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Her face screwed up like she was flipping a switch, then cleared. When it relaxed, she was back to the Dee I remembered, though a little older and somehow even more pretty. She was a gorgeous woman. She had been always, but now it was more pronounced. The baby cheeks were gone, and she’d filled out the rest of her curvy body with an incredible figure. If I weren’t so preoccupied with Rose, it would have certainly had a hell of an effect on me. As it was, I had to file all that away for later.
“Dee,” I said. “I need help.”
“I can see that,” she said.
As she walked across the room, straightening up a bit and shaking away years of history between us, she looked like she was going to try to treat me like any other patient. I just hoped she would be able to help me.
12
DEE
My first thought when walking into the room and seeing Hawk standing there was not one that I would be proud of.
Somehow, that son of a bitch got hotter, I thought, then immediately regretted it. He was still tall and muscular but now had filled out a little. He looked like he was ripped right out of one of those Lifetime movies. The girl that fell for him in high school, the girl that went with him up to the make-out point and made love in the back of his car, the girl that waited all night for him to show up and pick her up from prom, swooned. Then the girl that had to deal with that humiliation, the pain and hurt and trust issues that came from all that, she spoke up.
All that ran through my mind like a hot knife through butter a split second before I looked down, and my heart sunk to my feet. The little baby in his arms couldn’t have been more than a month or two old, and he was bouncing them, holding them tight to his chest and acting like any attentive father of a sick child. It was the most effective way of deflating a person who already thought they were deflated.
I shouldn’t have felt that way. There was no reason for me to feel anything about Hawk having a child. It was to be expected, really. He was in mid-twenties when a lot of people had kids. The shock of seeing it, had just momentarily stunned me.
But I had a job to do. The look on Hawk’s face when I came in had turned from recognition to desperation, and I realized the reason he’d called me was because he trusted me.
I looked around the rest of the room and noticed a distinct lack of a mother there. Where was she? It wasn’t unusual for new parents to bring their babies to the ER for tiny things, if that was what was going on, but usually it was both parents. Especially this early in the morning. Before I let that thought linger too long, I shook it off and focused on the baby. I couldn’t let myself act too familiar. I couldn’t act like I wanted to. I had to treat this like any other patient.
Any other impossibly hot patient that I had a history with.
“Herman,” I said. “It’s been a long time.”
He grimaced, and a small part of me smiled. I knew he hated being addressed by his given first name. He much preferred everyone used the nickname, to the point where his mail was addressed with it. But using the name that he kept closely guarded as a secret not only let him know I remembered him all too well, but that I was not the same person I used to be, and I wasn’t going to just fall all over him because he asked for me by name.
“Dee,” he said, not responding with my whole name. At first, I wanted to be insulted by that, as if he were arguing the intimacy of our conversation in a passive-aggressive way, but I heard the pleading in his voice as it processed a moment later. “I need your help.”
“I heard. How old is the baby?”
“Seven weeks,” he said.
“What’s her name?”
“Rose,” he said.
“Rose? Like your sister?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Can I ask where the mother is?”
“That’s the thing,” he said.
There was a pause as we stood there in near silence, only the sound of baby Rose gurgling in the background. I waited for him to finish the thought, but when he didn’t, I realized that there was something going on. This wasn’t just the mother wasn’t there because she was at home or sick. Something else, something much bigger, was happening. It started to make sense why he’d asked for me. He wanted someone who would help him without judging him.
A heaviness seemed to fill the room, and the tone shifted. I thought it might be a chance for me to speak to him and tell him what I thought of him or at least indicate that I didn’t ever care to hear from him again and I was doing just fine without him. But all my tentative fantasy of revenge or pettiness was going out the window now.
