with a bigger scar. If it was me, I would get it stitched.” He could tell from Dante’s face that he did not want to go and get it stitched.

“It’s not that big.”

“Yeah, it is.”

“There should be a bunch of those butterfly strips in there.” Dante nodded in the direction of the first aid kit.

Shannon glanced up at him. “You said you wouldn’t argue.”