Rocco was just glad that it hadn't happened to Whitney in his place.
It wasn't long before Whitney returned with a medical supply kit and an extra box of gauze. Rocco remained on the kitchen stool as she'd told him to, unwilling to move any more than necessary.
"I'm going to clean it up with some disinfectants and make sure it's all wrapped up, and you're going to have to be careful to make sure that wrapping doesn't get wet, okay?"
"Right," Rocco said with a curt nod of his head. It wasn't the first time he'd heard the same. The Lombardo family doctors regaled him with the same tale whenever shit got bad, but he was surprised to hear it come from Whitney's lips. She knew what she was doing. "You said you were a bartender or waitress all your life. Where's this medical knowledge coming from? This isn't stuff I'd guess the girl behind the counter serving me drinks would know."
"Ah, well, you'd be right," Whitney said. The clasps on the front of the kit popped open beneath her supervision, and she took out some medical grade disinfectant wipes sealed in sterile packaging. "I didn't learn any of this at the bar or at a restaurant. I um, well. Does it matter where I learned it?"
"You bet your ass it does," Rocco remarked with dry humor. "It's not like we're talkin' about cookin' eggs here, I wanna know so I don't die of infection or something." The Italian accent he tried to suppress in public flowed strong and smooth. If she'd seem him kill a man and still hadn't run, it meant she'd stick by him even if he let his tongue loose.
Dark eyes caught his blues for a moment, hesitant. With a tiny shake of her head, Whitney relented.
"Well you know how I said I was caught up and lost in the foster program, right? How I went to family after family until I aged out of the system?"
"Yeah." Before Whitney opened the packaging on the disinfectant, she undid his shirt and slid it from his shoulders so his chest was bare. The shirt had soaked up most of the blood, but the area around his shoulder still looked gruesome. Whitney didn't flinch.
"Well, that had a really big impact on my life. I wasn't always the good girl you're so fond of calling me, you know. When I was a teenager, I fell in with some thugs. Back then I thought they were so cool, so edgy, so big and organized, but really it was just a twenty-something jackass and a bunch of his gangsta friends who thought they were all that. It couldn't have been more than a dozen people in that group, if I had to guess."
"Little crime rings can be bad news," Rocco remarked. Had he been able to, he would have shrugged; the pain was too much to risk such a gesture. "At least in organized crime you've got rules everyone follows, and clear consequences for your actions. Petty crime doesn't have that, and things can get ugly fast."
"Try telling that to sixteen-year-old Whitney and see how far you get. I thought I'd finally found a family. To me, it was like, here's this group of guys who stick up for each other no matter what and are willing to take the fall for one another when the situation gets bad. I thought that it was going to give me the love I needed. I was wrong. But I didn't come away from that experience without learning anything. I learned about respecting myself, and, most important for right now," she tore the packaging on the disinfectant open with her teeth and took the cloth from inside, "it taught me about cleaning up bad wounds on the down-low. When the boys got hurt on a robbery gone bad or a drug deal, I was there to patch them up. Another one of the guys' girlfriends was in school to be a nurse, and she taught me all kinds of things. And it stuck over the years."
"But you go to a doctor to get your hand stitched up after cutting it on a can lid?" Rocco asked, incredulous. Whitney rolled her eyes skyward in a playful manner and shook her head. "Not because I couldn't stitch myself up, but I don't carry tetanus vaccines around. I'm not interested in dying a horrible death because of a can lid."
"Point taken."
The cloth touched his shoulder, cleansing the spilled blood away. As soon as it drew near the wound, the injury started to burn. Rocco grit his teeth and endured. Right now he had to be strong, and around Whitney, he found himself compelled to be even stronger than usual. Pain like this was nothing. He'd take it for her all over again if he had to.
"So tell me about your thug boyfriend. He treat you right, or do I need to go bust his ass?"
Whitney smiled an uneasy, but satisfied smile. The pain in it was distant, but detectable, and it made Rocco uneasy. Despite the short length of their relationship, seeing her hurt felt like a personal blow.
"He was the type of guy he was," Whitney said. The disinfectant cleaned the area around the wound, then traced over it. Rocco winced. "I thought I was so in love, and he was so in love with me. I was wrong. He didn't treat me how a man should treat a woman, and when it ended, it ended badly. I don't think about that anymore. I'm a different person now."
Different, yet quick to slip between the sheets with one of New York's most dangerous men. Rocco ran his tongue over his teeth as his nerves took over. Was Whitney just in love with the idea of danger and romance, or was she sticking by him for higher reasons? It was hard to tell. But no matter the case, if she were to stick by his side, he'd win her over and give her reason to stay. If a woman was able to sway his hardened soul this much, she deserved a spot at his side. Rocco would keep her there no matter what.
"So what I'm hearing is, if this joker comes by you again, I've gotta step up and take care of business."
"You don't really have to do anything," the words were raw and vulnerable. Rocco opened his eyes, biting back on the stinging pain of his wound to give Whitney his full attention. There was something haunted about her eyes, like she'd come to realize what a terrible situation she now found herself in. Had the shock finally worn away to expose the good girl beneath? Was she going to run like all the others had?
Their eyes met. Whitney hesitated, holding the disinfectant away from his shoulder. Her lower lip trembled, but in the next moment she found the force of will inside her self needed to stay strong. Whatever demons she struggled against disappeared, and she smiled at him in full. Radiant, dazzling Whitney was back again.
"...But I won't stop you from teaching a lesson to jerks from my past if that's what you want."
He smiled back. Warmth bloomed in Rocco's chest, the air between them thick with something he hadn't felt since he was a naive young teenager noticing women for the first time.
"You can count on it," he murmured as he reached out with his good arm to take her empty hand. "I've got your back."
"And I've got your shoulder," Whitney replied with a playful grin. "Let's get you bandaged up."
Step by step she progressed, dabbing at his wound and cleaning out little bits of fabric from his shirt as she went. When Whitney put the disinfectant away and pulled out a curved needle and medical grade thread in its place, Rocco's stomach lurched.
"You're gonna sew me up?" he asked.
"Um, well yeah. Have you seen how big these wounds are? If we don't stitch you up it won't heal. Haven't you had stitches before?" Eyes curious, yet still lighthearted. Rocco took strength from them.
"Well, yeah, but always from some uptight looking doc in medical scrubs. Guess it just feels more official."
"So then get me a white lab coat, if it makes you feel better." Whitney grinned. "I promise, I'm an old pro at stitches. Your doctor won't be able to tell they aren't his."
Doctors never made Rocco squeamish. He'd spilled enough brains that gore wasn't an issue. So why was he so anxious around Whitney? It wasn't because she lacked professional medical training, because Rocco had taken help from people who knew less. He realized he hated the thought of exposing his weakness to her, and that fear was causing him to be weaker yet.
The only way past that fear would be to embrace it.
"Sew me up, Doc," he instructed. Whitney grinned and posed the needle near the site of the injury.
"It sounds cliché, but um, this is going to hurt a little."
But when the needle bore through his skin, there was surprisingly little pain. One stitch drawn closed and tied off, Whitney started a second. As she worked, Rocco forced himself to relax. If Whitney had enough faith in him to trust him even after he'd tried to kill her, he could trust her back. By the time she was drawing the last stitch to a close, he looked over to examine her handiwork. It was impressive, no doctor would be able to tell it from stitches done up in the emergency room.
"All done," Whitney announced as she drew the needle away for the final time. "I'm going to cover it with some antibiotic ointment and then wrap it up. You need to change the bandaging every twenty-four hours, or if it gets wet or really dirty. I think the stitches should stay in for about a week, but um, maybe you should get to a medical professional before then, just in case."