Martin was impressed with the self-control he had exhibited once he had regained control of the situation. Every ounce of him wanted to kill her, to slice and stab and fillet his new houseguest. But he had stopped himself, as difficult as that had been. First of all, he needed to tend to his arm before he bled to death. And this girl was special, regardless of how badly she had played him. Even more importantly, his contact would be more than furious if he murdered a perfectly good girl just because she had become a little feisty, and that could jeopardize the entire setup he had been enjoying for the last three years.
Martin knew something else instinctively, too. This whole mess was his fault, not hers. He was still convinced that this beautiful little thing sprawled unconscious on his kitchen floor was the one. She had to be the one, the fates had spoken, and he was determined to enjoy the remainder of his allotted seven days with her, once he made absolutely clear who was in charge here.
But he should never have allowed his emotions and his unrealistic dreams to rule his actions. Sure, she was special, but she had only just arrived. He should never have trusted her, should never have allowed himself to believe she would do anything other than try to escape. She was still a teenage girl, after all, unused to the ways of the real world.
Martin’s arm began to throb, lobbing the opening volleys in what he knew was only the beginning of the war. The impromptu surgery hadn’t resulted in any irreversible damage, at least as far as he could tell, but the wound was deep, he was losing blood, and he knew the pain was going to get a lot worse before it got better. He needed to get to the hospital and get it sutured, that much was clear, but he had work to do first. Hopefully, he could complete it before he lost so much blood he passed out on the floor.
Slipping and sliding through the blood to the bathroom—holy crap, there was blood everywhere!—Martin knelt and rummaged through the cabinet located under the sink. He picked through spare toilet paper, boxes of tissues, a hand towel. He placed the towel between his knees and threw everything else on the floor behind him, and then finally spotted what he was looking for: a rolled up Ace Bandage.
He grabbed the bandage, and, as he did, he noticed his hands were shaking uncontrollably. Then he stood, and a wave of nausea and lightheadedness caused him to stumble. He grabbed the edge of the sink for support. He looked in the medicine cabinet mirror, and the man staring back at him was white as a ghost. Martin knew he was slipping into shock. He had to hurry.
He opened the door of the medicine chest, grabbing the rubbing alcohol, marveling at how far away from his body his hand seemed to be when he wrapped his fingers around the bottle. It was as if his arm had magically elongated, like he was some sort of superhero. Rubberman or something. In his ears, a buzzing noise had begun to sound and was growing steadily louder. It reminded him of a mosquito flying around his head at night when he was trying to sleep.
The rubbing alcohol slipped from his shaking hand and fell into the sink—luckily, it was in a plastic bottle. He really would have been in trouble if that bottle had shattered, spilling the valuable disinfectant down the drain.
Martin slapped himself in the face, hard, and it seemed to help a little. His eyes focused and the buzzing noise receded slightly, like an army falling back to regroup. How long he could keep that army at bay, he did not know. Probably not long. He placed the towel over the wound on his arm and unrolled the bandage, anchoring one end on top of the sink as the rest trailed away onto the dirty floor. Then he reached into the basin and lifted the bottle of alcohol, uncapping it with his teeth as he pressed his injured arm to his belly to keep the dish towel firmly over the wound.
When he finally managed to screw the top off the bottle, Martin placed it next to the end of the bandage on the sink. Breathing deeply, he lifted the towel, now soaked crimson red, off the knife wound. Blood gushed, and there was no way to reliably gauge the severity of the injury, but if the mounting pain was any indication, she had gotten him good.
He sucked in his breath again and, gritting his teeth against what he knew was coming, poured the alcohol straight from the bottle over the open knife wound. The liquid hissed and bubbled, and Martin sucked air in through his teeth, trying not to scream. He failed. The pain ballooned and mushroomed, detonating in his arm like a nuclear explosion. Bright white spotlights danced in his vision, and, for the second time in seconds, he had to grab the sink for support. His arm throbbed, and he felt like he was being stabbed again, over and over.
When he could stand it no longer, Martin wrapped the towel—the last clean hand towel in the bathroom—as tightly as he could manage around the wound, doing his best to pull the two halves of sliced flesh together. It wasn’t an easy trick to manage using just one hand. When he had gotten the towel packed as tightly as he could over the wound, Martin pressed it once again against his side and picked up the end of the bandage off the sink. He rolled the bandage around and around the towel, beginning at his wrist and running all the way to the elbow, then returning to his starting point, pulling it tight.
He was panting and sweating, the pain rolling off his arm in waves that crested with each beat of his heart. Martin sank to the floor and examined his handiwork with a critical eye while he tried to get his breathing under control and avoid passing out. Under the circumstances, he felt he had done a pretty impressive job of emergency first aid. The towel was packed relatively tightly against the knife wound and further blood loss would now be minimal, although it continued to soak into the thick white cotton.