Chapter 2
ROSCOE
I collapsed into the closest chair and buried my face in my hands. I was torn between crashing in the on-call room or attempting to make it home.
I really wanted to sleep in my own bed, but getting there would be an issue.
After a grueling two hours spent with a patient experiencing a complicated birth and then seven hours in the operating room and recovery ward with her, I delivered four more babies yesterday.
Now I could add five more healthy deliveries to my record, even though a few things didn’t go exactly according to the birth plans the mothers wanted to follow.
Of course, the best laid plans usually go sideways in my experience. My mad dash from the restaurant - before getting Serana’s number - two nights ago was the perfect example.
I had so much fun laughing with her during the dance class that I couldn’t resist asking her to join Josh and I for dinner.
After almost two hours of constant laughter and easy, intriguing conversation at Dylan’s restaurant, I didn’t want the night to end and knew without a doubt that I’d like to spend more time with Miss Gonzales.
Serana Gonzales.
Even her name was beautiful, but not nearly as breathtaking as the woman herself.
I appreciated a beautiful woman, but only if that beauty wasn’t hollow. I couldn’t stand the vapid types who spent more time grooming their appearance than their character. Makeup, clothes, and profession were irrelevant; to me, what lay beneath the surface was all that mattered.
When Serana walked up with her friend and asked me to dance, I was shocked to have been singled out by such a beautiful woman, considering that we were surrounded by some men that I knew were much better looking than me.
It wasn't that I was hard on the eyes, but I didn’t have modeling agencies beating down my door either.
My brother Ranger and I had always joked that we were the brains while Noble was the brawn.
It was a running joke, especially since Noble looked like the perfect mixture of Dad and Papa - which was wild, considering that he was adopted just like we were.
With their darker skin and light brown eyes, Noble and Tati couldn’t easily be mistaken for our siblings, but Holly, Ranger, and I knew that they were family even if we didn’t share a single strand of DNA.
Recently, our family grew again when our fathers brought nineteen-year-old Cruz into our childhood home.
He wasn’t a kid, but he was our brother now - and always would be.
I wondered if it would be too stalkerish to show up at Zoey’s office to ask for Serana’s contact info.
Maybe a surprise visit wasn’t the best idea.
Calling would be better, but given it was Zoey Duke, a text was probably the safest bet - it involved less contact, which I knew was exactly how she preferred things.
No, I wasn’t going to stalk her. I’d just let things play out - an idea that would probably seem a lot stupider when I wasn’t so sleep-deprived.
Until then, which probably wouldn’t be any time soon, I needed to go back to my initial problem and figure out how in the hell I was going to get home.
A lightbulb went off, and I opened the Life360 app that Tati had forced on us. We initially resisted, none of us wanting or feeling like we needed a full-time digital babysitter, but once she got Holly on board, it was over. Now we could see where the others were at any given time.
Right now, my brother’s dot was in almost the same location as mine, meaning he was somewhere in the hospital.
Since I hadn’t received a text letting me know that Noble was ill or in some other kind of distress, that meant he was working and probably in the emergency room with a victim or a suspect.
Maybe I wouldn’t have to interrupt anyone’s sleep to get a ride home after all since my brother’s work schedule was almost as erratic as mine.
I finally got the energy to stand up, irritated that I was so exhausted. While completing my residency in Chicago, a twelve-hour shift would have been a cakewalk, but I’d gotten soft working in private practice. Luckily, It didn’t take me long to get to the emergency room or find my brother.
I followed the sound of a belligerent drunk cursing everything but his toenails, then peeked around the corner to find him leaning against the wall with a look of pure boredom.
He saw me instantly and lifted his chin in greeting which then directed the woman’s attention to me.
“It’s about fucking time you got here. This man is bothering me and I want him removed!”
“You want me to make the cop leave? That’s not how this works,” I said, trying very hard to keep my expression neutral.
“Out!” she yelled as she swept her hand toward the doorway. When the cuff stopped her movement, she looked down at it, clearly puzzled as to how it got there. She looked at me and said, “I didn’t know you were into this sort of thing, but I’m down.”
Noble started coughing as he turned his back to the woman to hide his laughter, so I played along to make things worse.
“I guess we’re gonna need a safeword.”
“Hmm,” the drunk woman hummed, obviously trying to come up with something good.
“Let’s see if you can guess which one I prefer.”
The woman slurred, “Give me a hint.”
“It’s an animal that starts with the sixteenth letter of the alphabet.”
She stared at me for a few seconds, then began whispering the alphabet song while trying to count the letters on her fingers. She lost track halfway through, and when I looked at Noble, he was grinning.
“You and Amethyst have a gift,” Noble said proudly as he walked across the room and leaned against the wall next to the doorway where I was still standing. In a lower voice, he said, “Amy is the kid whisperer, but you’re the stupid whisperer.”
“She’s probably not stupid when she’s sober,” I allowed.
“Do you have a patient coming in?” Noble asked. He studied my face for a second before he said, “You look like shit.”
I waited until my jaw finished unhinging for a massive yawn before I said, “I’ve been here way too long to drive myself home safely. Instead of calling an Uber, I looked up your location and saw you were right around the corner.”
“Tati’s stalking app, huh?”
“I have to admit that it’s come in handy once or twice already.”
“Did you know you can put boundaries around certain places and have the app alert you when someone in your group happens into them?”
“No. What purpose would that serve?”
“If it just so happens that someone is stopping at the grocery store and I need milk, why not send them a message asking for them to pick some up for me?”
“You little shit!”
“What? I’ve never asked you to bring me groceries!”
“I thought you were doing some weird mind-meld bullshit, because every time I stopped to get a smoothie, you’d send a text asking what I was doing and then ask if I’d bring you one.”
“I do that when anyone is getting coffee too. Or if they’re at Whataburger.”
“And you say Tati is the stalker!”
“I just use the tools I have to complete the task at hand.”
“Lazy ass!”
“There’s not an animal that starts with the letter Q!” the patient in the bed said angrily.
“Actually, there are two adorable Australian marsupials - one is called a quokka while the other is a quoll. Plus, if you consider birds to be a type of animal, you’ve got quail and Quaker parrots. There’s also a clam on the East Coast known as a quahog.”
“Really?” she asked. I nodded, so she asked, “Which one is it?”
“None of those.”
“But . . .”
“Q is not the sixteenth letter of the alphabet,” I explained.
“It’s not?”
“Try again.”
The woman frowned and looked back down at her hands as she started singing. Noble snickered before he asked, “Do you even think she remembers why she’s trying to find that letter?”
“Probably not.”
“When she’s released, I’ll have to transport her to the jail, so you can’t hitch a ride with me.”
“It was worth a try.”
“Lawson’s on duty. Let me see where he is right now,” Noble said as he put his hand on the mic at his shoulder.
He spoke in code, and I recognized Lawson’s call number.
Just a few seconds later, our friend replied that he was at the hospital, too, so Noble pulled out his phone and sent a text.
A few seconds later, his phone buzzed, and he said, “He’s filling out paperwork in the ER breakroom, so you might go see if he can bring you home. ”
“Thanks,” I said as I stuck my hand out to shake my brother’s.
The woman looked up as I said goodbye and asked, “You’re leaving?” When I nodded, she said, “But I haven’t picked out a safeword yet.”
“Keep working on it and just let the officer know what you come up with. I’d like at least five options to choose from, okay?”
“Five?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And birds count.”
“Yes, they do,” I said as I walked out with a final wave at my brother.
I greeted the few staff members I knew by name as I walked through the emergency department and then pushed the door open to the breakroom without looking through the small pane of glass first. I would live to regret that as I found Lawson with a nurse in his lap.
Well, I assumed it was Lawson since his face was covered by her scrub top as her hands clutched at his hair.
“Oops!” I muttered as I spun around to leave.
“Dr. Hamilton! I was . . . I just . . . It’s my lunch, and I . . .”
“I blame Lawson. He’s been leading people astray since he was a toddler,” I said as I looked everywhere but at the woman who was hastily fixing her clothes.
She hurried out of the room without another word, and I frowned at my friend as he leaned back in his chair and smiled.
“Your libido is gonna get you and that nurse in trouble.”
“Nah. She knew what she was getting into.”
“Because you’ve slept your way through the rest of the staff and she’s ignored all the warnings?”
“Says the man that brought home a different nurse every time he came down to visit,” Lawson replied.
“But those were nurses from Chicago.”