Chapter 14
Fourteen
You think you can hurt my feelings, but I’m an overthinker. I hurt my own feelings.
—Apollo to Dru
APOLLO
She’d gone into work, and I didn’t know what to say about that.
I’d asked her to stay at home with me, and she’d said she would, only to go back on her word.
“She said that she needed the money.” Silver shrugged.
Webber threw his arm around her shoulders and pulled her into his side before saying, “Aella said that she was always working. It can’t be healthy to be throwing down seventy-two hours a week.”
No.
No, it couldn’t.
“Oh, before I forget.” Silver pulled out the paperwork. “This is all. And here’s your credit card that you gave to me so casual like as I was running out the door and you arrived. I didn’t give it to Dru, though, since she wasn’t coming back to you.”
Well, that was a really good hit to the chest, even if she didn’t mean to make the hit in the first place.
“Also,” she was hesitant now. “I don’t know if you know this or not, but Dru’s hella allergic to dogs.”
My heart sank. “What?”
“Yeah,” Silver looked at the two dogs that’d been shedding dog hair all over my house for the last few hours. “Really allergic. Throat swells up, can hardly breathe, sometimes needs breathing treatments kind of allergic.”
“Fuck.”
I closed my eyes as the news hit me.
I couldn’t keep them.
Not with her being allergic.
We may be very new, but I knew where this was going.
My heart was already well down the path, even if my head was taking a little bit of time to catch up.
“They can come to my place,” Webber suggested.
“Oh,” Silver’s eyes looked giddy. “Is it bad that I want to say ‘finally’ really loud? Or is that too insensitive?”
I laughed then.
Silver had been trying to silently sneak the two dogs into her car every time they visited Knight and Elaine since they’d arrived back home from deployment.
It was a joke to see how far she could get them without either of them noticing.
I placed my hand on Kenny’s head. “I think they’d like that.”
I loved the dogs and all, but I wouldn’t choose them over Dru.
“You really don’t mind?” I asked Webber.
He shook his head. “Not at all. They’re both awesome dogs. Trained really well. Good around the kids. Plus, they’re getting a bit old now and don’t chew on shoes.”
“I’m sorry that my dog chewed on your shoe. But in his defense, you’d cleaned a deer earlier in the day and had blood all over your shoes. What did you expect him to do? Turn down that kind of delicacy?”
Half an hour later, I was vacuuming like a madman while simultaneously placing a one-hour delivery order for a massive air purifier.
Only after it arrived and I had the whole thing set up and running in the house did I go find her at work.
I found her on the surgical wing, barking orders at a few nurses at the nurses’ station, looking like a queen residing over her kingdom.
All her colleagues looked a little flustered, though.
New.
I wondered if any of them had been working long. They all looked like they’d stepped out of diapers only yesterday.
When they turned, the badges on their shirts declaring them “students” was visible, confirming my thoughts.
“…why would you not take a BP on a patient with no lymph nodes?”
There were a few answers, but none of them were sufficient to her, so she explained loudly why that was a no-no.
I loved hearing her be so authoritative.
I loved even more that she seemed to sense me and stopped talking before turning to survey me.
Her mouth fell open when she saw me leaning there, and then she turned back to the students and told them to go.
They left, scurrying like rats to get out of the queen’s notice.
She walked up to me woodenly and said, “What are you doing here?”
“Wondering why you chose to come to work when you promised me you’d stay,” I replied gently.
She winced. “I’m allergic to dogs, Finnian. I’m sorry, but I can’t go to your house anymore. And plus…” She looked around the room where not a single person resided. “I needed to work.”
Dammit.
I’d have to find a way to get her the information she needed to let her know that her loan was paid off without letting her know I was the one to take care of it. Once she knew she didn’t have to work so hard, maybe she’d give herself the rest she so desperately needed.
I held out the coffee for her, this one different from the ones she ordered in the mornings, and she took it.
She brought it up to her nose and sniffed, and gasped.
“How did you know?”
“Triple shot of espresso with vanilla flavoring and drowning in cinnamon?” I asked. “Trade secrets.”
She shook her head and took a sip, closing her eyes when bliss filled her. “This is perfect. Thank you.”
I reached into my back pocket and retrieved the two cookies—gingersnap—and handed them to her.
Her eyes went wide, her mouth falling open in awe.
“Now, I know that you didn’t ask Aella for this one. She doesn’t ever work night shift with me, so she wouldn’t know. How did you figure this out?” she asked.
I grinned, deciding to go with the truth. “I hacked into your Starbucks account to see what you order the most.”
She rolled her eyes. “You could’ve just told me you didn’t want to tell me.”
I raised a brow at her. “Do you know what I do for a living?”
She frowned. “You’re a state representative.” She paused. “Or were. I saw it spark national outrage that you quit just an hour ago. I’m sorry.”
“I’m not,” I admitted. “I’m actually quite happy about it. I think for a long time, that was my escape. But it stopped being an escape a while ago, and I was just too fucking hurt to admit to myself I didn’t want to come home and see everyone here so fucking happy when I wasn’t.”
Her eyes widened.
“That plane crash gave me plenty of time to think about everything. And in the end, it was an easy decision to step down. I can’t stand Washington, DC, and politics. I want to be here, doing what I really love to do.”
“What is it that you really love to do?” she wondered.
“Other than you?” I teased.
“Other than me.”
“I’m a hacker.”
She blinked. “You’re what?”
“A hacker,” I repeated myself.
“Like, the type of hacker that goes to jail for breaking into the CIA’s stuff?” she asked.
“Like that, but I wouldn’t get caught,” I answered. “Those that get caught are either too stupid to be doing that in the first place, or they want to be caught. I don’t want to be caught.”
She took a sip of her coffee and froze, bringing it down to stare at for a few long seconds before she looked back up at me and said, “You weren’t lying about hacking into my Starbucks account, were you?”
I shook my head.
She took another sip of her coffee before shaking her head and saying, “I guess as long as you’re doing it for good and not bad, I’ll be okay with it.”
She didn’t need to know that sometimes I did it for bad.
I’d tell her later, once I really got her used to the idea.
In the meantime…
“What time do you get off?”
She jerked her head toward the nurses’ station when an alarm sounded. “Hold on.”
She walked to a speaker system and punched a button. “Hi, what can I help you with?”
The woman on the other end of the line said, “I need to go to the bathroom.”
“I’ll be right in,” Dru promised.
“Where is everyone?” I asked.
She set her cup down next to her area—and I knew it was her area due to all the food piled up around it ready for her to eat. The woman had a sweet tooth from hell, I’d noticed.
Most of her Starbucks orders consisted of a coffee and multiple cookies. Or cake pops. Or whatever seasonal shit was available that had sugar in it.
I also noticed that when the fall confections came out, she went overboard and always ordered two or three.
I’d tried to get a pumpkin spice cookie, but they’d been all sold out. I’d had to go to a local bakery that was thankfully open past midnight to get her the gingerbread ones.
She hadn’t noticed the type yet, but I knew they were her favorite.
Hopefully I’d put a smile on her face later when I wasn’t around.
“Staff meeting. We’re working on a skeleton crew unless they’re needed. They’re just in the breakroom, though, so they’re not far,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”
She left, and I moved to her spot and sat down, my gaze going to the computer in front of my face.
And, because I couldn’t stop myself, I started clicking away at her computer.
I was playing on it for a solid ten minutes before Dru came back and pulled up a seat next to me.
She didn’t say anything, but she did watch my every move.
“What’s all that?” she asked, pointing at the screen.
“Code,” I murmured.
“What are you doing to my computer?” she wondered.
“Making it run faster. Taking off all the monitoring. And putting Solitaire back on it,” I murmured.
“I hate that they take it off company computers. It’s as if they think that employees will just get on the computer and play Solitaire all day instead of working.
That was a staple on all computers. I think it’s bullshit that they take it off. ”
She snickered.
“I haven’t played Solitaire in a long time,” she admitted.
“Well,” I backed out of the program. “You have it back. Plus, now it runs faster, and you don’t have to worry about what you’re browsing on. I took it off of the hospital’s servers.”
“Huh,” she said. “Why?”
“Because I also think it’s bullshit when employers watch your every move.” I stood up. “Come to my place when you get off?”
“The dogs…”
“Are with Webber and Silver,” I interjected before she could ask much more. “They’re great dogs. Silver was always trying to steal them from Knight and Elaine.”
I rubbed at my chest when the pain shot through my heart at the mention of my friends’ names.
It would never get easier, either.
I knew because Tavi’s name being mentioned still had the power to make my knees weak, and it’d been a while since he’d been gone.
“What? No! You can’t get rid of their dogs!” she cried out, leaning forward in her seat and placing her hand on my thigh. “They’re already lost, Finnian. They don’t need that added to their grief!”
I caught her hand and folded it in between both of mine. “Baby, listen to me.”
She stubbornly kept talking, trying to convince me of something that I wouldn’t give on.
“They don’t know their entire lives has changed…”
“They’re good dogs,” I spoke over her. “But Silver loves them. I like them. Do you think that they’d be better off with someone that likes them, or loves them?”
She refused to answer.
I winked at her and pulled her closer by her chair. “I already cleaned my house from top to bottom and ordered an air purifier. There’s no hint of them even being in my house now.” I leaned closer. “Now, will you come to my place once you’re done here?”
“Do I have a choice?” she asked.
I pressed my lips to hers, giving her a brief kiss before standing. “Actually, no. You don’t have a choice. See you when you get off work.” I paused. “I will install an app on your phone that’ll let you into the gate and the house. If I’m still in bed, just crawl into it with me.”
She frowned. “How will you…”
I raised a brow at her.
“Never mind.” Her lips twitched. “Hacker. I remember.”
I winked at her and left, smiling for the first time in hours.
Too bad the feeling didn’t stay.