by Faye, Amy
She looked over at him as he raised his hands in a three-fingered salute. He didn't look anything like a boy scout, and even now all she could convince herself of was that he was making a perverse mockery of the entire organization.
"Just make sure you don't get any ideas about what you think I might be interested in."
"Of course," he replied, his voice solemn to the point that she suspected him of bullshitting. "I wouldn't dream of it, Miss Boss."
"Don't call me Miss Boss. If you're going to call me anything, call me Caroline, and be a little more obedient than you were in the hospital. What happened anyways?"
He looked over at her with a raised eyebrow. "Why does it matter?"
"Why won't you tell me?"
"I'll tell you if it matters, but far as I was concerned it wasn't a big deal. Honestly, y'all kept me too long. If you just let me go when I'm feeling better, maybe I don't get bored and start going after your pretty lady-nurses."
"I'm sure that somehow, you'll be able to figure out how to keep your hands to yourself, eventually."
"Oh, if I'd seen you beforehand, I'd have known to keep my hands to myself, at least a little longer." He winked and laughed, and Caroline couldn't keep her sour attitude up much longer.
He had confidence, she had to give him that. There were plenty of other things that Caroline didn't doubt for a minute that he'd rather that she give him, but she wasn't about to make that mistake.
As long as at least one of them knew where to draw the line, she could afford to enjoy the attention, even if it was just for a little bit.
He set his hands back on the wheel and that was when she noticed them. His knuckles were split wide open, and the thin gauze and athletic tape that covered them wasn't enough to cover up the dark stain of blood on them.
Caroline shivered at the thought of what he'd done with his hands to make them look like that. If he wasn't going to tell her then he wasn't going to tell her. There was no getting around that. But how long would it be before she found out how he got those injuries? And when she did, how bad could it turn out to be?
5
Caroline's jaw set and she sucked in a breath. She'd been in hospitals almost every day for the better part of three weeks now. Before that, it had only been most days, and she'd been studying for longer than that. Years. But somehow, this part of it never got any easier. Everything else was easy, compared to the visits she made on her day off.
No matter what else she did, no matter how hard the work was, she was able to manage it. Sarah was a big help, in that regard. Having a woman around who was as tough as nails and never seemed to let any of it touch her. Well, mostly never did, at least.
She'd let one thing touch her. After a week with Shannen in the spare room, it wasn't hard to imagine what had set her on edge about going to check on him. He was terminally allergic to being agreeable in any way, shape, or form. That was as his roommate; she could only imagine how bad it must have been to have him as a responsibility.
Seeing her father, though, was an entirely different situation, and one that she wasn't happy about in the least bit. There was too much going on in her mind, too much that she didn't want to think about, and it was only with a great cost that she managed to hide her constant worry.
It was one thing to feel okay about everything when she was away, when he was far away from her. When she was just trying to accept her place in the whole situation. It was entirely another to look down at him, at his rapidly-fading body, and remind herself that he'd be as right as rain any day now, as long as she just kept the faith.
She cursed herself for not having gone to church in months. It wasn't so hard to justify to herself that she needed the time, that she was too busy. School, work, and everything all came together to make her far, far too busy. At least, that was what she told herself.
The reality, she feared, was something a little bit different. She couldn't lie to herself forever, even if she wanted to. She could lie to anyone else, to Dad and to Sarah and to Shannen, but deep down, she would always know that she was panicking.
She took her deep breath, held her stomach tight, and forced herself to step into the room.
"Dad, hey."
He looked up at her with a smile that was reserved for these visits, and then he looked away as a cough started to rack his chest, harder than she had realized was even possible for a man of his now diminutive size.
"Caroline."
"You're looking good." It was a lie, but she had to say it. She couldn't pretend halfway. If she was lying then she was lying.
He coughed again. "Good," he said. His voice was rough like sandpaper, which was the way it should have been. Everything else about him had changed so much, but that had stayed the same. "Because I feel like shit."
She laughed, and for a moment she thought she was going to lose her composure and with it, any hope that she could keep a happy face on for him.
"Did I tell you I got a roommate?"
"Oh yeah?"
"Yeah," she said. Then, all of a sudden, the entire conversation seemed like it was a very perfectly bad idea. She wasn't exactly going to tell him who she had living at the house, was she? She wasn't going to tell him that some big, muscular guy was sleeping in the bed across the hall.
"What about her?"
"I don't know," Caroline answered, glad that he'd taken the liberty of assuming the gender. "Shannen is, well, something else, I guess."
"Oh yeah?"
"I don't know how to put it exactly. Different."
"Different good?"
"I don't really know," Caroline answered, truthfully. It was the first honest thing that she'd said to her father the entire time, and as much as it embarrassed her to have to admit that, she didn't exactly have any other way to do it, either. "Different."
"Nice?" Something in Caroline's expression must have answered the question for him, because a moment later he decided to rephrase the question. "I mean, she's not a horrid bitch or anything, right?"
"No, I don't think that's right." Caroline made an effort to choose her words carefully. "She's just, I don't know. Complicated. Tough, hard to read. 'Taciturn.'"
He raised an eyebrow. "And how do you spell that?"
"Why," Caroline teased. "Going to write it down in your diary?"
"Maybe; you don't know." He turned to the TV. "You know, they let me change the channel to whatever I want. Somehow, now matter how badly I want to change it, I keep watching this damn soap opera that's been running since before you were born. Why's that, I wonder?"
"Good taste?"
He barked a laugh, dry and rasping and full of vinegar. "Hardly. Your mother used to watch it. I always told her it would rot her brain."
"That's exactly what it'll do. You should watch something else."
Dad's head laid back on the pillow. "I'm sorry, sweety; I'm a little tired. You mind if I just turn over and sleep a little bit?"
He looked tired, she thought, as she looked at him. Too tired. She tried to ignore that fact as she kissed him goodbye, tried to ignore it as she went home.
Taciturn was one word for Shannen. He was a thousand things, all at once, and none of them fit right together. He was quiet and distant, and at the same time he was exuberant and friendly. He was energetic and he was lethargic at the same time.
In spite of herself, she wanted to talk to him. Wanted to tell him about her trip to Dad's room. Maybe, if she talked about it, she wouldn't have to worry. He could reassure her, maybe, she hoped. There was work to be done in the morning, but she couldn't sleep. Every time she closed her eyes, even for a moment, all she could see was the positively skeletal figure of her father, his eyes drifting shut even as he tried to hold them open for her.
He was going to be alright, she reminded herself. He didn't have much else choice, no matter what he thought. He was going to be alright because she wasn't going to let him die. She still hadn't even gotten married yet, and she wasn't going to have a child never meet her gra
ndparents.
She'd never had any herself, and that was enough to tell Caroline that every child should probably have some. From both sides of the family, preferably.
Her shoulders slumped as she looked over at the clock. It read 12:32, and her body hurt from tiredness. Her eyes hurt. She had to be gone in the morning, and no doubt, so did Shannen. He was gone as often as not before she had even woken, the sound of his car door slamming shut waking her from her sleep a minute or two before her alarm did.
Today, though, he wasn't home, and he certainly wasn't beating her to bed. She frowned and looked at the clock again. 12:33, and she was up far too late. Her eyes stung with lack of sleep but she forced them to stay open as long as she could.
Which, as it turned out, was not much longer. She couldn't have said when she fell asleep, but she could say when she woke up, which was exactly when the alarm started blaring in her jeans' pocket, beeping simultaneously with low battery.
She cursed herself, plugged the phone in, and hoped that thirty minutes' charge would get her through the day somehow. She had things to worry about, but Shannen, home or not, wasn't on the menu. She couldn't afford to worry about him when she had work to get ready for, and things that needed forgetting.
His cock, of course, did make that list.
6
Caroline's eyes drifted shut as she sat in the passenger seat of the little coupe. She ought to have insisted on dinner. He would have given it to her, and she was hungry. The feeling was gnawing at her stomach, but her eyes just refused to stay open a moment longer than necessary without coffee, and she'd tried valiantly to convince herself that it was too late to drink any.
"You know what? I changed my mind," she said, her voice loose and uncontrolled. He pulled over without a word, stepped out and when the door opened and closed again, he pressed something cold and glass into her hands.
Caroline twisted the cap off and drank deeply from the sweet, cold drink. The energy didn't hit her right away, but the knowledge that it wasn't going to be long until it did finally helped her find the motivation to open her eyes the rest of the way.
"God, thank you. What do I owe you?" He made a noncommittal noise and kept his eyes on the road. "Okay, fine, then."
They drove a little ways in silence. She was the one to break it, for a second time.
"You know what, if you don't talk to me I think I'm going to go insane. That, or I'm going to fall asleep right here, and you're going to have to carry me inside."
"I'm not going to carry you inside, so you'd better get ready for the fancy coat and the padded walls."
"See, that wasn't so hard, was it?"
"What do you even want me to talk about? I've got nothing to say to you. Nothing of any interest to you at all, really."
"Anything. What is it that you, like, do exactly?"
She braced herself for an answer she wasn't going to like. The first day she'd seen those knuckles, and the blood on them. Blood was a pretty specific indicator of a job that she wasn't going to like, no matter what it was that he did specifically.
She didn't want to let him know how she felt about violence in general because she wasn't about to kick someone out for what they did to earn the money that he paid to her. If she wasn't going to kick him out, then she wasn't going to cause tension if it wasn't necessary.
The only thing that made her even ask was that she had hopes, somewhere deep down in her gut, that she had interpreted the whole situation wrong from top to bottom in the first place. Maybe he wasn't any kind of rough and tumble knee-breaker for the mob.
Maybe he had gotten it scraping his hand at a construction site, and they'd, she thought, needed him on a job site.
That didn't really seem to fit him, though it was certainly masculine enough. She sighed as he drove on in silence. She forgot about the question entirely and watched the lights passing the car by, trying to pretend that she didn't feel the least bit offended that he wouldn't tell her anything. That he wouldn't even talk to her the least bit.
He had a bad habit of being quiet when he should talk, and talking when he should know to be quiet. She wanted to just slap him in his stupid face, but that wasn't exactly an option. She needed the money, after all. But all the money in the world didn't make it alright that he was a rude son of a gun. There was basic human decency to be considered, damn it.
"I'm a fighter," he said. She'd asked so long ago that she wasn't even sure he was speaking to her when he said it, and when she decided he couldn't have been talking to anyone else, it still took her a minute to remember precisely what it was that he was supposed to be answering.
"What, like..."
"A professional fighter. I'm in town for training, and I didn't exactly have a hotel room lined up."
"Like, on television?"
"Not your television," he said, his voice darkly sarcastic. "But yeah, like on television."
"Is that good money?"
He let out a breath and pulled off the freeway. "You sure you don't want something to eat? I'm starved."
"If you're hungry, I guess I could eat." It wasn't totally honest; after all, she was so hungry that she could eat a live cat. The only thing that had stopped her feeling it so far was the tiredness, and as that faded she found herself wanting food more and more. But she also knew that there were two chicken drumsticks in the freezer with her name on them, if he decided he wasn't interested in paying for two.
"Well enough, I guess," he answered.
"What?"
"The pay."
"Oh," she said. She'd been perfectly ready to accept him changing the subject, and it was a surprise when he answered her, even if it was a little bit later than she'd expected. "I can't imagine how that must be. What do you even do during the day?"
"Mostly? I train."
"So you don't just beat people's noses in?"
"Not when I don't have to," he said. As if it were nothing at all. In her tiredness, all the serenity and peacefulness seemed to melt away a little.
"'Not when you don't have to?' I don't know about you, but I've never had to bop anyone in the face, not even in sport, and I just, well. I don't know. Fine. It's your career, not mine, and I should keep it to myself."
"It's not usually that bad," he said, as if that made it better somehow. As if he could just make the violence go away because it wasn't all that bad. Because, well, he only beat them black and blue, he didn't break their bones. That was totally different, right?
"Just drop it," she said. Then, a moment later, as if she hadn't heard her own advice, she turned and glowered at him. "You think you can just beat up anyone, don't you?"
He looked over at her with a raised eyebrow as he pulled into a parking lot. "Yeah, I pretty much do. Anyone under two hundred pounds, and most folks over it, at least."
"I bet you can, too," she said, her eyes sharp and pointed and her face drawn up into an angry snarl. "But do you ever think about what happens after you beat the hell out of some poor sap? He comes to me, and he's got to lay up in the hospital, sometimes for days or weeks, and all so that you can make your blood money and people on television can watch someone get beat halfway to death."
"I gather you're not a fight fan," he said, his voice impassive.
"If I had my way, you'd be out of a job," she said. She shouldn't have lost her temper like that. "But I'm not going to have my way, so in that case, do whatever."
"Look at it this way. You want to put up my room and board for free? I can call my manager, call off the fight, and I can be your kept man. There's plenty of other things I can do to pay you for your time, if you'd rather I do that."
The way he waggled his eyebrows was as much a serious suggestion as it was a joke, and she wasn't sure which she preferred.
"Shut up," she said, but the edge was out of her voice, and he knew it immediately.
"Trust me, I'm quite good at all that stuff. The fighting is just a hobby, my real talent, my real calling, it's girls like you."
; "Like me, huh? You have a lot of girls 'like me'?"
"None of them are quite like you, Caroline."
"Flattery will get you nowhere, Mr. O'Brien. But if you want to keep telling me how wonderful I am, I certainly won't say no."
She looked at him, at his bandaged-up hands, and her eyes ran up and down his body against her better judgment.
She'd done a lot of stupid things in the past few days. Letting Shannen stay, regardless of how much it was that he was giving her, was one of the stupidest. She still hadn't managed the stupidest thing of all, but if he kept coming at her like that, one of these days she was going to have her guard low enough, from the tiredness of working late hours and the enticement of having a man that looked like he did around.
Then she'd make the biggest mistake of all, and more of her than she wanted to admit was thinking very, very hard about how much she was looking forward to it when the dam finally broke. She'd never done anything like that before, but from the look that Deborah had on her face when Caroline had walked in, she was sure of exactly one thing, and that was that she must have been experiencing something pretty out of this world.
7
Caroline's eyes were roving across the room; waiting for someone to tell her what time she was supposed to be working wasn't exactly the most entertaining thing in the world, after all, and she wasn't exactly in a hurry to go around this morning doing everything.
There were few enough times as it was that she was able to get time off, and if she wasn't going to use them to relax then she wasn't going to get any time to relax at all. Dana was supposed to be getting her schedule, and it wasn't supposed to take this long, she figured, but 'supposed to' didn't count for a whole heck of a lot when you were actually waiting for it.
She sipped the coffee slowly this morning. It was one thing to have a cup in order to keep yourself sane; it was quite another to have time to actually savor the taste, and she was more than just enjoying it, she was actually looking forward to the cup. To the sweetness. To having a little bit of coffee with her sugar, she thought, quoting Dad in her head.
