Bedside Manners (The Breakup Doctor Series Book 2)

by Phoebe Fox

  And that was the last thing I heard before what felt like a ham hock clubbed into the side of my head, my vision went dark, and a slab of granite slammed into my body.

  twenty-six

  When I woke up, I was lying on the concrete floor of my lanai, though something cushioned my head—a pillow from my patio sofa, I saw as I sat up.

  Which was a dire mistake, as my brain throbbed like a beating heart inside my head, sending agony shooting out through my eyeballs.

  Jesus. What happened?

  I heard voices and looked through the open sliding glass door into my house to see Sasha and Stu—the latter with dark blood crusted along his left temple—talking to two uniformed police officers.

  Oh. Right.

  Chip was nowhere to be seen, but for all I knew he was cuffed and lying facedown on the ground just out of my view.

  I hauled myself to my feet, unable to stifle a groan as the ice pick in my head stabbed at me again. My left arm stung, and I saw that I’d badly skinned it, along with my left knee and thigh.

  I hobbled into the den like a war refugee.

  “Hey, there,” I said, as though arriving late to a soiree.

  Four faces turned to me.

  “You’re conscious! We’re not supposed to move you—the ambulance is on its way. Sit,” Sasha said, pushing me toward a chair.

  “What! No, no ambulance—I’m fine. Are you okay, Stu?” I asked, reaching toward his bloody head.

  He ducked. “I’m fine.” Of course he was fine; we were always fine—we were Ogdens.

  “Where’s Chip?” I asked, looking around the kitchen and den.

  “The alleged perpetrator had already left the scene when we arrived, ma’am,” one of the officers said. His stiff white-blond crew cut seemed to nearly brush my eight-foot ceiling, and his carved jaw was so sharp I wondered if he broke razor blades against it. “I suggest you seek medical attention, ma’am—you’re going to want documentation of the contusions.”

  I craned my neck to look up at him. This guy took his job dead seriously.

  The other cop—swarthy and glowering—brandished a clipboard toward me. “We’re going to need you to sign this report.”

  I glanced at it. “No, I don’t want to file a complaint.”

  “You have to,” Sasha said.

  I shook my head—another terrible mistake, as my tender brain crashed into my skull. “Things just got out of hand. Thank you, Officers,” I said to Starsky and Hutch.

  “Brook, he hit you,” Sasha argued. “He hit Stu. He’s dangerous—and a repeat offender.”

  The blond giant flexed his eyebrows in what looked to be a scowl. “We’ve been called on a domestic violence assault, ma’am. Charges will be filed by the county whether you fill out a report or not.”

  Their words joggled something free in my brain. He doesn’t mean it, Sheila had said of her emotionally abusive boyfriend, Tom. She’d justified his behavior eight ways from Sunday. Just like I had with Chip.

  Shame rose up to choke me.

  Sheila, whom I’d felt so sorry for because she couldn’t see past what she desperately wanted with her boyfriend to the way he manipulated her through her deepest vulnerabilities. Sheila, whom I’d pityingly categorized as a mouse, a victim who wouldn’t see what was right in front of her face, who justified Tom’s awful behavior toward her because she thought she could change him.

  How was I any different?

  Chip Santana had been playing me for weeks—maybe months. Blinded by my attraction to him, I’d convinced myself that he meant well. That he’d had some tough breaks. I’d justified what I already knew firsthand—his explosive temper, his volatility, his always simmering rage—and even what I knew of his past behavior with other women, and convinced myself that he had changed. That I could help him change. That I could “fix” him.

  All the same justifications Sheila gave for Tom.

  I was supposed to be the expert—and I’d been conned. I’d let myself be conned.

  Tom attacked Sheila emotionally. Chip had turned it physical with Katie, with me, and who knew who else. And if I let this go right now, he might go on to do it again—maybe even worse.

  “You’re right,” I croaked at Sasha through a constricted throat, then turned to the shorter cop with the clipboard. “Hand me the form.”

  Except for the momentary excitement of an ambulance wheeling into my driveway, sirens blaring and lights spinning until we convinced them we weren’t in need of emergency transport after all, after the police left things went just about back to normal.

  Such as it was.

  “What will happen to him?” I’d asked the cops as I filled out the complaint form.

  The tall Aryan-ideal officer dropped his ice-blue eyes in the vicinity of my face without tipping his head a fraction of an inch. “He’ll face assault charges and will likely serve up to a year in jail.”

  “He’ll go to jail?” I repeated in dismay.

  Guilt prickled my chest. I didn’t think Chip was a monster—just a loaded cannon that needed to be defused. I couldn’t think landing in jail was going to help bring out the gentler side I still hoped was buried somewhere underneath his uncontrolled impulses. More likely it would do just the opposite, and the therapist in me railed against sending him somewhere that would almost certainly remove any hope he had of doing better.

  The little swarthy fireplug shrugged. “Depends. He could get a reduced sentence, if anyone’s willing to plead for lenience for him. But given most cases like this, I don’t recommend it.” The expression accompanying his mild words suggested the subtext that I might be an idiot.

  I didn’t know the right thing to do—was my judgment about Chip still clouded, or was there some part of his better nature that was salvageable? As a woman—as a friend—I wanted to believe the latter.

  But I knew that as a therapist, I had to walk my talk. I signed the complaint. Later, when I wasn’t reeling from what had happened and a possible concussion, I’d examine whether it was wise to plead for leniency.

  Nurse Sasha assisted as Stu and I cleaned ourselves up—his fall against the glass door had split the skin just above his temple, which bled rather out of proportion to the seriousness of the wound, we learned to our relief when we wiped away the dried blood. Sasha spread Bacitracin over it (I had a vat of it, thanks to my ongoing tattoo removal) and put a butterfly Band-Aid over the cut. His ankle where he’d twisted it had swelled up like a tick, so we wrapped it in an ACE bandage. Chip hadn’t broken the skin with his roundhouse punch to the back of my head, so once I got the dirt out of my skinned forearm and leg, a little ointment was all I needed.

  “I’m not leaving either of you alone, though, after a head injury,” Sasha said.

  Stu and I both knew when there was no backing her down, so we ordered pizza and parked in my living room once it arrived to eat in front of a Friends rerun—“The One Where Ross and Rachel Take a Break.”

  “Friends literally covered every relationship situation there is,” I said, staring numbly at the episode I’d seen a dozen times—where Ross sleeps with the copy store girl too quickly and ruins everything with Rachel—and thinking, inexorably, of Ben.

  “Oh, really?” Sasha asked, sitting on the floor and picking the olives off her slice, popping them into her mouth one by one. “There’s no ‘One Where the Guy You’ve Been Counseling and Then Slept with Attacks You and Your Brother.’”

  “Cool,” Stu put in. “There should have been.” We’d planted him on my sofa, with pillows elevating his twisted ankle and an ice pack for the swelling.

  “Why’d he hit me?” I asked around a mouthful of pepperoni pie.

  “I don’t think he meant to. He was trying to reach me,” Sasha said.

  “Nah.” Stu barely looked up from his plate. “I
was watching. He just kind of lost it. You ever hear of berserkers?”

  “What, you mean like crazy people?” I asked.

  “No, they were soldiers or something, right?” Sasha said.

  He nodded, still staring intently at his pizza. “Norse warriors. They were supposed to fall into this trance state, a fury that they couldn’t control, like some kind of animal spirit took them over. That’s what it looked like. He just went crazy and started hitting at anything.”

  “Jesus,” Sasha breathed.

  Stu muttered something we couldn’t hear.

  “What?” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “I shoulda done something.”

  “You did,” Sasha said. “You charged him. It was pretty badass.”

  “Yeah, and then I went down like a chump.” Stu still wouldn’t meet our eyes.

  “Bro,” I said incredulously. “You lunged at a tattooed berserker twice as big as you. And he fought dirty. Who punches a guy who’s off balance from a sprained ankle? In the freaking ribs?”

  Stu rubbed at his torso. “Dude can hit.”

  “Yeah, well, it seems like he’s had plenty of practice,” Sasha said darkly, reaching up to stroke Stu’s good leg. “I thought you were tough as hell,” she told him. “When you’re feeling better remember what you did. I might want to do a little role-playing.”

  I was too bone-tired to even react.

  “Look, this wasn’t your fault, Stuvie,” I said. “If you weren’t here it could’ve been a lot worse.” I put down my half-eaten slice, my appetite abruptly gone. “This was all on me. I screwed everything up.”

  “Brookie, come on,” Sasha cajoled. “Don’t take the blame for what that asshat did.”

  I shook my head. “No. I lit the match. I’m the one who agreed to meet with him again, even knowing I shouldn’t. I encouraged him when I knew better. I responded when I should have ignored him. I opened a box I should have left closed. And then I...” Shame flooded up again. “I freaking slept with Chip Santana. After all your warnings why I should stay far away from him.”

  Stu shifted uncomfortably. It was probably getting a little feely up in here for him. Or maybe he just didn’t want to hear about his sibling’s sex life. God knows, I could relate to that.

  “Honey,” Sasha said, “you were in a rotten place. You were upset. Hurt. We all do things when we’re vulnerable that we’d never do in our right minds.”

  She had that right. But I was a therapist. And I’d gone down a road like this before—hadn’t I learned from it? Wasn’t I supposed to be getting better at this?

  “How did you know?” I asked Sasha. “How did you know about Chip when I didn’t, from the beginning, when you first met him at Faryn and Jan’s party?”

  “Oh, please,” Sasha said. “I’ve dated Chip.”

  “What?” I yelped, and Stu’s gaze shot to her, eyebrows at his bandaged hairline.

  She waved a hand. “Not Chip, per se, but many Chip-like individuals. That type of guy used to be like a beacon to my uterus.”

  Stu and I exchanged an awkward glance as Sasha went on.

  “Believe me, Brookie, I totally get the appeal of that guy—the bad boy, the one you want to reform, the one who sends those primal signals right to the center of your—”

  “Yeah, I get it,” I cut her off quickly.

  “But you don’t have to beat yourself up over that. You think you’re the first woman to think with the little head?”

  “Sash, girls don’t have a—”

  “Semantics, Stu. Don’t interrupt. The point is this, honey,” she continued to me. “You were overdue for one of those guys. Every woman has to have at least one. Or at least a dozen, in my case—sorry, babe,” she tossed toward Stu.

  “No worries—been there myself,” he said, unconcerned. “There are female versions of those guys too. And I nailed a ton of them.”

  “Yeah, you did!” Sasha said, and they high-fived.

  I would never understand their relationship.

  “But how else do we learn what we want unless we get all up in it with what we don’t want?” Sasha went on. “You think I’d be as happy as I am with your brother right now if there hadn’t been so many train wrecks before him?” Beside her I saw Stu nod, his face lit up. “No, I’d still be that same poor mess of a girl trying to find gold in a quarry. Be grateful for the Chip Santanas. Sometimes they’re the only way to the Stu Ogdens.”

  My brother cupped the back of her head and pulled her in for a brief, sweet kiss.

  “Or the Ben Garretts,” I said sadly, watching them.

  Sasha reached for my hand and gave it a quick squeeze. “Or the Ben Garretts. But if you ask me, I don’t think that train’s out of the station yet.”

  “Oh, honey, thanks,” I said wearily. I pulled out of her grasp and set my plate with its half-finished slice on the cocktail table. I wasn’t hungry anymore. “But trust me—that train’s halfway to Cleveland at this point.”

  My brother and Sasha—my dearest friends—stayed all day long with me, all of us lounging around the living room, watching crap TV, telling stupid stories to make one another laugh, and doing absolutely nothing.

  They did not ask for any details about what had happened with Ben, or Chip, or why I’d done what I’d done, for which I loved them completely.

  When five o’clock rolled around Sasha suggested I get dressed and we’d all drive over to Mom and Dad’s together.

  “You two go on. I’m not going to go.”

  Their eyes bugged out like cartoon characters.

  “What?” Sasha said. “Your mom is going to kill you!” You did not miss Sunday dinner in my family unless there was an act of God or you were dead.

  “Tell her I’m sick, you guys,” I pleaded. “I’m just not up to it.”

  They didn’t want to leave me alone, they said (though I suspected they were more afraid of showing up without me and having to answer to Mom), but, Gandhi-like, I passively refused to be moved, and ultimately they had little choice.

  I didn’t even bother getting up to walk them out, just waved them out the door and lounged back on the sofa, tuning in to a Sex and the City marathon. Because wherever Friends left off in relationships, SaTC picked up, and it helped to see Carrie, Miranda, Samantha, and Charlotte making mistakes every bit as stupid as my own.

  Except, of course, that theirs were fictional.

  I can’t say I was entirely surprised to hear a car pull into my driveway a little after eight thirty—I’d expected Stu and Sasha to come back and check on me, just not so early.

  My phone buzzed in my hand just as the doorbell rang, and I pulled up a text from Sasha: CODE RED: The eagle swoops in your direction.

  What the...?

  “Brook Lyn, it’s your mother.”

  My head shot up at her voice outside my door.

  Dammit. Stu and Sasha must have oversold my imaginary illness. My mother had never, since I’d been living on my own, “dropped by.” For her to be here she must think I was dying.

  Maybe if I stayed quiet she’d assume I was asleep. Or at the hospital.

  The doorbell rang again. “Brook Lyn, answer the door. I know you’re home.”

  Sighing, I rose and shuffled over to let her in.

  “Hey, Ma,” I said, hoping I sounded sick enough to avoid a litany of my transgressions.

  She frowned when she saw me, then scanned her eyes down my body. “You like them,” she said, sounding surprised.

  I glanced down to the pajamas I’d never changed out of this morning—the ones she’d given me last Christmas. “Oh. Yeah. They’re comfortable.” I’d never worn them before today, but they actually were. “Look, Ma...I’m sorry I missed dinner.”

  I knew an apology was like showing my t
hroat to a tiger, but for her to come all the way over, she must be piping mad.

  But my mother didn’t pounce. Instead she examined my face carefully for a moment, then reached into her oversize purse and pulled out a Tupperware container. “I thought you might be hungry.”

  I stared at it until my mom held the container out toward me and said, “If you’ll let me in I’ll heat it up for you. I don’t want you drying it out in the microwave.”

  “Oh...sorry. Yes. Come in.” I moved back to make room, and Mom took a step inside—I had a fleeting image of a vampire that had to wait for an invitation to cross the threshold before swooping in to attack—but she simply waited for me to lead the way to the kitchen.

  In the awkward silence that often ensued when Mom and I were alone together—and the two of us alone here at my house was a first—she twisted on the front burner and reached below the counter for a pan she placed on it. Then she opened the container and poured its contents—some kind of meat stew—into the saucepan.

  “Lamb tagine,” she said as she opened a drawer for a wooden spoon. “Turns to rubber if you microwave it.”

  “Sounds good.” I manufactured a few coughs.

  Her back was to me as she stirred. “I know you aren’t sick, Brook Lyn.”

  The denial was on my tongue, but I held it in. I was too tired to lie, and frankly I didn’t feel like insulting her with it. “I’m sorry, Mom,” I said again instead. It grew easier.

  “I saw your brother’s bandage. And his limp. Sasha told me.”

  Out of my mother’s sightline I rolled my eyes. Sasha the snitch—apparently she’d keep any secret I told her, unless it involved brownnosing up to my mom.

  But I knew how much she craved my mother’s approval and love. How could I begrudge her that?

  “What did she tell you?” I asked.

  My mom’s shoulders lifted and fell. “Probably just the highlights. You broke up with that boy you liked so much. There was another boy. It was bad.”

  I sighed, glad she was facing away from me as tears pricked my eyes. “Yeah. It was pretty bad.”