After Hours (InterMix)(38)
I took her up on the offer, gladly.
Having sort of won that fight with Marco and squared away the stuff with the police, I was feeling strangely capable and strong and Zen, despite my exhaustion. Despite f*cking up and taking Marco’s bait, channeling the emotional intelligence of a four-year-old. I plopped down in an easy chair kitty-corner from Lonnie and greeted him with a big old smile.
His magnified eyes swiveled to my bruise. “It suits you.” He was deadpan, and I chose not to read it as meaning he was pleased to think I’d been punched in the face.
“I may get the other side done to match,” I told him, equally deadpan.
I kept my eyes on the TV, but I was pretty sure he smiled, in my periphery.
The hand-off meeting was low-key, as it’d been a relatively calm day on the ward. After my day-shift colleagues with minor incidents to relay had made their reports, there was a silence, several night-shifters staring at me expectantly.
“Oh,” I said, touching my brow. “No, this was recreational.” I hadn’t meant it to be funny, but a couple people laughed, and it actually cheered me some.
I didn’t feel like getting grilled while the group was signing out, so I changed first, and fast. There were only two orderlies chatting in the coffee room when I logged out, neither of them Kelly, and neither said a thing to me aside from good night.
As I pulled open the door to the lot, June had never smelled so good.
Predictably, Kelly was standing beside his truck, next to the little set of brick steps I’d take up to the lawn. He opened the passenger side as I strode in his direction.
He patted the top of the door frame. “Ready to go, Nurse Roughneck?”
“I told you no,” I said, plainly aiming myself toward the steps.
“And I’m telling you get in.”
Fuck me, the nerve.
I glared at him a long time, just taking in the physically superior, bossy, heterosexual white male aged eighteen to sixty standing before me. Like this guy didn’t already get his way, every place he paused as he moved through the world.
It was time to draw the line. And the line went straight up the crotch of my panties.
I stopped and locked my arms over my chest, Kelly-style. “I’ve had it up to my black eye with pushy men today, Robak. I’m going home to sleep. And I’m not answering my door, no matter how hard anybody knocks.”
“Tomorrow, then.”
I dropped my head back, sighing loudly into the darkening sky. “Jesus.” I looked him in the eyes. “Yeah. Fine. Whatever. Whatever will shut you up so I can go home and collapse.”
“Six thirty,” he said, slamming the passenger door. “We’ll grab dinner.”
“Yeah, sure. We’ll grab dinner. We’ll grab one drink, and nothing else will get grabbed for the rest of the night.”
“Fine.”
“Fine.” I jammed my purse over my shoulder and marched past him and up the steps to the lawn.
“See you then. Dress pretty.”
“Fuck off, Kelly.”
Chapter Six
Dress pretty, Kelly’s voice echoed.
Easier said than done, I thought, flipping through the hangers in my closet the following evening. He’d already seen the only dress I owned; the past few years hadn’t exactly left me with the spare time or money or energy for socializing.
Plus I was strongly tempted to dress as dumpy as possible, just to show him I didn’t give a shit, that I wasn’t here to be ordered around, into a nice outfit or indeed, his bed.
But f*ck it. It was Sunday, my night off. I’d survived a first week that felt like an entire month, passed a pretty lousy birthday, and been cussed out by more belligerent men than I cared to count.
“What goes with a black eye?” I mumbled, perusing my choices. I settled on my nicest jeans and a dressy charcoal top. I’d bought that top when I’d sensed this guy from one of my night classes was on the verge of asking me out, excited to go on a rare first date. He never did ask. I found my scissors and clipped the price tag from the collar.
I put on far more eye shadow than I normally would have, hoping to camouflage my damage. In the end it didn’t do much aside from make it appear that I was trying—and failing—to look seductive, which was the last assumption I needed Kelly making about me.
At six twenty-five I slipped into a pair of flats and locked up.
Kelly was punctual, already leaning against his hood in the circular drive in front of the apartments. He’d worn jeans as well, and a fatigue-green tee shirt faded nearly to sage. For once his arms weren’t crossed like a shield, but braced behind him. He looked as relaxed as I’d ever seen him. He gave me a little nod as I trotted down the steps. There was summer in the air, a warm breeze that reminded me of broken teenage curfews and a hundred once-favorite songs and forgotten crushes.