Chapter 3
BANDIT
"Your doctor's here."
Carmen says it before my bag's off my shoulder, the way you'd announce a delivery.
"He's not my doctor." I drop the bag behind the intake desk.
"He asked where you were." She licks her thumb, flips the sign-in sheet. "Twice. Also he took the last of the good coffee, so that's your situation to manage now."
"He is not…" Nadia's at my elbow with the grin, and arguing with both of them at once is how you lose a whole shift. "I don't have a doctor."
"Mm." Carmen doesn't look up. "You should tell him that. He's under the impression."
I let it go as we set up together, Nadia and me, while Carmen runs intake. The waiting room's already half full.
"So." Nadia snaps a glove box closed. "He's incredibly sexy, right? It's not just me being forty and starved."
"You're thirty-one."
"Confirm or deny, Bennett."
I should deny. I'm a coward about most things and a disaster about this one. "He's attractive. Objectively. Like, in a clinical, observational …"
Nadia laughs so hard she has to sit down.
"I have a thing, okay." It comes out before I can stop it, and once it's out the rest follows, because that's how I'm built. "For mature guys. Always have. And the gray at his temples…" I close my eyes. "It should be illegal. There should be a law."
"Oh my God!" Nadia's grinning like a mad woman.
"I notice it every single time I look at him, which won't be a problem, because I'm not going to look at him." I open my eyes. Carmen has abandoned intake and crossed the room to hear this properly. "Don't."
"I didn't say anything," Carmen says.
"You're going to."
"I'm going to tell him you wrote a bill."
"I will end you," I tell her, "and your whole bloodline," and both of them are gone, wheezing, and I've made it so much worse.
* * *
The thing is, it isn't the silver in his hair. Well, not only.
A boy comes in around nine with a fishhook through the meat of his thumb and his whole face screwed up to keep from crying in front of strangers.
Six, maybe. Bones gets down on the floor with him.
He doesn't loom when he asks the kid which superhero has the worst grip strength and argues with him about it, dead serious, until the hook's out and bandaged and the boy's still mid-sentence defending his answer.
A man comes off the bus disoriented, and his daughter's voice goes thin and high with panic. Bones doesn't match it. He drops half an octave, slows everything, treats the man while the daughter shakes apart next to him, and the calmer he stays the more she borrows from it.
He's funny in a dry, throwaway way that catches the whole room off guard. He's never once hurried. His hands are steady on people who flinch from everyone else.
I keep finding him across the room. That's the only honest way to put it.
I'm doing my job and then I'm not, I'm just there with my hands full of nothing, parked on the gray and the size of him and the way he listens like the person in front of him is the only thing interesting in the entire Seattle area.
Doomed. There's no other word.
I am doomed.
By lunch time the waiting room's empty and the volunteers have peeled off one by one until it's quiet. Carmen left last. She winked. I'm pretending that didn't happen.
I'm hauling the five-gallon jug off the cooler stand to swap it, both arms wrapped around it, when his voice comes from behind me.
"Put that down before you throw your back out, Bandit."
"I've got it."
"The only thing you're gonna get is a hernia."
He takes it out of my arms. Not a grab. He just sets his hands over mine and lifts the weight away like it weighs nothing, and his thumb drags the back of my hand on the way, and the jug goes up onto the stand in one motion.
He doesn't step back after. I don't either.
"You keep staring at me." Low. Not a question.
A better liar would have an out ready. I've got nothing, and he's close, and the clinic's empty around us.
"I know."
That lands. One corner of his mouth moves.
"Why."
"Because you're …" The word's sitting right there and there's no graceful version. "You're stupidly attractive and it's distracting and frankly rude of you to be, in a free clinic, where I'm trying to work."
"Uh-huh." He waits. He seems to be good at waiting. It's unfair how good he is at it.
"The silver," I blurt.
A line shows up between his brows. "The what."
"At your temples. The gray." I go hot to the ears, the way I always do right before I say too much. "I told the others. There's a whole thing now. It should be illegal and I notice it every time I look at you, which is apparently always, so. There. That's the why."
He laughs. Quiet, surprised out of him, and it changes his whole face, and that's worse than the gray, that's so much worse.
Then he stops laughing and his hand comes up. Two fingers under my jaw, tilting my chin. Slow enough to give me a hundred chances to step back.
I don't take one.
He kisses me.
It's nothing like I had braced for. He doesn't crash into it. He settles into my mouth like he's got all afternoon and nowhere he'd rather be, certain and warm, and the patience is the thing that undoes me, a man who already knows how this ends and is in no rush to get there.
My legs have carried me through doubles and night buses and never once quit.
They quit now. The only solid thing left is the front of his shirt, so I take a fistful and hold on.
He makes a low sound when I do, like it costs him something.
His hand slides off my jaw into my hair and tilts me where he wants me, and the kiss goes deeper by degrees until a sound comes out of me I have never made in my life.
He swallows it. His other hand finds the small of my back and brings me in until there's nothing between us but the heat of him through two thin shirts. Slow. Sure. He kisses me like he means to keep me.
Every nursing class I've taken taught me what a body does under strain: the heart rate, the breath, the blood leaving the hands and feet. None of it has a word for this. Everything I thought I knew about kissing splits into before and after, and this is the after, and there's no getting back.
When he eases away he does it the same unhurried way, finishing the kiss on his terms, one last soft press like a signature.
I'm done. Standing, technically. Wrecked.
His thumb moves once along my jaw. He's breathing harder than a man who just lifted a water jug should be, and there's a flush along his cheekbones he can't fully hide, even though he hides everything better than I do.
"Bandit," he says, rough at the edges.
"Stop calling me that."
"Nope." Not a flicker of intention to.
I make myself pick up my bag. I make myself walk to the door on legs that have filed a formal complaint.
At the threshold I look back, and he hasn't moved, hasn't looked away that flush still on his cheekbones and that mouth still wet from mine, and I have to physically turn around and make myself leave.
The bus is late. I sit on the bench and try to distract myself by thinking about Darling and the question I still haven't answered about a woman who maybe wasn't confused at all and I'm unable to locate.
But it doesn't work.
There's only one thing in the whole screaming city my thoughts return to.
It's a very sexy man with gray at his temples and steady hands.
I cannot make myself stop thinking about him.
And that's the thing that's going to get me into real trouble. Not Brightmoor. Not Darling. Him.