Shane stumbled into his rundown house in the early morning hours. The sun wasn't due up for another three hours at least, but he was too tired, drunk and pissed off to bother with turning on a light. He instantly regretted that decision when his knee made contact with the coffee table. A whole litany of curse words just flew out of his mouth as he fell back to land uncomfortably, but safely, on his sunken couch. He lay there, haphazardly, for several moments, waiting for the pain to subside.

"Who does she think she is?" he muttered angrily. He lay there in dejected silence before a wave of fury built up inside of him. He leapt to his feet. Who did she think she was? He honestly couldn't remember the last time someone had made him this angry. As he turned around to make his way to his fridge to grab another beer, he lashed out against the wall. The force with which his fist connected with the wall tore straight through the plaster and into the solid wooden frame beyond.

He gasped in pain as he extracted his hand from the wall. Even in the dim light from the moon outside, he could see several splinters stuck in his knuckles as well as a few gashes that were bleeding pretty heavily. As if that wasn't bad enough, a knock came at his door.

"Who is it?" he barked out. He was in no mood to be seeing anyone right now.

Instead of an answering reply, his door flew open, irritating him to no end. He turned around to start shouting at whoever had the audacity to just walk into his place when he stopped stone-cold.

"What is the matter with you, Shane?" Nikki hollered, slamming the door shut behind her. Shane pressed his one good hand against his forehead in order to stall the migraine he could feel coming.

After letting out a growl of rage, he replied, irritation barely held in check, "Can we do this in the morning?"

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Nikki stiffen up. She crossed her arms tightly across her chest, before she started in on him again. "Excuse me? For your information, 2AM fully qualifies as 'the morning' and, no, I will not come back later. We're gonna do this right now. I don't know what your problem is, Shane, but you are not using my bar to harass Kelly around anymore. In fact, if I so much as see one more bruise on her, whether you put it there or not, I'll have Charlie throw you in jail and throw away the key. This ends right now." Shane had stood absolutely still throughout the whole tirade, and now breathed a sigh of relief at Nikki's conclusion. He knew she was done (at least until he opened his big mouth again) because he could hear her heavy breathing as she tried to regain control of her emotions.

"Fine," he replied quietly. He turned his head just so, in order to better see her. Her mouth opened and she appeared on the verge of saying something, when she closed it again. Finally, she just replied sarcastically, "What? No fight?"

He was about ready to ask her to leave, in the politest way he could muster, when she cut off the words before they could even leave his lips. "Shane, what did you do?" Her tone of voice made the question come out as an accusation, which it very well could have been. He was momentarily stunned by the concern that tinged her words. He looked down at the blood that was dripping onto the floor. He had been so focused on trying to get her to leave that he had temporarily forgotten about his injury.

"Nikki, just go," he asked, but she ignored him. She dropped her bag onto the floor by the door and flipped on the lights. He clamped his eyes shut at the sudden burst of light that flooded the room and stabbed through his eyes to hit his brain head-on. He winced in pain as she took his hand in hers and started examining it. When he felt well enough to open his eyes without having the urge to vomit, he did so. Nikki was peering closely at his hand before surrendering it back to him. Without saying a word, she headed off to his bathroom. He watched her go, wondering what she was doing. Why on earth would she care about his injuries after the verbal thrashing she had just given him? She should have just left him to his own devices.

The continual dripping of his blood on the floor reminded him that he should wrap it up before it made a bigger mess than it already had. He had just grabbed one of his work shirts off of the floor when Nikki reappeared with various medical items, shouting for him to stop. "What are you trying to do? You're going to get an infection if you use that!" He could hear the disgust in her voice when she referred to his dirty shirt as that. He looked back down at the shirt he held in his hand and then over at all the stuff she dumped on the kitchen table. She pulled him over to where the kitchen light was better in illuminating his wound and then she produced tweezers from the bundle she had dumped on the table. She started pulling the splinters in his hand out.

"I don't see why you're so concerned over my health. I'm sure you wouldn't care if I lost a hand, or an arm." As if retaliation for his comment, she savagely yanked a splinter from his knuckle. "Ow!" he shouted. He was convinced that after this encounter, Nikki was never going to let him live it down. He couldn't even understand why this little injury was causing him so much difficulty when he knew that he received much worse just working at the docks.

"You know, even though you're the biggest jerk I've ever had the misfortune of knowing, I still consider you a friend—most of the time."

Sarcastically, he replied, "I'm touched." Another yank of a splinter and another growl of pain.

"Where'd you find all of this stuff? Is this in my bathroom?"

"You have a first aid kit buried in the cabinet under your sink. I'm sure half the stuff inside of it is no good anymore, but I can guarantee that it's a lot better than the dirty shirt you were trying to poison your blood with."

"Really?' He had no idea where it had come from, but he was somewhat grateful that she had found it. Otherwise, his he-man caveman-style patch up might have killed him...if she was to be believed.

It took several moments but Nikki finally extracted most of the splinters from his knuckles. The ones that she couldn't get at, she said could still be extracted but he had to soak his hand in warm water for a few minutes. Getting that all set up, there was nothing to do but wait while his hand soaked. They eyed each other warily across the table before Nikki started rummaging through the supplies she had brought out of the bathroom. She lay aside some towels, a roll of gauze padding, a couple of large gauze pads, a bottle of rubbing alcohol and the freshly sanitized tweezers. Shane spent this whole time just watching her.

"You seem to really know what you're doing." It wasn't a question, but a statement. Nikki just nodded as she avoided his eyes. Shane hadn't really noticed that she was purposefully looking away from him until just then and he soon began to wonder why. She's embarrassed about the way she yelled at me earlier.

"Well, when you work in a bar like I do, you have to break up fights all the time and occasionally patch the combatants back up. It comes with the territory, I guess. I've used my nursing skills on Kelly more than once." She finally looked up at him at the last statement, not even casually, but she met his eyes with a hard stare. Shane immediately went to work setting up a mental blockade. He refused to let Nikki play the guilt trip card on him. He turned his head to stare intently at the wall, but he didn't miss Nikki's faint sigh of disappointment. She had already seen way too much of his weak side tonight. He needed to show her that nothing was going to be any different when the sun came up. He was going to go back to his bad boy persona in the morning and she was going to go back to hating his guts. That's just how their world worked. That's how it was always supposed to be.