Page 50 of Fighting For You

We had dinner at a saloon off the boardwalk. Roast beef, fries, sarsaparilla floats in tall glasses. The place was dim and cool, and Nora sat across from me in a leather booth with her chin in her hand. The low light from the bar caught the side of her face, and I let myself look at her the way I'd been wanting to look at her all day.

"I had a really good time today, Knox."

"I'm glad you did." I turned my glass on the table. "I come here sometimes. When my head gets loud after a shift. I get on the motorcycle and ride Route 66 through the pass, and by the time I get here, whatever I was carrying feels smaller."

She looked at me. "Is that why you brought me here?"

"You were upset the other night. At The Lantern. I thought this might help you clear your head too."

Nora picked at the edge of her napkin.

"A few weeks ago, one of Jen's patients crashed and I got reassigned to cover her bay." She said it like she'd been holding it and was tired of the weight. "When the attending checked the chart afterward, there was a dosage that didn't match his order. Jen's credentials were on the entry, but I was the nurse on the patient when he caught it. I should have seen the discrepancy and I didn't. Gracelyn told me this has been happening for a while. That administration's been cracking down on charting errors on the floor, and it's Liz and Jen's charts that keep flagging."

I knew who Liz and Jen were. Every firefighter who'd ever come through those ER doors knew who they were. They flirted with anyone in turnout gear, and I'd never liked either of them.

"That's not on you, Nora."

"I know. But I'm the one who missed it." She turned her glass on the table. "And on top of that, Liz and Jen are telling people that Dr. Harlan gives me special treatment. That he pulls me onto cases and spends extra time with me at the workstation. He doesn't. He's just a good doctor. He treats everyone like that." She took a breath. "And they saw us at the diner when we went for the chicken tenders. So now the story is that I'm playing both sides. Getting special treatment from Harlan at work and seeing you on the outside."

I looked at her across the table. She was frustrated and tired of explaining herself to people who didn't deserve the explanation. I could see it in her shoulders.

"Tell them you're with me."

She blinked. "What?"

"This is a date, Nora. We're dating. Tell them that."

She stared at me. "Just like that?"

"Just like that. You don't owe them a story that makes them comfortable. Give them the truth and let them do whatever they're going to do with it."

"What if the stories come back to bite me?"

"Do people actually take Liz and Jen seriously?"

She was quiet for a long moment. Then something in her face loosened, and she smiled. It wasn't the big smile from the photo booth or the easy one from the boardwalk. It was smaller and steadier, and it looked like relief.

After dinner we walked back along the boardwalk. The sky had changed while we were inside. The blue from this afternoon was gone, replaced by a bruised purple rolling over the peaks. The wind was picking up, pushing warm air down the street, carrying dust and the smell of rain that hadn't arrived yet.

"Knox, look." Nora had stopped at a shop window. Raw stones displayed on a piece of velvet behind the glass, deep purples and cloudy pinks and something rough and dark that caught the light from a lamp inside. They glowed against the dust.

She stood there looking at them.

"Do you want to go inside?"

She nodded.

The shop was small and quiet, cooler than the street. Shelves lined every wall, and every shelf was full. Rough stones arranged by color, polished pieces under glass, clusters of something translucent sitting on wooden stands with handwritten labels beside them. Colors I didn't know rocks came in. Nora moved through the rows with her hands behind her back, leaning close to read each label without touching anything.

"I used to have a collection of these," she said. She was looking at a tray of raw stones near the register. "Six pieces. I kept them on my bedroom shelf. Amethyst, rose quartz, black tourmaline, carnelian, a couple of others." She touched the edge of the tray. "They all burned with the house."

I watched her look at them. Her fingers hovered over the tray without touching anything, and her face had the same quiet ache as when she talked about the house. She missed them.

"Why don't we rebuild your collection?"

She looked up at me.

"We can buy them again. One by one."