Chapter 22
Twenty-Two
In banana years, you’re bread.
—Sage to Gentry
Sage
The next morning, I was a little less excited about my day.
The impending long day didn’t bode well for the lack of sleep I’d gotten last night thanks to my ability to overthink everything.
Though I wasn’t complaining about that lack of sleep.
I got to spend the night in Gentry’s arms, and when he woke and found me still awake around two that morning, he’d exhausted me to the point where I had no other choice but to fall asleep.
I’d spent half the night thinking about what was going on with Gentry and me, and whether we could put labels on what we had.
The other half of the night I’d thought about missing little boys in the area, and the files that I could go through to hopefully help locate them, possibly find a connection.
“You okay?”
Gentry’s low, rumbly voice had me glancing over at him from the passenger seat of his truck.
Gentry drove me to work again, thanks to a new dusting of snow on the ground when we’d woken up.
“I’m fine,” I lied.
I wasn’t fine.
I had all the questions.
What were we doing? Did he feel the same way about me that I felt about him? Would he want me to stay with him again tonight? Were we telling people that we were together? Were we together?
The questions were endless inside my brain, and I wasn’t going to voice a single one of them.
He grunted, then pulled off the main road into a parking spot along the front of the only coffee shop in town. “What do you want to drink?”
I blinked at him. “Ummm…”
“I’ll just go in there and get hot chocolate or something if you don’t know,” he warned.
I bit my lip. “I like hot coffees. Anything with a lot of sugar and milk.”
His lips quirked. “I think I can handle that.”
He bailed out of the truck and headed toward the front door of the coffee shop.
I watched him through the window as he greeted the older woman behind the countertop.
A large man came from the back room and offered Gentry his hand. The two shook hands, and then the man behind the counter went to work pulling stuff out of the display case and putting it into a box.
The older woman went to work on two coffee orders and then placed them on the counter with a straw.
By the time that Gentry made it outside, I was practically hyperventilating.
The man knew that I drank my coffee with a straw.
He also knew that I liked something sweet with my coffee, hence the box he was carrying alongside the coffees that he had balanced in one hand.
I rolled down my window when he got to me and took the box from his hands.
When I had it safely in my lap, he handed me the straw and the coffee.
“I told her to surprise me on the drink,” he said as he waited for me to get settled before he rounded the truck.
By the time he got back in I had the straw in the coffee cup and was taking a hesitant sip.
“Ohh.” I pulled back and looked at it. “What did she make me?”
“I have no idea,” he admitted. “I told her your specifications and she went with it. I’ll ask her next time I take you.”
I nodded, peeking into the box as he pulled away from the curb.
“What are these?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” He chuckled. “I just asked for whatever they had. I’m sure everything is good. Everyone at work raves about their Danishes.”
“You don’t eat Danishes?”
“I eat savory and not sweet,” he said as he pulled to a stop in front of the doctor’s office.
Before I could reply to his crazy comment, he was out of the truck and rounding the hood again.
When he arrived at my door, he pulled it open and reached for my nursing bag with my lunch and a change of clothes, just in case I had a similar day to yesterday.
With everything in his hands but my coffee, he walked with me to the door and waited with me while I unlocked the door.
He walked inside with me, set all of my stuff down on the staff counter in the breakroom, and then turned to me.
Before I could tell him thank you for the help, he had my coffee on the counter next to the other stuff I’d brought and had me backed against said counter. His body pinned mine there as he cupped my face and studied me with expressive eyes.
“I don’t know what has you stressing,” he said. “But I’ll figure it out.”
I refused to show any weakness. Or let him know what was actually stressing me out.
Instead I said, “I promise, I’m fine.”
He snorted and pressed a kiss to my mouth.
I sank into the kiss, unable to stop myself.
We only pulled away because a throat was cleared behind us. “Gentry, this is a location where children are present. You can’t have sex here.”
Gentry pulled back at Odin’s words, a grin on his perfect mouth. “We weren’t going to go that far, bud. But if we ever do, we’ll be sure to keep it to after hours.”
He winked at me as he walked away, clapping Odin on the back as he left.
Odin studied me for a long moment before he said, “It’s good to see my friend happy.”
Startled, I met Odin’s eyes and said, “What?”
“He’s happy,” he repeated. “Only known him since we all started our new lives over here, but he’d never smiled until you got here.”
My shoulders sank. “I’m the reason he didn’t smile.”
Odin shrugged. “You might be part of the reason. Or the instigating factor. But from what he’s shared, you were the one getting attacked at the time.
Any man that’s a man at all, he’ll save a woman from getting attacked.
His course was set the moment he came outside and saw what was happening.
It’s just unfortunate that the man that retaliated didn’t have a conscience.
Man deserves to be dead for killing his kid. ”
I rubbed at my chest. “He does.”
“But we choose our battles,” Odin added. “And doesn’t look like Gentry’s battling anything anymore.”
With those parting words, our day started.
But his words didn’t leave me all morning.
Having a bit of downtime before we started for the day, I hopped into the patient records room and started to look around.
Armed with a list of names that I’d pulled out of a file folder on Gentry’s kitchen table that morning, I started to look through the records, hoping to find the kids that’d disappeared in our area’s names.
I struck gold with the first two and the last one on the list.
I’d just headed out of the records room when I ran into Bernice. “Hey.”
She looked worn out, like me but worse.
“You okay?” I asked.
She grimaced. “Didn’t sleep well last night. All that albuterol in my system had me hyped up. Barely got a couple hours of sleep.”
“That sucks,” I said. “Maybe today will be better.”
She hummed as she shoved her stuff into the cubbies in the small break room. “Maybe. What do you have there?”
I told her.
She looked intrigued. “You’re helping him?”
“I mean, he doesn’t know that I am.” I laughed. “But yeah.”
I explained what I was looking for and what had been found so far, giving her a little more information than Gentry would probably be comfortable with by the time I was done.
Odin had walked in sometime in the middle of our conversation, adding his two cents on the matter when he could.
Bernice smiled when the clock rang out nine o’clock, signaling the start of our day. “Let me know if you need any help. I’d be happy to do some internet sleuthing with you.”
I took the phone off automatic answer that sent them straight to voicemail, and the damn thing immediately started ringing.
“We need a receptionist,” I told Odin.
“Constance is coming in to help around ten once she gets her daughter to school after their breakfast date,” he said. “Know anyone that needs a job?”
I didn’t know anyone in this town other than the Dixie Wardens and their family, which I told him in the next moment.
He groaned. “That’s what everyone keeps telling me. You women are no help.”
I patted him on the back as I passed to unlock the front door. “We’ll figure it out.”
Constance arriving to answer the phone helped immensely.
It allowed me to unchain myself from the desk and actually get some work done.
The files I pulled this morning were a long-ago memory.
By the time our first break in the day rolled around, it was nearly five o’clock.
Luckily, we had no more scheduled patients for the day, meaning I finally got the chance to look at the case files.
For a whole five seconds until the door jingled, announcing another patient had arrived.
All three of us groaned.
Odin placed his hands over his face and cursed softly.
The first few patients of the day weren’t anything special. Just general checkups.
But as the day progressed, the cases were all a bunch of flus and colds, practically drowning us in germs.
The one that’d come through the door as the clock struck five was no different.
Two women had arrived with their son, who was sick and feverish.
“It’s not too late, is it?” the mom asked. “We came from fifty miles away.”
I froze as my entire being went still in shock.
Professor Wood.
I’d know that cranky bitch anywhere.
“The time on the door says five. We walked in at four-fifty-nine,” the woman with Professor Wood said, sounding cantankerous.
I’d bet my left tit she was fun to be around on a constant basis.
I smiled, though it didn’t reach my eyes.
Because my eyes had settled next on the young boy who was with them.
The perfectly aged young boy who looked exactly like his father.
I smiled, though it was fake as shit, and said, “This way. What is going on today?”
Odin and Bernice didn’t follow me into the exam room as I took the boy’s vitals and got all the relevant information.
As I did, I took notice of a few things.
The boy never once spoke.
He had haunted gray eyes that looked so much like his father’s that it physically hurt my heart to look at him.
“What’s your birthday, young man?” I asked the boy.
The boy—Dean—didn’t speak.
It was like he’d been trained not to by his parents.
Professor Wood cleared her throat and gave a birth date that I would know by heart for the rest of my life.
There was no longer any doubt in my mind.
Gentry’s son was alive.
And he was in our exam room.
“I’ll be right back with the doctor.” I smiled at all three of them before I hauled ass out of the room.
Odin got up to follow me back in, but I caught his arm and dragged him into the breakroom and slammed the door closed.
Odin blinked at me as Bernice came off of her seat and looked at me like I was levitating.
I might have been.
“What is it?” she asked.
I swallowed past a lump in my throat and said, “Gentry’s dead son isn’t dead.”
“What did you just say?”
I turned to find that we weren’t completely alone in the breakroom. There was someone else in there, too.