18. Skylar #2
His words are heavy, slurred almost, as though he doesn’t mean to say them, even inside his own head. And I know how that feels, because the next words that tumble from my own mouth are off the fucking wall.
“Yeah? Well you look good in my bed, Mal . Shame you’ll never be there again.”
I smile on the way to work, even through the traffic on the A-roads, and the roadworks I hit in Truro that add another half hour to my journey.
I’m not smiling by the time I get there. Mal hasn’t given me a lobotomy. But I’m in a good enough mood that even the prospect of gatekeeping A&E from the streaming desk doesn’t piss me off.
It pisses Marc off instead. “I need you in majors.”
“You always say that. What do you do when I’m not here?”
“Shout more.” Marc surveys the desk as I slide into my seat. “Where are the biscuits?”
I have no idea. But as luck has it, for Marc at least, I spot a packet tucked behind a pile of forms and hand them over.
He eats while I poke around on the computer, logging in to the admissions system, keeping an eye on the double doors that blast me with Cornish wind every time they open, regardless of the weather.
Marc puts the biscuits down, waylaid by another nurse needing his attention. I glance at the packet. They’re ones I like when I’m not tied in knots. And they’re not fucking white. They have jam in them—Marc’s favourite. How the hell are there any left?
Kinda wish there weren’t. Avoidance is easier when people do it for me. I can’t get in my head about something that doesn’t exist.
You’d think, anyway. Regardless, I don’t want to spend my life forcing people I care about to eat food they don’t like for my sake.
One time. And it was Mal. Everything’s different with him.
I eat a biscuit, distracting myself with learning the current waiting hours in the department, knowing I have limited time to find out before someone pops up in front of me and expects me to know.
“Quiet overnight.” Marc’s in my face again, faint surprise in his eyes as he finds me eating anything he hasn’t seen me eat a thousand times before. “So you’re probably in for a shit day.”
“You’re not staying?”
“Fuck off.” He utters that part quietly. “Unless the sky falls in between now and eight o’clock, I’m going home.”
He leaves me with that, and his biscuits, and wanders off to finish his shift.
And as it happens, the sky doesn’t fall in.
I spend my morning utilising my assessment skills and redirecting non-emergency cases to the urgent care service, reducing the pressure on A&E.
I see every face that walks through the doors.
No one takes a step until I’ve seen them, and it’s fucking exhausting, but it passes the time.
It’s lunch before I know it. I take my phone to the break room and message Sol, checking Jack is doing okay after whatever went down between him and Mal last night. Sol and I arrived too late to know for sure, and Jack didn’t want to talk.
And Mal?
I exhale as I sink onto a lumpy couch and unwrap a protein bar, picturing Mal last night instead of how he was this morning.
From the aggression he brought into the bar, to the pale face and clammy skin that landed in my bed.
Common sense tells me the beer he sank for whatever reason agitated a condition he’s yet to learn to live with.
Fear reminds me it could’ve been a precursor to something far worse, dark clouds before a storm, and I find myself tapping into cardiology sites, refreshing the knowledge I already have.
It dulls my appetite. And stops me thinking about Mal in my bed for any reason beyond that he needed a safe place to fall.
He chose you.
Did he?
Or was my room just closest?
I know the answer. And I’ve run out of time to pretend I don’t. My break comes to an end and I make my way back to the front desk, eyeing the increased footfall in the waiting area, contemplating whether Marc’s prophecy will come true.
The next few hours are wild. Heart attacks, strokes. A resuscitation by the vending machine. Then a father tears through the doors with an unconscious baby, limp and blue, and I don’t draw breath until it’s way past the time I should’ve left.
I’m still on the streaming desk, a queue dotting through the entrance and beyond, stretching all the way to the bus stop.
I scan the faces waiting on me. Find more annoyance than distress, which lets me know how the next hour or so of my life is going to play out.
But one man waiting catches my attention, mainly because he doesn’t seem to want it.
He holds an arm to his chest, fidgeting and restless, gaze fixed on the police officers who stroll through the department, towing a prisoner I’ve already processed and redirected to X-Ray.
He’s alone. My age, maybe. Dressed like a prick in expensive clothes and trainers that cost more than the ridiculous sum I spend on protein products and supplements each month.
He looks familiar, and not in a good way, but I see too many arseholes on a daily basis, at home and at work, to keep track of them all.
I have no clue who this idiot is, even when he reaches the front of the queue, his eyes widen, and he gives me a name absolutely not his.
“Dom Ramos?” It’s a struggle not to roll my eyes to the moon and back. “Like the Portuguese footballer?”
The man gives me a jerky nod.
I ask his address. Type it in and suppress a sigh as it comes back as a local McDonalds. “What’s brought you to A&E today?”
“Burnt my arm.”
“Where?”
“In the garden.”
“I meant where on your arm .”
Slowly, the man unfolds the limb he’s been guarding since I spotted him, and rolls up the sleeve of his designer polo shirt. A fist-sized patch of charred skin greets me, a halo of blackened tissue around it, dirty and ragged, as if heat has chewed its way through his flesh.
It’s gory, but I can handle the sight of it. The smell, though…it’s more familiar than this mope’s face, and my stomach churns for a reason far more malignant than the biscuits I’ve managed to polish off trapped behind this desk.
Smells like guns.
Smells like Mal did last night, and the realisation has me reeling, but I don’t have time for that. Not here. Never here. I get a hold of myself and find the focus everyone under my care needs me to have. “How did you do that?”
“Barbecue. Fucked up lighting it.”
“When?”
“Last night.”
“And you’re only just coming in now?”
“Looked all right after eight pints.”
It’s a story I’ve heard before, one that’s turned out to be true. But as I ask more questions and get more vague answers, my bullshit radar flashes red.
My relief arrives to take over from me.
“Wait there,” I tell the man. “I’ll take you through.”
I escape the front desk and escort him to a bed in the trauma unit while he avoids my gaze like the plague.
By chance, Marc is still there. Or he’s back for another shift. I’ve lost track. Regardless, he doesn’t buy the man’s story about barbecues and lighter fluid. “Looks like a flare injury to me. You don’t get that gunpowder stink from much else. Nothing a civvy can get hold of anyway.”
“What are you doing with him?”
“Burns unit if he ever comes back from the bog.”
And in the end, the man doesn’t. He disappears without a trace, and he’s not the only patient to do it today alone, but it plays on my mind as I finally get my shit together and leave the hospital.
In my car, I tap through the messages Sol and Jack have sent from Sol’s phone.
Sol: it’s jack. ur l8. u ok?
Sol: Taking Jack to my mum’s. Be back for close down. Let me know you’re home?
For my sake, not the pub’s. But I’m irrationally annoyed with Sol for reasons I’m not sure of yet, and the gunpowder scent still cloying my senses nonsensically seems to be a fucking clue.
I reply to Jack and drop my phone on the passenger seat.
The early evening sun catches the screen, and for the first time in a while, I don’t want to go home.
I’m keyed up and overtired, a state of mind that usually leads me to fuck someone and never talk to them again.
But I don’t feel like doing that either, so I just drive, finding speed on the country roads I know well enough to pretend I’m someone else for a little while.
Someone who rode a Harley at a hundred miles an hour without giving much of a shit who got in my way.
I’m not that person anymore—I’m not fifteen , and I haven’t been for a long time. Not since my childhood was eviscerated overnight and I became this instead. A functioning mess Sol used to argue wasn’t all that bad. But he doesn’t know . No one does, and they never will.
Not as long as Cam keeps his promise.
Cam O’Brian.
My need for speed peters out as thoughts of the Rebel Kings president fill my head.
I haven’t talked to him in a while. By choice or necessity, depending on my mood.
Kinda miss him, but I always have, and I’ve never let myself think hard enough about it to figure out if it’s affection for an old friend or warped nostalgia.
I don’t think too hard about it now. Thankfully, I run out of road for where I want to go and ease my car into the secluded parking spot near the hidden lagoon.
It’s a warm evening, a world away from this morning’s bitter winds, British summertime in full swing. But the sun has come late enough that most people have stayed home, and for the second time in recent memory, I have the lagoon to myself.
You weren’t alone last time .
Memories of Mal’s kisses, of his dick hot and heavy even through his clothes, surge through me.
I dump my bag and strip, stepping into the shorts I swim in when I come here after work.
Then I dive, my simmering blood cooled by the chilly water, and I swim and swim and swim until I run out of breath.
Then I swim some more until I’m so close to passing out I almost don’t bother to stop. Almost . I’m not feeling that dark today. I break the surface, flick water out of my face, and I know before my lungs fill with air that I’m no longer alone.