Yup. That’s how far we got before I realised whatever was going on with him couldn’t wait the six-odd hours it was going to take us to get home.
“Wake up,” I repeated. “And stay there. I’m coming to get you.”
I shut off the Peugeot we’d hired and rolled out, rounding the bonnet to get to Mateo.
He was where I’d left him, confused but awake. “This looks like hell. Where the fuck have you brought me?”
“A&E. Sorry, brother. I think your appendix is trying to kill you.”
“No, it ain’t. Leave me alone.” Mateo resisted my attempts to ease him from the car. “It’s just a fucking bug.”
“You don’t get bugs.” I spoke nothing but truth. In the five years I’d known him, he’d never had so much as a cold. “And tell me where your pain is?”
“What pain?”
“The one making you lean like an eighty-three-year-old.”
Mateo braced a hand on the dashboard and tried to push himself upright, his usual olive complexion sickly grey. “Motherfucker, what a cunt.”
“Me or the organ misbehaving in your belly?”
“Both.”
“I’ll take that. You still need out of this car.”
Mateo levered himself out of the Peugeot and walked into the busy hospital of his own volition. The A&E department was busy. They triaged him fast, but the wait to see a doctor was endless, despite the nurse agreeing with my layman’s diagnosis.
She gave him a bed though. Probably because it was obvious to just about everyone he was going to spend however long it took to fix him scowling death at people and hurling his guts up.
“Don’t tell Em.” Mateo made a grab for my phone the second the nurse was out of sight. “He doesn’t need to get all stressy over nothing.”
Too late.
“It’s not nothing.” I evaded him easily enough to prove my point. “And if it is your appendix, it’s gonna need to come out.”
Mateo daggered a glare at me that fast became a wince, raw-dogging the pain since he’d already lost the measly paracetamol the hospital had offered to bridge the gap before a doctor found us. “Nothing’s coming out of me.”
“Everything’s coming out of you,” I retorted. “You haven’t kept anything down in days.”
“Cunt.”
“Yeah, you’ve said.”
“Not you.”
“Who, then?”
“I don’t know.”
Mateo ran out of steam and lay back on the bed, boots still firmly on his feet, sulking into the jacket he’d refused to take off. He shut his eyes for a while, as close to a nap as I’d ever seen him before today, while I texted Embry an update that would do nothing to calm him down as he made a mad dash north to get to his husband.
Decoy:triaged him and gave him a bed. waiting for the doctor to confirm, but they’re pretty certain it’s his appendix
Embry:Did they give him pain relief?
Decoy:yeah, didn’t stay down tho
Embry:Call me if anything changes