Page 123 of Out for Blood
“Of course you did.”
He leads me in the direction of his office.
The office looks frozen in time. Towers of textbooks lean precariously across his desk, anatomy charts decorate the walls, and medical journals are layered in neat disarray. The same battered coffee mugs sit precisely where they’ve always been, looking like they’ve survived several decades longer than they should have.
I claim my usual seat. Not that I ever intended to, but Mr. Higgs insists it’s my chair.
He sets a steaming mug in front of me.
“How’s the shoulder?”
I blink.
“Excuse me?”
“The left one.”
I study him for a moment, another constant in a place full of them.
He raises an eyebrow.
“You’re favoring it.”
I roll my shoulder experimentally and wince. Apparently, I’m not hiding it as well as I thought.
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“That’s creepy.”
“Observation skills.”
“Still creepy.”
Mr. Higgs chuckles.
Then sits across from me.
For a moment neither of us speaks. The silence between us isn’t uncomfortable and never has been.
We’ve spent hundreds of hours together at this point.
What started as awkward conversations evolved into friendship somewhere along the way.
A friendship neither of us really talks about, it just exists.
Like the Wednesday visits, the coffee he always has ready, and the anatomy books that somehow keep finding their way into my hands, it’s become another constant.
“You finish the one on musculoskeletal injuries?” he asks.
I nod as I drink my coffee.
“Last week.”
“And?”
“The human body is disturbingly fragile.”
