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ELI CAME TO IN A STRANGE room with a tall ceiling and a narrow, institutional window to his right. The first thing he felt was his parched mouth. He’d never felt as thirsty as now. He tried to move, his arms were strapped to the bed – why was he in bed? – and his legs felt leaden.
“Help!” His croak and a steady beeping sound were the only sounds he heard in the small room. The beeps sped up, and Eli realized they were familiar from several TV shows. But why? And where was he?
“Help!”
A door swung open. He didn’t see it happen, but the air shifted over his face and arms. “Gently now.” A woman’s voice. “You’ll be fine, but settle down and breathe, okay? You gave us a bit of a scare, but you’ll be fine.”
Eli turned his head. An older woman with a short, gray haircut was standing over him, giving him an assessing look. Her lilac scrubs were plain and she wore no makeup, but he noticed a glint of a pendant with a luminous, green stone around her neck.
Glass? Glass!
“Glass,” he said, quieter this time. His whisper was intelligible, and she nodded.
“Let’s see how you’re doing,” she said in a no-nonsense voice. “What’s your name?”
“Eli. Eli Winkler.”
“Do you know where you are, Eli?”
He had to think about that. “I think I’m in a hospital.” Ah, an intelligent answer.
“Do you know today’s date?”
“Uh...” He thought hard. “No. I mean it’s April, and it’s Monday, but I’d have to check my phone.” He frowned. “It’s 2015. The year, I mean.”
“Yeah. You seem lucid.” She picked up a small laptop and started typing. Then she looked at something behind him, and typed some more as though she was taking notes.
“What are you doing?”
“Checking your vital signs, Sweet Pea.” She smiled. “Do you remember what happened?”
“Sorta.” Eli thought back. “A piece of glass exploded, and then I started bleeding, and Bo dragged me away. More or less.” A vision of Bo’s frantic expression, his determined frown, it all came to him. “He said I won’t die on his watch.”
“Did he now. He did a good job.” She smiled.
“What’s your name?”
“Debra. Sorry. Should’ve introduced myself. I’m a nurse at this ICU and I’ll be taking care of you, Eli. Unless you’d like a male nurse?”
An image of a burly guy seeing him naked, or even washing him off, crossed his mind. He blushed. “No.”
“Not very modest, are you?” Debra’s voice was teasing. Innocuous.
“Women are nicer.” He gave her his most charming look. “Besides, I’m gay.”
“Oh okay. I see, that makes sense.” She looked at his notes. “Is there anyone who we can notify you’re in the hospital? Anyone here in Pittsburgh?”
Matt and Jeff popped up in his mind by sheer habit, and he rejected them. Not those guys. Not his elderly neighbor, and his employer already knew. “No. No, I’m okay on my own.” He thought back to the fall that had ended his dancing career, and to the subsequent hospital stay. “Make sure people from work are allowed to visit me, okay?”
“I’ll make a note of it.”
He yawned. Debra noticed. “Here, drink this. You’ll be thirsty after the anesthesia. And you’ll want to sleep a lot.”
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HE DID SLEEP, AND WHEN he saw Debra again at the end of her shift, she let him drink a disgusting, cherry-flavored electrolyte drink. “Are you hungry yet?”
He had to think about it. “Not sure. Not really.”
“You will be.” She gave him a bedpan to use. “Somebody sent you flowers, but they’re outside. You can have them in your regular room. They’ll move you tonight.”
“How long will I have to be here?” Eli asked.
“Well,” she said, “that depends on your doctor. The glass cut one of the smaller arteries in your thigh, and some muscle, and we want to make sure it heals clean and you don’t rip anything. You wouldn’t want the bleeding to start again.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“Once we’re sure you’re on the mend, you’ll be released into home care, and once you can walk with a cane, you can go back to work. No heavy lifting, though.”
“Shit.”
“Disappointed? Don’t be. You got lucky by an inch or so. You’re still alive, aren’t you?”
She patted his shoulder in a motherly gesture, which made him tense. “Oww. My arm! I forgot about my arm.”
“Oh, that.” She had a peek at the clean bandage on his bicep. “That’s nothing. Just a flesh wound. You have stitches, but that’ll heal much faster than your leg.”
She showed him all his remote controls, wished him well, and disappeared. He was alone with his own thoughts.
Released into home care.
That should be interesting. Mom would want to fly in and take care of him, which would be fun for about two days. Then she’d get bored and try to redecorate his apartment, revamp his wardrobe, and scrub every surface in his place. And when she was done with that, she’d try to talk him into taking a job somewhere in New Jersey, preferably in Kingston.
Except he just started to like Pittsburgh, and Kingston didn’t have a cool glass factory that made gorgeous colors of all kinds of glass. Kingston also didn’t have a hunky glass gatherer with flaxen hair and eyes like the summer sun, who played bass in a rock band and who kissed like a god.
Before Eli fell asleep, his last thought was of Bo, and whether he was okay.
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THEY DIDN’T MOVE HIM to a regular room till morning. He was alone, although there was another bed, and it was made with the regular, white hospital linens. The walls were wallpapered in a pattern of beige and tan stripes, and the obligatory framed prints on the walls featured pictures of cats and dogs. There was a wheeled nurse stool by each bed, and a visitor’s padded reading chair by the door, right under the small, mounted TV screen. Eli had lived in worse.
Right now, he wasn’t sure whether he was lucky he was in the room alone, or unlucky, since he had been feeling terribly lonely.
He reached for his cell phone, and his heart sank when he found it as it had been before. No texts. No messages. It was ten in the morning, though, and his parents would be at work. That was good, because if he called them now, they couldn’t talk for too long. Also, they couldn’t gang up on him.
Mom or Dad first? He weighed the cons and the pros. He’d always been a Mama’s boy with all his dancing, but Dad was the one who understood his penchant for travel and wild adventure. It hadn’t been Dad who tried to talk Eli out of his Peace Corps tour.
He looked around. The door was open and the usual ebb and flow of hushed hospital conversation drifted in. People had been good about knocking before entering.
Eli heaved a deep sigh, shifted his injured leg the smallest bit, and dialed a number.
“Eli?”
“Hi, Dad.”
“What a pleasant surprise. What’s up, son?”
His father sounded positively cheerful, and Eli didn’t think he wanted to rain on his parade. Maybe he could just say he was calling to say hi. Or to ask about... well...
“Eli? Tell me what’s wrong.” Art Winkler’s voice assumed that no-nonsense, commanding tone Eli had been used to hearing when he and his friends made a mess in the den.
“There’s been an accident. I just wanted you to know I’m okay. You know, in case they call you from work.” He paused. “Or from the hospital.”
“Oh.” He could just see his father, his leather loafers on the corner of his desk, leaning in his executive chair. Head thrown back, brows drawn together, fingers tapping on the armrest of his chair. He let him ride it out. It wasn’t a good idea to interrupt him when he got like that. “What kind of an accident? What happened?”
Ah, a fact-gathering mission. Eli was in the clear. “Oh, nothing major. You know how unannealed glass can just fall apart, right?”
“Yeah.” They had talked about that.
“A piece of cullet blew up and I got cut a bit.”
“A bit? How many places?”
“Two.” Eli was, after all, just stating the facts.
“So what... you got stitches?”
“Sure. I got stitches and I’ll be all right. They moved me out of the ICU this morning _”
“The ICU?” Now his father sounded like Starship Enterprise was under a Romulan attack and the red alert screamed through all the decks. Eli suspected his dad always tried to act like Captain Kirk, but he usually came off a lot more animated than that.
“Dad, I’m fine. Really.”
“Tell me the extent of your injuries. In detail.”
Eli laughed. He knew this part was likely to come. “Not sure, really. All I know I was lucky Bo Bartowski applied pressure the way he did. They fixed the artery. Not the big femoral one, the one that branches off of it. So see, it could’ve been worse.”
“How much blood did you lose?” Now his dad sounded like he was going to pass out. Maybe Eli should’ve called his mom first. Women were used to blood since their teens, after all.
“How much, Eli?”
“Lots! Look, I don’t remember. I just remember asking Bo if I was gonna die, and he said not on his watch.”
“Fuck.”
The silence stretched across their cell satellite connection, bouncing from tower to tower, to space and back again. Eli couldn’t speak. His father didn’t swear. Not ever.
“That guy Bo deserves a medal,” he finally said. “You work with him?”
“Sort of.” How much to tell? Dad didn’t feel comfortable with the details of his gay dating life, but still, a relationship. “I really like him,” he said instead. “As in, I hope to date him. Although I hope he won’t think it’s just gratitude on my part.”
Three seconds. “Is he a good man?”
Eli considered the question carefully. He and his dad had this unspoken pact of never lying to each other. His dad told him when the school was teaching him lies about marijuana and sex, and he told Dad that he was gay and wanted to go to the prom with a guy, or at least alone. His dad had confessed he had a drinking problem, and Eli took his well-deserved dressing down for doing a line of coke in college.
“Yeah, I think he is. I don’t know him well enough for a total analysis yet, but... I really like him, Dad.”
“Still, you’ll need some help. Your mother and I will be flying out. Have them loan you a charger, so your phone doesn’t run out of juice. I’ll text you the details.”
The nurse brought him a vase of mixed flowers from Zimm Glass. She set it on the windowsill and gave him the card to read.
Wishing you a speedy recovery from your friends and colleagues at Zimm Glass.
He recognized the even, angular handwriting of Millie, the head of Human Resources. His heart sank a little. He’d hoped for something signed by other people. People he knew. Apparently, life went on without him.
His thoughts spiraled in a downward direction, moving from a canned “Get well” message to whether Bo would consider dating him after this disaster, to whether he’d get fired for dancing around a pile of cullet.
That had been dumb. He got himself into a real pickle this time – first getting involved with Matt and Jeff, then the disaster at the RamRod, then Bo’s timely rescue – and now this. He could only hope Bo hadn’t see Eli’s attempt at a ballet pose that used to be second nature to him only eight years ago.
Dance. That’s right, he signed up for open classes at the PBT, and now he couldn’t go. Not until this all healed, and considering the two-hour surgery it took to pick every last bit of glass from his upper leg, the internal sutures and the external ones... well. He’d be lucky walking the way he did before, let alone dancing.
And it was all his damn fault, forgetting that cullet could blow. Hell, he hadn’t even had safety glasses on, since production wasn’t in progress.
He wanted to dance. He still wanted to dance, even after all these years, and now he fucked it all up and it was his damn fault.
A knock on the door interrupted his thoughts, for which he was grateful.
“Hi.” A tall, thin man walked in, with bushy salt-and-pepper hair and a beaky nose. He wore a white coat and a hospital ID on a lanyard around his neck. “I’m doctor Schmidt and I got to operate on you yesterday.” He sat on the wheeled stool, skooched over, and shook Eli’s hand. “I just want to check on you. How are you doing?”
“Okay, I guess.” And that was the truth.
“Any pain?”
“I got some pills, but it’s not real bad. Could be worse.”
Dr. Schmidt nodded. “Okay. Don’t be afraid to ask for help if it hurts.” He measured him up and down with a thoughtful gaze. “You’re in a good physical condition, and you’re young enough to heal well. But you’ll heal properly only if you give your body the rest it needs.”
Eli rolled his eyes.
“I knew you’d be one of those.” Dr. Schmidt smiled. “Five days of no weight-bearing at all. That means crutches for you. Change your bandages, or have someone change them for you. Don’t get the wounds wet. Your arm just got a few stitches. Your leg might need some PT. What do you do for exercise?”
“Dance,” he said, making the words gush out. He didn’t know why it was so very important that he could dance again. It was, though. The way Bo looked at him, maybe. Or the way...
The doctor’s eyes widened a bit. “Professional?”
“No. I tore up my hip in college and had to stop for a year, which sort of messed up my career track.” Eli was gratified to see the doctor just nod instead of offering platitudes. “I just started again. It sucks to have to stop.”
“Dance and Pilates will be good for you. But only if you’re fully healed, hear?” Dr. Schmidt pulled his card out. “Give me a call if you need anything. I probably won’t see you, but the hospital will arrange for home care to come by every day.” His pager beeped. “I’m sorry. They work me hard.” His smile was supposed to be encouraging, Eli thought.
“Thank you, Doctor,” he said, and shook his hand. “I’ll be patient.”
Then lunch came, plain and insipid.
After four hours of utter boredom and bullshit TV on the hospital channels, somebody knocked on the door.
“Come in!” It was probably time to take his vitals again, and to check his wound dressings. Ah well, whatever. Even that was better entertainment than old reruns.
“Hey, Eli,” Bo said.