“Here,” I said, holding my bottle out to her.
“You know,” she grumbled. “I really would’ve pictured you for one of those big Yeti cups. Not this bullshit.”
‘This bullshit’ that she was talking about was a plastic sports bottle.
“I don’t like cold stuff,” I answered. “I like hot stuff. Room temperature stuff.”
“Hmm.” She twisted off the bottle and sat up, her face going white.
I caught the look that passed over her face as she raised the bottle up to her mouth and downed the pills with my water.
For some reason, watching her mouth go onto the same rim of the bottle that my own mouth had been on did certain things to my body I wouldn’t willingly admit to.
“Why are you watching me so creepily?” she grumbled as she twisted the cap back on and tossed it to me.
I caught it, set it on the bedside table, and said, “Where does it hurt the most?”
She pointed, and I took the time to check out her vision and mental status, proclaiming what I already knew a few minutes later. “You didn’t break anything. Just a solid punch to the face. Your lip is split, all your teeth are still there, and you have a lovely bruise forming on your face.”
Anger at this man still boiled me alive.
I wanted to go find him, pull him into a dark alley, and give him a piece of his own medicine.
“You look like you’re about to murder someone,” she sighed. “You should really get that under control. I might actually think you like me.”
I scoffed. “Never.”
She pressed a hand to her face and said, “What do I do now?”
What did she do?
Unfortunately, she wasn’t going to like my answer.
“You’ll come with me tonight,” I said, eyeing her face.
“To where?” she grumbled, her lip aching, splitting open with her words.
“To the rally we have going on at the lake,” I answered. “The biker will be there. You can point him out to me.”
I wasn’t sure that it was for the best—her pointing him out.
Yet, I was going to do it anyway.
Coreline and I may not get along the best, but she was my person to mess with. Nobody else’s.
Hell, it pissed me off enough the other day when her brother said something snarky to her in my hearing range while we’d been at the bar.
Needless to say, having the knowledge that some biker had hit her in the face? Yeah, that pissed me way the hell off, and I wasn’t quite sure as to why.
“Do you really think it’s a good idea for me to go with you?” she wondered. “Because it seems like that would be bad. He’d have the ability to find me… and I don’t really want to be found by him.”
“You have his bike.” I snapped my fingers. “Does it have a license plate?”
She snorted. “I don’t know, dummy. I was too busy getting punched to notice if it had a license plate or not.”
I helped her sit up by adjusting the bed until she was in a mostly seated position, then I began cleaning her face with a couple of gauze pads I had leftover in my pocket from an emergency this morning.
“Dr. Crow?” a sweet voice, one that I recognized, called from the front of the room. “Can I give you help with anything?”
I looked over, but like always, I didn’t recognize the face.
“Yes?” I asked, hating that I couldn’t place her.
“You need help?” she asked in surprise.
I shook my head, finally comprehending the question she’d asked. “No, actually I don’t. Are there patients that need to be seen?”
She visibly wilted. “No. You’re all caught up for a while. We’re still waiting on test results.”
I nodded my head and went back to cleaning the blood off of Coreline’s face. “Then no, I’m good on help. Thank you.”
The door softly closed behind her and Coreline said, “You’re a weirdo.”
I pressed a little harder than I intended, causing her to flinch. “That was rude. And on purpose.”
I rolled my eyes. “Actually, it wasn’t. But it is karma.”
“Karma is for people that did something wrong,” she informed me. “Which I haven’t done.”
“I’m sure that you had to have done something wrong to make the universe think you deserved this,” I grumbled, gesturing toward her punched face.
“I am a nice person,” she declared. “You just don’t see it all that much because you piss me off.”
I chuckled and helped her finish getting cleaned up.
By the time I was done, the bruise that spanned from her chin to her ear, all the way up to the side of her nose, made me want to holler in protest.
“Why do you keep looking at me like that?” she grumbled darkly.
“Like what?” I gathered up all the trash and threw it away in the can by the sink. After that, I washed my hands. “Like you’re crazy?”