“I don’t know you from Adam,” I snapped.
“I’m Adam, nice to meet you,” a guy in the car on the opposite side of me yelled, holding his hand up in the air and getting a withering glare from the meathead.
“Yo!” I waved back, then turned back to the angry bastard. “Now shut the hell up, sit the fuck back down in your shitty vehicle, and wait for the light to go green.”
I knew what I needed to do, and it was imperative that I do it now.
I had to get Sasha, apologize, and make sure she didn’t get hurt or injure her newly healed leg.
That’s not what happened, though.
Before I could close my window, the meathead was there, and his fist was connecting with my cheek, making it feel like a bomb had gone off in my head.
One second I was looking at her and relieved to see she was looking back at me. The next, my head was jerking to the side as pain exploded and radiated from where a fist the size of a Rottweiler had connected with it.
Fortunately, in all of my rambling, most of the audience had developed an affinity with me.
I’d like to think it was called The Twat Sac Men's Club—the membership consisted of any man who’d ever said something to his woman without thinking. Who’d realized how badly he’d fucked up and would go to the ends of the earth to fix it, even if it meant taking on the Hulk in real life.
As the meathead got back into his car to drive away, my Twat Sac brethren moved their vehicles so the asshole couldn’t drive away. They also called the police to attend the incident.
It wasn’t until much later that an officer told me that most of the callers had added, “You might want to send the paramedics, too. The guy looks like he could squeeze a cantaloupe between two fingers, and the poor guy’s head’s about the size of one.”
But what made them laugh and had Sasha—who’d quickly come back to help me as I drifted in and out of consciousness—snorting, was the comment two callers had added after that.
“How the hell didn’t his hair move?”
Six hours later…
Oh, how the tables had turned.
After hours of tests, scans, and an x-ray that they took while I slept, the doctor had just told me I had a concussion.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t stop puking my guts up, and none of the medications they gave me stopped it, so I’d been in the middle of hoiking everything in my stomach up into a weird bowl while he broke the news.
“Do you have any allergies to any medications?”
I only had just enough control to shake my head before the next wave hit me, and I was back over the bowl.
“What about in your family? Are any of them allergic, or are they sensitive to anything? The medication I have in mind can cause strange reactions in people, so we have to ask so that we know in advance if there’s anything the patient might do.”
What the hell kind of shit was it they were thinking of giving me?
I was just about to shake my head no when I remembered my cousin Cole.
“Yeah.”
The doctor looked up from his screen and frowned at me. “Brother? Parent?”
“Cousin.” Swallowing over the watering in my mouth that forewarned the puking was going to happen again, I rasped, “Can’t even take Tylenol.”
“How does it manifest?”
Moving my eyes to where my phone was lying on the table and hoping Sasha understood what I was asking for, I almost cried with relief when she got up and brought it over to me.
Here’s where I learned something about my phone. Apparently, when I threw up like I did when the light from the screen pierced through my head, it didn’t recognize my face. But when I squinted down at it from where I was now hanging with my head off the bed, it did.
After long moments, I managed to find the video I needed that my cousin Tom had sent me ten days ago, and passed it over for the doctor to watch.
Cole had been playing with his kids on a trampoline in their backyard and had jumped badly.
By badly, I mean, one of his legs had gotten stuck between the metal frame of the trampoline and the fabric, with large springs on either side of the gap that attached it all together.
Due to his size, he’d tipped off the edge of it—leg still trapped—and the whole thing had moved with him.
So, when his wife had run outside, thanks to the screaming coming from the man and his kids, it was to find him on the ground, with the trampoline on its side and his leg stuck firmly in it.
It’d taken the Piersville Fire Department to free him from it before he’d been taken into hospital to get the deep cuts on his leg and his dislocated shoulder put back in.