After Hours: (InterMix)

by Cara McKenna

  “Truth hurts,” Marco said, and his smug-ass grin was the final straw. When he got inside his cab and slammed the door, I spat on his windshield and gave him the finger. In the half second it took, my brain screamed Mistake! ten thousand times over.

  His door flew open.

  “You fucking touch my truck—”

  Logic told me to run but my body was marching to meet his, some idiot bit of my programming thirsty for blood and shrieking Mama bear! Activate! I fisted my car key and slammed it against his gleaming hood, drew it with a squeal down the perfect, glossy red paint, and wished with every cell in my body I was rending his chest open.

  Then his hands were around my arms, thumbs digging into my flesh. Thoughtless, I drove my fists up between us the way I’d practiced a thousand times in restraints. I broke his hold and thumped his chin. He grunted, and when he opened and closed his mouth his teeth were pink. He must have bitten his tongue.

  “You fucking psycho cunt.”

  “Excuse me?” Twice in one week I get cunt hurled at me? I couldn’t hit Lonnie but I could sure as fuck hit Marco. I came at him flailing, but he grabbed my arms again and shook me hard.

  I heard Amber yell, “Let her go!” I heard gravel grinding under our shoes, heard Jack begin to wail.

  “Stay on the steps!”

  Marco’s grip on my arm was gone. He charged me a pace and gave me a hard shove. My feet weren’t quick enough, and I stumbled, trying to catch myself on my car. But I was too far away, and my elbow banged dully against the door; then pain exploded in my face as my temple hit the side mirror.

  I heard Amber yell my name. Jack’s wailing turned to shrieks. It was the latter that had pebbles beneath my palms and my arms shoving me to kneeling, my hand finding the car door as I forced my legs to work and let me stand. My face hurt, but it was dry. My elbow hurt, but the joint didn’t scream when I bent it. One of the knees of my scrubs was split and my skin felt raw, but I didn’t care. I stared at Marco, stared right in his face with adrenaline pulsing through me like pure, molten hate.

  With my eyes I told him, I’m gonna fuck you up for making my family cry. But my body hurt, and my brain got its say. My brain said he’d win, if he wanted.

  What he wanted, apparently, was nothing more to do with any of us.

  “Crazy bitches.” He hawked and spat on the dirt and climbed back inside his truck, reversing out of the driveway as slow and lazy as you please.

  When he rolled onto the street and drove off, I realized I’d won. I was hurt and scraped up, but I’d won that fight, somehow.

  Amber hurried over, holding Jack to her chest with one arm, smoothing my hair back with her free hand.

  “Am I bleeding?”

  “No. But it’s real red. Lemme get you some frozen peas or something.”

  “I have to get back to work. And you have to call the cops, and tell them where he lives and what happened. Tell them I’ll come and give a statement, the second I’m off work.” While the bruise is still nice and heinous, I thought grimly.

  “Okay.” She said it too quietly for me to trust.

  “Do it today, Amber. Do it right now. Give them my number, so they can call and arrange for me to meet with them. Don’t you dare pussy out.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  I nearly believed her that time.

  Despite my speeding, I got back late. I hurried to the empty locker room and changed into fresh scrub bottoms and shoved the ones with the ripped, crusty knee deep underneath the wadded paper towels in the trash can. I checked my eye in the mirror over the sink, and it was pretty gross. My lid was puffy and pink and shiny, the skin under my eyebrow purple, radiating red. It was a job for an eye patch, not concealer. Sadly I had neither, so I rinsed my face and smoothed my hair, and headed for the sign-in room, walking as tall as I could.

  And of course I ran into Kelly. Of course I did.

  He was filling a cup of coffee from a carafe and I ignored him, scouting for a dry erase marker.

  “Drawer by your hip,” he said.

  “Thanks.” I had to turn to open it, though, and he saw.

  “Whoa.” I looked up in time to catch his pale eyes growing wide. “What the fuck? Who did that to you?”

  “Not a patient.”

  A glare eclipsed his icy irises. “Who, then?”

  “None of your business.” I dug through the drawer. Highlighter, no. Sharpie, no.

  He strode to the freezer and pulled out an ice pack, squishing the gel inside and wrapping it in a paper towel. “Here.”

  I abandoned my search, pressing the pack to my face. “Thanks.” Six more hours in my shift, and probably twenty more times I’d have to say “no comment” when someone asked how I’d managed to get a black eye during my lunch hour. I glanced at the gash on Kelly’s temple, and way too many details about what had happened after he’d turned up injured at my threshold revisited me in a breath.

  “So who did that?” he demanded again, locking his dumb, huge arms over his dumb chest.

  “A ’93 Tempo.”

  “Where were you at lunch?”

  I sighed and leaned wearily against the counter. “Don’t tell anybody.”

  “I won’t.”

  “I got in a fight with my sister’s asshole ex-boyfriend. He shoved me and I tripped, and hit my eye on my side mirror.”

  His own eyes narrowed. “Where is he?”

  “Oh, come off it, Kelly. I don’t need some tough guy to sic on another tough guy. I’ve had enough of your type to last a lifetime.”

  “You call the cops?”

  “My sister did,” I said, praying it was true. “Everything’s under control. Quit hassling me about it.”

  He stepped close and I let him take the ice pack away. He squinted at my bruise, and I studied his eyes. They were nearly a color today, a frozen lake reflecting a clear blue—

  “Ahhh, ow.” I fidgeted as he pressed my brow bone, the spot tender.

  “You break anything?” Press, press, press.

  “I don’t think so. But my head might explode if you keep poking me.” He let me go and gave me back the ice pack. I nearly missed his body when he stepped away. Reeling and tired, I tried a joke. “Think this’ll earn me some cred with the residents?”

  He smiled. My heart suddenly felt as swollen and bruised as my face.

  “Want me to lie for you?” he asked. “Tell everyone you got that shiner doing something tough, on the ward?”

  I wandered past him and found a marker in the drawer. I wiped lunch off-campus from beside my name and wrote general in its place. “Nah. I’ll seem more badass if I leave it a mystery.”

  He followed me into the hall. “I will get you to tell me who this guy is.”

  Holding the pack in place, I shot him a one-eyed glare as the keypad beeped. I pushed in the stairwell door. “I’m a grown-ass woman.”

  “And some shit who calls himself a man gave you a black eye.”

  I stopped short on the landing between floors. He was two steps behind me, and our faces were nearly level. “What are you gonna do if I tell you, Kelly? Hunt him down and beat the crap out of him?”

  “Likely.”

  “Which’ll solve what?”

  “More than some slap on the wrist from the cops, if I know the type.”

  “Well you don’t. You don’t know me or my sister or her problems. You don’t know anything about us, so butt out. We don’t need rescuing.” Amber did, but that was my job. Today hadn’t been my finest moment, granted, but if any dog was going to snarl and bark and bite on her behalf, it was this bitch. Guys only ever made things worse.

  When we reached the third floor, Kelly said, “Lemme take you out for a drink after work.”

  I sighed, pausing with my keycard in hand. Did
I really want to sit on a stool in some dive, with my knee touching Kelly’s, and numb myself with a drink and a big reassuring wall of muscle? Yeah, a little. But no way in hell did I think it was smart. Over my shoulder I said, “I’ve seen plenty of you already this week, off the clock.”

  “So see some more.”

  “Quit trying to save me.”

  “Who said I was?”

  I tapped my card to the lock and pushed in the door, aiming myself down the hall to the ward.

  “You really wanna head to bed after the second half of your shift, look at yourself in a mirror and try to fall asleep, thinking about all this shit? Come out for a drink.”

  I punched the code to let us into the deserted lounge. “No.”

  I marched toward the rec room to find Jenny and catch up with my duties, to get lost in all the details that wouldn’t allow me to think about anything else. About Amber or Marco or Kelly Robak.

  “I’ll meet you at my truck at seven twenty,” Kelly said.

  Just before I veered off for the nurses’ booth, I mouthed a fuck off in his direction.

  And damn him to hell, he smiled. “Seven twenty it is.”

  * * *

  The cops from Amber’s town called me around four, and one of them came out to Larkhaven and I gave him my statement in the staff parking lot, where he took a couple of digital photos of my ripening bruise. I hoped something would come of it. Anything. But even if the system was in our favor, I didn’t trust Amber to not suddenly drop charges.

  At least work was quiet. And at least I had the next day off. During Saturday shifts we didn’t have to do any inventory, which saved a ton of time. Kelly and a couple of other orderlies were escorting some of the Starling residents to the campus chapel, one of the rare opportunities the men got for a field trip. I’m sure the change of scenery motivated them far more than a chance to get good with the Lord, but then again, living in a locked ward, a few minutes’ fresh air and sunshine were probably a damn-near religious experience. And praise Jesus for an hour free of Kelly Robak.

  Once the last meds of the shift were distributed and my notes logged, Jenny told me to go ahead and keep an eye on things in the rec room. The subtext being, You’re a mess. Go watch TV with the patients until hand-off.

  I took her up on the offer, gladly.

  Having sort of won that fight with Marco and squared away the stuff with the police, I was feeling strangely capable and strong and Zen, despite my exhaustion. Despite fucking up and taking Marco’s bait, channeling the emotional intelligence of a four-year-old. I plopped down in an easy chair kitty-corner from Lonnie and greeted him with a big old smile.

  His magnified eyes swiveled to my bruise. “It suits you.” He was deadpan, and I chose not to read it as meaning he was pleased to think I’d been punched in the face.

  “I may get the other side done to match,” I told him, equally deadpan.

  I kept my eyes on the TV, but I was pretty sure he smiled, in my periphery.

  The hand-off meeting was low-key, as it’d been a relatively calm day on the ward. After my day-shift colleagues with minor incidents to relay had made their reports, there was a silence, several night-shifters staring at me expectantly.

  “Oh,” I said, touching my brow. “No, this was recreational.” I hadn’t meant it to be funny, but a couple people laughed, and it actually cheered me some.

  I didn’t feel like getting grilled while the group was signing out, so I changed first, and fast. There were only two orderlies chatting in the coffee room when I logged out, neither of them Kelly, and neither said a thing to me aside from good night.

  As I pulled open the door to the lot, June had never smelled so good.

  Predictably, Kelly was standing beside his truck, next to the little set of brick steps I’d take up to the lawn. He opened the passenger side as I strode in his direction.

  He patted the top of the door frame. “Ready to go, Nurse Roughneck?”

  “I told you no,” I said, plainly aiming myself toward the steps.

  “And I’m telling you get in.”

  Fuck me, the nerve.

  I glared at him a long time, just taking in the physically superior, bossy, heterosexual white male aged eighteen to sixty standing before me. Like this guy didn’t already get his way, every place he paused as he moved through the world.

  It was time to draw the line. And the line went straight up the crotch of my panties.

  I stopped and locked my arms over my chest, Kelly-style. “I’ve had it up to my black eye with pushy men today, Robak. I’m going home to sleep. And I’m not answering my door, no matter how hard anybody knocks.”

  “Tomorrow, then.”

  I dropped my head back, sighing loudly into the darkening sky. “Jesus.” I looked him in the eyes. “Yeah. Fine. Whatever. Whatever will shut you up so I can go home and collapse.”

  “Six thirty,” he said, slamming the passenger door. “We’ll grab dinner.”

  “Yeah, sure. We’ll grab dinner. We’ll grab one drink, and nothing else will get grabbed for the rest of the night.”

  “Fine.”

  “Fine.” I jammed my purse over my shoulder and marched past him and up the steps to the lawn.

  “See you then. Dress pretty.”

  “Fuck off, Kelly.”

  Chapter Six

  Dress pretty, Kelly’s voice echoed.

  Easier said than done, I thought, flipping through the hangers in my closet the following evening. He’d already seen the only dress I owned; the past few years hadn’t exactly left me with the spare time or money or energy for socializing.

  Plus I was strongly tempted to dress as dumpy as possible, just to show him I didn’t give a shit, that I wasn’t here to be ordered around, into a nice outfit or indeed, his bed.

  But fuck it. It was Sunday, my night off. I’d survived a first week that felt like an entire month, passed a pretty lousy birthday, and been cussed out by more belligerent men than I cared to count.

  “What goes with a black eye?” I mumbled, perusing my choices. I settled on my nicest jeans and a dressy charcoal top. I’d bought that top when I’d sensed this guy from one of my night classes was on the verge of asking me out, excited to go on a rare first date. He never did ask. I found my scissors and clipped the price tag from the collar.

  I put on far more eye shadow than I normally would have, hoping to camouflage my damage. In the end it didn’t do much aside from make it appear that I was trying—and failing—to look seductive, which was the last assumption I needed Kelly making about me.

  At six twenty-five I slipped into a pair of flats and locked up.

  Kelly was punctual, already leaning against his hood in the circular drive in front of the apartments. He’d worn jeans as well, and a fatigue-green tee shirt faded nearly to sage. For once his arms weren’t crossed like a shield, but braced behind him. He looked as relaxed as I’d ever seen him. He gave me a little nod as I trotted down the steps. There was summer in the air, a warm breeze that reminded me of broken teenage curfews and a hundred once-favorite songs and forgotten crushes.

  He nodded. “Evening.”

  “Hey.” I stopped a few feet in front of him, glancing demonstrably around us. “Gorgeous day.”

  “More gorgeous still, that we don’t have to spend it in there.” He nodded across the road at the Larkhaven gates, then stood up straight and went around to open my door. “You look nice.”

  I glanced at my top. “I thought the gray would bring out my bruise. How’s your temple?”

  He pressed the white bandage. “’S fine. Ready to go?”

  I nodded and slid into the passenger side.

  “Where are we eating?” I asked him as he started up the truck.

  “There’s burgers and that kind of shit
at the bar, and an Italian place, and a taco place.”

  “Don’t tell me I actually get a say? Kelly, you spoil me. Next I’ll get to pick my own drink.”

  He smirked at me then pulled us away from the curb. “You’re feisty tonight.”

  “Funny what getting punched in the face by your own car does to you. And burgers are fine.” Burgers and dim bar lighting to hide my eye, and a place I’d be able to call familiar after this second visit.

  “As you wish.”

  “We’re not messing around tonight,” I informed him as we reached the main road.

  “I never mess around. I’m all business in the sack.”

  “Seriously. I’m not doing a thing with you tonight. And if I change my mind—which I won’t—I’m counting on you to be gentleman enough to respect the wishes I’m laying out right now, in this truck.”

  “Fine. Not tonight. That leaves plenty of other nights.”

  I sighed, watching the woods slip past and spotting a deer frozen amid the maples. Run if you’re smart, honey. I glanced at the hunter in the driver’s seat. Too late.

  We shot the shit about our days off, and Kelly told me a bit more about the city when the fields fell back and mummified factories and mills rose up from the horizon. He parked in front of Lola’s, in the very same spot as the last visit.

  Again, the place was bustling despite it being a school night. We took seats at the bar and Kelly leaned over the counter to grab me a menu.

  “Seems busy for a Sunday,” I said, scanning the fare.

  “Unemployment breeds boredom, breeds alcoholism.”

  “That’s very cheerful, Kelly. Thank you.”

  The bartender came by and Kelly looked to me.

  “I’ll have a light beer, please.” I said it perkily, with a big smile in Kelly’s direction. When the bartender left us to pour I asked, “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

  He shrugged. “I’ll pick my battles.” He said it in a cocky, lazy way that implied those battles would most definitely be waged betwixt my spread thighs.

  Our beers arrived, and I ordered a cheeseburger and onion rings.