After Hours (InterMix)(33)

With Kelly talking, I had a fine excuse to stare at his bruise and cut. He’d got that wrestling the next best thing to a knife out of Don’s hand. It suddenly looked so . . . obscene.

“How real was it?” another orderly asked.

“He was serious,” Kelly said. “He was already bleeding when I showed up—he wasn’t sitting there with the thing at his wrist, waiting for someone to walk in on his big production. He was real pissed to see me.”

My angst toward Kelly faded. He’d come to me after finding his favorite resident in the midst of a suicide attempt, after he’d gotten his temple slashed with the weapon of choice, probably already slick from another man’s blood.

It sucked, feeling used. But it couldn’t have sucked half as bad as whatever Kelly had been feeling when he came to me, needing sexual medicating. I just had to make it clear I wasn’t here to be anybody’s soothing distraction. No man’s jab of temporary calm, infatuation or not.

“So Don’s going to be spending his day with the docs,” Jenny said, with a nod toward Dr. Morris. “We’ll have a couple guys on him, in shifts, but Kel, I want you to sit this one out.”

If you blinked, you’d have missed Kelly’s response. A fly’s wingbeat of overt annoyance, a narrowing of his eyes and hardening of his brow, then it was gone. “Sure.”

“Best we don’t chance letting him see that little souvenir he gave you. Once he’s lucid he’ll be primed to look for reasons to beat himself up over this.”

“You got it.”

The meeting wrapped and it was time for morning meds, residents arriving to queue beyond the large square painted on the floor before the nurses’ station window, the patients’ so-called “zone of privacy.” My heart thumped hard when it was Lonnie’s turn to approach. He’d avoided me my second day, dodged me like I’d been the business end of a skunk. “Not the apologetic type,” Jenny had told me. But today he looked right in my eyes with his magnified ones, and I looked right back, and smiled pleasantly, finding his pill cup and sliding it over. “Good morning, Lonnie.”

“Yeah, morning.” He filled a paper cone from the water cooler.

“Do you have any questions about your medication?”

Nothing.

Jenny asked, “How we feeling today, Lonnie?”

He swallowed his pills and slid the crumpled, empty cone through the slot before shuffling off.

“Not talkative, that’s for sure,” I said.

“He won’t be, with you, not after what happened on Monday. Not for a while. Consider it his version of a sorry.”

Deep in my scrubs’ hip pocket, I felt my phone vibrate. I told myself to ignore it, wisely wary about letting myself get distracted while meds were being distributed and logged. But between careful notes and morning greetings, a thought slipped through.

What if it’s Kelly? A text or something.

Saying what? “Thanks for the *?” He doesn’t even have your number.

He could have gotten it from someplace. Same as he found out my birthday and my room number.

You shouldn’t give a shit, so you better at least act like you don’t. Let him wait.

It was I who ended up waiting, though, nibbling my psychic fingernails to the quick for an hour before I got a chance to check my phone. And it wasn’t Kelly; it was Amber.

Marco coming today, the text said. Don’t think it’s going to be good. Are you working?

Ah, f*ck. Translated by someone who’s known Amber her entire life, that text said, Marco’s coming and I’m f*cking terrified. Come fix this.

I texted back a quick, When? and waited for the longest ninety seconds ever for her reply. Noon, I think. On his lunch break.

Well, he had a job—that was a new development. But the fact that Amber was freaked-out now, before he’d even arrived, wasn’t good. If she wasn’t really worried, she’d welcome the drama, be more than happy for him to show up so she could make a big scene. This was bad.

I had to go.

No. Not in the middle of work. I needed boundaries.

But Amber needed me, and family came first. I was the only one she had. If I didn’t come running, nobody would.

“Jenny?” I asked as we reorganized the meds.

“Yup.”

“Is there any chance I could take my lunch break off campus?” Our lunches weren’t technically off-the-clock. We took them in shifts during the patients’ lunch period, and at least a couple of nurses needed to hang near the dining area, for emergencies.