Chapter 8
BONES
Isink the last screw into the new strike plate and lean on the drill until the head bites flush. The door swings, catches, holds. Latches on the first pull, which I'd bet money is the first time it's done that in the building's life.
"That'll hold now." I thumb the bolt. Solid. "Long screws into the stud. Whoever hung it before used drywall anchors."
The super tests it twice, takes credit with a grunt, and goes back inside. That leaves me and Bandit on the step with a door that locks and no reason left to pretend I drove across the city about a door.
Neither of us reaches for one.
"Upstairs," I say. Not a question.
She climbs ahead of me and I take the stairs slow, like a man with all night ahead of him. I have all night. I'm not spending any of it on the wrong side of her door.
Inside, I move a stack of textbooks off the one chair so she can drop her bag, and a flash card flutters loose off the top. I catch it. Her handwriting. Furosemide. On the back, in the same cramped hand, a clean little list: what it does, what to watch for, what to ask before you push it.
It's a good card. Better than half the residents I've worked next to could write.
She's built her whole life out of cards like this one.
Three years of it, alone, and somewhere in there she still found the hours to walk other people's medicine across town so nobody had to reuse a needle.
From what I see around me, the only thing she splurges on is the coffee, and I want to buy her a year of it.
Not pity. This isn't it. This is the thing that gets a man into trouble.
"You eaten?" I already know the answer.
"I had a …"
"That's a no."
"It's a granola bar's worth of no."
I pull my phone. "I'm ordering. Indian. There's a place by the gate that does a butter chicken I'd ride through weather for."
She goes quiet in a way that isn't her.
"What."
"I've never had Indian food."
I look up from the phone. "Say that again."
"I've never had it." She crosses her arms, daring me.
I shake my head, ordering anyway. "Sweetheart, you've been robbed."
"Bandit," she corrects me, and there it is, the grin trying to get out from under the scowl.
It comes in twenty minutes, more containers than her counter can hold, and I park us on the floor with our backs against the bed because there's nowhere else two people fit.
She approaches the butter chicken like it might bite first. One careful forkful. Stops. Goes still.
"Oh," she says, with feeling.
"Yeah."
"No, that's…" She takes another, bigger. "That's not fair. Up to now, my favorite was cereal."
"Tragedy."
"You've ruined cereal." She points the fork at me, mouth full, dead serious. "I want that on record. You ruined cereal for me in one bite."
I tear naan in half and put the bigger piece on her side. "Eat the rice too. You're running on a granola bar and a building's worth of stairs."
"Yes, Doctor."
"Don't." But I'm smiling and she sees it.
She digs in like someone who forgot she was hungry until food showed up. I watch her eat and don't bother hiding it. Halfway through I reach over and slide the card out of my back pocket, the one that floated off the chair.
"Furosemide," I read off it.
She rolls her eyes so hard her whole head goes with it.
"Loop diuretic. Dumps fluid. Watch the potassium, watch the pressure when they stand up, don't push it fast in somebody's ear unless you want to make them deaf.
" She licks sauce off her thumb. "Ask before you give it whether they can get to a bathroom, because nobody warns you about that one and it's the part that actually matters at two a.m."
I sit with that a second.
"You're going to be a hell of a nurse."
The compliment lands. She ducks her head over the container.
The containers empty out. She leans her shoulder into mine and leaves it there, and I let the quiet sit because it's a good quiet, the kind I don't get enough of.
Then she tips her face up, and I'm done pretending I'm here about food either.
I kiss her slow. No counter in the way this time, no exam at eight, nothing in her she'll second-guess on a bus. Just her mouth under mine and the small sound she makes when I take my time with it.
I get a hand into her hair and ease her back against the side of the bed, careful, the way you'd handle the one thing you can't replace.
My mouth finds the line of her jaw, the soft place under her ear, the pulse going quick at her throat.
She arches into me and her fingers curl in the front of my shirt, and every blood cell I've got is voting hard for staying.
"Bones." Breathy. My name and a question both.
"I've got you." Against her skin. "Right here."
Her breath catches when I drag my thumb along her collarbone. Her spine goes liquid when I get a hand flat against the small of her back and pull her in. She's all want and no armor, and I could have all of her tonight. The wanting was never the question. The when is.
The when is now.
I don't say it. I stop holding the line I've held since the clinic, that's all, and she catches the shift in me the way she catches everything.
"Bones?"
"Bed." I'm already standing, already lifting her with me.
She comes up off the floor wound around me, and I lay her down and come after her.
I get her out of the scrubs slow. The top first, my mouth chasing the skin as it bares. The drawstring bottoms next, and I keep my eyes on her face the whole way down, give her every second to tell me no.
She doesn't. She lifts her hips to help me, and that — her, choosing this — burns through me like a downed wire.
"Look at you." I mean it as worship and it comes out a vow. "You've been carrying everything alone so long you forgot somebody could just take care of you. Not tonight. Tonight you don't lift a finger."
"Bones." Half a plea.
"I know." I drag my mouth up the inside of her knee, her thigh, in no kind of hurry. "Let me."
I kiss my way down her until she's arching off the bed and my name comes apart in her throat. Her hands fist in my hair and hold on. I take her there slow, greedy for every sound, drunk on the way she finally stops being careful until she's shaking and past words.
"Let go," I tell her. "I've got you."
She breaks with both hands locked in my hair and my name in her mouth, and I stay with her through all of it.
Then I climb up the bed and gather her in, pull the blanket over us, tuck her into the curve of my body where she fits like she was cut for it. Her heart's still slamming against my chest. I lay my hand flat over it and wait for it to settle.
"Hey." I tip her chin up. "You with me?"
"Mostly." She laughs, wrecked. "You didn't …"
"Tonight was yours." I kiss her hair. "We're not keeping score, Bandit. We've got all the time in the world to get to mine."
She burrows in closer, her breath going slow and even against my throat. This is no op. I'm just a man holding his girl in a room the size of a closet, and there's nowhere on this earth I'd rather be.
"I have to tell you something," she says into my chest. "And you're going to be disappointed."
"Doubt it."
"I tried to find out where they send the transfers. Today. I asked Kessler straight out." Her fingers move over my chest. "And I blew it. I didn't get the name of the place. I had it right in front of me and I left without it."
"Tell me how it went. All of it."
So she does. How she dressed it up as a student angling for psych hours, shadowing, even unpaid.
Kessler was easy and decent right up until she asked where the hard cases go.
Then he wasn't. He wanted to know who in his building was talking transfers in the hall.
Then he caught himself, told her to get her finals out of the way first, steered her at the county program instead.
"He was nice the whole way through," she says. "And I still walked out cold." She exhales. "I'm sorry. I couldn't get the name."
I lie there and run it back, every line she gave me, the way I'd run a chart hunting the number that doesn't fit.
And there it is.
A clean facility doesn't flinch when a good kid on staff asks to shadow. Kessler flinched. Wanted to know who was talking. A man only counts the mouths in his building when he's scared of what they'll say.
She didn't come back with the name of the place. She came back with a doctor running scared, and possibly low on the totem pole.
"Bandit." I press my mouth to the top of her hair. "You didn't blow anything."
She goes still against me, then settles, the apology draining out of her shoulders.
I keep her there, and over the top of her head I'm already lining up the words. Angel's going to want to hear this, exactly the way she told it.