“Summer, you’re hurt—let me help!”
Summer never had been able to make up her mind whether the clarity she had in an emergency was a blessing or an annoyance. Sinking her teeth into her lower lip, she turned and started for the house. “Come on. You can’t stitch it up out here.”
Isaac followed behind the woman, astounded by how level headed she was considering the huge gash still bleeding down her side. Once they had reached the house he got straight to work, searching every drawer and cabinet for a needle and thread. He soon found what he needed and returned to her side. “Do you want something to bite down on?” he offered, trying to think of ways to make it less painful, “…this is going to hurt a lot.”
While he banged around, finding what he wanted, she busied herself washing away as much of the blood as possible. The water was a shock to already sensitised nerves, and the clench of muscles in her arm threatened to speed the bleeding again. For all that it had bled hugely, and still bled sluggishly, the wound wasn’t so very deep after all — a vicious scrape across the top of her forearm, between the two bones. A millimetre or so deep, and the same across; worse by far than any kind of paper cut or cat scratch, yet all the same nowhere near lethal.
“Not sure it can hurt much more than it already does,” she gritted, patting the area dry with a handful of paper towels. “Let me sit down and brace it across the table, at least, so I don’t twitch so much. And you need to run that needle through a candleflame first.” The idea of using her beading thread to sew up her arm would have been funny at any other time.