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“Ah, and how will I do that? If I’m only going to be seeing you once a week, I mean,” she said.
You didn’t fucking give out your goddamn number to someone you were giving hush money to. As much as possible, you never wanted anything to ever be able to trace back to you.
So tell me, then, why the fuck I jotted my number down on the pad above all my instructions?
Clearly, I needed some fucking sleep or something.
“Just for emergencies,” I clarified, as if that made it any better.
“Okay. Ah, thanks. What about showering?”
“What about it? You having shower emergencies?” I asked, unable to stop my gaze from doing a once-over, from imagining those curves under those baggy layers she was hidden under. “You can definitely call me for shower emergencies,” I said without thinking, watching as her lips parted and her eyes widened.
Not in shock or fear.
Nah.
I’d been on the planet long fucking enough to know heat when I saw it on a woman’s face.
That?
That was heat.
As if this situation wasn’t fucked enough to begin with.
“I, uhm, I meant… can I shower? Like can the wounds get wet?”
“Yeah. If you use a mild soap, not that shit with like grit and a ton of garbage in it, it will actually be good to let it rinse over it and keep shit clean in between saline rinsing. Just don’t go overboard. Don’t scrub the spots. Try not to get anything but soap in them.”
“Okay. Good.”
“You got a work shift tonight?” I asked, and the way she seemed to go a little green at the idea answered me before her words could.
“Yeah.”
“That’s gonna suck,” I told her. “A little rest is gonna make that pain really settle in,” I added.
“Gee. Thanks for the pep-talk, Surgeon.”
“Surgeon?” I repeated.
“That’s what Maine called you,” she explained.
Maine.
Christ.
Maybe I shouldn’t have given her the truth. There was a chance she wasn’t going to look into me and my Family. But, then again, I’d never known a woman who couldn’t double as an FBI agent or Private Eye with their investigative skills.
If she was going to uncover my name anyway, what was the harm in telling her myself?
“It’s Salvatore,” I told her. “Surgeon was an old nickname of mine.”
“An apt one, apparently.”
“Listen,” I said, done with my list, and getting to my feet, walking over toward her. “Would you rather I sugar-coat it, and let you find out the hard way, or give you the cold-hard truth from the beginning, so you can mentally prepare for it?”
“I guess the reality,” she admitted. “It wouldn’t hurt for life to, you know, just once be a little softer and kinder,” she said, mostly to herself as she turned away as the coffee machine beeped.
