Chapter 9
BANDIT
There is a man the size of a doorway making coffee in my kitchen, and he is doing it wrong, and I have never been happier in my life.
"You only own one mug," Bones says, like he's reporting a wound.
"I only need one mug."
"You need two now." He hands me the one mug and drinks his straight from the pot, standing, because there is no room for a second chair. He fills the whole galley like furniture somebody delivered to the wrong address.
I sit on the counter and watch him not do the thing. The morning-after thing, where two people pretend the night was an accident they're both too polite to mention.
He kissed me awake. I made a sound about the hour and he told me to go back to sleep, and then he made coffee instead of leaving, and that's the whole conversation we needed to have about whether this is a thing or not. It's a thing.
"I'm gonna be late," I say, and don't move.
"You're gonna be late," he agrees, and doesn't make me.
When I finally peel myself off the counter and into my scrubs, he's gone quiet. He digs in the pocket of his cut, and what he comes out with is so small it disappears in his hand.
"Here." He opens his fingers.
It's a pin. A little enamel lightning bolt, gold, no bigger than my thumbnail. Cheap-looking, the kind of thing you'd find on a corkboard at a craft fair.
"Angel gave me this when we started," he says. "First week. Told me if I got close to you, I was to put it on you and make sure you kept it on." He turns it over once. "In case something ever went sideways."
I take it and hold it up to the light and laugh.
"Oh my God. He's serious?"
"Deadly."
"Bones." I'm grinning. "This is a craft-store lightning bolt."
"I'm aware."
"Your VP gave you a friendship pin and told you to clip it on the girl. For her safety." I press my hand to my chest. "Does he know it's not 2003? Does he know spies aren't real?"
"He watches a lot of movies," Bones says. "He's the most paranoid man I've ever served with. He once made me change a meeting because a florist looked at him funny."
I'm not sure if he's defending it or just stating the facts.
"It's so cloak-and-dagger." I'm turning it in my fingers, delighted. "It's a secret-decoder-ring level of cloak-and-dagger. There should be a trench coat."
"There usually is."
"I'm not wearing a panic button shaped like a Lisa Frank sticker to work, Bones."
He doesn't argue. That's the thing about him, he doesn't argue, doesn't sell it, doesn't tell me I'm being naive or that I don't understand what I've walked into. He just looks at me with the lightning bolt between us, and he says four words.
"Wear it for me."
And it's not funny anymore. The joke drains out of the room and leaves just him, asking me for something with his whole body braced like the answer matters more than he wants it to.
I stop laughing.
"Okay," I say.
I have a lanyard already crowded with junk, my Brightmoor badge, a tiny rubber duck a kid gave me, a smiley-face button, a four-leaf-clover charm I've had since high school and never once felt lucky wearing.
I clip the lightning bolt in among them, and it vanishes.
Just one more piece of cheerful nothing on a student's lanyard.
You'd have to know it was there to find it.
Bones looks at it sitting against my chest, and his shoulders come down half an inch.
"There," he says.
?
He stops the bike one bus stop before Brightmoor.
We didn't discuss it. We don't have to. A girl in a volunteer's scrubs who arrives at a wellness institute for very rich people on the back of a Harley with THUNDER BASTARDS across the rider's spine is a girl who gets questions she can't answer.
So he drops me where the bus would've, and Brightmoor stays none the wiser. That's the version of careful I can do.
I climb off. I take off the helmet and hand it back and don't let go of it right away, so for a second we're both holding it.
"Eat something," he says. "Go to your shift. Come back to me after."
"That's three commands in a row."
"Get used to it!"
He hooks two fingers in my lanyard, thumb landing on the lightning bolt without looking like he's checking it's still there. Then he tugs me in by it and kisses me, unhurried, in the gray morning, and I forget about the shift and the whole rich rotten building down the block.
When he lets me go, I'm slow to leave. So is he.
"Text me when you're done," he says.
"I will."
I walk the last block listening to him not pull away until I've turned the corner, and I have to wipe the grin off my face before the glass doors throw it back at me.
?
I don't even make it to the locker room.
"Bennett." Dr. Kessler is at the front desk with a coffee and his coat already on, like a man on his way out, not in. "There you are. I was hoping I'd catch you."
"Dr. Kessler." I get my badge up to the reader. "Morning."
"I looked into your request." He smiles, easy. "The transfer facility. I spoke to their clinical director, a lovely woman, and they're happy to have a nursing student observe. Supervised, of course. They don't open the doors for just anyone."
My pulse does something hopeful and stupid.
"Really?"
"As it happens." He lifts his coffee like it's all very ordinary. "I'm driving out there this morning. Quarterly review, dull as it sounds. You're welcome to ride along and see the place. Save you the bus." He checks his watch. “I’ve squared it with the floor. You're with me."
And here's the thing. Refusing would be the strange move.
He's the medical director, he's offering me exactly what I asked for.
A student really interested in psych would say yes before he finished the sentence.
I think I should message Bones but Kessler's already walking, already holding the door, and the thought goes under the wheels of how badly I want to see where they sent her.
Darling. I could find Darling today.
* * *
His car is the kind with seats that exhale when you sit in them and a console that lights up like a cockpit. It smells like cold air and sanitizer. We pull onto the highway going north, away from the city, and he talks.
He's good at small talk. Pleasant. He asks about my finals. I tell him and he nods in the right places. Then he asks what I want to do after graduation, and I say I'm considering psych.
"Would you stay local to be close to your family?"
"I'm not sure," I say. "And it's just me."
"Mm." He signals, changes lanes. "You live alone, then? Out by the university?"
"Other side. It's cheaper."
"Roommates?"
"Just me," I say again, and the second just me lands heavier than the first, and I can't make myself look at why.
It's nothing. It's a man making conversation on a long drive. He's nosy by trade. His thing is the human mind after all.
"And this new interest of yours to visit the other facility," he says, glancing over, friendly. "Have you mentioned it to anyone? It's good to have a mentor in your corner when you're applying."
"No," I hear myself say. "Just you, really."
"Good." He smiles at the road. "I'd hate for it to get back to the wrong people that I'm playing favorites."
Every question is the question a kind man would ask. His eyes drift once across my lanyard at a light, over the duck and the clover and the smiley face, and move on, and nothing happens.
We turn off the highway, then off the county road, then through a gate that opens before we reach it.
The facility is beautiful.
That's the part I'm not ready for. I'd built something gray in my head, chain-link and bars, and what's in front of me is clean and expensive, glass and cedar tucked into the trees, a fountain, a sign in tasteful brushed steel: Solstice Cove Beacon.
There are flowers. There is a man in scrubs walking a patient through a garden, unhurried.
It looks like the most legitimate place in the world.
Kessler parks. Comes around. Opens my door before I've found the handle.
"After you, Bennett," he says.
I get out and stand in the good clean air and look up at all that glass, and I wonder: Am I going to find her in there?