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Mira
“Eight weeks?” I sputter, repeating the words the doctor just said to me. Wasn’t hearing about the surgery bad enough?
I mean, seriously, why should an ankle injury require surgeryandtwo months to recuperate? If a guy falls down on the football field, they give him a few minutes to shake it off and then send him back in with a probable concussion.
Okay, probably not the best example.
Still. This news is unacceptable.
I can’t be off my feet for that long. I run a bar, for God’s sake, and I run it well.
Besides, there’s the cost to think of. My deductible is ten thousand dollars.Ten thousand dollars.The bar is doing great, but it’s not doing the kind of great where I can fork over ten grand without it feeling like someone shivved me.
For a fleeting second, I wish Danny were here, and not in the waiting room, so I could give him acan you believe this guy?look. Then again, he’d probably side with the doctor.
“Can’t you just, I don’t know, prescribe me crutches? I can hobble around and keep the cast off the ground. I’ll be golden.”
The doctor frowns at me, his face creasing handsomely. He’s attractive in a completely generic way—the kind of person my mother would rave about, ending her tirade of praise withand he’s a doctor.But I could care less about snagging a man, much less a man in scrubs. The only man I’m thinking about at the moment is my new roommate.
Danny surprised me today. First, by having a personality. Second, by being surprisingly good looking after he took off those ugly glasses, like in one of those movies where the girl removes the glasses that took up half her face and reveals she’s been a stone-cold fox all along. Or maybe I didn’t notice the stealthy fox thing he had going on because the other couple of times I’ve briefly interacted with him he’s shown no glimmer of personality whatsoever. But he’s got these intense dark brown eyes, surrounded by eyelashes I’d need to use Black as Night mascara to achieve, and thick, wavy dark hair that’s just asking to get tousled.
Oh, and he also surprised me by saving my ass.
As a rule, I’d rather not be saved, but I couldn’t think of any smarter way to get to the hospital without the use of one leg. So I let him scoop me up into his arms. He’s surprisingly sturdy for such a tall, lanky guy, and it felt…nice, being held against his chest. Like maybe I could rest for a moment.
And I can’t deny it was pretty sweet, the way he didn’t try to mansplain the need for an ambulance to me—or convince me that I should let Lucas Burke, my sister’s fiancé, cover the bill, which he’s definitely going to try to do. Hell, Danny even took the trouble to leave that stupid note on the record table box, just like I asked him to. Earlier, in the apartment, he’d obviously been trying to appease me by saying yes to everything I asked, but he wasn’t doing that in the stairwell. And when we got to the ER, he kept up a steady stream of conversation, even though he looked worn out. He also refrained from asking me five hundred times if I was all right. Maybe that’s because I obviously wasn’t, but I was grateful. It felt like he was being good to me because he genuinely cared, like a prince in one of those dumb movies my little sister loved as a kid…
If the prince were a grumpy computer programmer with a stick up his ass and staggeringly ugly reading glasses. I mean, seriously, those things are—
“Of course you’ll have crutches,” Hot Doc says, giving me a mental shake. “But you told me you’re on your feet for most of your shift. You’re not going to heal like that.”
“Are you going to run my bar?” I ask pointedly. “Because I worked way too hard to let that shit slide.”
“You don’t have employees?”
I do. My co-bartender Azalea is fan-fucking-tastic, and we just hired a fill-in bartender so we can have actual lives, but we’ll need someone else to cover for me. The bar’s successful enough, so I could hire someone. It’s just…
It’smy bar.
Glitterati is my brainchild. Someone once wrote in a review that walking inside immediately gave him a headache, which I took as a compliment. It’s not easy to give a person an immediate headache. But apparently two parts glitter, thirty parts color, and four parts Britney Spears will do the job. Every piece of that bar carries something of me inside of it, from the resin bar top that I poured myself to the ever-changing drink list. I don’t know what Glitterati would be without me.
Maybe you don’t know what you’d be without Glitterati.
The voice in my head is clearly stupid, though. So I ignore it and tell the doctor with a straight face that I’m indispensable.
The doctor gives me a look that I’m familiar with, one that has nothing to do with busted ankles and sprained feet. “I can see that,” he says, a corner of his mouth hitching up, his blue-gray eyes sparkling.
It does less than nothing for me. I might as well be watching a commercial for foot fungus cream. What this charmer doesn’t know is that I’m charmed out. I’m not going to fall for any B.S. from another man who knows how to talk the talk, no thank you. My ex Byron wasn’t my first mistake, but moving in with him after two weeks of dating was a piece of idiocy I won’t be repeating—and living with him for two months after we broke up was a hell I’ll never live in again.
I’d much rather interfere with other people’s romantic lives than bother with my own. My sister and my friend Shauna are taken and my co-bartender, Azalea, has no interest in humans with penises, otherwise I might try to hurl the hot doc at one of them.
“So you can understand the problem,” I tell him, using the clicker attached to the bed to raise it up higher. My ankle is a constant throbbing pain, and I’m about five seconds away from begging him for some sweet, sweet drugs. “Can’t I get, like, a steroid shot or something?”
“At least a month and a half off your feet,” he says sternly. “You don’t want to walk with a limp for the rest of your life.”
“Shit, I guess I don’t,” I admit.
My last thought before tuning out is that Danny isn’t going to like this news one bit. I think both of us were banking on the fact that our schedules don’t align, but now we’re going to be seeing a lot more of each other than either of us bargained for. He wanted to come back here with me after the triage team finally decided a very clearly broken ankle was worthy of medical attention, but I wouldn’t let him. I told him it was because the nurse might want to disrobe me, and he gave me a scandalized look that reminded me of the way my grandfather used to heave a sigh whenever a “heavy petting” scene came on TV. Then he clenched his jaw and said he’d stay in the waiting room if it made me more comfortable.
