Twinkle, Twinkle (Naughty or Nice) by Josephine Myles Page A

It wasn’t doing anything as sinister as sparking, but he ordered the rubberneckers back to their seats for their own safety. A young nurse bent over the supine man in blue.
    “What do we have?” Tom asked her, kneeling down on the other side of the man’s head.
    “Electrical burns to his left hand, front, and back. He’s unconscious but breathing normally. I was about to check for spinal injury before moving him.”
    “I’ll do that.” He was on the best side, with the man’s back to him. As his dispassionate fingers felt along the vertebrae and around the occipital and parietal bones, a less clinical part of his mind observed that the top half of the electrician was rather more impressive than he’d been expecting. Broad shoulders filled out the white T-shirt under the overalls, and his closely cropped hair revealed a finely shaped skull. The hair was soft under his fingers, salt and pepper with a white patch the size of a fifty pence coin behind his right ear. Funny, that. He remembered the overweight kid with the vitiligo at school. It had been in a similar spot, but it couldn’t be him. He’d be long gone from here, and anyway, despite his bulk, there was nothing overweight about this man.
    “He’ll have a nasty contusion, no doubt, but he’s safe to move to a cubicle. I’ll be back to have a proper examination when he’s settled.”
     
     
    A FTER checking in on one of his earlier patients, the redoubtable Mrs. Brown, who today claimed to have swallowed half a bottle of Toilet Duck—last week it was allegedly Persil Color laundry liquid—Tom swung by the cubicle containing his unlucky electrician. He shooed out the nurse and took a closer look at the patient. Even unconscious he was an attractive man, with strong bone structure, full lips, and silvery stubble thick on his cheeks. Tom distracted himself by examining the paperwork. Pulse, blood pressure, heart rate, breathing: all stable. Burn to left hand, second degree: washed and dressed. Patient’s name… no, surely not. But then again, he had that patch of white hair too.
    A soft huff drew Tom’s focus from the name spelled out in bold, black ink. He looked up to meet a pair of blinking, gray-blue eyes.
    “Vincent Draper.” It should have been a question, followed by a brief rundown of his current condition. Instead, it came out as an awed whisper. Last time he’d seen Vincent, he’d been a ball of blubber squeezed into a school uniform. Plastic-rimmed glasses—the cheap, NHS issue ones—had obscured his eyes, and a melancholic aura had set him even further apart from the rest of the grammar school lads. They’d picked on him mercilessly. Called him VD and made filthy jibes about his mum. They’d shoved him around, safe in the knowledge that VD didn’t have the guts to fight them off.
    And then that last time… that last time things had gone too far.
    Tom gulped, trying to ignore the hot shame that threatened to engulf him. It was just dilated capillaries. He could bend them to his will. He stared down at the clipboard, holding it in front of him like a shield.
    “What happened?” the man croaked, seeming not to have heard Tom’s whisper.
    “You appear to have had an electric shock. You’ve sustained a second-degree burn to your hand, but otherwise everything seems fine. Any aches or pains?” Proud of the way his bedside manner had returned, Tom risked a brief glance up at Vincent, whose brows contracted quizzically.
    “That’s never — ” Vincent’s eyes dropped to Tom’s badge, and it was too late to try and conceal it. “No way! Tom Berriman! What on earth are you doing back in this dump?”
    Tom gestured down at his green scrubs, too stunned to come up with a better answer.
    “Yeah, I heard you went off to medical school. Fair play to you, mate. You’ve done well for yourself.”
    Vincent’s smile seemed genuine, and Tom’s shoulders started to relax.
    “And what about you? I didn’t recognize you at first.”