CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
HIM
“What the fuck did you just do?” I grunted, staring at the needle currently sticking out of my arm before looking back at Jules. At her wide eyes and flared nostrils.
“Exactly what you asked me to do?” she replied between heavy breaths.
“Pretty sure I didn’t ask you to stab me with whatever the fuck this is.” I wrapped my fist around her hand and squeezed until she loosened her grip, then I yanked the needle from my skin and tossed it aside.
“It’s just another benzo,” she whispered. “Little higher dose to counteract the tolerance you’ve built up.”
I could already feel my eyelids getting heavy. I shook my head and blinked a few times. “I can’t believe you fucking drugged me.”
Was it hypocritical as fuck? Sure was.But we’d already established I was more of a do as I say and not as I do sorta guy.
I stumbled back a step, my ass hitting the sofa before my entire body slid down the frame.
Little higher? Yeah, don’t think so. This chick hit me with a fucking horse tranquilizer.
I glanced into the kitchen to find my mother grinning at me. She didn’t have to say it. I already knew what she was thinking because it was what I was thinking too.
Told ya so.
I must have drifted off because one long blink turned into lost time. To the clock on the wall telling me almost an hour had passed and I was still sitting on the floor in the living room. I wasn’t dead, though. So, shit was looking up.
I shifted my weight onto one arm and tried to move but the rest of me wasn’t having it. I was still so fucking tired…
When I opened my eyes again, a handful of minutes later, I found Jules standing over me. Two of her fingers resting on my neck, her attention on the clock, and her lips twitching slightly without realizing she was doing it as she counted in her head.
“Just checking your blood pressure,” she said the moment she turned back around and saw me staring at her. “You were out for a while.”
“Ya don’t say,” I hissed.
She flinched at the edge in my tone but she didn’t step away. “I was just trying to help you relax so we could talk.”
I let out a low, humorless chuckle. “Doesn’t get more relaxed than knocked the fuck out, now does it, Nurse Keller?”
She stared at me for a few seconds, her eyes watering. And suddenly I was left feeling bad again. This shit was getting real old.
“Go on, then. Talk.” I sighed. “I’m listening.”
She nodded once before sitting in front of me cross-legged on the floor like we were about to have a fucking tea party or something. And my ass was highly underdressed.
“I never wanted to be a nurse, you know?” she admitted. If she expected it to be some big “got ya” moment, it wasn’t.
Lots of people ended up doing shit they never wanted to do when they were younger.Take me, for example. Serial killin’ wasn’t exactly on my list of career choices but here we were.
“Okay?” I prompted her.
“I didn’t like people. Still don’t really like them or understand them. But animals are different. Animals were never as difficult to understand for me. I wanted to be a vet or open my own animal shelter?—”
“That’s great, Jules. I like puppies too, but?—”
She kept talking over me, staring past me, instead of looking at me. “Which was why I was super excited when our parents took us to a petting zoo. Robbie wasnine. I was eleven. It was the first time I’d ever seen someone milk a cow in real life…”
“Glad you’re feeling so chatty and all, but what does any of this have to do with—” I tried again.
She cut me off. “You said you wanted the truth, right?”
