Chapter Three
Whitley
I PARKED ON LEVEL TWO. I always park on level three, same end spot by the stairwell, three years of the same muscle memory, and I didn't figure it out until I was already heading up when I should've been heading down.
My feet had made their own arrangements for the morning and hadn't seen fit to mention it.
Faith was finishing her overnight at the nurses' station when I came onto the floor, auburn hair loose over her scrubs, and the grin she was actively trying not to have was already mostly there by the time I'd gotten two steps past the door.
“Patel signed the discharge orders at six-fifteen,” she said, sliding the paperwork across. “His ride hasn’t checked in yet.”
She gathered her jacket and her enormous canvas tote and paused.
“You’ve got something on your face,” she said.
I waited.
“Looks like it might be a feeling,” she said, and walked out before I could answer.
I stood at the nurses’ station with the discharge paperwork in my hand. Three years working alongside your best friend, who’d known you since your first clinical rotation and had never once missed a single thing, was a significantly underrated liability.
I put the paperwork under my arm and went.
THE DOOR TO 407 WAS open.
Scorch was sitting on the edge of the bed, discharge paperwork in his hands: black jeans, black tee, the cut on, reading the post-op instruction sheet straight through. No IV pole. No monitor leads. His effects were on the tray table in a neat stack: wallet, keys, phone, watch.
He hadn’t seen me yet, which gave me two full seconds to take in what six-foot-three out of a hospital gown looked like.
The answer was: considerably different.
The cut had the club patch on the back, bold and dark against the black.
He had his forearms on his knees and his head bent over the paperwork, and the breadth of his shoulders under the leather made the room feel right-sized for the first time since I’d walked onto this floor.
Heat slid under my sternum and pressed south and settled low, and I gave it exactly the time it took to clip my pen to the chart.
His eyes came up. Dark eyes did a fast read: scrubs, clipboard, same expression.
“There she is,” he said.
“Dr. Patel’s orders are signed,” I said. “Your ride hasn’t checked in yet.”
He held up the discharge packet. “I’ve been reading.”
“I see that.” I set the chart down and pulled the rolling chair around. “Questions first or straight through the sheet?”
“Let’s do questions.”
I sat down. “Go ahead, then.”
He held up the sheet. “Wound care twice daily: what constitutes soiled? Because I know where your threshold is and mine is probably not in the same zip code.”
“Visible drainage, dressing saturation, or any wetness from outside in. Sweat counts.”
“I’m going to sweat.”
“Yes. You are.”
“At the rally.”
“Which you won’t be riding in for another ten days.” I got there before he could. “You knew I was going to say it.”
“Follow-up in seven days,” he said. “Can I use a Bandera clinic or does it have to be Houston?”
“Any board-certified provider who can review a post-op note and examine the wound in person. I’ll write a clinic in Bandera on your paperwork.”
“Signs of infection.” He read them straight back. “Redness, warmth, swelling, discharge, fever over a hundred and one. Which one shows up first?”
“Warmth before visible redness, usually. You’ll feel it under the dressing before you see it.”
“And I call the number on the sheet.”
“Before you decide it’s nothing.”
He set the sheet down. “You think I’m going to decide it’s nothing.”
“I think you have a very high threshold for what qualifies as a medical problem.”
His mouth pulled toward a smile that didn’t quite get there. “You’re not wrong.” He picked up the sheet again. “No riding for ten days.”
“You heard me.”
“How about seven?”
“Ten days, final answer.”
“Eight and a half.”
“It’s not a negotiation. Ten days.” I kept my voice level. “If you tear that repair, it’s not ten days — it’s Dr. Patel’s schedule plus whatever follow-up he determines is appropriate, and that timeline I cannot give you.”
A beat.
“All right. Ten days,” he said.
I wrote the clinic name and address in the contact section, initialed the wound care protocol, dated the bottom. I slid it across. He signed it. I signed the witness line. Neither of us said anything. I picked up the chart.
The form was the same one I’d signed off on two hundred times. It had never taken that long.
I WAS REACHING FOR the phone at the nurses’ station when it rang. Renata picked up first, held the receiver toward me.
“Says he’s the ride for 407,” she said.
I took it.
“This is Whitley Stahl, discharge nurse.”
“Hey — hi. Cricket. Hayes Reed.” His voice came fast, young and certain of itself. “I’m Scorch’s ride. I’m calling ahead because there’s been a situation with the truck.”
I set my pen down. “What kind of situation?”
“Flat tire. The prospect’s truck, the one I borrowed because my bike’s currently in pieces.
Flat tire on the 610. We’re waiting on roadside.
I’m thinking minimum two hours, probably more, and I wanted to call the floor first because if I call him directly he’s going to want to solve it himself and honestly someone else needs to handle his situation this one time. ”
“I’ll tell him. Two hours minimum, call when you have a better estimate.”
“Yeah. Yes. Exactly.” A pause. “Hey. You’re the one who did the blood pressure thing, right? Kicked me out?”
“That was me.”
I handed the phone back to Renata.
I stood at the nurses’ station for one second longer than the situation required. Then I went back to 407.
SCORCH WAS ON HIS FEET with his phone out. He heard me come in and turned. Read my expression before I said anything.
“That’ll be Cricket,” he said.
“Flat tire on the 610. Two hours minimum.”
I sat down in the chair. He worked through contacts one by one, not frustrated, just fast. Names I didn’t know, places I couldn’t place. He had options.
He stopped.
“You don’t have to stay,” he said.
“I’m on shift.”
“Not in this room.”
The word came out of my mouth before I decided to make it a plan.
“I’ll drive you,” I said.
He turned.
The heat that had been sitting low in my belly since I came on shift was doing what it always did when he was close — present and unhelpful and not remotely interested in my professional assessment of the situation. I kept my hands on the clipboard.
“Bandera’s three hours,” he said.
“I know how far Bandera is.”
“You’re coming off shift.”
“I know what shift I’m coming off.”
He studied me. Not the charm read — the other kind. Measured. Taking his time.
“I have a spare room,” I said. “One night. You get a proper rest, you don’t put yourself in a three-hour drive on discharge day, and you call Cricket in the morning when you have a plan.”
He put his phone down.
“I’m not a liability,” he said.
“I didn’t say you were.”
“You said it the other way.”
“One night only,” I said. “Then you’re on your own.”
He held my gaze for one more beat. Then he picked up his keys, and the grin came back, wide and sure, like the Cheshire Cat who already knew where the canary was.
“Lead the way, sweetheart,” he said.
My pulse jumped once in the base of my throat and I picked up my badge.
His eyes found my car, the silver Civic, third spot from the stairwell, a car of perfectly reasonable proportions for exactly one of us.
Scorch stopped at the passenger door.
“This is a very small car,” he said.
“It fits me perfectly.”
His gaze came off the car and settled on me, brief and warm. “Yeah. I can see that.” he said.
My pulse jumped once and I got in before I had to answer that.
He folded himself into the passenger seat with the focused determination of a man completing a difficult objective. The seat went to the last notch and then past it. His knees were near the dashboard. His shoulder was solidly in my space.
He found a position and owned it.
“Comfortable over there?” I said.
“Completely comfortable.”
His knee was three inches from the gearshift.
“You are not comfortable.”
“Any time now,” he said, with considerable dignity.
I pulled out of the garage.
WE MADE IT TO I-10 before he spoke.
“Just one night,” he said.
“That’s the arrangement.”
“And in the morning I do what I want.”
“In the morning you call Cricket and work out your own ride,” I said. “Tonight you sleep somewhere that isn’t a hospital.”
He watched the city thin out past the loop. After a while: “Your place. What should I know?”
“My cat hates strangers,” I said. “Don’t take it personally. Give her an hour.”
“I’ll win her over in thirty minutes.”
“You are going to lose that bet.”
His voice went warm. “We’ll see, sweetheart.”
I kept my eyes on I-10.
THE BUNGALOW WAS TWENTY minutes from the hospital, west of the loop: a narrow lot, a live oak that had been there longer than the house, a front porch with two boards that still needed replacing.
I’d bought the place with three years of trauma-nurse income and painted the door yellow the same week, because the previous owner couldn’t tell me not to anymore.
Scorch filled the doorway from the inside. When I pushed the front door and waved him through, he had to angle his shoulder to clear the frame. The living room reorganized itself around him: the couch, the bookshelf, the lamp doing its best from the corner.
That was when Loretta opened her eyes.
She’d been asleep on the back of the couch at approximately shoulder height and opened them to find a large dark presence three feet from her face. She sat up. She assessed.
She hissed.
Not a polite warning. A full-commitment editorial: spine up, ears flat, position unambiguous.
Scorch looked at the cat. His voice dropped to the low careful register of a man who’d spent time around things that could bite.
“I’ve got no beef with you,” he said.
Loretta hissed again for good measure, then dropped off the couch and walked into the bedroom with her tail up and her dignity entirely intact.
“That’ll do it,” I said.
“She’ll come around.” He watched the bedroom door. “They always do.”
I had approximately no idea what to say to that. I hung my keys by the door and kept moving.
I showed him the spare room: narrow, a full bed, the window facing the neighbor’s fence, clean towels on the chair.
He stood in the doorway and took it in. The room wasn’t much.
It was clean and it was mine. The breadth of him in that doorway, ink and cut and the quiet that came off him now that there was no hospital between us, pressed against the inside of my sternum. I kept moving.
“Bathroom’s across the hall,” I said. “Ibuprofen in the cabinet. Take it with the first wound care so you stay ahead of the inflammation.”
“I know how to take ibuprofen.”
“I know you do.” I moved toward the kitchen. “Are you hungry?”
“Yeah, I could eat,” he said.
I SWAPPED OUT OF MY scrubs while the broth heated. By the time Scorch appeared in the kitchen doorway I was in jeans and a white tank, which was either a reasonable decision or not, depending on how you looked at it.
He took in the kitchen. “Put me to work,” he said.
“You had surgery four days ago.”
“I can hand you things.”
“There’s beer in the refrigerator,” I said. “Sit anywhere you want. But if you reopen that incision we’re going back to the hospital.”
He got the beer and sat with his back to the wall and his eyes on the door. I pulled out the soup ingredients and pretended not to notice.
Chicken tortilla soup was fast: broth and canned tomatoes with green chiles, beans, the rotisserie chicken I'd been working through all week, tortilla strips from the bag that had been in the pantry since February.
The soup was on the stove in twelve minutes.
I set the bowls down and sat across from him.
Scorch tried the soup. "It's good," he said.
"It's fast," I said.
"I make tamales," he said. "Red chile pork. My grandmother's recipe. Still working on the masa."
"Did she teach you?"
"Made me sit on the counter and name every step as she went." The corner of his mouth lifted, small and real. "Said I couldn't pretend I hadn't watched."
"She sounds like she knew what she was doing."
"She was tough," he said.
I reached for the bag of tortilla strips at the same time he did.
We both stopped. His hand was an inch from mine over the center of the table.
He pulled back. I shook some into my bowl and slid the bag across to him.
He was watching me from across the table, taking his time about it.
"You look different outside the hospital," he said.
"I'm off the clock."
"I can tell." He picked up his spoon again. "I like it."
I picked up mine.
"Shannon," I said.
I looked right at him when I said it.
He set his spoon down. Looked back at me across the table, easy and in no rush.
“We’ve talked about that,” he said.
“We have.”
“I told you what I go by.”
“I know you did.”
“Every time you say that name,” he said, “you’re going to find out what I do about it.”
“Is that right?”
“That’s a fact.” He said it the same way he said everything he meant.
My thighs pressed together under the table. The space between our bowls was the wrong distance in both directions.
I stood up, took my bowl to the sink, and turned around. He was watching.
I went to my room. My pulse hadn’t settled by the time I hit the light switch.
I needed a plan that wasn’t the obvious one.