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A hand closed on her forearm, going tight as she flinched away. She fought it, confused and resisting panic.
“No, you’re good, it’s me, it’s me! Nancy!”
She shook off a spin and realized she was propped on a set of steps, Frank’s voice raised as he kept her from struggling to her feet. There was a weird tone of white noise, and it receded as she started to feel more alert.
“You’re okay, but you hit your head. I need you to sit still,” he said clearly. “Can you hear me?”
Nodding hurt. She reached up and he caught her before she touched the top of her head where the pain felt like something gnawing on her. Something thickly liquid was wetting her hair.
“I think I’m bleeding.”
Nancy knew her tone was off. She was swaying, and her joints felt too weak to stabilize her.
“You are a little bit,” he said. “It’s not that bad. The scalp bleeds a lot from nothing. I’m more worried about the inside. How’s your stomach?”
She tried to feel the rest of her body, but only felt weird and shaken. Nancy frowned, and managed to meet Frank’s gaze as he waited for her to answer.
“Sick at all, need to throw up?”
He was crouched in front of her, his hands on her legs and giving her a pleading look to be okay. She understood his reaction but she was a little removed from her own feelings.
“No, not that. Doesn’t feel like anything.”
There would be a giant headache later, once the shock left her. She heard Frank sigh. “Good. I need you to stay awake for me. If you start to drift off, say something,” he told her. “Okay, I’m about to shine a light in your eyes and blind you. Before I do that, look at something far away and tell me if you can focus on it.”
Nancy found a sign over his shoulder, tipping her head carefully. The sickening wet feeling through her hair changed direction and flowed faster.
“There’s a no parking between 6 pm and 6 am sign across the street. The street name is Oak Hill,” she said.
Frank looked back to read the sign, and turned to her, sparing an encouraging squeeze to her knee. “Good, and you can see me clearly? It’s not difficult to focus your eyes?”
There was a stress tic in his jaw, sometimes making a vein pulse down his neck. Nancy realized she had a big coat draped around her slumped shoulders, and he was down to a t-shirt. It was late fall in Boston. He was going to be cold.
“I can see you. You should take your coat back,” she said. “I’ll get it dirty. I’m not cold. It’s kind of warm.”
Frank reached behind her and took his coat away, but he didn’t put it on. His face flushed and he said something under his breath. “I’m too angry to be cold,” he said roughly. “That ass threw you into a bike rack. He could have killed you over smuggling a few thousand dollars of weed in a state where it’s legal recreationally.”
Nancy’s butt was going numb and she shifted to ease the feeling. “He likely has priors and will be going to prison. It doesn’t matter what gets smuggled. You can have a parrot, but if you fill a truck with them and start driving you’ll be charged with something. You can’t take it personally he didn’t want me to catch him.”
All three of them had been running after the man, dodging around playground equipment and benches. The park was tiny, but it had a gazebo with a stone base. Nancy remembered running past it. Frank must have carried her back to it once she was knocked out. Frank was in weak sunlight, but she was under the shade of something far above her.
“I choose to be angry a man tried to kill you, Nancy,” he said tightly. “It doesn’t matter what he thought he was escaping. By that logic it’s perfectly fine to shove you on the subway tracks if he’s running late for a movie. I’m going to shine a light in your eyes. It’s going to be unpleasant.”
She cringed as the quick flash of illumination set off the pain in her head she’d been expecting.
“Ow, yeah that’s true. I’m not saying it’s okay he did it,” she mumbled. “But I was chasing him. You and Joe were chasing him. Where did Joe go?”
Frank had put his phone away, and he was digging in his backpack. If she knew him, he probably still carried the first aid pouch from his scouting days. It had expanded a lot to include the ability to give stitches and treat anaphylactic shock with an epipen.
“Joe is getting the car, but there’s an ambulance coming, too. Whichever vehicle gets here first you’re getting in and we’ll go to the hospital.”
Nancy wasn’t as foggy as before. The gap between the chase, the injury and coming back to awareness was mostly sorted out.
“I don’t think I need to go. I wasn’t really knocked out, you know? Nothing feels broken. My brain isn’t squishing out,” she said.
Frank studied her, his face stern. “That’s the concussion making you tired. Even if we went back to the hotel you can’t sleep. You can’t imagine you married someone trained as an EMT and are going to refuse first aid for a head injury,” he told her. “I’ll wrestle you into the damn ambulance.”
She knew he wasn’t angry at her, but the insistence was a lot when she was feeling weak.
“I’m sorry I got hurt. You know I didn’t mean to. I don’t want strangers touching me and they don’t even do stitches under the hair half the time. Hospitals are the worst place when you have a really bad headache,” she said, aware her tone had veered toward whining.
The numbness was gone and she was sad; longing for a comfortable, dark bedroom. He was too responsible to give in about medical care. She was in for a long, invasive day of checks that wouldn't actually cure her concussion. The doctors would tell her what she knew she had, and then she would have to heal slowly.
Frank had paper wrapped packages of gauze out, and he stopped opening them to look at her directly. “You don’t have to be sorry. I’m sorry I have to make you go somewhere bright and noisy. I know you recognize the difference between feeling beat up and being really hurt. But if you go to sleep forever because we assume that, I’m a widower in my teens and I’m going to have to drink myself to death, okay?”
His attempt at a joke was horrifying, and Nancy felt tears overflow down her cheeks. “NO! Not ever okay Frank!”
She shoved at him and he fell back on his ass. They did dangerous things with the measure of them, calculated risks guesstimated from previous experiences. Nancy knew she wasn’t immune and that meant neither was he. And they weren’t even really married, but they also were just a little bit. If anything, the lack of a legal marriage meant they couldn’t get divorced and give it a true end.
Hardass Agent Hardy was gone. He came back on his knees and hugged her as she pulled herself into a mortified slump. It was just being injured that made her such a crybaby, and that made it much harder to calm down.
“I’m sorry. Nobody’s dying, it was a really bad joke. I’ll be serious from now on. I’ll be humourless. We’ll discuss very heavy topics. I’ll recite statistics, and you can eat the expensive box of chocolates I’m going to buy you,” Frank whispered. “I’m a jerk.”
He wasn’t, and it was terrible he wasn’t. If he could just show some crappy trait that was impossible to love, she could work out if she was the unrequited party of their dynamic. They could only float in the maybe of it for so long.
“You’re not a jerk,” she mumbled. “My head hurts a lot.”
“You’ll feel better soon.” He took her disgusting, bloody hair in one hand and cleared it from her cheek, kissing her there delicately. His mouth went down under her jaw, brushed her earlobe and laid a peck on her throat.
Nancy stretched her back, leaning forward to him. He came up and kissed her on the mouth, a warm, unhurried caress that brought a sudden stop to her tears. The waves of fatigue were no match for the heat that lit up her cheeks like two stove burners.
Frank pulled back and she let him go, staring at him as he paused for something she might say. He went back to his gauze packs and she pouted.
“That didn’t make me less dazed,” she complained mildly. “And I hate that we only ever kiss when somebody’s upset and I look like garbage.”
He smiled at her, bunching a white lump to dab at her head. “You’re always pretty, and you cried off a lot of the crusty playground sand. I’m not seeing any visible brains. You’re probably twitterpated, but it’s a very common chronic condition.”
It was familiar, and his tone made it clear it wasn’t a real medical condition. Nancy made a little inquiring noise.
“Like Thumper explained to Bambi,” he said. “Every spring, all the animals reunite and a few of them take a fancy to someone. I’ve been living with it for years. It’s sometimes hard to manage, but it’s not all bad.”
She was huddled right up to his chest, his scent drowning her in a weird urge to nuzzle and rub on him. She’d bled on his shoulder at some point, and the knees of his jeans were damp from kneeling on the ground.
“What’s so good about it, in your opinion?”
“I know where I caught it, and I know the person who gave it to me is worth at the very least nervous excitement,” he said. “It sometimes flares up and those are the days Joe complains we’re being ‘too married.’”
She was fascinated now, aware he was humouring her because he thought it distracted from the soreness as he picked at her wound.
“Do you think we’re too married?”
His soft, easy note of uncertainty was gentle on her ears. “Maybe not married enough. I think eventually the condition becomes terminal twitterpation. Leads to some dangerous behaviour - sudden marriage proposals and surprise honeymoons and such. Sometimes two people meet and their twitterpation crosses strains and the next thing you know they’re just up to crazy stuff,” he said. “Living together and spending all their time together, and talking about having babies.”
He was clearly not suggesting that was for them in any near future, but it wasn’t an impossibility. Nancy liked the way he smoothed her hair flat, even though it was filthy with blood.
“A terrifying condition when you put it like that,” she said lightly. “It’s making my concussion seem like a kindness. I hope you have someone you can talk to about it, for support.”
Frank bundled the bloody gauze in the wrapper, zipped his backpack and stood up. “I have somebody nice who always listens.”
They were growing past the need to drop clues about what they might say if it was time to say it. Nancy watched him bemused as he reached down to help her up.
“You’re going to be a bit dizzy, and all pins and needles,” he said. “Take your time.”
She stood up slowly, irritated to remember she was hurt and in pain. She had a lot to think about while she was near Frank, and she didn’t want to waste time on naps and healing. There might be a flare up of married symptoms to worry his brother soon. Nancy wasn’t sure she wanted Frank to be cured.
“Are you still packing me off to the hospital,” she asked.
“I’m not locking you up in a Victorian institution for mad wives,” Frank told her, keeping one of her hands. “I’m going to stay with you. I want to see that sexy brain on your MRI you’re getting. So we can make sure you don’t slip into a coma and die. What about this plan is unreasonable?”
She gave him a tragic look. “The gross hospital smell, the bad food, and how long it will be before I can shower the blood out of my hair,” Nancy told him.
He smiled. “You need to toughen up. I could send you to a spooky asylum for difficult women too smart for their own good?”
Aware he was baiting her, Nancy scowled at him. “What is this idea of sending me places like you can put me in a box with enough postage and that’s normal?”
He grinned, clearly enjoying her outrage. “Obviously you’ll have some packing peanuts and a water bottle and some food. We’re going to use a lot of fragile stickers and some air holes for the box,” Frank told her. “And you’ll be wearing my new invention I just thought of called the wife helmet. It’s a football helmet I’m padlocking onto your head. It can be any colour you want!”
She glared at him, marveling at the notion Joe was famous for being a charming jackass but most people thought Frank was polite and a little dull in comparison. He was just as quick with a juvenile bit of humour, but more selective when he said it aloud. He gestured with their joined hands to the ambulance pulling up the curb, closely followed by their rental car.
“Oh, look, it’s our ride,” he said brightly.
Nancy widened her eyes and gave him a fake smile. “Just in time, you were about to need the emergency room.”