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“Girl, get yourself in there and just take half an hour. You need it, hon. You’ve been with the kids all day after working a twelve-hour shift and returned here to do it again. Not having enough sleep isn’t only critical for your success but our patients too,” I say, shooting her a warning glance.
“She’s right,” Andrea, another nurse who just switched to the night shift this week, sleepily pipes up, looking away from the computer in front of her.
Rayna rubs her eyes and yawns. “I’ll be fine,” she insists, stretching and returning to her book.
“Okay, fine,” I shrug.
I return my attention to updating patient charts and preparing one of our patients to transition from the ICU to the regular room.
“This asshole,” Andrea mutters.
“Who, Jair?”
“Yeah. He’s not answering his phone again. This is the second morning this week.”
I glance at the clock on the wall opposite us. “Drea, the man’s probably still asleep.”
“It’s almost eight, Moni.”
“Maybe he’s sleeping in,” I suggest.
“Jair doesn’t sleep in. He’s usually up by four on mornings he has to work and six on ones he doesn’t.”
“Maybe his phone died.”
“It’s not going straight to voicemail. I’ll be back,” Andrea says, getting up. Scowling, she dials him again as she walks off.
I know what she’s thinking, and she’s probably right. She’s mentioned several times that she’s worried he’s cheating on her, which he probably is. Jair’s a fine, pretty boy who’s very aware of his looks and their impact on women.
When she met him, he had a girlfriend, who had taken him from his previous girlfriend, and Andrea did the same. She’d discovered he was involved with two other women at the time, whom he claimed to have broken up with. I doubted it.
That was the type of drama I had no time for. At thirty-four, I was looking for something different in life, though not quite sure what. I just knew I wanted it to be exciting, adventurous, and maybe even dangerous.
Returning to the patient charts I’d been working on, my mind shifts to yesterday afternoon. After indulging in a little sexual pleasure and bathing, I’d gone to get my locs retwisted before eating dinner and coming into work.
No matter what I’d been doing, I realized that Caelan Blackwood was never too far from my thoughts. That was a problem. When I’d come on shift last night, Sarah said he’d been there all day and most of the evening. He’d just left half an hour before I’d come on.
I was thankful that we missed one another because we clearly couldn’t stand each other, but for some strange reason, I had this strange sexual attraction to the man. A smirk lifts the corner of my lips as I think about Erykah Badu’sNext Lifetime.
Though our situation isn’t quite the same, I can’t help but think we could've worked something out if we’d met one another in another lifetime where things were slightly different.
As it stands, he represents everything that I abhor. Although it wasn’t a motorcycle gang that did it, but a street gang, I’ve lost too much at the hands of people like him. Violent criminals with little regard for life and no respect for people’s property.
Andrea returns from her phone call, and I don’t miss that her eyes are red, and she’s chewing her bottom lip.
I look over to Rayna, whose head is bobbing, but she’s still staring at her book and jotting down notes.
“Hey, get it together. You’ve got another forty minutes.”
“I know,” she mutters.
“Whatever shit he’s on, you don’t deserve it. My mama used to say the same way you got him is the same way you’ll lose him if it wasn’t on the level,” I say, leveraging a stare at her.
“Moni, I just thought that I could....”
“What? Change him?”
She nods.
