Nash (Marked Men #4)(36)

I managed to get through the holiday shift with no incidents, and aside from Sunny asking me what was wrong every five minutes, it was preferable to listening to my mom scream and moan about her life and the way the holidays were playing out for the Fords this year. I was dodging Dr. Bennet left and right because even though I promised to go out with him and I didn’t want to disappoint Sunny, my instincts were screaming at me to cancel my date with him. I was too unnerved, too off-kilter after what had happened with Nash, to think I could get through the date unscathed.

When it was time to go home I looked at my phone and winced when I saw I had a missed call from Nash. He didn’t leave a voice mail, but there was also a text that simply said:

Merry Xmas Saint.

I owed him an explanation. I knew it, but I just didn’t think I could do it. I had a difficult time expressing myself clearly when the subject wasn’t embarrassing and undignified. How was I supposed to tell him that not only was he the first guy I had ever been with that made me feel that good, he made me want to actually have sex? How was I supposed to explain that I didn’t want him to be the guy that made sex fun, made me want it, because of the awful things he said a lifetime ago and the way they made me feel? How did I go about explaining that I didn’t want to like him, didn’t want to feel anything for him after the abysmal way his flagrant disregard for me in high school had left me feeling for a lifetime? Would he even understand that because of the younger him, because of those painful moments tied directly to his actions, I normally hated the idea of being naked around another person, loathed being exposed and vulnerable, so sex for me was always confusing and awful?

I couldn’t explain it to him when I couldn’t even get it to make sense to myself. When had all my dislike for him morphed into something that had me jumping him the first chance I got? And did that mean I was ready to forgive him for the sins of the past? I didn’t have answers to those questions and thinking about them made my head hurt.

I didn’t text him back that day, or the next, when he asked if I was okay, or the next, when he asked if we could talk. I straight up ignored him. Phil had decided that if he was well enough to attend Rule and Shaw’s wedding, he was well enough to try his luck moving his care home, so I didn’t have to worry about running into Nash at the hospital anymore. That thought made me want to cheer and howl in frustration at the same time. But by the weekend he wasn’t texting me anymore, and I resigned myself to the fact that whatever symphony of self-destruction I had created had played its last note. Since I was the composer, I had nowhere else to lay the blame.

Time flew and all of a sudden it was the beginning of the following week and my date with the good doctor had arrived. I wanted to go even less now than I had when he first asked me. I would have backed out, made some kind of excuse and played dead if only Sunny hadn’t been hounding me about it every chance she got. I’d also made the mistake of telling Faith about it, more for her support than anything else, but she was tickled pink about the prospect of me dating anyone, so she was nudging as well. I was stuck and all I could do was power through it.

I had a similar argument with the doctor that I had with Nash about wanting to take my own car, only instead of being Nash and using gentle persuasion and unflappable logic to get me to ride with him, he looked at me disapprovingly and pointed out how odd it would appear to his friends if we showed up not together. It wasn’t an argument I wanted to rehash with someone so concerned about appearances, so I reluctantly agreed, and he told me he would pick me up at my apartment. I told him we should just leave from the hospital since the party was in Cherry Creek and it was closer, but again he gave me a look like I was silly and didn’t know how dates worked.

So there I was at nine P.M. on New Year’s Eve, it had been exactly seven days since my disastrous date with Nash, and instead of trying to make polite conversation, or figuring out how to make the most of my time with Dr. Bennet—Andrew—I found myself in the passenger seat of his very nice SUV pondering what Nash was up to. After all, it was New Year’s and that meant kissing at midnight.

I sighed heavily and started when Andrew stopped the steady stream of conversation he was having with himself about himself. No doubt about it: the doctor was his own biggest fan.

“Everything all right?”

I forced a smile and fiddled with the ends of my hair, which I had left down and put into giant, loose curls.

“Sure. It’s just been busy at work and with the holidays. I’m a little beat.” And I’m obsessing over a guy I shouldn’t be, but I didn’t think he wanted to know that part of it.

“Did you always want to be a nurse?”

“Yep. I like nursing, like the rush of the ER, but mostly I wanted to help people.”

“Ahh, you’re one of those.”

I lifted an eyebrow and looked at him out of the corner of my eye. We had stopped in front of an opulent town house in one of the wealthiest suburbs of the city. My stomach dipped. I could already tell this was going to be dreadful. We had been doing just fine when he didn’t need me to join in on the chatter.

“One of what exactly?”

“Those people who went to nursing or medical school based on ideals and fuzzy feelings of giving back.”

What? People went into these fields for reasons other than compassion and concern for the well-being of others? Since when? I was dumbfounded, so I had to ask, “Why did you go?”