1
Sophia
I could handle gunshot wounds, heart attacks, and twelve-hour shifts without blinking.
One biker with dark eyes and rough hands was proving to be a different problem entirely.
I was, on the available evidence, in trouble.
My old, trusty sedan Doris had caught on the second turn of the key at the end of a twelve-hour shift, which was generous of her, and I had driven home through a town that was mine end to end — every cracked sidewalk, every porch light, the bakery's back door propped open onto an alley already smelling of yeast. The light over the Fourth Street intersection had cycled green to yellow to red for nobody and I had waited at red anyway. I had pulled into my own driveway four minutes ago. I had cut the engine, but I hadn’t moved yet.
The cottage sat twenty feet from my front bumper. Low and white and absurdly picket-fenced. The most embarrassing thing I owned, paid for by the most extraordinary inheritance a girl could come into — the one I received after losing my parents in the most horrific way possible. At least it allowed me to have my own property where I could turn my fence into the color of achildren's book. I'd repainted the pickets in June. I'd stood out there in shorts and one of my brother Liam's old UT Austin t-shirts I'd stolen the week he started law school and never given back. I felt ridiculous painting out there all by myself, but I kept going.
My parents had been dead eighteen years.
It was on the table for me at thirty in the way it had been on the table at twelve — a fact, a shape, a thing I had learned to be a woman around. But that wasn’t what had me sitting in my driveway.
What had me sitting there was a man I had thought about for ninety-six hours straight.
I closed my eyes, remembering our meeting.
It was eleven at night,in the middle of a shift that had already cost me four cups of coffee and any feeling in my left foot, when a man in his late twenties came in with a tea towel wrapped around his right hand and a sheepish look on his face — shaggy dark hair past his collar, scruffy beard, biker tee under an open flannel. He held the wrapped hand up at me when I pushed the curtain back, the way you'd hold up a parking ticket at a guard booth — by way of explaining what we were both here for.
"Angle grinder," he said, when I lifted the rag. "Moment of stupidity."
Behind him, against the wall, was the tall one.
Six-four. Arms crossed over his chest, the cross of the arms pulling the t-shirt tight across his shoulders. A jaw the color of two days of work. Forearms ribboned with old white scars and corded with the kind of vein that runs up a man who builds things for a living, which I could tell he did from the greasecreases of his knuckles. My eye went up the vein once more before I told it to stop, and somewhere under my ribs the breath I was halfway through taking lost the thread.
"Cal said I didn't need gloves for a quick job," the patient said to me.
The man against the wall said, low: "I told him to wear gloves."
It was the drawl that did me. Long slow vowels from somewhere further south than this part of Texas. The voice came across the room and landed on the back of my neck the way a hand might. I cleared my throat as I rolled the tray over. I snapped on gloves. I rolled the tray over.
"I'm Sophia," I said to the patient, snapping on my gloves, trying with all my might to focus on him rather than the man behind me. “What’s your name?” I asked, meeting the patient’s eyes.
“Tuck,” this giant man replied, though I swore I heard a bit of nervousness in his tone as I began threading my needle.
"I'm going to clean this out and put a few stitches in. Good news — it's a clean cut. Bad news — "
"My friend's right about the gloves."
"Your friend's right about the gloves."
He winced as I started on the wound — half the sting, half being agreed with on top of being told off. "He is not gonna let me hear the end of this, ma'am."
"I should hope not."
I got a laugh out of him at that — low and surprised, the chuckle of a man who had not expected to be sassed on a Tuesday night by the nurse about to put a needle in him. I looked up from the wound and gave him the smile that came with it, before I had time to weigh whether or not to give it to him — the real one, the one that usually stayed hidden behind the professional one — and he caught it full in the face and went,for one absurd second, sheepish as a kid being told off by his mother.
"Yes, ma'am," he said again, quieter.
"Lie still. A couple of stitches and you're done."
I bent back to the stitching. My hands had been doing this for six years and they did it now. I threaded the needle. I made the first pass. The patient sat very still under it, as if the only acceptable response to being looked after was to occupy as little space as possible while it was happening.
The man at the wall did not say anything else.
