Sexting the Mafia Doctor (Forbidden Kings #13)

Lena

ONE

Not again.

I can feel her moving through the open floor, the way you feel the weather coming in. The target is whoever still has their headset on when she makes her pass.

That’s me. It’s always me, because I’m the one who doesn’t pretend to be on a call to avoid her, because pretending makes me feel worse than just saying yes and grinding through it.

I pull up the queue, take a breath through my nose so it doesn’t come out in my voice, and tap Accept.

“Thank you for calling Meridian Wireless. This is Lena. How can I help you today?” My voice comes out warm and bright and entirely manufactured, and the man on the other end doesn’t notice.

Nobody ever does. I think they’re just glad to get a real person on the line instead of automation.

He wants to go through his bill line by line.

Fine. I settle in. I can track a billing dispute with about forty percent of my brain while the other sixty percent runs a grocery list, quietly checks the time, and counts the minutes since Miranda last texted.

I have learned, over three years of this, to exist in several places at once.

It’s not the same as being present. But I don’t need to be present for this.

The truth is, I’m good at this job in the way that people are good at things they find spiritually deadening but technically manageable.

I know the system. I know where the overrides are and which supervisors will approve them and which ones will make you justify the same waiver three times and then deny it.

I can do it in my sleep, and sometimes, I damn near do.

There’s a woman three desks down, Priya, who’s been here eight months and still reads from the prompts, and sometimes I watch her doing it and feel some combination of pity and envy because at least she’s still reading.

I should not still be here. I know that. I should be in a different city, on a different trajectory. The version of Lena who went to community college and transferred and finished her degree and did something with the business classes she was actually good at.

But Opal’s dad left when I told him I was pregnant, and that version of me became impossible. So, I made the necessary adjustments, and the adjustments have a way of becoming permanent if you’re not careful.

I’ve been not careful for a while now.

My phone buzzes in my lap. I angle it just enough to read.

Miranda: “She feels real hot, Lena. More than yesterday.”

The grocery list in my mind dissolves. My stomach does the thing it’s been doing since Tuesday, when Opal woke up hoarse again. I keep my voice on the call perfectly steady. I redirect the man toward plan options, which is something I can actually fix, away from the data overage, which isn’t.

Meanwhile, under the desk, I type back to Miranda: “Keep giving her the Tylenol every four hours. Meet me at the free clinic at 6.”

He takes the plan option. I close the ticket and take the next call. Three more buzzes from Miranda come through in the next forty minutes. Each one is a gut punch.

“We’ll be there. She won’t eat.”

“She asked for you, poor little thing.”

“Lena, I’m a little worried.”

Miranda Castellano is not a woman who worries easily.

She raised four kids in our building, two of them without their dad, watched the block cycle through three different economic eras, and has the disposition of someone who has been surprised enough times that she’s stopped letting things surprise her.

When she says she’s a little worried, it’s the way a smoke alarm says there’s a little smoke.

At 5:01, I’m logged off and moving. I don’t wait for Karen. I smile at nobody in particular and take the stairs. April cold hits me outside the revolving door, and I pull my coat the rest of the way on while I walk, already calculating.

The 14 bus. Twenty minutes if it’s running okay. Twenty-five is more likely.

I spend the whole ride doing the thing I try not to do, which is more math.

What Opal’s care costs versus what I have.

The prescription co-pay for whatever they prescribe tonight.

Whether I can swing both it and the electric bill this cycle.

When is the point where I need to call my mom and ask for a hundred dollars, which I hate doing because my mom doesn’t have a hundred dollars either, not really, and because calling her means explaining why, and explaining why means watching her worry, and I have enough worry in my immediate environment.

It’s a lot. I know it’s a lot. I tell myself that every time I do the math. But I also know it doesn’t matter that it’s a lot.

Opal is everything.

The free clinic on Archer is a squat brick building lodged between a check-cashing place and a laundromat, in a block that hasn’t quite decided what it’s becoming.

The waiting room smells like industrial cleaner and someone’s lunch and the particular staleness of recycled air, and the fluorescents hum at a frequency just slightly too present to ignore.

Everything looks slightly sick under them. Maybe that’s efficient, actually.

If you look sick, you belong here.

Opal is asleep against Miranda’s shoulder when I arrive.

She’s wearing her purple cardigan over her pajama shirt because that’s what she was in when the fever got bad, and her hair is tangled, and even from ten feet away, I can see the flush on her cheeks.

I take her before I even say hello to Miranda, and press my lips to her forehead, and close my eyes.

Too hot. Not the regular sick-hot that resolves with Tylenol and a good night’s sleep. The other kind.

“Thank you for bringing her, Miranda.”

“Of course.” She squeezes my arm, looks at me with the wrinkled expression she saves for moments she thinks I need something, but she knows I won’t ask for it. “Do you want me to stay?”

I shake my head and try not to notice the way Opal is sleeping through all of this. “Thanks again.”

“Anytime.” She heads out. I appreciate that fact. She knows I handle things better with less of an audience.

I get Opal’s name on the sign-in sheet. The woman behind the desk has a laminated name tag that says RITA, and the energy of someone who is processing human suffering at a volume that would break most people. She’s fine, she’s used to it, next.

I get it. That kind of apathy is a form of protection. I don’t hold it against her. I take the clipboard and find us two chairs that are next to each other and settle in.

Opal wakes up partway when I shift her. Her eyes open, register me, and do the specific softening that means I’m the correct person. “Mama.”

“Hey, baby. We’re at the clinic. The fish one.”

“Fish,” she says and looks toward the tank. The fish have arranged themselves in the corner farthest from the glass, all facing the same direction, which I have never been able to explain.

Time has no meaning here.

I’ve been here for an hour and twenty-three minutes. I do what I do, which is count things. The ceiling tiles. The water stains look like different animals from different angles. The people in the waiting room. Eleven adults, four children, and the man in the corner who’s always asleep there.

I don’t count him with the adults. They’re visitors. He’s a resident.

There’s a family two rows over. It’s a dad with a toddler in his lap, the toddler gnawing on the arm of a toy stethoscope, completely unbothered by the situation.

The dad has been awake since at least yesterday, I think.

We make eye contact for half a second, the two of us, and there’s that brief exchange that happens between parents in waiting rooms at night.

Fatigued. Overwhelmed. Unable to quit.

Other responsibilities come to mind again.

Bills. Debts. Those two blend and overlap.

How much longer can I lean on Miranda? She’s elderly, and she takes care of Opal in exchange for me occasionally going to doctor appointments with her, since her kids have moved away.

My mother is… she does her own thing. Her pastor is the most important person in her life, and last year, she told me she’s leaving everything to her church.

Not me. Not her sickly granddaughter. A megachurch.

Not that she has much to leave behind anyway.

And then, there’s Ed. I try not to think about Ed a lot. I’m not good at it.

He likes to show up at the weirdest times to remind me what I owe him.

I know what I owe the bastard, and I don’t need reminding.

But I can’t say any of that to him. Loan sharks aren’t known for their patience, so I never push things with Ed.

I pay him what I can when I can, and thankfully, he’s usually okay with that.

The triage nurse who calls us back is brisk and capable and has the careful kindness of someone doing more with less.

She takes Opal’s temperature, writes it down without blinking, looks at her throat, and asks me about her history.

I know the history by heart. Seven prior strep visits over fourteen months, two courses of amoxicillin and one of penicillin.

She nods and sets us up in a curtained bay. The doctor will be with us shortly.

It’s chronic strep that no one can seem to get under control. They took her tonsils, but it’s not helping, and that surgery sank me into a debt that Ed holds now.

The exam table is narrow. After about twenty minutes of Opal shifting and whimpering at every swallow, I lower us both to the floor, because the floor is wider and she can put her head in my lap, and that’s better.

I pull her cardigan closed and rub her back in slow circles and watch the curtain and wait.

Dr. Hale should be here any moment. That’s what the nurse said. The truth is, that moment could be five minutes from now or tomorrow. We have never been his priority. He thinks I’m a worrywart, and he’s said as much. Doesn’t matter that we have the bloodwork and history to back up my claims.

The supply closet door across the hall opens.

A man comes through it sideways. Not Dr. Hale.

Broad shoulders, dark hair with silver at the temples, jaw unshaved, wearing a lab coat that’s had a long day.

He’s carrying a small box, moving with the economy of someone who has somewhere to be, already mentally checked out of this particular hallway before he’s finished walking through it.

He almost makes it past us.

But he stops.

He scans us with those cold, dark eyes. Opal’s flush, her stillness, the floor, me.

Something in his expression does the thing where it doesn’t soften but sharpens instead, like a lens finding its focus.

He looks down the hall in the direction of whatever Dr. Hale is buried in.

Something moves through his face that I can’t name.

“How long has she been on the floor?” Low voice. Unhurried. The kind of voice that makes the ambient noise organize itself around it.

“A while now.” I don’t want to sound like I’m complaining—if he tells anyone that I’m being difficult, we’ll never get seen. So, I smile as politely as I can manage. “They said the doctor would be right with us. I’m sure it won’t be long.”

He looks back at me. His eyes are dark, attentive. No sympathy there. Just observation.

“Are you the new doctor?” I ask.

Something moves behind his expression. A two-second calculation I can see but can’t read.

He reminds me of a boy I knew in college, Aaron.

Too smart to be in a remedial math class with me, but he took it for an easy A.

He was always calculating, always thinking.

He was a little weird, but I felt oddly safe with Aaron.

He was incredibly straightforward with me, almost like he didn’t know how to lie.

There was no subterfuge with Aaron, not ever.

One time, he told me he could see my bra through the button gap in my shirt.

If any other guy had told me that, I would have thought he was being gross or trying to flirt.

Coming from Aaron, though, it was a warning, in case I didn’t want to flash anyone.

I thanked him, fixed my shirt, and it never came up again.

The man meets my gaze. “I’m the new doctor. Would you like me to examine her?”

“Please. If you have the time.”

He sets the box down against the wall and crouches to our level, and I feel the evening reorganize itself around that single motion. Thank God.