After Hours (InterMix)(34)

She thought a moment. “That should be fine. I don’t think anyone else requested leave. Check the board, though.”

“Great. Thanks.” I bit my tongue, temped to overexplain. Like she needed to hear about my family issues, on top of the crises she was paid to give a shit about.

The morning passed way too slowly. Kelly was on the ward, and if he felt adrift without Don there to keep an eye on, he didn’t let you know it. I glanced at him every now and then, but I felt hardly anything—only the faintest glimmer of lust, a shadow of regret. Worries about Amber’s bad choices eclipsed my own.

So I’d f*cked up and screwed around with my hyper-macho coworker. The boyfriend who’d once shaken Amber so hard she’d had to wear a neck brace for a week was coming over, and not for the latest of a thousand drunken, weepy apologies, from the look of her text.

The second the lunchtime meds were prepped and Jenny gave me the go-ahead, I was bolting down the halls and across campus to the apartment complex. It was twenty-five minutes’ drive to Amber’s, which meant if I sped, I had just enough time to grab her and Jack and pile them in my car and bring them back here, if things looked really bad.

My tires squeaked as I peeled out of my space, taking the speed bump at the exit so fast I bit my lip open. I tasted blood all the way to Amber’s and saw red when I pulled up and spotted Marco’s stupid, shiny, ’roided-out pickup parked next to her sun-bleached Cavalier. Three months he was behind on Jack’s child support, but his rims looked new. Probably never missed a truck payment. The f*cking priorities.

Parking next to him, I slammed my door so hard I almost lost my footing on Amber’s gravel drive. I heard the argument before I caught sight of either of them, and whipped the screen door open, sending it bouncing off the siding with a rattle.

“Erin?” Amber called.

“Yeah.” I found them in the kitchen, standing rigidly on either side of the counter, Jack hugged to Amber’s hip, huge blue eyes full of confusion. I wanted to take him in my arms and shut those perfect little lids on all this.

Amber’s eyes were just as huge. Skinny legs in a too-short jean skirt, dirty-blond hair a wet tangle, flip-flops on her feet. Still my baby sister, in so many ways. She looked pissed, but not hurt or scared. Marco looked like the douche he was, nearly tall and nearly muscular, nearly shaved head. Like you’d left Kelly out in the sun for a week to soften and grow tan.

“Hey, Erin,” Marco said, gaze on my sister.

“What are you doing here?”

He did that thing I hate, sucking a snorting, snotty breath through his nose, a glimmer of the fat old townie he’d one day become. “Had some business to discuss with Amber. And to see my son.”

Don’t say it, I beamed to Amber. But I could see on her face, even my little instigator wasn’t calling Marco’s paternity into question, not today. Good girl.

“He thinks I’m seeing some guy he knows,” Amber said. “Some guy I’ve never even met, just because his stupid drunk friend thought he saw us together at some bar.”

“He wasn’t drunk. And it was you. I know that pink sweatshirt he said you was wearing.”

“He’s met me twice. How’s he supposed to f*cking pick me out of a f*cking lineup?”

I shot Amber a look. Don’t you f*cking dare turn my nephew into one of those little shits who drops F-bombs before the training wheels have even come off his bike. He was her son, though, not mine. Her little barnacle, stuck following her into murky waters, same as we were Mom’s.

“You should go,” I told Marco. “Even if she was seeing someone, it’s none of your business. Your business is to pay child support and be a good role model for your son.” In my head, the studio audience roared with laughter.

“Don’t act like you get to boss me around, just ’cause you’re wearing those scrubs. You’re not a doctor and everyone f*cking knows it.”

“Don’t act like you get to push my sister around, just because you’re bigger than her.”

“Er’n,” Jack interjected, reaching out a chubby arm and breaking my already banged-up heart.

“Hi, baby.”

“I ain’t touched her,” Marco said.

Not today, maybe.

“If you said what you needed to, just go, Marco.”

He took a couple backward steps toward the door, shouting past me. “I better not hear nothin’ about you and him.”