Rock Bottom (Dawson Family 6)

“This isn’t goodbye,” I say with a smile.”But I’ll miss you.”

“You will?”

The question in her voice kills me. “I will, Rory. I meant it when I said I like being with you.” The words are right there on the tip of my tongue, wanting to come up and tell her exactly how I feel. If only there was more fucking time.

I run my hand over her hair, smoothing it out. “Can I be lame and ask you to let me know when you’re home safely?”

Nodding, she smiles. “Yes, but I want you to do the same.”

“Okay, I’ll text you so I don’t wake you up.”

“Ugh,” she groans. “I forgot I have to go home and sleep before work.”

“I do feel for you.” I kiss her once more and then pry myself away. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Right. Dinner tomorrow.” Her eyes linger on mine for another few seconds, and then she rushes out the door. I stand there, rooted to the spot, looking where she was just standing.

Tomorrow cannot come fast enough.Chapter 29Rory“Hey girl!” Jane waves to me from behind the desk in the nurses’ station. “How was Florida? Did you have fun? You look tan. Ugh. I hate you.”

I take a big drink of my coffee—which is cold by now—before I can answer. “It was a lot of fun.” My mind goes to Dean, and I get confused all over again.

One moment he’s the same player he was the night he took Blaire home from the bar. Then another he’s the real Dean, joking and laughing along with letting me see past his walls. And then he’s back to giving me mixed signals.

It’s infuriating, really, and I stewed it over the whole plane ride home. I like him, but I’m not going to sit around waiting for him to get his head out of his ass and leave his baggage at the claim. He was hurt before, and I can’t even imagine the pain and humiliation that would come with walking in on your spouse in bed with someone else.

If he’s not ready to move on. Fine. If he never wants to date someone ever again. Fine. But don’t fucking tell me to give you a chance to prove yourself and then nothing happens.

Though maybe it did? Ugh. I’m running on too little sleep to think about this right now.

“And educational,” I add. “There have been a lot of advancements in surgery just over the last year.”

“Yeah, I’m sure. How were the beaches?”

I tell Jane everything I can without giving away any details about Dean, and it helps the first slow part of the night shift go by just a hair faster than a crawl. There are no scheduled surgeries overnight, and when we get a lull like this, it means one of two things: we’re going to have a relatively easy shift or shit is going to hit the fan at any second.

Of course tonight, the latter happens and we have two emergency surgeries come in at the same time. Dr. Weiss is already here, and the on-call surgeon is paged to come in ASAP.

I start prepping one of the patients for surgery, doing my best to smile and be calm, helping to ease the sixteen-year-old girl’s nerves. Her appendix needs to be taken out now. She’d been feeling stomach pain for over a day and ignored it, not wanting to miss a party one of the popular kids invited her to.

“Being popular in high school is overrated,” I tell her, wiping her skin with an alcohol swab. “I know it doesn’t seem like good advice coming from an old lady like me, but trust me, you’ll move on to bigger and better things.”

“Were you popular?” the girl asks, teeth chattering.

“Not at all. I was the epitome of nerd.”

“You don’t look like it. You’re pretty.”

“I was a late bloomer.” I feel for a vein to insert her IV needle into. “And I’m still just as nerdy and weird as I was then.” She looks away as I start the IV. “I always felt bad for the popular kids,” I say, only telling half the truth. I was in her shoes once and would have done anything to go to a party and be accepted by the it-crowd. “It would be exhausting being that fake.”

“I never thought about it like that.” She closes her eyes, wincing when the needle pops through her skin. “But it would.”

The girl’s mom comes back into the room and bombards me with questions. We move in a whirlwind from there to get the girl into the OR. The surgery takes longer than average, but it’s successful in the end, and I’m by her side when she wakes up in the PACU. I do my assessment, talk to the mother again, and then go out to let Dr. Weiss know his patient is awake.