He spears the last bit of sausage that I’ve been eyeing. But instead of bringing it to his own mouth, he holds it out for me. “No,” he says. “We’re going to be great.”
Tuesday pipes up at this, saying, “You two might be all hunky-dory now, but the moment I step back in that hospital, Nurse Ross is going to have the chopping block all ready for my head.”
That’s how selfish I’ve been lately. I didn’t even consider Tuesday’s position for even a millisecond. She was risking her job when she helped wheel him out and into the night like she did.
“I really owe you,” Brice says to his cousin.
She punches him in the shoulder. A little too hard in my opinion, given that he’s a patient and all. “Yes you do. I bet they’ve already reviewed the security tapes and figured out it’s me who took off with you. I’ve probably got a thousand messages, but my phone died last night. God, I need a smoke.”
She pulls out a pack of cigarettes and looks towards the door. Brice shakes his head, rolling his eyes at the same time. “I’ll never understand how the people who keep us healthy can get addicted to those things.”
“Now is not the time to be talking about making yourself unhealthy. You’ve probably set yourself back a week staying up all night like you did. You’re supposed to be resting.”
Now that I’m looking back and forth between them as they carry on like this, I can definitely see the family resemblance. Their noses are the same. Like one was copy and pasted over to the next. Then there’s the smile. It’s just a bit lopsided for both of them, the left corner of their lips pulling up half an inch higher than the other side.
It’s also at this time that I notice how Tuesday and I are similar. We’re about the same build: thin and just a tad shorter than we would both probably like. Her chest is at least a cup size bigger than mine, but I’d be willing to bet that we’d have no problem sharing wardrobes.
This is when my idea strikes.
“Tuesday, can you come to the bathroom with me?”
Her eyes glance back to her cigarettes sitting on the table, but she slides them back in her purse for the time being. She stands up, walking three steps behind me. We leave Brice at the table, confused.
The moment we’re inside the bathroom, I say, “Switch clothes with me.”
Tuesday doesn’t object, but she doesn’t start stripping either. After the initial shock at this odd request, she asks a dumb-sounding, “What?”
“You said that they probably have video of you taking Brice out of the hospital last night. I can tell you’re stressed about what’s going to happen when you get back there.”
She bites her lips and nods. I know that I hated this girl at first sight, but that’s only because I thought she was stealing Brice away from me. I might have only spent the past two hours with her, but it’s easy to see that under normal circumstances, she’s probably the kind of person who can make friends with everyone. I briefly wonder if this character trait is one reason she ended up getting into nursing.
“We’ve been gone for almost five hours. They might not have noticed until this morning, but there’s no way they won’t have figured it out by now. I could get fired. Maybe even arrested.” Her voice is small, and she won’t stop looking at the bathroom tiles stained with ground-in dirt.
“Which is exactly why we need to change clothes.” She’s still not getting it, so I direct her into one of the empty stalls while I take the other one beside it. While I pull my shirt over my head, I explain. “I’ll take him back to the hospital. When they catch me, I’ll admit that I stole your uniform in order to sneak him out. Unless their CCTV cameras are super high definition, I bet they won’t be able to tell the difference between you and me.”
I dangle my shirt over the wall that separates us. “You go home and wait for your next shift. If they ask why you never answered your phone, say that you lost it on the bus or something.”
There’s a pause before Tuesday says in a more upbeat, but still soft, voice, “I can get what Brice sees in your now.” She then hangs her shirt over the wall. We switch and begin dressing in each other’s clothes. “I didn’t get what was so special about you when he insisted on sneaking out of the hospital. I mean, you haven’t even come to visit him for weeks. Then you ended up being in another guy’s apartment, and I really wasn’t impressed.”
“Not a great first impression,” I say and hang my jeans over the wall.
“But Brice kept insisting that I would like you. That I had to, because you’re his best friend,” she says and passes me her pants. “We might have grown apart over the years, but I can see what he means.”
She exits the stall first, and I’m seconds behind.
I never had any worries that her clothes would fit me. They’re scrubs, which means loose fitting. But I wasn’t expecting my clothes to look better on her. My jeans hug her ass better than they ever accentuated my curves. And now that Tuesday is in a normal shirt, she looks even cuter. Especially when she tilts her head at me and asks, “Do you mind?” She then comes up behind me and takes my hair in her hands. “I always have my hair up at the hospital.”
When she finishes fixing up my hair, we both look each other over in the mirror. “My jeans look better on you,” I say, admiring how normal Tuesday looks now that she’s not dressed in her nurse outfit.
“And you look as straight-laced as they come.” The moment the words are out of her mouth, she looks down. Then her eyes come back to mine in the reflection. “I didn’t mean that you’re not straight-laced now. I was just trying to say—”
Shaking my head, I say, “It’s alright. I get it. It’s not every day you meet someone who makes adult films for a living. I mean, you only dabbled in it. I jumped in head first
.”
Tuesday nods at this, not trusting herself to reply for a few seconds. Then she finally says, “You and Brice seem good together. And if you’re going to keep seeing Brice, that means I’ll be seeing a lot of you too. So I hope we can be friends.”
Now it’s my turn to pause and consider what to say to this. It’s not hard to count the number of people who have wanted to be friends with me. If we exclude my fans online who are only interested in my body, that leaves just one: Brice. I’ve gotten used to being a lone wolf, but the idea of a friend like Tuesday doesn’t seem as burdensome as it might have felt a month ago.