2. Skylar
Cornwall - England
One. Two. Three. Four. I count the seconds between each breath for something to do.
Something to focus on that isn’t the chair at my back and the table in front of me.
The too-bright florescent lights, the sharp voices, and the curdling stench of stale coffee.
None of it usually bothers me. Not when I’m working, when I’m busy .
But meetings like this do my head in. It’s hard to remember that sitting around a table and talking about important shit was once my greatest ambition.
When you were twelve. When you didn’t know better.
My fingers twitch. I fight the urge to curl them into a fist and zero in on who’s talking right now.
Dr. Ramsey.
Marc .
He’s been my friend since we both landed down here at the same time. But even he’s not enough to stop the discussion around me blurring into nothing.
Protocols.
New drugs.
Where to keep the fucking pens.
All of it matters, but as I lose the battle to stay present, all I hear is the pounding of a gavel on vintage wood and the roar of motorcycles in my ears.
I smell blood and I glance at my hands again.
Seeing them stained red is a daily occurrence, but this blood, phantom and yet not, it’s old.
Rusty . And it makes my scrubs feel heavy on my skin—it makes me want to fucking puke.
No .
I’m not doing that. Not today.
I shove my mind somewhere else. To the streak on the window.
To Marc across the table as he gives the bed manager who won’t stop talking the driest look I’ve ever seen.
To the nurse beside me who smells of biscuits and antiseptic.
For a few minutes, it works. Then my mind starts to drift again, taking me back in time to how I started my day.
Different table. Different people. It’s a twisted, fucked-up thing that it all feels the same to me.
“You’ll probably never see him.” Jack sits bolt upright in his chair, his broad shoulders rigid with stress he doesn’t deserve. “If he even comes. I can’t get a straight answer from him, but that might be my fault.”
Doubt it. Jack shoulders the blame for just about everything, but he’s rarely right. “It’s fine if I do see your brother,” I remind him. “Just like I told you already it’s fine for him to live here. How can it not be? He owns this place as much as we do.”
Malachy Gallagher. Jack’s younger brother and silent partner in the shitshow downstairs we call a business. He’s a soldier. Or he was . And now he’s not, and he’s coming home, and I know way too much about him for a man I’ve never met.
“Still doesn’t feel right,” Jack frets, the anxiety in his deep green eyes out of place with his rugged exterior. “I mean, it feels right for him to be here, even if it’s the last thing he wants, but it’s your home too, and I don’t like that I’m forcing this on you.”
“You’re not forcing me. I agreed, remember?”
Maybe he doesn’t. Jack doesn’t forget as much as he thinks he does, but the last few weeks have been tough on him, dragging the past into the present, and fuck if I don’t know how that feels.
I rise, leaving untouched the tea and toast he put in front of me, and press my fist to his arm. “Never worry about me, Jack. It’s going to be okay.”
“All right, Skylar?” My name brings me back to the present. The meeting has finished, I realise, and Marc has moved to claim the space beside me, his perceptive gaze bouncing off the neutral expression that comes too naturally to me. “I thought you’d have more to say.”
“About what?”
“Everything. That meeting was bollocks.”
“They always are.”
“Bollocks for you ,” Marc expands. “That’s why the bosses looked so nervous when you came in. They were waiting for you to shut them down with that fierce efficiency.”
“I don’t do that.”
Marc swipes a weathered muffin. Peels the paper and pulls a face, tossing it back where it came from. “I respectfully disagree. It’s why I like you. And it’s why the other nurses send you to these meetings instead of their manager.”
“If you say so.”
“I do. Every damn day.” Marc grins. Then his expression sobers, all business again. “What are you on tonight?”
“Late shift. Triage.”
He’s already shaking his head.
I frown. “Why? What do you need?”
“I need you in majors. If they’re going to cut nursing levels, they need to think harder about who goes where.”
He’s right, but it’s not his call. Marc’s a doctor—a good one, the best—but he’s not God. If he wants me somewhere else for the night, he’ll have to deal with the nurse manager, and I wait for him to stride away to do just that. He’s not scared of anyone, and he doesn’t waste time.
But Marc lingers, tilting his head a little, scanning me with a thoughtful stare I’m never in the mood for. “Everything okay?”
“Better now the rain’s stopped.” The meaningless words come easy. And they hit the spot. Marc’s no fool, but he’s spread thin, distracted by trying to keep an underfunded department safe. He believes me and asks about Jack instead, about his brother Mal, because Marc was a soldier once too.
“You know him?”
“Mal Gallagher?” Marc shrugs. “Way after my time, but I’ve trained with him. Know his face and where it’s been. It’s shit what happened to his crew.”
He speaks as if I know, but it’s the one thing Jack hasn’t told me. Because it doesn’t matter how many shadows mar my friend’s brain, he’ll take his military omertà to the grave.
“Anyway.” Marc turns his head as someone calls his name. “I’m going to need you tonight, okay? So don’t let anyone fuck you about.”
He leaves me with that, and a hollow ache in my stomach that has nothing to do with anyone but me.
An empty wrench I can’t seem to rectify, not today.
Should’ve eaten. Story of my life. But I ignore it, just like I ignored Jack’s breakfast and the questionable muffins admin dumped on the stupid fucking table I’m still sitting at.
I push upright and escape to my locker, digging out the protein snacks I keep stashed at the back. White chocolate. Vanilla. I hate them. But I slowly chew an over-sweet bar, and swallow even slower until it’s gone. Until it’s down and I win the war to keep it that way.
Function .
That’s all I need today. To survive, until this time tomorrow. If Marc gets his way, it’ll be easier. But this life…it’s never fucking easy, unless I’m asleep, and that’s not happening until I sit at another cursed table, wishing I was dead.
Is that even living?
Today’s one of those days I’m not so sure it is.
Marc does get his way. It’s hard for even the most jobsworth manager to argue with a doc as experienced as him.
And I’m as glad of it as I am unnerved when the late shift descends into the kind of carnage that makes the hours fly by.
I work overtime because they need me as much as I need to be occupied, but it’s over before I can blink.
Fuck .
I’m at my locker again, contemplating my options. I’ve been gone long enough that my housemates have noticed, but I turn my phone off and shove it in my pocket, shove them in my pocket—I can’t go home right now.
Not like this.
Not yet .
But it’s the middle of the night in Cornwall, a county that keeps civilised hours outside of the few wild towns scattered up and down the coast. I live in the wildest of them all, but lucky for me, there are others with underground bars dark enough that no one knows my name, and that’s where I need to be to kill this godforsaken time.
I leave the hospital and step outside, drawing my hood up against nothing but my own fucking self.
A bad habit, maybe, but I have enough that this one doesn’t seem too important.
I don’t think about it as I find my car, slide behind the wheel, and drive away from my late shift.
I don’t think about anything, and by the time I reach the only place I can stand to be, my mind is scarily blank.
At least, it’d be scary if I knew. But like this, I don’t know anything except it’s the only port in a storm I can handle.
I ditch my car and move through the dodgy after-hours pub as if I’ve been here a hundred times, when in truth it’s only been a couple. I don’t get like this much. It’s why it’s so gnarly when I do. Why something so horribly familiar leaves me so shell-shocked.
Drink.
I want to. But despite the disassociation bearing down on me, enough awareness lingers for me to know it’s a bad idea on a stomach as empty as mine.
A shadowed corner at the end of the bar calls my name.
I claim the stool pushed against the wall and sink into it.
I get a beer I won’t drink and stare at my phone, angling it so no one nearby can see it’s dead.
And that’s me for the longest time, head spinning and yet so fucking still a breath of wind would blow me over.
There’s nothing else, until there is, and the footprint of the bar creeps into my fucked-up reality.
The scent of over-fermented cider and spilt beer. A tangle of fairy lights in a cracked jam jar. Low music I’d probably hate if I listened hard enough, and a tanned hand on the bar way too close to my untouched beer for comfort.
Unblinking, I study the hand, then a corded forearm and bicep, and finally the face of the man they belong to.
Tall.
Scruffy.
Ash-brown hair framing his unshaven jaw, and long lashes and sage green eyes that stir something in me, but I’m too foggy and spun out to know what.
Then he turns his head. He locks his gaze on mine, and like magic, I’m not spinning anymore. “Rough fucking night?”
With a voice like his slithering over my cold skin, I’d rather have a night of rough fucking. But I’m as good at deflecting strangers as I am my friends and I loosen my shoulders with a vague shrug. “Nah, just killing time.”
“Me too.”
I don’t ask why. I don’t care. And he doesn’t seem to mind that I don’t pursue the conversation. He nods, like he understands—like he knows —and goes back to nursing a beer he’s not drinking either.