by Faye, Amy
She grabbed two new bottles. "So anyways, you were saying?"
He took the beer from her and used his shirt to cover his hand as he twisted off the cap. She did the same, the sharp metal points digging into her hand as she did so.
"You spent a long time asking me why I was at the club."
"Why were you?"
"I told you last night," he said. A smile spread across his face. Slowly, very slowly, but impossible to miss at the same time.
"And I just told you I don't remember."
"I had some business."
"Legal business?"
He shrugged. "Legal is a pretty flexible limitation."
"You'd be surprised how much police officers disagree with you on that one."
"You'd be surprised yourself. They're a lot more flexible than you might think at first glance."
"Not in my experience."
"Then you've met the wrong police officers."
"You're getting off-topic," she countered.
"I needed some extra money."
"So, what, you were… doing a drug deal or something?"
He smiled widely, took a drink from his bottle, and set it down on the floor. "Hardly. I was setting up a fight."
"You're really not in any condition to fight."
"And yet," he said, his voice low, "I'm not going to let it stop me."
He pressed up from the couch, took another drink, and started towards the door. There were a thousand reasons he couldn't be allowed to leave, but the one that mattered the most was the one that she wasn't remotely ready to admit to.
23
Caroline looked down at Shannen and frowned again. He was asleep for now, which she hoped meant she could go to sleep herself. Something told her, though, that the minute she let herself crawl into bed, regardless how much work she had in the morning, she was going to regret it.
That was going to be a very serious issue, because she could hardly afford to go without sleep with a 12-hour shift waiting for her in the morning, but at the same time, she wasn't a nurse so she could log hours. She had spent the better part of the last decade learning to help people heal, and Shannen was just going to wait for her to leave and go out, no matter what she had to say about it.
She shook her head and headed towards the back. She'd hear if he turned that fucking car on, she knew, and furthermore, there was nothing she was going to be able to do to stop him short of tying him down and making sure he never got the chance to leave.
There were other problems with that, though, problems that she didn't remotely want to have to deal with. Like questions of what sort of ideas he would get in his head, and once they were in his head, what might happen to him if he managed to maintain an erection for longer than four hours.
Her eyes closed and the throbbing in her head managed to subside nearly long enough to start getting a decent amount of sleep. She hoped so, anyways, because she wasn't going to be able to fit a nap in the next day.
She woke the same way that she usually woke. To the sound of Shannen, up and about. The routine was so simple and so ordinary that it took her a minute to even realize that there was something wrong with it.
"What are you doing moving around," she finally called out as she pulled a shirt on. She took a moment to stop in front of the mirror and examine herself, making sure that she didn't look quite so much like she wasn't wearing a bra as she was afraid she did.
The sounds outside her room stopped suddenly, and when she finally resigned herself to her nipples poking through the fabric of her shirt, she stepped out to see Shannen standing there looking as if he'd just been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. He had a bowl out and stood with a single cracked egg in his hand, hovering over it.
"Morning," he said, watching her. His eyes were wide and held a strange glint. The lights hurt her eyes but not as much as they had the day before, so it was progress.
"You should be laying down. If you needed to get to bed, then I would have helped you."
"I got tired of laying down. I was hungry."
"Then come wake me." She left off the part where she didn't mind how he did it. She especially left off whatever those suggestions might have been.
"You need your sleep," he answered, the first correct and almost sensible thing he'd said the whole conversation.
"Well, I'm awake now." Her alarm started going off behind her, and she scrambled to turn it off. When she padded back out of the bedroom, the eggs were pouring into a pan, and making a noisy sizzling sound. Caroline noticed something else, as she came closer and the last cobwebs of sleep started to sweep themselves out of her mind.
Bacon, she thought. The oven was turned up and it didn't take a rocket scientist to put two and two together. "You better be making enough for me, if you're cooking," she said, in a voice that she hoped didn't sound bitchy.
"Of course, my lord," he answered mildly, the expression on his face a mockery of seriousness. "I wouldn't dream of anything else."
"Good," she growled. She had her phone plugged in a minute later and coffee brewing a moment after that, and started toward the bathroom. "I'm going to get a shower. You'd better not be getting ready for work, is that clear?"
"I know," he answered mildly. It was a surprise, and not a pleasant one. Shannen was never mild, as a rule. In the past month, he'd never once been anything but contrary, sarcastic, and occasionally openly flirtatious. Pleasant, though? Not on her life.
She tried to push that feeling of nervousness out of her gut. There were other things that needed worrying about. Important things. If she was going to worry then it ought to be about one of those things, not about where her tenant had suddenly learned manners overnight.
The shower felt good on her skin. Almost scalding, hot enough to burn off any of the contaminants of her daily life. There was something almost holy about the feeling of being clean. There was even a verse in the bible about it.
She shut off the water and pulled on a towel, stepped across the hall and into her room as quickly as she could and dressed in a rush. There was always a hurry, but today there was a special hurry on account of having to make sure that Shannen didn't suddenly get a very bad idea.
The sound of the car driving off as she pulled her bra on told her everything she needed to know. Not only hadn't he taken her advice, he probably hadn't given her anything to eat, either. Two strikes. Her lips pressed together to form a tight line.
Whatever, she said to herself. He wasn't really her responsibility. If he thought he was going to be fine then it was his body, not hers. And all she could do without a badge and a gun was to give him advice. After all, he'd avoided the hospital for a reason, and no doubt being able to tell her to fuck off was one of them, as much as it pissed her off.
She let out a breath and forced herself to continue dressing, pretending as best she could that she wasn't pissed and that it wasn't a big deal anyways. That was how she had to think of it because there was nothing else she could do.
She was, however, pleasantly surprised by at least one thing. There was a plate on the table, the food on top of it still steaming. A big plate of scrambled eggs and three strips of bacon. Her coffee sat there, the steam starting to fade from that, just like she wanted. Even the little jar of sugar sat beside it with a tiny teaspoon laid over top.
He was a son of a bitch, but at least he could do one thing. There was an index card folded in front of it, and she picked it up as she sat down, and unfolded it as she reached for the salt.
It was short enough to read at a glance:
"Sorry – Eat up
"You need your strength"
She frowned at it and then started doing exactly what she had been told. She was going to need her strength, he was right.
Wherever he was going, whatever he was going to do, if it didn't kill him, she was going to, and that was going to take all the muscle that she could muster.
He was a surprisingly good cook, too. The coffee was good, the eggs were good, the ba
con was good. There was only one thing that wasn't good, and it was the man who'd made them, who seemed to have no sense of self-preservation whatsoever and at every turn delighted in making sure that she would suffer for worrying about him.
She forced herself to think about something else. The hospital had been slowing down, it seemed. Well, that wasn't totally right, she knew. There was plenty more to it.
The number of people going in hadn't gone down. If anything, there were more of them now, as the winter drew closer and closer to the holiday season.
The hospital wasn't slowing down at all. It was her speeding up, and she wasn't sure how she was supposed to feel about that. Proud?
Why on earth would she feel proud? She'd been slowing everyone down since she got there, and now she was just starting to approach the point where she wasn't slow any more?
That was nothing to celebrate. After all, all it meant was that she was starting to approach the speeds everyone else was at. And for that matter, she couldn't even talk one unruly 'patient' into staying in bed for one solitary day.
But something in her stomach lit up like a fire as she sat and ate and watched the clock on the far wall. She shouldn't have been proud of herself because there was nothing to be proud of, but she couldn't help it.
She was starting to get better at all this, and if she wasn't careful, she might actually be good at it.
24
Somehow, she didn't feel the least bit slapped down by work. It should have been hard, because the day was as long as it always was and she was as tired by it as she had always been.
But the fact was, regardless of what she was supposed to be feeling about it, she simply wasn't feeling the least bit bad. She was right. She was managing.
The text that came as she approached the end of her shift, though, did what twelve hours of dealing with violently ill patients couldn't. It reminded her of how far she had to go.
Shannen didn't seem to find anything wrong with texting her, and she supposed he shouldn't have. Whatever they had together, she didn't have any reason that they should spend so much time together, but they did. He always gave her rides home, and it was an easy part of her life. He also always bought dinner, and she wasn't opposed to that.
So it was perfectly ordinary that he should text her near the end of her shift to tell her that he was headed over to the hospital. It was perfectly ordinary when Sarah, her supervisor, told her to go home and have a good night, too, only a few minutes later.
What had he done, though? He shouldn't have been moving at all, never mind training. What could he have been doing with his day if not his job, though? And if he was fighting, or training, or whatever it was that he did day-to-day, then he was going to get hurt.
That much, at least, made perfect sense. It was obvious. But she couldn't stand it. How could he be so fucking stupid?
She frowned and her eyebrows rubbed themselves together until it worked her up into a headache that she knew wasn't about to go away, and when she finally did make it down to the lobby, she was ready to pick a fight with anything and anyone that crossed her path.
She hoped to hell that it was going to be Shannen because he was the only one who deserved it. There was no luck in the world, though, and Caroline knew better than that. Someone stopped her on the way out.
A woman who had maybe four inches on Caroline and looked like she probably could have bench pressed the small nurse with one hand. It's best to choose your battles, and not to go too nuts. Sometimes, though, there's no real choice available to you, and the fight picks you. This was, she hoped, one of those times, because regardless of whether or not the woman deserved it she was going to get it.
Caroline tried to tell herself that the woman should have seen the expression on her face, like she was going to light the whole building on fire if someone tried to stop her on the way out.
"What do you want?"
The big woman, her hair dark and her eyes darker, seemed to suddenly realize her mistake. "I, uh. Where's the lavatory?"
Caroline sucked in a breath and counted to ten. At the end of it, she knew she should have calmed down, and further, knew that it was all futile anyways. "There's a sign right there," she said, pointing straight up. "If you follow the signs, they will tell you to go another twenty feet or so up that way, take the second right, and they'll be on your right. There will be a sign at the turn and there will be another sign on the wall when you get there."
The woman's face strained and Caroline's heart broke, but she shouldered past, the fury that burned in her heart only slightly dampened by the conversation.
Shannen stood out of his car like he always did, looking cocky like he always did. She snarled in his general direction as she walked up.
"How was work," he asked as he slid into the driver's seat and the car growled to life.
"Oh, it was fine. You?"
He looked over at her, apparently sensing her anger in the way that a rabbit senses a dog chasing it, and yet, if it affected him, he didn't show.
"I'm fine."
"Oh, good. You're fine. You're lucky you didn't get your stupid nose broken in, and your ribs broken."
"It's still early," he said mildly. "I could make an effort, if you would like."
She practically shrieked. "No, I wouldn't."
"Then cool down," he answered. "I'm fine. Like I said."
"You could have at least tried to make an effort to look like you didn't want to get yourself killed," Caroline murmured. "There's a reason that most people don't go fighting with a stab wound, you know."
"What's that?"
"Because you get hit in a stab wound and it opens up pretty much right away. Because in your case, it's tied up in a bunch of stabilizing muscles and you seriously risk rupturing the sutures just by moving vigorously." She snorted. "Fucking obviously."
"I can see you've put a lot of thought into this," he offered. "But I promise, I'm totally fine."
"Oh, you're fine. That's great. Maybe that doesn't make me feel better, did you think of that?"
He let out a long breath before he answered. "I'm not going to talk about it, though," he said finally. "And that's pretty much how it's going to be."
"What do you even need all this money for?"
He looked over at her. "I don't ask you why you work so much, why you need a roommate so bad you're willing to have some guy lying around."
"I need it because I have expenses. I need the money! And for that matter, I need to put in the hours to be able to get jobs in the future. This is just how it is, when you're new to nursing. Most fighters don't fight constantly, and they usually avoid stabbings."
"Well, you've got your reasons," he answered. "And I've got mine. That's all I'm saying."
"Yeah? What are your reasons that are so good?"
The car's engine lulled for a minute and then growled louder still as he stepped on the gas. The car rabbited forwards, accelerating faster. She looked over and his hands were white on the wheel.
"I told you," he said finally. His voice strained to maintain whatever control that he had, even as he sounded nearly like he was under good control. "I don't want to talk about it."
She let him drop it, in spite of herself. She saw the weaknesses in him. She knew that it would have been easy to dig in, twist the knife, and she might actually come away with him understanding one tenth the frustration of having put in all that work to try to keep him from bleeding to death on her couch, only to go out and get into a god damned fist fight the next day.
Instead she laid her head back and closed her eyes. "Where are you taking me for dinner?"
He looked over, let out a long breath, and flexed his fingers, trying to ease the tension out of them. She knew that it wasn't likely to work, but it was nice to see him making the effort, at least.
"I was thinking a sandwich."
"Yeah?"
"Is that going to be a problem?"
"No," she said. The fire in her belly unlit itself entirely,
and the only thing it left behind was a bone-deep tiredness that she knew wasn't going to go away with just a long night's sleep. "I'm game for whatever."
"Good enough for me," he answered. They pulled into a parking spot and he eased the car to a stop, pulled the hand brake and killed the engine. "After you."
She pulled her legs out of the low car and climbed out, standing and shaking her hair out again. It felt good down, but there was no way that she could keep it that way during work, and there was no way she was going to cut it short so that she could leave it down, either. She'd spent too long, too many years and too many hours, trying to get it to this point and she wasn't going to give it up now.
"You look good," he said. She realized suddenly that Shannen was watching her, leaning as he was against the car.
"Thanks," she answered, unsure how to take it. It wasn't the first compliment he'd paid her, and it wasn't the first time he'd suggested he was attracted to her.
But it was the first time that he'd complimented her like that, she thought. The first time that he'd just said it, simply and directly and without a hint of anything else on his mind. And for the first time in a while, she didn't know what she was supposed to say about it.
He didn't wait for her to decide what reaction was appropriate before he continued. "You know what? I want to hit a movie. You're coming, too. It'll be like a date," he said, winked, and started toward the door.
Her chest thumped in her ears, and for the first time Caroline was truly speechless.
25
Caroline sat in her chair and wondered how she was supposed to act. There were a thousand examples that she could point to, from movies and television shows. Ideals of how a woman was "supposed" to act when she was on a date.
She didn't know if any of them really fit the relationship she'd build with Shannen, if she could call it that. Then again, he made no effort to encourage her to act any closer to her than he ever had before. She liked that.
So, instead, she settled into the seat that was a little bit too close to be next to a man his size, or very nearly anyone of any size. She ate another handful of popcorn, and paid exactly as much attention to the movie as the loud pair of women beside them would allow her to.
