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“What’s exactly wrong with her?” A deep tug of surprising protectiveness has gathered in my gut. The flirty nurse takes the vials, licks her lips before excusing herself out the door of the lab room.
“Well, unfortunately, due to legalities, I can’t tell you that,” he pauses and raises his eyebrows. “But she can if she so chooses.”
I shake my head and snap my tongue between my front teeth and my lip, switching my fingers for my hand gripping my forehead because there’s a pounding there that is growing by the minute.
“Does she want to meet me?” I ask, shifting in the uncomfortable chair and wondering why hospitals have to have such horrible lighting.
“She’s thinking it over. I thought it might be easier on her to know your stand on things first. If you don’t want to meet her, that’s your choice, and it makes it easier on her to know that ahead of time.”
The door to the small room opens, and the nurse who took my blood reappears, giving me a long glance up and down with a sly smile. She’s already touched me way more than necessary, and touching isn’t my thing, to begin with, unless it involves my fists.
“Is there anything else I can do in here?” She’s looking between the doctor and me, crossing her arms and pushing her tits up into the V of her scrub top.
“Ah, no,” the doctor replies in a dismissive tone. “I told you we were all set.” It seems he may be picking up on her interest in me beyond the professional necessities.
She nods, frowning, and ducks back out, flashing me another smile as she goes. I sniff and look back at the doctor. For the most part, women that are attracted baffle me. I look in the mirror, and I see an ugly fuck: bulging forehead, scars, crooked as hell nose.
I may be obsessively clean, but I sport a beard that screams homeless. My face is a map of the battle scars of my line of work.
Then, there’s my size. I’m huge, like grizzly bear huge. I duck through most doorways.
The day I picked Mrs. Morrison up off the street, she asked if I was a linebacker for the Detroit Lions. When I told her ‘no,’ she asked if I’d been part of some genetic experiment for the government. She’s a trip.
I think about Mrs. Morrison. She’s alone. She had one daughter who died of breast cancer five years ago.
And I have one I didn’t know existed until today. And she could be sick.
Sometimes you only get one chance to do the right thing.
I look up at the doctor on a nod. “Tell her yes. If she wants to meet me, I’ll meet her. It’s up to her though. I’m not going to push.” A tightness in my chest ratchets down another click.
I do want to meet her, even if she doesn’t, but I want her to make the call.
“Great. Sit tight. I’ll be back.”
I pull my phone from my pocket and check my messages and texts. I’ve got a few business visits to make today for some overdue repayments. Nothing that needs bloodshed, not yet.
But they do need a reminder their time is running out.
I click on the photo albums on my phone. The first is a picture-of-a-picture, of me and my brother Arthur taken twenty years ago standing outside our parents’ house after their funeral. They died in a car accident. A drunk driver hit them.
That was the day I got sober. I look at the picture and my dead eyes looking back.
It wasn’t three months later that my brother was diagnosed with HIV/Aids. I spent the next year with him and his partner doing everything that was medically available at the time to save his life.
But it was too little too late. Arthur passed away, and two years later his partner James lost his battle too. I have a black as fuck heart, but the truth is, when I love, I love with everything I’ve got, and it was too much loss. I’m not cut out for connections — too many endings. I am not setting myself up for that shit again.
Mrs. Morrison is my weakness, but even with her, I keep my distance as best I can.
After James died, I threw myself into my work. Until then, I’d dabbled in some petty loan sharking and some contract enforcement for some of the big crime families, but I was strictly freelance, you’d say.
I click again — a different album.
Looking at the screen, my heart reminds me I still remember something about connections.
I scroll through another picture.
Actually, there’s about a hundred of them.
I’m a level headed guy. I have to be. Unemotional. Distant.
But I’ve got one huge fucking problem.
Nicci.
The girl that drives the senior bus I put Mrs. Morrison on at least twice a week.
