Page 9 of Crash Out
He shoved. I caught it on my shoulder, barely, not even a real hit, but my head disagreed. My head disagreed loudly and immediately, a spike of pain that went from the base of my skull to somewhere behind my left eye, and the music got louder than it had been a second ago, and the bar lights were suddenly doing something I didn't appreciate.
I came back to myself with my hand in his collar. I didn't remember deciding to grab him. My ears were ringing in a way that had nothing to do with the music.
Then someone had my arm.
"Let go," I said, pulling against it, because I had not resolved anything here and I was not —
"Wesley."
I turned.
Cross had my elbow in one hand and was looking at me like a man who had done a rapid medical assessment and arrived at conclusions he wasn't happy about.
Not alarmed. Cross didn't do alarmed.
He did that thing where his face got very still and very focused, and that was somehow worse.
The bar had rearranged itself around us. Someone was dealing with the other guys—one of the training staff guys, I registered distantly. Jenkins had appeared somewhere to my left looking equal parts thrilled and horrified. The music was still going. The lights were still wrong.
And Cross was looking at me like I was exactly what he'd always thought I was.
There it was. The look I'd been waiting for, the one I'd known was coming eventually, like a man watching his worst professional assessment confirmed in real time.
Morrison, it said.Of course. Of course it was Morrison, in a bar, with a head injury, in a fight, at midnight.I could practically write the incident report for him. I'd probably given him enough material for a whole section of his tablet.
Patient demonstrated predictably poor judgment. Again.
"Breathe," Cross said. The same voice he'd used at the table.
I laughed, because that was what I did. "I'm breathing."
"Your pupils are uneven."
"That's a fun thing to say to someone at a bar."
He didn't react. He was looking at my face the way he'd looked at it on the bench, that full-attention thing again.
My head was doing something genuinely unpleasant and the lights were too loud and I was running low on the particular type of energy that powered the system.
"I'm fine," I said anyway, because some things were automatic.
"You're not." Factual, the way everything he said was factual, like he was reporting conditions rather than having a conversation. "How long has the right side been slow?"
I opened my mouth.
Closed it.
"You noticed that."
"I noticed that on the ice," he said. "Three hours ago."
Which was—that was a long time to notice something and not say anything, and I didn't know what to do with that information. My head was really hurting now, the bright persistent kind that sat behind your eyes and made the corners of everything go slightly wrong.
"The shove didn't help," I said.
"No." A pause. "It didn't."
Jenkins had materialized properly at my side, looking up at me with his face doing about eleven things at once. "Bro. Are you okay?"
