“Oh, good!” Robbie said. He smiled. When Robbie smiled, the entire world literally had to stop to smile back. It was some sort of universal law that people could not be sad around him. “You’re awake! I’ll call the nurse.”
“Wait.”
But, it was too late to stop him from doing anything. Robbie had already pressed the call button, which would more than likely bring a nurse running to his room. He suspected that his injuries, whatever they were, might make him more of a priority. Then again, judging by the fact that he didn’t have a breathing tube shoved down his throat, maybe they considered him low risk.
Maybe he still had time to talk and figure things out.
Robbie rustled around out of sight for a few moments, then came back into view carrying a very uncomfortable-looking plastic chair, which he set down gently on the floor. He sat down, though he seemed to be perching on just the very edge so that he was still within Ulysses’ line of sight.
“Robbie?”
“Yes?” Robbie chimed back, almost before he had finished speaking. If there was ever a person in the world who was a little too eager to please, it was Robbie. “What do you need? A drink of water? Or, maybe I should wait until the nurse comes to check you out. I don’t want you to choke.”
A sip or two of water sounded like a damn fine thing right then, but that wasn’t what Ulysses had wanted.
“What happened to me?” he asked.
He wished he didn’t have to talk to Robbie about this at all. Robbie, who was too good for this world, who as a child would have eaten all his vegetables without asking and volunteered to do housework. They hadn’t talked much about their school days, not that Ulysses would have been able to remember much, he’d skipped so many days, but Robbie certainly would have been the kind of kid who did all his homework on time, plus extra credit, who always raised his hand to give what would naturally be the right answer.
A goodie-two-shoes, if he wanted to revert back to a more childish form of name-calling.
Robbie furrowed his eyebrows. He clearly plucked or waxed them, because they were in a perfect shape not naturally known to any man. “You don’t remember? I guess that’s okay. It must have been very traumatic.” His voice colored with the exact right amount of sympathy, and it clearly wasn’t deliberate. Everything about him was always exactly right.
Ulysses chewed on the inside of his lip for a moment, tasting copper, letting the nip of pain clear the irritation from his thoughts. Robbie’s nature was just as frustrating him as it always had been.
“No,” Ulysses growled. “I don’t remember. That’s why I asked. What happened?”
“Well, you were in an accident.”
An accident? What kind of accident?
He couldn’t recall anything, not even with that to jostle his memory. Except, maybe that wasn’t quite true. If he really thought about it, he remembered getting on his motorcycle in the parking lot of the bar. Then he had ridden off, feeling very stable and at peace, with the sea breeze whipping past his face.
If he pushed his memory even harder, clawing into the blank space which came after he mounted his motorcycle, he thought he caught a vague impression of something red. A light. A stoplight?
He had blazed through it, not seeing any other vehicles coming from either direction.
Then, a sound he wouldn’t ever forget now that he remembered it: a horrendous squalling shriek, the sound of someone slamming on the brakes, shredding their tires on the road.
After that, a sense of…falling? And some sort of collision. He knew that, could feel it, but there were no real words to describe what it had been like.
Then, no matter how hard he pressed, there was only darkness.
When he opened his eyes again, Robbie’s presence had been replaced by the image of a young woman dressed in polka-dot scrubs. No, Ulysses realized, not polka-dots. The rows of round, pastel shapes were little rubber ducks, grinning their little ducky grins.
At least some of us are happy, he thought, a little nonsensically.
The nurse smiled at him, noticing that she had gotten his attention. “Hello, Mr. Bender. How do you feel?”
“Like death,” Ulysses replied.
Her smile didn’t falter, and he couldn’t see her eyes properly enough to get a sense of what emotions she might be hiding. Her scent was as clean and disinfected as the rest of the room, offering no hints. “Well, let’s see what I can do about that, shall we? I’m just going to check your vitals, and then I’ll let the doctor know that you’re ready for him to see you. After that, I’ll be able to get you some more pain medicine. Would you like that?”
Ulysses hesitated, the words already tangled up on his tongue. He wanted to say yes, please, give me some sort of drug to lessen this hell. With Robbie in the room, he didn’t know if he should. An alpha shouldn’t need to take artificial human medicines to deal with his pain. They were stronger than that, tougher than that.
The nurse clearly took his silence as acquiesce, because she nodded pleasantly and got to work with checking his pulse and whatever else the monitors were recording. She also lifted the bedsheet off his body and appeared to be checking on the other parts of him, though he couldn’t lift his head to see what that might be. She either didn’t touch him, or else touched him in a place he couldn’t feel.
With the sheet lifted up, cold air infiltrated. He hadn’t noticed until just now how damn cold it was in the room, until the frigid air caressed the places of his body that had only just previously been warm.
Even the sensation of cold was strange, not touching him all over. There were patches of his body that seemed unaffected by the change in temperature.
Bandages?
Ulysses gritted his teeth, fighting the urge to shiver. Cold never bothered him before. He found it bracing and refreshing. Why now was everything so different?
At long last, the nurse replaced the sheet over him, tucking it up high around his shoulders. He breathed a sigh of relief and then immediately berated himself for it, knowing it was just a much a sign of weakness as everything else.
The nurse didn’t comment on it, though she was a professional and probably very used to keeping her thoughts to herself. She must have thought he was being weak and pathetic, that he was a wimp and not deserving of any sort of respect. Instead, she said, very cheerfully, “Well, everything seems to be in order with you. That’s to be expected, considering your stature.”
Ulysses bristled, although tightening any amount of muscles in his battered body only caused more pain, and then realized she wasn’t actually referring to his physical stature. She knew he was a shifter, was maybe one of very few members of the hospital staff who knew of the existence of people who could turn into animals. And she would have to have that knowledge, otherwise his vitals would have sent her running for an entire team of emergency doctors. He wasn’t quite sure exactly what differed between himself and a regular man, if his blood pressure and heartbeat were naturally higher or lower, but he did suspect the difference would be concerning to someone not in the know.
As he was a shifter, and a wolf with a hardy constitution at that, he was in possession of rapid healing abilities. There was very little that a shifter’s body could not handle, unless the problem originated from within in the first place.
She hadn’t stopped speaking, so he quickly tuned in again to catch up on what she was saying, just in case it was important. “You’re very lucky, all things considered. You just relax and the doctor will be in to see you, and he’ll tell you all about what comes next. If you need me, don’t be afraid to press the call button. I’ll come running.”
“Wait,” Ulysses said. “What exactly happened to me?”
He wanted to know, needed to know, so he could figure out exactly what his fractured memories meant.
Still smiling, the nurse just shook her head. “The doctor will tell you all about that. It’s best you hear it from him. Remember, don’t hesitate to call me if you need anything.”<
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“Sure,” he said. “Whatever.”
She walked away, her footsteps muted. He watched the door to his room open and close as she left, and then he was alone with Robbie once more.
There were worse people to be stuck in a hospital room with, he supposed. Just, he felt very stupid, lying here in front of the man he used be with on the daily.
Really, it had been more like a relationship. They hadn’t been lovers, although he hated the contrite sweetness of that word and wouldn’t have used it even if it was accurate. They were more like boyfriends, though Ulysses never envisioned anything more serious than that in their future. Something vital was missing, though Ulysses hadn’t been able to figure out what. If Robbie knew, he had never said so. And that meant Robbie didn’t know, because the omega wolf would never hesitate to give the right answer when he had one.
And maybe that was the problem.
He was too…perfect.
Too responsible.
Too uptight.
They hadn’t ever even had sex. Ulysses was pretty sure every wolf on the face of the planet loved sex, so clearly something was awry.
Ulysses strained his hearing, hoping against hope that he would be able to pick up on approaching footsteps as a doctor arrived to deliver him from this nightmare situation. No one came. It was only him and Robbie, who was now back in his position in the chair at the side of the bed. No one was going to save him, so he was going to have to deal with this on his own.
“Hey, Robbie?”
“Yes?” Robbie replied immediately, as eager as ever. His eyes had brightened over the course of the past few minutes as he let go of his worries, clearly believing in the competency of the medical system. His irises were back to bright blue, striated with a lighter cerulean shade.
“Why were you at the bar?”
Robbie drank responsibly, usually favoring sweet, flavorful cocktails that he could sip and enjoy in the company of a few friends. He was not a bar-hopper, was not even a bar-goer by any stretch of the imagination. The dive bar scene, rough and tumble, with an unpredictable atmosphere where absolutely anything could happen, was just not the place where he would normally be.
Maybe to pick up a drunk friend who needed a sober ride back home, or to provide helpful company to someone who was feeling harassed.
But to just enjoy it for himself?
That wasn’t like him.
A vaguely embarrassed look crossed Robbie’s face. His cheeks bloomed with pink rosettes, a very flattering blush that made him look somehow even more attractive than before. The colorful addition to his skin gave him a youthful, lively appeal. He was the sort of man who could give a straight guy some very confusing feelings, especially right now. His looks defied gender and preference. He was just damn fine.
Despite all the pain he was in, Ulysses felt a faint echo of desire inside his groin. The feeling was quick to fade, and that was probably the most sensible thing about getting the hots for someone while lying in a hospital bed: it was best not to prolong any horniness.
“Some friends wanted to go and try it out. I told them they probably wouldn’t like it, but they heard good things about it.”
Probably from people with very different tastes.
“I guess they probably had some different opinions,” Robbie said, stating almost word for word what Ulysses had thought. “But we didn’t know that at the time. So, we went to go try it. I didn’t expect to see you there, though. That was a big surprise. And…” He hesitated, probably wondering if what he was about to say would come off as rude. Ulysses would have personally had no such qualms, but Robbie was much more thoughtful than that. Thoughtful to a flaw, if Ulysses really gave voice to his opinions, as he always did.
“It seemed like a place you would definitely like. Just, not a place for me or my friends. We left pretty quickly. Then I saw you get on your bike. And my danger senses started tingling.”
Robbie smiled sweetly at the end of this statement. Even he was aware that “tingling danger senses” was a stupid thing to say.
Stupid, not implausible or impossible. Shifters tended to have what could almost be labeled a sixth sense, giving them intuition into events or results that they could not otherwise have known.
“I followed you. And then I saw you…”
Robbie never got to say what he saw, because a single, sharp knock on the door interrupted the conversation.
Ulysses craned his eyes over in that direction, feeling them strain in their sockets. God, when had looking around become an exhausting task?
The door popped open and a tall, dashing man in a white doctor’s outfit strode into the room. Despite the getup, he looked very much like an actor who played a doctor on some sort of stupid television drama, rather than a real medical professional. His eyes were deep and mournfully sweet, and his coffee-colored skin was as smooth and flawless as glass.
Dr. Handsome strode over and held out his hand to Ulysses, who could not reciprocate. That didn’t seem to matter, since the man hadn’t been trying to shake his hand in the first place. This was, after all, not a meeting of equals. Instead, Dr. Handsome placed his hand on Ulysses’ shoulder and gave him a couple of gentle pats. “Mr. Bender, how are you feeling? A little sore? Tired? Hm?”
“Like shit,” Ulysses responded truthfully. “Who are you?”
“Oh, forgive me.” Dr. Handsome chuckled. “We’ve met before but it was under much more stressful circumstances. I’m Dr. Ibori, but you can just call me Hank.”
“Dr. Ibori,” Robbie said, because he would never call a person of authority by anything less than their title, “Ulysses doesn’t remember what happened.”
“I remember some of it,” Ulysses fired back, wanting to be the correct one for once.
For what it was worth, Dr. Ibori didn’t seem perturbed by this fierce exchange in the slightest. He just smiled, albeit with much more grace and charm than the nurse had. “Well, that’s perfectly normal. Mr. Olson, do you mind stepping out for a moment while I have a talk with Mr. Bender here? Take a walk. Help yourself to some coffee in the cafeteria. Sarah at the desk outside will point you in the right direction.”
“Oh, just call me Robert,” Robbie said, because he was excruciatingly correct at all times. Robbie knew he was not the focus at the moment, that he had no authority here, and he wanted to be addressed in a way which reflected that. It wasn’t a matter of self-esteem, because Robbie always had the proper amount of that. It was just something natural to him, to know his place in any situation.
Robbie stood up, set his delicate hand on Ulysses’ shoulder for a moment, and then left the room. He shut the door as quietly as possible, so quietly the click of the latch was nearly inaudible.
And just like that, Ulysses felt much better. He didn’t want to have to keep up an impressive façade for the duration of what was undoubtedly going to be a very unpleasant conversation. It would be easier to fall apart in the presence of someone he would probably never see again, when he would never have to look at them and remember the judgment in their eyes.
Not that he intended to fall apart. He was, after all, breathing on his own and speaking coherently. This wouldn’t be that bad.
But, just in case. He was glad Robbie was gone.
Dr. Ibori started to perform the same sort of checks the nurse had, as if he didn’t trust her observations. When he pulled the sheet down, his fingers were much less gentle than hers had been. They poked, prodded, pinched, and jostled.
“Ow,” Ulysses said.
“I’m sorry,” Dr. Ibori responded, not sounding sorry at all. He continued with his observations, occasionally asking if this hurt, or if that gave a twinge when he did this.
The answer was always yes, and fuck yes.
Finally, the doctor straightened up. There was a lot of him to straighten, and Ulysses felt a momentary stab of jealousy at his height.
Dr. Ibori pulled his face mask down, though Ulysses wasn’t sure when he’d pulled it up in the first
place. “Well, you are healing at a very rapid rate, as is expected. However, we’ll get into specifics later. Right now, I must ask, do you really not remember anything?”
“No,” Ulysses growled. “I don’t. I was drunk.”
“Yes. Yes you were.” Dr. Ibori’s voice suddenly hardened. “And you’re lucky you weren’t killed or that no one else was directly affected. According to witness accounts, and what the police managed to put together…”
The police were involved? Great.
“…you ran a red light on your motorcycle. There was a car coming. They braked, swerved around you. They didn’t hit you.”
Then why did he feel so awful?
“You also swerved, which wasn’t necessary, though you couldn’t have known that in your state. You ran right into a pole. A street lamp pole, if you care to know. You were thrown from your motorcycle, and you hit the side of a bank building at the corner.”
That would certainly account for the collision he remembered.
“If it wasn’t for your helmet, you might have cracked your skull in half like an egg. As it is, you don’t even have a concussion. You are very lucky you thought to wear it.”
If there was one rule Ulysses would abide by, it was the one about always wearing a helmet. A dead biker was no biker at all.
“Then, tell me, Hank, why am I here?”
Dr. Ibori’s hard expression didn’t relax. If anything, he only grew more serious. That didn’t exactly do much to boost Ulysses’ hopes.
“You’ve sustained many cuts and abrasions, most of which I doubt will still be present after a few days. You have whiplash, though no damage otherwise was incurred to your neck or spine. You dislocated your right shoulder, where you hit the bricking on the side of the building. We have reset that. It should heal quite nicely unless you cause yourself further injury.”
So far, the toll didn’t seem all that bad. Ulysses was about to comment on that, and then Dr. Ibori continued speaking. He was apparently only pausing for breath and was nowhere near done.
“You have bruised two ribs quite nicely and sprained your right wrist. You wrenched several muscles in your right foot and ankle. These injuries should also heal with no real difficulty. And you have lost your smallest toe on your right foot.”
Taming The Alpha: A Wolf Shifter Mpreg Romance (Savage Love Book 3) Page 3
