CHAPTER 12
My superpower is picking the slowest moving line in the grocery store.
-Coreline to Toddy
CORELINE
You know when you look down over the edge of the cliff and you think, man, it would hurt to fall down that. Possibly, I’d die.
Well, that was exactly how I felt as I walked into the clinic behind him.
I knew, on a visceral level, that I shouldn’t be doing what I was doing.
Because things just wouldn’t end well.
Nothing would be good at what was about to happen… yet, I was doing it anyway.
My heart was pounding, my blood was singing through my veins, and I had a herd of buffalo galloping around my stomach.
I was so nervous that I felt like I would throw up at any second, and I couldn’t even blame it on my stupid head anymore.
He’d punched someone for me.
He’d punched two someones for me.
“You work here?” I asked curiously, eyeing him as he punched in a code to the front alarm.
“I’ve picked up a few shifts when they needed me to,” I answered. “This being a satellite office of Mercy Saints, I’ve done a few shifts here when they were short on their own doctors. Since I like to work, mostly to pay off my student loans that are still in the hundreds of thousands, I take whatever anyone has available to make that happen.”
I winced. Hundreds of thousands?
Holy shit.
“I paid off my college in six months,” I mumbled. “And I make more than you.”
He shot me a look that clearly said ‘fuck off’ and headed for the back room where I assumed exams took place.
“Come on,” he instructed. “I think I need stitches in my jaw.”
I blinked, feeling my stomach bottom out. “You do?”
“Yeah,” he answered from somewhere down the hallway, having disappeared into one of the rooms. “I felt his ring rip my skin.”
My stomach lurched again.
“Thank you,” I said softly as I followed the light that’d just flipped on. “You didn’t have to go about it that way… but thank you.”
“I didn’t have to, no,” he agreed. “But I did because nobody should hit a woman. It’s downright ridiculous that he was ‘having problems’ and thought to take it out on someone. What if that’d been a child? He could’ve killed them.”
My face throbbed in that moment, just thinking about the damage that man could’ve caused to an innocent child.
Jesus, that could’ve been really bad.
“What do you…” My voice trailed off as I came around the corner to find him shirtless and searching through drawers and cabinets.
He looked up, caught the look on my face, and smirked.
I wanted to knock that smirk off his face, mostly because I really wish he hadn’t caught me ogling him.
His stupid body.
How was that fair for a man to have that kind of body, anyway?
I shouldn’t be here.
I definitely shouldn’t be here with him.
I’d never thought I’d find myself in this position. Yet there I was, standing in Tide’s place of work, staring at him with his broken face and his sexy body. What was wrong with me?
“You still seeing that loser?”
I frowned at the quick change of subject.
When I didn’t answer quickly enough, he turned so that he could see my face.
“Franklin and I broke up,” I told him bluntly when he looked at me expectantly.
“Yeah?” he asked, moving closer, his eyes heated and intense.
“Yeah.” I hesitated. “He thought he was God. And I thought he wasn’t.”
He snorted. “You do have the worst taste in men.”
I crossed my arms over my chest defensively.
“I do not,” I disagreed. “What does it matter, anyhow? I don’t need a man to be happy.”
Lies.
I had shit luck with men. Even worse, I really didn’t know how to pick them.
I’d overstayed my welcome with Franklin, anyway. I should’ve left at the first sign of dislike.
“Could it be that you think you don’t need a man, because you’ve never had a man to show you that you need him?” Tide asked, crossing his arms over his chest.
I felt my heart skip a beat.
“I…”
“You’re fighting the inevitable,” he said. “We’ve been doing this dance for so long, that you don’t know how to not follow the steps.”
He had a point.
But before I could say or do anything else, he gestured me forward. “Come on. You’re gonna sew my face up. Then we’ll talk.”
That ‘talk’ sounded like a really bad idea.
“Come clean me up?”
CHAPTER 13
Vodka mixes well with most things… except my ideas and decision-making.
-Coreline’s secret thoughts
CORELINE
I had a decision to make.
I could take this opportunity that life was handing me, or I could back off and do what was safe.
But then I remembered, Coreline King didn’t do safe.
She did what was right. She did what was necessary. She led with her heart.
I took the four-by-four gauze he was holding out to me and dabbed at the cut, my heart pounding inside of my chest at the thought of what I was about to do.