He starts walking toward me, and I put my hands up. “But... I’m sorry, Dr. Lassiter...”
“Call me Mike,” he demands.
“Mike, I’m sorry if you got the wrong idea, but I wasn’t playing hard to get. I don’t think of you like that. Look, if you let me get back to work, we can forget this ever happened. I won’t tell anyone.” I’m not a good liar, but right now, I’ll promise him anything if he’ll let me walk out of here.
I see another nurse looking through the window, and her eyes widen when she sees my face and Dr. Lassiter coming toward me. I hear the jiggle of the door, but Dr. Lassiter doesn’t even acknowledge her as she pounds on it. When she can’t get it open, she disappears, and I’m hoping and praying it’s so she can go get help.
"You're cheating on me," he says.
He’s crazy. That’s all there is to it. I’ve never led him on; I’ve refused all of his advances. This is not good because obviously in his head we have a relationship, and we don’t. I clench my eyes shut tightly. He has to be deranged. I take a deep breath. I’ve been trained to deal with things like this, but I’m drawing a blank of what I should be doing.
There's definitely something wrong with him, and when I don't answer, he continues, "You never went home last night. Who were you with?"
I cross my arms over my chest, refusing to engage in conversation with him. He just shrugs like it's not a big deal. "I know who you were with. It's that same man that's been sniffing around you forever now. I thought that you were a smart woman. You have to know what kind of guy he is. He's just using you. I'm the real deal. I'm the one that can give you the future that you want, that you deserve. We could be so good together."
Don't engage, I keep telling myself over and over, but the more he talks and the more asinine things he says, the harder it is to keep my mouth shut. "There's nothing between you and me. We don’t have a relationship, and we never will."
"Bullshit," he yells. "We're a team, you and I. We work well together."
I nod. "Yes, as doctor and nurse, we are a team, but there's nothing outside of this hospital that will ever happen between the two of us." He looks almost shocked as my words soak in.
He has one hand in his pocket. And from the imprint, I can tell that it's a gun. I try to keep myself calm, because I know that in situations like this, that's the most important thing to do. I try to keep him talking. "What about your family? You know you won’t get away with this. Won’t your parents”—heck, I don’t know anything about him—“or your kids or someone be upset if you go to prison? I’m sure they will."
"No, I don’t have any family. I only have you. I've been searching for you all night in Whiskey Run."
I don't tell him where I was at or that I was with Aiden. I'm sure he already knows that. "So what's your plan here? How do you plan to get out of here?"
He gestures at me, “When we get out of here, we are going to go to my secret house up in the mountains. No one knows about it, and they won’t find us there. I’m going to keep you there and show you just how good we can be together. Trust me, you’ll see.”
I want to shake my head. I want to scream at him, but I know I need to keep calm. My very life may depend on it. I swallow, hard. I don’t want to hear any more of this. I don’t want the details of what he plans to do to me or exactly how he plans to show me we can be good together. “Uh, no, I mean how are you planning on getting out of the hospital?”
"You're going to get me out." He pulls the gun from his pocket, and everything starts to flash before my eyes. There's no way that this can be happening. Everything that happened last night with Aiden. The fact that we confessed our love for one another, it was so perfect. And what? Now this?
I can hear the announcements at the hospital calling for a Code Violet, and at that point, I begin to wonder if I'm going to die. Dr. Lassiter laughs when he hears the code called because he knows it means that there is an intruder that is going to cause harm. He's looking at me smiling, as if he's getting off on my fear, so I try to rein it in. "You won't get out of here," I tell him.