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“Smoking hot . . . ” Tim interjects.
“—naive girls.” Angela finishes. “Violet is a woman. I knew it the minute I laid eyes on her. And no woman in her right mind would blow off a man like you for no reason.”
She folds her arms—going full Brooklyn.
“What’d you do?”
“I didn’t do anything,” I scoff.
Ryan and Garrett laugh. Full on cracking up. Garrett wipes at his eyes.
“That’s hilarious.”
“You guys are kind of dicks, you know that, right?” I tell them.
Ryan gestures around the table. “Our single days may be ancient history, but if that’s what you actually believe, you’ve been single too long.”
Callie slides in with the final piece of the puzzle.
“You might not think you did anything wrong, Connor, but she definitely thinks you did something wrong.”
The back of my neck gets itchy and hot under their stares.
“Well . . . there was one thing. Possibly.”
“Here we go,” Ryan quips.
And Angela raises her eyebrows expectantly.
“We hooked up,” I admit. “And I woke up afterward and she was sleeping, so . . . I left.”
Tim laughs like an ass, clapping his hands.
And I know immediately I’m screwed.
“That’s great!”
“No.” Callie shoots him a stern teacher look. “That’s really not great.”
“Legendary,” Timmy insists. “She must’ve been so pissed off.”
“What are you talking about?” I ask him. “I don’t want to piss her off.”
“Of course you do. Dodge and duck, leave and come back, run and she will chase. She won’t be able to tell which end is up. That’s how the game is played.”
I look my youngest brother in the face.
“Violet isn’t a game, Tim. She’s important to me.”
Finally, he gets it. And his face goes smooth with understanding.
“Oh.” And then he looks worried. “You might have a problem, then.”
Son of a bitch.
“Listen,” Angy says, inching forward in her seat. “It’s not that complicated. If you want to screw around and play the field, you listen to Timmy. If you want a mature, honest relationship with this woman—you only have to trust your heart. What does your heart tell you, Connor?”
My heart says Violet didn’t appreciate me giving her space right after we had sex—momentous, intimate, profound sex. My heart says it was wrong to tell her the next time I saw her that we could get together and do it again sometime, like it didn’t mean anything to me. Like she didn’t mean anything.
My heart’s telling me I’m definitely the asshole in this equation.
The question is—what am I going to do about it now?
* * *
The next day, the answer becomes clear. And it’s lose my ever-loving shit, apparently.
Because Violet is going out with another guy. He’s here, right now, picking her up from work.
I can see them through the glass window, in the rear parking lot near the staff entrance to the ED. He’s tall with dark hair and seems on the young side, a couple years younger than Violet. She runs toward him, smiling huge and giddily—the way she used to smile at me—and throws her arms around his neck, letting him hug her close, practically lifting her off her feet.
And something tears loose inside me—snaps in half—leaving any inclination I had to proceed with caution on the trauma room floor with the rest of the medical waste.
Even the double glass doors get the hell out of my way.
Okay—yes, they’re sliding glass doors with a sensor.
But even if they weren’t—they’d open for me now. Such is the raging level of my pissed-off-ness.
“You have got to be fucking kidding me.”
Violet turns my way, all round bewildered eyes and puffy parted lips that make me want to kiss her and never stop.
“Excuse me?”
“You’ve spent weeks giving me the cold shoulder, barely talking to me, canceling on me, throwing out my coffee, and not even looking at me unless you have to for work. And now you’re out here all warm and huggy with this douchebag?”
Yeah, that’s right, I said it.
Doo-hoosh Ba-hag. Prove me wrong.
Holding my gaze, Violet tells doucheboy in a careful, level tone, “Darren, can you please wait—”
That’s when I start to lose it.
“Darren? His name is Darren?! Like the husband from Bewitched? What are you gonna do? Are you gonna—” I make a stupid tinkling sound and twitch my nose back and forth with my finger the way the blond housewife witch used to on the old TV show.
And I take it back—it’s obvious I’ve already completely lost it.
But does that mean when Darren decides to grow a pair and steps up to me with his chest puffed out, that I back down? Fuck no.
“Who the hell are you?”
I get in his face. “You want to know who I am?”
I’m the guy who’s about to remove his head from his shoulders and shove it up his ass. I’m a goddamn physician—I know just how to do it.
He jabs a finger at me. “No—on second thought—I don’t give a shit who you are. If you ever talk to my sister like that—”
