Depends on Who's Asking

by Vale, Lani Lynn

  I turned around, found her gaze with mine, and said, “Saint. Saint Nicholson.”

  Caro narrowed her eyes.

  “Saint Nicholson.” Caro tilted her head. “Is that a joke?”

  I shook my head. I fucking wished it was. But it wasn’t.

  “No. I wish to God it was. But no.”

  Then I was once again heading back into the ER to get my wound looked at.

  It was as I was breaching the doors of the hospital that I heard Michael say, “Leave him alone, Caro. Now, what did this guy look like?”

  The doors closed behind me, cutting off her reply.

  • • •

  Walking into the duplex that I lived in two hours later, the very last thing I wanted to do was deal with my father.

  Yet, my phone rang anyway.

  And, like the dumbass I was, I chose to answer it instead of ignoring it.

  The one and only time I’d chosen to ignore a call from my father, he’d been in a car wreck. Ignoring it had been bad because I’d had to find out that he was injured by a secret service agent showing up at my door in the middle of the night to let me know.

  “Hello?” I grumbled as I poked around in the fridge.

  “Son,” my father’s deep voice growled. “How are you?”

  I felt my eye twitch. “I’m not coming home. And I’m not quitting.”

  My father sighed. “I need you here. At my side. This looks good for me and my reelection.”

  It might.

  But I seriously didn’t give a fuck.

  “And?” I asked.

  “Son,” my father said. “You’re not going to be able to continue playing this little game.”

  My ‘little game’ was my ‘life.’ My father didn’t like me living my life the way I wanted. He wanted me to live my life the way he wanted. The way that benefited him the best.

  “I’m not playing any game, Dad,” I replied tiredly. “I’m living my life. And I’m living the life I want to live, not the one you want me to live. So no, I’m not coming home to help you get reelected. I’ll come if you make it, though. On inauguration day.”

  My father sighed.

  “Not even for Christmas?” he asked.

  No. Not only no, but fuck no.

  “Last time I came for Christmas, you made me fucking sit at dinner with a woman that you and Mom wanted to set me up with so you could talk to her father about your possible reelection,” I told him. “So no, I don’t trust you anymore.”

  My father sighed again, longer and louder than the previous time.

  He seemed to do that a lot.

  The year that I’d joined the military, my father lost his reelection to his opponent, knocking him out of the White House after his first term.

  And now, my father decided that it was time to run again for his second term. Something that had never, ever been done before but by one other person. I hoped and prayed that he didn’t win, but I had a sick feeling that he might.

  Which didn’t spell good things for my future if he did.

  “Call your mother in the morning to wish her Merry Christmas. Don’t forget,” Dad ordered.

  “Isn’t it a better choice for her to call me and wish me Happy Birthday?” I countered.

  I was born on December twenty-fifth, which was why I had such a stupid name. Having a birthday on Christmas day has to be the worst, which is why I always changed my birthday in my mind to a different day of the month.

  The bad thing was, years later, they would come to regret naming me ‘Saint’ Nicholson due to not my embarrassment as a child, but their realization that it made them look weird to the political world when my father started running for higher positions in the government.

  “Son,” my father continued, “hope you had a good day.”

  I didn’t bother telling him about the stitches.

  I was sure he’d figure it out sooner or later. I just didn’t want to have to be the one to tell him, because then that’d bring on another lecture that I wasn’t willing to have at that moment in time.

  “You, too, Dad,” I said cordially. “’Night.”

  Us Nicholsons didn’t say ‘love you.’ We also didn’t do mushy.

  So, I didn’t bother to say any terms of endearment, nor did I do anything other than hang up the phone.

  And, as I looked at the eighteen stitches in my arm as I reached for a gallon of milk out of my fridge, I wondered if I needed to move again. This time to somewhere much smaller where people wouldn’t know me.

  For sure I would have to do it after he won.

  Everyone around me would know who I was after that.

  CHAPTER 1

  Due to personal reasons, I’ll be drinking again this weekend.

  -Caro’s secret thoughts

  CAROLINA

  “And then he started to laugh.” Brielle wiped her eyes. “I didn’t know what to do.”

  I’d met Brielle through a grapevine of friends, and for some weird fucking reason, she’d latched on to me.

  I wasn’t sure why, or how, I’d somehow become her keeper, but I didn’t like her.

  Not at all.

  She was petty and fake, and she was also not a person that I would normally spend time with.

  I especially didn’t like how she treated people.

  I looked down at my corn dog and wondered, idly, how long I had to wait to take another bite.

  I mean, she was really crying here. Like, big, fat drops.

  I looked at my watch and realized that regardless of whether Brielle was crying or not, I had shit to do, and listening to her cry about some man that didn’t return her attentions wasn’t one of them.

  “I gotta go,” I said to her. “I’m due back in court in fifteen minutes. I haven’t even gotten to eat my lunch yet.”

  Brielle wiped her eyes and shoved her lunch away with a ferocious scowl.

  I stood up and wondered if I should address her attitude, but decided that I didn’t have time for that, either.

  Honestly, I really wasn’t quite sure what the hell was going on with me.

  I shouldn’t have agreed to this lunch date in the first place, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself when it came to her. I felt bad for her.

  She truly was a mean person. But when I met her a few months ago when I got home, she’d somehow gotten me my new job… and I couldn’t blow her off after she’d done something so great for me.

  “Fine. But you’re paying. I paid last time.” Brielle stood up and left her trash on the table.

  “Are you going to throw all of that away?” I asked curiously, not bothering to argue with her ‘I paid last time’ comment. She was wrong. I’d paid last time, too. At some point, I was going to have to stop being grateful that she’d found me a job.

  She looked at the table, then the trash can only a few feet away.

  “No,” she said. “That’s not my job to do, it’s theirs.”

  I nearly rolled my eyes but chose to pick her trash up instead. Mine, I packed back into my bag and rolled it up before tucking it into my purse.

  Just as I was about to push out of the hospital lunchroom door, Brielle caught my attention once again.

  “You have toilet paper on your shoe.”

  I looked down and, sure enough, I did have toilet paper on my shoe.

  And something brown was on it.

  Gross.

  I kicked my leg and attempted to flick the tissue off.

  I stepped out of the way as I tried to get the stupid toilet paper off without touching it as the door at my back was pushed open and an amused man said, “Need help?”

  I looked up into the piercing green eyes—eyes that practically glowed with enjoyment—of Saint Nicholson, and froze.

  His chestnut-colored hair was curly and beautiful, and I practically itched to sink my fingers into the locks. To wind a couple of those curls around my fingers. And holy God, he had a pair of black horn-rimmed glasses hanging from his shirt collar. Where had those come from? />
  “I’ll make it,” I grumbled, trying not to allow my eyes to slide down the length of his body like I wanted to.

  But it was inevitable.

  The man was hot as fuck.

  He was tall, way taller—by at least a foot—than my five-foot-three. He was bigger around, too.

  Where I had curves, he had lean hardness.

  Where I had fat, he had nothing but muscle.

  And the uniform he was wearing only added to his sexiness.

  I had a thing for cops.

  I’d dated three in my life.

  None seriously or anything. A couple of months each.

  But none of them had been as drop-dead gorgeous as the man currently grinning at me.

  He moved forward, pressing his body close to mine, and then stepped onto the toilet paper with his booted foot.

  His big, booted foot.

  Like, way bigger than my size sevens.

  Just as quickly as his body touched mine, he was away from me, and the toilet paper was no longer clinging to my foot.

  He’d just taken a step back, closer to the counter, when a screaming man hustled into the room.

  And his eyes were aimed on Brielle.

  “You bitch!” the man yelled, shoulder-checking me on the way to get into Brielle’s face.

  Brielle flinched and backed away, her back hitting the counter where she’d been standing next to me watching me struggle.

  Before the man could get into Brielle’s face, however, Saint had him by the arm and he was hauling him backward.

  The barista behind the counter, a young man in his early twenties who’d grudgingly served Brielle despite her nastiness to him, watched in interest.

  The only two other people in the room, a mother and daughter, stood up from their table.

  “Whoa,” Saint said as he took hold of the man’s arm and pushed him backward so that he wasn’t crowding either Brielle or me too closely.

  “Get the fuck out of my face, moron,” Brielle snapped. “Why are you even here?”

  “Why am I here?” he growled. “I’m here because you set me up with someone that has goddamn Ebola! Now I’m in quarantine, or supposed to be, for the next three weeks! And if I have to be there, so the fuck do you!”

  Saint let go of his arm as if he had, well, Ebola.

  “Ladies, gentlemen,” a guy wearing a yellow decontamination suit said. “You’ll have to come with me.”

  The man sneered at Brielle. “This is all your fucking fault. Would it have fucking killed you to go out on a date with me? You had to send me on a fake date?”

  I had no clue what was going on, but I was sure that I wasn’t going to like it.

  • • •

  “What do you mean?” I asked, looking at the man in front of me with alarm.

  “You’ve been exposed,” the man from the Center for Disease Control, Jace Levine, explained again.

  I looked over at Saint to see him staring at Jace with alarm.

  “But it’s Christmas!” the mother with the young daughter said. “We won’t be out of here until Christmas!”

  Well, it was December first, actually. But still, she was right.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” Jace apologized as he looked at her, then at all of us. “But this isn’t really something that I’m able to control. You have to be quarantined to prevent the spread of this virus. And here, we can watch all of you to make sure that you’re doing what you should be doing.”

  In all, there were eight of us that were ‘exposed.’

  Saint and me, Brielle, the mother and daughter duo, Misha and Tisha. The man that exposed us all, Martin, the barista, Tate, and the security guard that had been guarding the hospital entrance, Darrel.

  “You’ll all be put into rooms,” he explained. “After today, you will no longer have contact with anybody but your roommate.”

  I prayed hard that I wouldn’t be stuck with Brielle. For the love of God, I’d kill her.

  “Do we get to keep our electronic devices? Do we get to go home and get our things?” Brielle asked.

  “You have what you have on you,” Jace said, “for now. We’ll be bringing you all provisions. Changes of clothes. Toiletries. Things of that nature.”

  “What about tampons?” I asked. “I’m gonna need those today.”

  Jace looked taken aback for a long moment, then nodded. “Medical supplies as needed, yes. I’ll get you those things today.”

  All of this was said from behind his protective equipment.

  He was sweating badly, and he looked like he’d rather be anywhere but here.

  So did all of us, now that I thought about it.

  “Who are we pairing up with?” Tate asked.

  “You two.” He pointed at Tate and Darrel. “You two.” He pointed at Misha and Tisha. “You two.” He pointed at Saint and me. “And you two.” He pointed at Martin and Brielle.

  “Oh, hell no!” Martin argued.

  “You two are the most likely to be contagious.” Jace shrugged. “We have obtained a hotel for y’all to be quarantined in. Now, we are going to transport you all to your rooms,” he ordered as he gestured to the exit of the cafeteria.

  They put us in a hotel. One that hadn’t opened yet, actually. We were transported by ambulance to the new location, put through rigorous decontamination, then escorted to our new homes for the next three weeks.

  It was brand new, and out of all the rooms it had, the ones at the very top, the executive suites, were the only ones open.

  “I’m not pairing up with him for three weeks! I’ll go with her!” Brielle pointed at me.

  Saint, God love him, hooked his arm around me. “Sorry, but my fiancée and I are going to be together. We’re not separating.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief when I realized that, despite our differences, he wasn’t going to let me go.

  Thank God.

  Over the last year that I’d known Saint, especially the last four months that I’d been home, I’d made it a priority to give him shit every time that I saw him. He’d made it a point to give it right back.

  And, from what I’d learned, he didn’t give shit to anybody but me.

  Which made me feel special in a way.

  “What?” Brielle screeched. “You’re getting married?”

  Four more yellow-suited people came into the room then, all coming up to us.

  We’d been showered, changed, decontaminated to the best of their abilities, and now they were leading us to our jail cells for the next three weeks.

  Without another word, we followed the silent man that led us to the top suite at the very end of the hallway.

  He opened the door with a code, then gestured for us to go inside.

  “After you,” he said.

  We went inside, and without another word, the door slammed shut behind us.

  We both turned to look at the closed door, then back at each other.

  “Holy fuck,” he muttered, shaking his head.

  CHAPTER 2

  I was born annoyed.

  -T-shirt

  SAINT

  “Oh my God,” the beautiful woman at my side said. “My parents are going to freak the fuck out.”

  I looked over at her in surprise.

  “They’re going to understand,” I pointed out.

  “They will,” Carolina agreed. “But my mom’s a nurse. She understands this kind of stuff. She’ll know how bad it is.”

  It was officially December first today. That meant we had three weeks of this. December twenty-first, or possibly even the twenty-second, we could go home. And that was if we didn’t have fucking Ebola by then.

  “How do you think this happened?” she asked curiously. “Goddamn, but Brielle always gets me into the worst situations. This one, though, by far tops all the others.”

  “I have no idea how this happened,” I admitted. “But you’re going to have to tell me what she’s done and why you think that this is all her fault.”

  Carolin
a moved then, turning her back to me as she walked farther into the sparsely decorated room at our backs.

  My eyes trailed over her instead of the room, focusing on the black, skin-tight pants that she was wearing. Her white button-down shirt that had sleeves that came to about halfway up her forearm were tucked into those skin-tight black pants, and I couldn’t see any underwear lines at all.

  Then there were the heels. My God, she was wearing sky-high black heels that I’d never, ever been attracted to on a woman before. But on her?

  Yeah, I was panting slightly.

  Like a complete loser.

  “Brielle is a tad bit selfish,” Carolina said as she whirled around and placed her ass on the bed as she faced me. “Likely she thought it’d be funny. Likely, she knew that this chick had the fuckin’ Ebola or whatever it is called and sent him anyway, knowing what would happen. I’m not sure. She didn’t tell me. But I seriously can see her doing this.”

  She sounded like an awful person, to be honest.

  I wondered idly why Carolina would hang out with her.

  “If you’re wondering why I hang out with her…” Carolina leaned back onto her hands on the bed, her breasts jiggling with the movement. “I’m not really sure. I met her a few weeks ago while visiting my mother at the hospital. And, I’m not sure if she actually was doing me a favor, or if she honestly thought it would get her into my mom’s good graces, but she said, ‘oh, hey! I have a friend that’s a judge. You should totally go do this…’ and wham, bam. I’m now a judge, I have a great job. Oh, and all of a sudden I don’t tell Brielle no when she wants to grab lunch every once in a while.”

  My mouth twitched up at the corner at her non-amused tone.

  “Interesting,” I said. “So, what’s that mean for you now? Are you still going to be friends after this?”

  “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I’m only fifteen minutes into this quarantine. With you, a man that I barely even know. Needless to say, there’s no telling what my feelings for her will be when we make it out of this on the other end.”

  She had a point there.

  To keep myself from staring at her, and her nipples that were starting to poke through the thin material of her shirt, I took a look around.