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And there were the cops we’d been anticipating.
“I’ll step out,” Seeley said, climbing off the bed. “See about getting you some pain meds,” he added. “I’ll be back,” he assured me. “I’m not going anywhere,” he added.
And I just went ahead and pretended that my heart didn’t do a little squeezy thing in my chest at his words.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Seeley
Ama was a terrible patient.
Not because she was rude or demanding, but because she was too dismissive of her symptoms when the nurses or doctors were around, but felt like shit when they were gone.
“They have enough to do. They don’t need to fuss over me. I’m fine.”
I was actually glad when the doctor decided to discharge her early the next morning, figuring she would let me do more for her at home than she would let the staff do at the hospital.
“Where’s my ride?” she asked as I pushed her in the chair out of the hospital doors.
She could walk just fine.
But it was a policy or some shit.
“You’re coming with me,” I told her.
“I can’t ride on a motorcycle, Seeley,” she insisted. “I mean… I wouldn’t even if I had two good hands to hold on with.”
“I’m aware. That’s why Levee and Cato dropped off the SUV instead,” I told her as I offered her my arm to use to pull herself up with.
She was sore.
Not just her arm and her neck and her face.
She must have hit her hip or something when she fell too because she was doing a fair bit of hobbling.
“You don’t need to drive me home,” she insisted.
“And yet I’m still going to,” I told her, helping her into the passenger seat, then handing her the bag of gauze and scripts the hospital was sending her home with.
“Um…” she said when, a couple of minutes later, as she was lost in her head as she’d been a lot over the past day, making me worry about her having some sort of PTSD about the whole situation, when I turned into the lot of her apartment building. “How do you know where I live?” she asked, and I could feel her eyes boring into my profile as I refused to look at her.
“I know a lot of shit about the neighborhood still,” I insisted. And it was true, so it didn’t ring as false as it really should have. But I couldn’t exactly tell her that I knew where she lived because I once followed her.
“It’s around the corner,” she told me as I purposely slowed down, making it seem like I was waiting for further instructions.
“Can I ask you something?” I asked as I parked the SUV, then went to help her out.
“Yeah.”
“Why the fuck do you live here?” I asked, waving at the tall brick building that reminded me so much of our childhood one. “You’re a doctor.”
“At an underfunded clinic,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t make that great of money. And a lot of it ends up going back into the clinic. And toward my student loans. What little is left, I am trying to put away to one day be able to buy the clinic from the current owners, so I can turn it into what I know it can be.”
“You’ll get there,” I assured her. If anyone had the drive and passion to make it happen, it was Ama.
“Hopefully before I’m eighty,” she agreed. “I can bring myself in. Really,” she insisted.
“And yet… I’m walking you up,” I said, shrugging when she rolled her eyes at me. But when she thought I wasn’t looking, there was a look of relief on her pretty, but very bruised, face.
