Chapter 13
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
HIM
I’d never given any of my girls my name before. Not that they could tell anyone if they wanted to. There just wasn’t much time to sit around and swap bedtime stories. Usually.
I glanced towards the window, eyeing the blizzard forming outside. There was plenty of time now, it seemed. No one was going anywhere with the roads looking like that.
I grabbed another knife from the butcher block on Jules’s counter, dragged my chair across the linoleum while kicking at the ceramic still scattered all over the floor until my leg was pressing against hers, and dropped back down in my seat.
She didn’t pull away from me as I moved her dark hair out of her face and flipped it over her shoulder.
She did sit higher though. Like someone had tugged her spine straight.
“Who hurt you, Jules?” I lowered my mouth to her ear.
“Come on, you can tell me. It’ll be our little secret.
” I watched the hair rise on the side of her neck and knew I’d struck a nerve.
It was fucked up. To use the words my ma used to whisper to me before she stopped caring if I told anyone or not.
But I was fucked up. I also wanted to know the answer and didn’t care how I went about getting it.
Nurse Keller leaned her head to one side so she could look at me, her eyes flicking up to meet mine. “My father.”
“Not very original. But I’ll take it.” I slapped a palm on the table, the other one clutching the knife I held at her back. “What he do?”
She shook her head. “I really don’t want to talk about—”
“Did I ask if you wanted to do it?” I barked before she could finish speaking. “You know all that shrink stuff. At least you should. If you wanted to talk about it, it wouldn’t be a fucking thing. But keep talking about it, and then it doesn’t bother you so much.”
That last part wasn’t as true as everyone liked to tell ya. But a white lie never hurt none. Sometimes it was less painful than the truth.
“I can’t…” She stared at me with wide eyes, the kind that little deer had before some hunter clocked his mom in that animated movie.
Disney got a few things right, I guess.
“Ya can. Ya just need a little motivator to want to.” I nodded towards the knife in my hand, and she turned in her seat to glance at it.
Then she turned back around to look at me. “Do whatever you have to do.”
“Oh, this ain’t for you, sweetheart.” I slid my arm off the top rail of her chair and lifted the blade to just under my jaw.
Pressing until I could feel the warmth trickle down my throat, the rise and fall of my Adam’s apple causing the edge to bite deeper when I spoke.
“It’s not much of a threat when ya want to die, but ain’t nurses supposed to protect and serve? Ain’t that in your oath or something?”
She jumped up, grabbed a clean rag from a cabinet, and pressed it to my neck before I had time enough to watch what she was doing. “That’s cops, you idiot,” she huffed out.
“What is?” I asked, peering up into those blue eyes of hers while she focused on whatever superficial damage I’d done—I wasn’t the one who was suicidal here.
“Protect and serve, that’s their motto. You’re thinking of the Hippocratic Oath. And nurses don’t take that either.”
She was wrong though. Most nurses cared more than doctors. Nurse Keller certainly did or she wouldn’t be so quick to patch me up.
“So, what’s it gonna be, Doc. Ya gonna spill all your dirty little secrets or do I have to jab a kidney next?” I smirked up at her, and she dropped the bloodied rag onto my lap, just barely covering the tenting fabric of the robe I was still wearing.
The fear I saw staring back at me had my cock rock-hard. It was a shame I wanted her to talk just as much as I wanted her to never say another word again.
“He never touched me,” she whispered.
“Right… and I passed the MCAT,” I grunted.
She raised a questioning eyebrow, and I reached up and pulled the plastic mask off my head.
That shit wasn’t as comfortable as they made it look in the movies.
All the sweat was making me itchy. “Ya hang around enough of ?em and you pick up a vocab word or two. Burke failed his three times.”
“Four,” Jules replied before she could stop herself, quickly covering her hands with her mouth.
“Okay, new girl.” I grinned. “Guess there’s some history there.”
She shook her head again, her glare taking in my chiseled jawline and dark eyes.
The tattoos that twisted up behind my ears and the hair I didn’t bother to maintain when they were gonna shave it all off anyway.
She hadn’t noticed before with the way I’d flipped up the collar of my lab coat and kept my shoulders hiked.
The hat I pulled low on my head before walking out of Briarwood that night.
But I was pretty. Pretty dangerous too. But that just made me prettier, didn’t it?
“No history. Us nurses just talk. Always have more to lose than our physicians do. They never mentioned you, though?” She was trying to be subtle. I didn’t like subtle. Or maybe I liked it too much, and that was the problem.
“Why would they unless they were sending you downstairs…” I watched her face, waiting for my meaning to land. It seemed to breeze past her instead.
“Downstairs?”
“The basement.”
“There’s no—” she started to say, and I cut her off with another slap of my palm on the table.
“What the fuck did your old man do to you, Jules.” I pushed up from the chair, walked over to the sink, turned on the garbage disposal, and dangled a finger over the drain. “Last chance…”
Was I really willing to sacrifice a finger just to make a goddamn point? You bet your sweet ass I was. I didn’t need all ten of ?em to strangle her.