Page 56 of Bent, Not Broken

Someone knocked on the door and we both shot our attention to it. A tall man with gray hair and a white coat cleared his throat and stepped into the room. The doctor, I assumed. He held a tablet in his hand as he walked closer, a nurse following straight in behind him.

“Officer Slater, how are you feeling?” he asked in a gruff no-nonsense voice you’d expect to hear from a grandfather to his grandchild.

“Sore,” I admitted truthfully, reaching up to touch my shoulder and then thinking better of it and dropping my arm again. “It’s like it’s burning.”

“Yes, yes, that’s to be expected. You had a bullet in your shoulder. As far as we can tell, there was minimal damage. You lost quite a lot of blood. We gave you some.” He peered down at the screen of his tablet carefully, humming every so often. “You needed surgery to remove the bullet, as it was lodged fairly far in your collarbone. We removed a small piece of bullet from the wall of your lung as well. Should be good soon.”

“What does that mean for his shoulder?” Madden asked, grasping my hand from my uninjured side. “Will he have full use of it?”

“We can never promise anything.” The doctor raised his gaze to Madden, eyes narrowed, studying him as though he was a bug. “Officer Slater will need to attend physical therapy after his release from the hospital, at the department’s expense, I’ve been told. No doubt the physical therapist will give Mr. Slater exercises to complete. The therapist and a specialist will diagnose his movement ability and report back to Captain Monahan.”

Fear plummeted through me, making my gut twist. “Wait, what do you mean diagnose my movement ability? Do you think I’ll have a long-term problem from this?”

Madden gave me that stupid sympathetic stare I fucking hated, the one people gave me after they found out my father killed my mother.

The doctor sighed and glanced at the nurse and then back to me. “Like I said, Officer Slater, I can’t promise anything. We won’t know the extent of the damage to your shoulder and collarbone until you heal. Collarbones usually aren’t a problem. There are many parts to a human body, and if you have damage to any nerves, that could affect the way you’re able to move.”

“That’s fucked-up. You have to at least have some idea. I’m not—”

Madden touched my good shoulder, and I shot a look at him. “Evan, shh. It’s going to be okay.”

“You can’t tell me it’s going to be okay,” I snapped. Fear lodged in my throat alongside the anger. “If I don’t have full range of movement, I can’t be a police officer, Madden. I can’t do my fucking job.”

“The doctor’s not saying it’s guaranteed. We have to wait until after you’ve healed.” His soothing voice made my muscles relax, and another shooting pain fired in my shoulder. I hissed, and Madden cringed with me. He turned back to the doctor. “Can he have some painkillers?”

The doctor nodded and turned to the nurse. They started chatting in jargon I didn’t understand, and the nurse said, “Yes, doctor,” before she left. He glanced at me again.

“Officer Slater, I’m sorry I don’t have better news for you. For shootings, it’s hard to tell what the damage is until it’s time to put the limbs to use. I’m going to recommend a very good PT for you. He’s helped shooting victims for me before. We’ll get you in the best hands.”

All I could do was nod, even as it grew hard to breathe. I straightened my upper body, and the throbbing from the movement made me wince and chomp down on my bottom lip to stop myself from groaning. Madden must have seen something on my face because he touched my elbow, concern crinkling at the skin around his eyes.

The doctor continued to speak jargon about tissue damage and what happened during the surgery to remove the bullet, but I didn’t listen. I tightened my fist and sucked in a sharp breath from the excruciating agony that burned in my shoulder and collarbone, all the way down my arm.

“Officer Slater, pushing yourself will only do further damage,” the doctor said, frowning disapprovingly at me. “Your first step is to recover, and as such, you’ll need some extra care over the next few weeks. Your captain told me that you live on your own. Is there anyone you could stay with to help?”

“Me,” Madden answered before I could. He raised his chin, determination set on his handsome, angular face. “He can stay with me.”

I stared at him, but he refused to look my way, instead focusing on the doctor.

“Good, good. I think we should give him another day in the hospital and then we’ll release him to your care. I cannot stress enough that he needs to heal before trying to use his arm normally, so I’ll give you a list of care instructions.”

I sighed, drowning out the doctor’s drone as he talked about what needed to be done. This wasn’t the first time I’d been shot, but it certainly had been the most painful. The one other time I caught a bullet, it was a graze on my leg, and I was up and about in a week. I had a feeling this wasn’t going to be the same. And staying with Madden brought across a whole new set of feelings that I didn’t want to start trying to understand. The excitement of being around him, spending lengthy amounts of time with him where we weren’t having sex… a tremble slid down my spine.

Fuck. I was in trouble.

For the next week, we fell into this weird dance of a routine. Madden took me back to his apartment above his parents’ pool house. The whole thing was strange, as I’d never had anyone take care of me before as an adult, but he’d taken the week off work so he could help me dress my injury and keep me in bed. He went so far as to bring me breakfast in bed when the pain made it hard to move. Mornings were the worst, after accidently rolling on it more than once.

I didn’t remember much about the accident, but I never asked Madden about what we’d talked about before I was shot, either. All I recalled was his voice, and something about me apologizing, but I never bothered to ask. It didn’t matter anyway. Whatever was said was half the reason he was at the hospital when I woke. He’d clearly forgiven me.

“When are you going back to work?” I asked him one morning after he’d helped me shower and then dress my shoulder and collarbone again. While it had been red and inflamed to begin with, as each day passed, it slowly returned to my normal color, with an added bruising that turned brown before heading toward a yellowish hue. The hole in my lung, strangely enough, had been the least of the wounds, and was already closed up.

I sat at the kitchen bar, a glass of orange juice and some scrambled eggs and bacon on toast in front of me. I’d quickly learned that Madden could cook, and there were no housemaids to do the dishes for him, and that first night I spent here, he was the one who washed my uniform.

Madden worked his way around the kitchen, doing the final dishes before he walked around the bar to join me on the stool beside mine. His food and glass of milk were waiting for him and he grinned. “I’m technically back today, but River gave me permission to work from home. I have clients coming here to visit, so I’ll need you to stay in the bedroom for a few hours.”

“Do you trust your clients to come to your home?” I asked before I could stop myself.

He snorted and grabbed his knife and fork, cutting a piece of toast before gathering egg with it and stuffing it into his mouth. I watched the way his lips moved, unable to look away from the shininess of them. “Not all my clients are bad people,” he mumbled around his food.