Chapter 2
chapter
two
Jules
I’ve always hated the smell of disinfectant.
It likely dates back to whatever traumatic childhood event that landed me in foster care.
In truth, I’m happy not knowing the specifics of what happened to or around three-year-old me.
I’ve had a good life ever since meeting my foster sisters, Cora and Hope.
We created a family together, and no amount of nonsense that life has thrown at us has separated us.
We are each other’s ride-or-die, the three musketeerettes or whatever.
Which is why I am currently enduring the astringent, stinging smell of bleach.
Cora’s text came in at 10:52.
Cora: At Saddle Creek Memorial. Passed out at the party. I’m fine. DON’T FREAK OUT.
Historically, that is the single most freak-out-inducing sentence in the English language.
Hope and I were one terrible Hallmark movie into our standing Saturday movie night. We’d been snuggled on my couch. I’d already had a glass of wine, and there’s a rule in our family: nobody drives with anything in their system. Ever.
So Hope drove us to the hospital, and I’m not convinced she stopped at a single stop sign between my house and here.
The hospital waiting room’s television shows a cheerful man in a suit droning on about tomorrow's weather. He’s far too happy about a partly cloudy day. He’s clearly never sat in a chair like this one, orange plastic and bolted to its neighbors.
Hope paces the linoleum in front of me, her sneakers squeaking faintly on every turn.
Four steps out. Pivot. Four steps back. Her ponytail swings with the motion, and every few seconds she glances toward the hallway where we know they’re examining Cora.
It’s as if Hope believes she can will the doors open through the sheer force of her staring.
She's trying not to panic.
I'm trying not to let her see me panic.
My hands are folded so tightly in my lap that my knuckles have gone pale. I’d been picking at a hangnail on my thumb without noticing I was doing it until it started to sting. So now I’m trying to keep my fingers still.
“Maybe they just got backed up," Hope says for what has to be the tenth time. Her voice cracks a little on backed up.
"Maybe."
"Maybe she's fine."
"Maybe."
Hope stops pacing and narrows her eyes at me. Under the fluorescent lights, her face looks washed out, mascara smudged faintly at the corner of one eye from wiping away a tear. She probably thinks I didn't see her cry.
"You're doing that thing."
"What thing?"
"The one where you answer in one-word sentences because you're freaking out."
"I'm not freaking out."
"Liar."
I sigh, and it comes out shakier than I mean it to.
"Fine. I'm freaking out."
Cora’s the sturdy one. The practical one.
The one who reminds us to drink water and renew our car registrations and stop buying shoes we can't afford.
The one who shows up to everything ten minutes early with a granola bar in her purse for whoever inevitably forgot to eat breakfast—which is usually me.
People like Cora don't just... pass out. Even with fourteen weeks of morning sickness and a diet that’s mostly saltines.
Not unless something is really wrong.
I press the heels of my hands against my eyes until I see spots. If it were possible, I would physically push the thoughts out of my head. It doesn't work. It never works.
A nurse pushes through the double doors carrying a clipboard. Her scrubs are a soft, faded blue and her rubbery, Croc-like shoes squeak against the tile.
I spring to my feet so fast the entire line of bolted-together chairs scrape against the floor. An old man in the corner of the room starts at the abrupt noise.
She smiles apologetically. I bet they teach that smile in nursing school. It needs to be gentle enough to soften bad news, but not so cheery it undercut the seriousness of the situation.
"Nothing yet,” she says.
Hope sits back down, deflating like a popped balloon.
I don't.
If I sit down, I'll stew in my own thoughts and pick more cuticles.
Instead, I stalk toward the vending machines. I wrap my arms tight over my ribs like I can hold myself together from the outside.
Experience has taught me that sugar can’t actually fix an impending emotional collapse, but it can numb me out for a good five minutes. Healthy choice? Nope, not even a little bit. But they call it emotional eating for a reason.
The machine eats my five-dollar bill with a mechanical shudder and a smug little beep. The coil makes a half turn, but then stops, holding my candy bar hostage.
Of course it does.
"You've got to be fucking kidding me,” I growl.
I smack the side of it, the sound sharp and flat in the tiny room filled with buzzing machines. My palm stings.
Nothing.
I smack it again, harder, my reflection ghosting back at me in the smudged glass.
My brown hair is wild from me constantly running my fingers through my loose waves.
My eyes are close to being red-rimmed, but I’m not a crier so it’s mostly from me pressing my hands against them.
I am the very embodiment of a woman one bad vending machine experience away from a complete breakdown.
Still, the damned machine begrudgingly holds onto my would-be snack.
"Violence rarely improves negotiations."
The deep male voice behind me startles me enough that I whirl around with my fist still raised, heart slamming against my sternum.
Holy… cowboy.
He’s tall. Tall enough that I have to tip my chin up to meet his eyes.
Before I get to those eyes, though, I notice how his impossibly broad shoulders fill out a faded denim jacket thrown over a white dress shirt, tie yanked loose at the collar.
It’s reminiscent of James Dean. Only this guy is big enough to smash James Dean into the ground.
Granted James Dean was only like five foot eight.
Why am I even thinking about James Dean?
Cowboy’s dark hair is a little too long, and it curls slightly at the collar. Thank God he’s not wearing a ball cap, or I think my panties would combust. Is it just me that finds that incredibly sexy? The way a man’s hair can curl around the edges of his ball cap when it’s time for a haircut.
His eyes are blue. Like Texas sky blue after a blue northern.
I look like the crypt keeper’s sister—because no one looks good under fluorescent lights at eleven at night.
Except this man. Because he looks like he walked off the pages of a hot cowboy calendar.
They make those, right? I mean, I know they have the firemen calendars, so it seems they should have cowboys too.
And I bet that smile of his probably gets him out of all kinds of trouble. It’s easy and lopsided. His lips twitch, and I realize I’ve just been standing here cataloging all of his features like some kind of pervert.
He holds out a fresh five-dollar bill and waves it a little. I can already tell from looking at it that it’s worn and soft at the edges, like it's lived in his wallet a while.
"I've found positive reinforcement works better,” he says, his crooked grin still firmly in place.
"I don't need your money." It comes out sharper than I mean it to, all the fear and adrenaline with nowhere else to go.
"I didn't say you did." He’s completely unbothered by my clipped tone.
"Then why are you offering it?"
He shrugs, one shoulder rolling easy, like this is the most natural conversation in the world to be having with a stranger at a vending machine at the worst hour of my life.
He steps closer to the machine and feeds his five dollars into the slot. He presses the corresponding letter and number and this time two of the candy bars fall into the bin. Then the sound of coins dropping into the change well.
The vending machine hums against my shoulder blade, a low electric buzz that vibrates straight through my shirt. A cart’s wheel squeaks somewhere down the hall. Then a page calls for a doctor I’ll never meet.
“I’ve got two sisters,” Cowboy says. “I know what it looks like when a woman needs chocolate.”
I stare at the two candy bars in his enormous hand, a hand I think could probably palm my whole face. The wrappers crinkle where his fingers curl around them.
I look back up at him.
He’s got to be six-four, easy. Shoulders that block out a good chunk of the fluorescent light behind him. His easy smile is likely practiced, and I’m annoyed at how much it calms the riot going on in my belly.
A stranger’s smile should not put me at ease, no matter how handsome said stranger is.
“This feels like a trap.”
“It’s really not.”
“Because if I take that, I’m accepting candy from a stranger.”
“Then let’s remedy that. I’m Payton.” He winks. “Now I’m not a stranger.”
His gaze flicks over me, and it isn’t quick. It isn’t polite either. Not rude, just unhurried, like he’s committing me to memory. Those blue eyes start somewhere around my messy ponytail and end somewhere around my sneakers.
And something about the slow, deliberate way he does it sends a little pulse of heat straight through my belly.
I reach for the candy bars before my body can do anything humiliating, like spontaneously ovulate.
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
I tear open one of the wrappers and take a bite. Peanut butter and chocolate flood my tongue, dense and sweet. Dopamine surges through me, and I close my eyes and moan.
Pretty sure I moan.
“So good.”
He laughs low, and I feel it more than hear it, some vibration in the three feet of air between us.
I open my eyes again. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re laughing at me.”
“I’m really not.”
“You are.”
“I’m laughing near you.”
“That sounds suspiciously like something a man says right before a woman murders him in a hospital vending room.”
His smile gets wider. It does something unfair to the corners of his eyes.
Damn it.
He has a really good smile, which is unfortunate because the rest of him is already offensively attractive. He doesn’t need bonus features.
“You here for somebody?” he asks.
The question wipes away the momentary distraction, like someone flipped a switch. My stomach drops the two floors it had climbed back up while I was busy noticing his forearms.
“My sister.”
His expression changes immediately. The teasing disappears, replaced by something softer, something that reaches his eyes before it reaches anywhere else.
“She okay?”
“If I knew that, I wouldn’t be assaulting hospital property.”
He nods.
No empty reassurance. No I’m sure she’s fine, or everything happens for a reason, or any of the other bullshit people say when they don’t know what else to say. The kind of thing that makes my molars grind every single time.
He just leans one shoulder against the vending machine, like he’s got nowhere else to be, like the hallway isn’t lit like an interrogation room and the air doesn’t taste like hand sanitizer.
“Waiting sucks.”
I look at him, really look, past the shoulders and the jaw, at whatever’s actually sitting behind his eyes.
“Yeah.” My throat feels tight around the word. “It does.”