The Nurse's Not-So-Secret Scandal

by Wendy S. Marcus

  As if he understood he tapped the pad and said, “Write down as much as you know.”

  “Your time would be better spent sleeping.” She did as he asked. “Or preparing me a gourmet dinner.”

  Fig approached her with his arms open. She stepped between them and he hugged her close. “It’s going to be fine, Roxie. They’ll come. I’ll make it happen.”

  Roxie pulled back to look at him. “What are you up to?” She studied his face, trying to find the answer. But he gave nothing away.

  “It’s better you don’t know,” he teased. “What time do you think you’ll be home?”

  Home. It would be so nice if this really were her home, and whenever she returned to it, Fig would be there waiting for her, making her feel safe and cared about. Happy.

  But she was the pretend girlfriend, and he was her temporary man. Because Mami couldn’t live alone, and as soon as her house was habitable, they’d both be moving back into it. And because Fig wasn’t the only one with quirks he didn’t want others to know about.

  “I’ll call you and let you know,” Roxie answered.

  “Call Kyle’s house phone. My cell’s turned off.”

  “Did you call your mom?” Roxie asked. She’d already spoken with hers, twice.

  “I will,” Fig said. “Later.”

  Roxie detached his cell phone from the charger and handed it to him. “Do it now. So she doesn’t worry.”

  He put the phone down. “She’ll worry no matter what.”

  “Did you ever think maybe if you called her on a regular basis and involved her in your life a bit more she wouldn’t call you constantly or go to such extreme lengths to see you?”

  Based on his expression, no, he hadn’t.

  “Either you forgive her for the past or you don’t. Either she’s in your life or she isn’t. All or nothing. Anything less will be a stressor to you both. She’ll always be seeking more of your time and attention. And you’ll constantly be trying to put her off and make her go away.”

  “Short of moving back in with her, I’m not capable of giving her the amount of my time and attention she wants.”

  “Discuss it with her,” Roxie suggested. “Set limits. But you’ll have to give a little, too.”

  Fig stared down at the phone in his hands. “Do you think I’m crazy?” He looked up and smiled. “Maybe I should clarify. Crazy for forgiving her?”

  “Honestly?”

  Fig nodded.

  “I don’t think you have forgiven her. I think there’s part of you that wants to, but a bigger part is still angry and hurt. And unsure. Because you never found out for certain if she purposely set out to hurt you.”

  “She was a good mom,” Fig said. “She used to play with me for hours and read to me. Sing to me.” His words drifted off as he remembered something. “She stayed with me and held my hand and refused to leave me alone through countless scary and painful procedures and tests. The leukemia was very real and we battled it for years. Without her, I think I would have given up. Yet she prolonged my suffering, to control my life. How am I supposed to deal with that?”

  “You close the door on it and lock it away.” Like she’d chosen to do with all the ways her mother had failed her. “Or you work things out with your mom.” Roxie kissed his head. “If you want to move forward and heal, you need to choose.”

  * * *

  On Tuesday night Roxie sat at the corner of the bar at O’Halloran’s, praying the pain medication she’d convinced Fig to take after a particularly—purposely—energetic round of demanding sex kept him sound asleep for the time it would take her to accomplish her task and return to him.

  “The usual to start?” Triple B asked.

  Roxie nodded. He returned with an ice cold bottle of beer.

  While she waited, she sipped the familiar brew to calm her nerves, she listened to the same old songs playing on the jukebox and watched the regulars drinking what they typically drank and doing what they typically did.

  But for Roxie, tonight was no ordinary night at O’Halloran’s.

  “Well, well, well. If it isn’t Roxie Loves Coxie.”

  His voice grated on her self-control, and she briefly considered breaking her beer bottle over his head. But then she wouldn’t get what she needed, and he wouldn’t pay for what he’d done, so she lifted it and took a sip of its bubbly goodness instead.

  “Fancy meeting you here,” he continued the charade.

  As if their “date” hadn’t been prearranged. “Hi, there, Johnny.” She wondered if that was his real name. “Nice to see you again.” The remnants of that lie sat bitter on her tongue. But— Nothing to see here, folks. Just two old…friends meeting up for a drink.

  As if on cue Triple B meandered over. “What’ll you have?” He tossed a napkin on the bar in front of Johnny.

  “A beer. Same as her.”

  Johnny leaned in to whisper in Roxie’s ear. The stubble on his cheek grazing hers made Roxie cringe. She much preferred Fig’s smooth skin. “Too bad we got all this bad business between us,” he said. “We were good together. Had us some fun.”

  So she’d thought. Until the call she’d hoped was for a second date turned out to be for the purposes of blackmailing her. “You’ve got yourself some talent,” she said.

  “Maybe when this is all done we could…”

  Not even if someone were holding a loaded gun to her head. “Maybe,” she lied. Play the role. Draw him in. Get him talking. “Was it your buddy who filmed us?”

  He nodded.

  Come on. Talk. “I heard his breathing on the tape.” His heavy, excited breathing.

  “He likes to watch.” Johnny smiled.

  “If you’d let me know you were making a video of us, he could have come out of his hidey-hole and gotten closer to the action. I bet he would have liked that.” The creeper.

  “You mean you would have been okay with it?”

  Perfect. “I might have been. If you’d asked real nice.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind for next time.”

  You do that, scuz-bucket. “So where is he? Your friend.”

  “He’s around.”

  Roxie scanned the bar, didn’t see him.

  Triple B delivered Johnny’s drink, placing it on the bar with a bit more force than necessary. Johnny, however, was too busy staring at Roxie’s cleavage in the low-cut blouse she’d purposely worn to notice Triple B’s bulging biceps and step-out-of-line-and-I’ll-beat-you-into-a-coma scowl. Roxie motioned her friend away.

  “So you called this meeting, doll. What’s up?” Johnny took a swig of beer.

  Roxie leaned in close. “I pulled the switch,” she said quietly. “The drugs for the tape. That was the deal.”

  Johnny looked around. “I heard you’ve been on vacation this week.” He eyed her suspiciously.

  “One of my best friends is the head nurse on 5E. I dropped in to visit her. She got called out on an emergency, asked me to give her keys to the charge nurse. I saw my opportunity and I took it. Since I wasn’t on the schedule to work, if someone figures it out, there’s no way they’ll trace the switch to me.”

  Johnny smiled. “Smart girl. I knew from the moment we met you were perfect for the job.” He ran a callused finger up and down her arm. “We could make a good team, you and me. In and out of the sack.”

  Roxie fought the revulsion of this man’s touch and sat perfectly still. That he actually thought she was okay with being taken advantage of, videotaped and threatened with exposure. “Did you bring the tape?” Roxie asked.

  Johnny nodded. “Just like you asked.” He didn’t offer any further information. He finished his beer and ordered another—for each of them.

  Roxie didn’t have time for thi
s. She needed to get the tape and get the heck out of there. “Where is it?”

  “My car.”

  Not the car. Triple B would totally freak if she got up to leave the bar with Johnny. “Ask your friend to bring it in.” Then she’d have them both in the same place.

  “What’s your rush?” Johnny chugged from his second beer. “Drink up.”

  Roxie lifted her second “beer” to her lips. Triple B had replaced it with ginger ale, like she’d asked. She couldn’t risk anything dulling her senses. “I’ve got a friend waiting on me,” she lied.

  “The pale, bald guy?”

  So he had been watching her. “Yeah.”

  “He your boyfriend?”

  “Patient,” she answered, wanting to keep Johnny interested until they’d finished their transaction. “Friend of the family. So. We going to make the exchange or what? I’ve got to get back before he wakes up.”

  Johnny finished his beer. “Outside.”

  She grabbed her purse and stood. What else could she do? Halfway to the door Triple B bellowed, “Where you going, Roxie?”

  She plastered a smile so he wouldn’t know just how nervous she was. “Outside for a few minutes. I’ll be back in to settle up.”

  “I left enough money for both of us,” Johnny said.

  Lord help her.

  “Five minutes, Roxie.” Triple B picked up his wooden drunk-slugger and slammed it down on the bar. “Or I’m coming out after you.”

  “That was quite a show,” Johnny said when they reached the parking lot.

  Fear crept up Roxie’s spine. Had he figured her out?

  Johnny laughed. “But you look like you can take care of yourself.”

  She almost collapsed with relief. “He worries. I went to school with his wife.”

  Johnny walked past car after car. She’d been so drunk the night they’d left together she had no recollection of what he’d driven her home in. Something moved on her right. Roxie halted.

  “It’s only Luke,” Johnny said, taking her arm.

  His friend. Two against one, not good. And now he was pulling her along, double not good. Roxie dug her heels into the gravel lot. “Look. I’d rather stay over here in the light so I can see what I’m doing,” she tried.

  “Come on.” Johnny gave her a tug to get her moving. “I have a light inside my car.”

  Roxie wanted to run. But she needed him to take the pills. And she needed to get the tape. In a flash of morbid thought Roxie took solace in knowing if something happened to her, Victoria would see that Mami was taken care of.

  “Hey, Luke,” Johnny said into the darkness. “Roxie said next time you don’t have to hide.”

  “I said maybe there’d be a next time.” Maybe as in never, you miscreant.

  Johnny stopped beside an old-style Cadillac parked in the shadows and opened the door. She could sense Luke close by. Johnny rummaged through a bag on the backseat and took out what looked like a DVD in a clear plastic case.

  “How do I know that’s of me?” she asked.

  He held it up to show her “Roxie” written in black marker on the disk. But wait a minute. “Shouldn’t there be a tape? From the video recorder?”

  Johnny smiled. “I told you she was smart, Luke,” he said and turned back to the bag. He emerged with three mini-camcorder tapes.

  She held out her hand.

  He held the disk and tapes out of reach. “What do you have for me?”

  Roxie felt around in her purse and pulled out two sheets of blister-packed Percocet pills and two of Vicodin pills. He reached for them.

  “I give you the pills. You give me the tape. Like we agreed.” Roxie’s heart pounded. She could smell her own sweat. “At the same time.”

  Johnny stepped forward and held out the disk and tapes with his right hand. She took them with her left hand at the same time he snatched the pills from her right. There. It was done. But before relief could settle in, Johnny yanked her by the arm, turned her and forced her up against his car while he mashed his lips into hers.

  “This is why you tried to screw me unconscious and insisted I take my pain medication afterward?” Fig’s eerily calm voice penetrated the darkness. “If you want me to kiss you you’re going to have to stop swapping spit with other men.”

  Oh, God. Not now. “It’s not what you think,” Roxie said, trying to push away from Johnny.

  “Let her go,” Fig demanded.

  Johnny opened the front door of his car, reached inside and turned on his headlights, surrounding Fig in light. “Well, well, well. He sounds awful jealous for a patient,” Johnny pointed out.

  She should have inflicted a disorienting blow to his head when she’d had the chance.

  “You told him I was your patient?” Fig asked. To anyone who didn’t know him he’d come off completely calm and in control. But his right eye twitched, and his jaw looked made of stone.

  “I don’t want no trouble,” Johnny said. “You can have her.” He dropped his hands. “I’ll just be on my way.”

  “No. Wait,” Roxie said to him.

  “You mean you want to come home with me and Luke, after all?”

  “Roxie doesn’t do tag team. Isn’t that right, honey?” Fig asked. “Or was that a lie, too? Maybe we’re not as well matched in the bedroom as you led me to believe.”

  This was a nightmare. Wake up. Wake up.

  “Get lost, buddy,” Johnny said. “She’s made her choice. Get in the car, Luke.” Johnny grabbed Roxie around the waist and started to push her through the open door. “Come on, baby. Me and Luke. We got what you need.”

  “No.” Roxie tried to twist free.

  Fig started toward her.

  Car after car skidded in around them.

  Johnny pushed her away. “You double-crossing bitch.” He slammed his gigantic fist into her cheek.

  Pain exploded on contact. Tiny pinpricks of light speckled the darkness. A black nothingness threatened. Wanting to be finished with this whole situation, wanting to be done with this night, Roxie didn’t fight it.

  CHAPTER NINE

  BACK at the hospital. Again. Fig paced the E.R. hallway outside of Roxie’s room. He couldn’t tell which hand hurt worse, the one attached to his fractured wrist or the one that’d planted the knockout punch to the unchivalrous excuse for a man who’d struck Roxie.

  “You are some piece of work.” Kyle handed him a bag of ice. “You’re going to need an X-ray, you know.”

  “Nothing’s broken.” Fig made a loose fist then, despite the pain, extended his fingers. “You haven’t mentioned how you and Victoria happened to be in O’Halloran’s parking lot at eleven-thirty on a Tuesday night. And why you didn’t warn me what was going down.”

  “I don’t know much more than you,” Kyle said, his hands in his pockets. “I couldn’t sleep on that couch Victoria banished me to, so I was awake when she tried to sneak out of the house.”

  “What is with the two of them?” Roxie, allowing herself to be used in some sting operation to capture a drug-dealing blackmailer—he found out after the fact—putting herself in danger. She and Victoria sneaking around, not confiding in the men responsible for protecting them.

  Victoria stuck her head out into the hallway. “She’s awake.”

  Finally. Some answers. Up to now all Victoria would say is “it’s not my story to tell.” Fig followed Kyle into Roxie’s room, which looked identical to the one he’d been in prior to his surgery. She lay on a stretcher, the top slightly elevated, with no pillow. Her left eye was almost swollen shut, the area surrounding it and her cheek an inflamed red that m
ade Fig want to search out the goon from the parking lot and hit him again. He was in the E.R. somewhere. Fig had seen him come in.

  “You hit him?” Roxie accused the second she saw him.

  “He hit you,” Fig explained.

  “With your left hand?”

  He held up his splinted arm. “Well, I couldn’t use my right.”

  “How are you going to take care of yourself?”

  She was worried about him?

  “And if you’re both here—” she pointed back and forth between Kyle and Victoria “—who’s home with Mami and Jake?”

  “Ali and Jared,” Victoria answered.

  “Then who’s watching the baby?” Roxie asked.

  “They brought him along,” Victoria said. “Your mother is in love.”

  Roxie flung her arm over her forehead. “You should all be in your own homes in your own beds.”

  “I had to be there,” Victoria said, standing next to the stretcher. “In case something went wrong. If Ali wasn’t nursing, she would have come, too. She and Jared had a huge argument over it.”

  “We’d have had a huge argument, too, honey,” Kyle said to Victoria, “if you’d taken the time to fill me in on your little plan.”

  “Which is why I didn’t,” Victoria countered.

  “Would one of you please tell me what the heck is going on?” Fig asked. Loudly.

  Roxie clamped her eyes closed and brought her hands up to her temples. “Keep it down, will ya? Lady with a closed head injury here.”

  “Sorry,” he whispered.

  “That’s it. I’m going to start charging,” she said to him. “Fifty dollars every time you do something that warrants an apology to me. Effective immediately.” She held out her hand.

  “Start me a tab,” he said. “You know you’re awful chipper for someone who was mauled and beaten in a dark parking lot.”