“I wouldn’t say that,” I corrected. “There are single men in town. They’re just hard to find.”
“Oh, please, what are you going to do, date one of the biker men?” Devon said with a chuckle. “They are the only guys who are single here, and for how often they come to the hospital, we might as well.”
I smirked but quickly interjected with a different thought, not really interested in going down that road.
“I mean, think about the places that exist in every municipality,” I said. “Firefighters. Police. Government jobs. Surely, there are some men in their twenties and thirties. Maybe a cute cop or lawyer in town somewhere.”
“Okay, sure, but you’re talking a dating pool of, what, a dozen men? Most of which will have a small-town mentality?”
I sat against my chair and crossed my arms.
“I’m just saying, Kaitlyn, for as smart a girl as you are, as badass and tough as you are, you deserve someone better than someone who’s going to talk about putting women in the kitchen and saying you need to be a stay-at-home mom as soon as your belly expands half an inch.”
“They can’t all be that bad,” I said, even though prior experience within Springsville city limits had shown otherwise.
“Really,” Devon said. “When was the last time one of your dates talked about a foreign country they had visited? Or climate change? Or, hell, trying a dish that wasn’t pizza or hamburgers?”
I hated that, even if Devon had meant to say what she did as an exaggeration or a joke, she actually wasn’t kidding. I could not remember the last time those things had happened in Springsville—I had to go back to when I was in nursing school in Los Angeles.
“Point made,” I said.
“Like I said, if we’re going to restrict ourselves to this town, we might as well go for the bikers. At least a lot of them are hot, and a lot of them are badass. They may be terrible to talk to, but they’re great to look at.”
My smile faded. There was nothing hot about them. There was nothing attractive about gangsters. Whether they rode bikes or pimped-out vehicles, whether they wore cuts or bandanas, death followed them everywhere they went. Six pack abs or popping veins did absolutely nothing to overcome the nightmare that their presence could create.
I only had to flashback a year ago to one of the worst overnight shifts I had ever done. I was dealing with a personal tragedy at that time with my older sister, and what came in around one in the morning was one of the few times I had lost my composure as a nurse.
A beautiful young woman by the name of Shannon had come in, having suffered fatal wounds at the scene of the crime. Though she was deceased upon arrival, I was tasked with putting her downstairs so the team could conduct tests to officially give a cause of death. I tried my best to maintain my composure, but seeing another woman killed by gang violence made me break down and cry. I had managed to at least get to a bathroom and do it, but it just happened far too close to what had happened to my sister.
It was like God had a sick sense of humor—if you could even call it humor—and wanted to remind me of how Kristina had died. At least in my sister’s death, the first time I saw her body was after being embalmed with all of the scars and ugly stuff hidden. In Shannon’s case, though, not only was she not embalmed, she had come in with her eyes wide open, as if she would forever remain aware of how her life had ended.
We weren’t supposed to do this, but I wound up shutting her eyes for her. I couldn’t believe that no one who had brought her in had done so, and someone had to give her peace from all of the gang violence. If I hadn’t, who would have?
All of this was to say that while I considered it my professional duty to treat whoever came through our doors, regardless of gang or group affiliation, that was a categorically different question from dating one of them.
And even if I could look past their violent tendencies, there was also the fact that hot and attractive were two different things in my eyes. Hot was someone that would have looked great in porn or to fantasize about. Attractive was someone who I wanted to actually spend time with. The bikers were hot, sure, I guess by definition I could grant them that. Attractive?
“Yeah, but I don’t want a badass, I want some good asses,” I cracked, causing Devon to laugh.
This was just how the two of us operated. We’d trade dark humor, crack jokes, and ignore the seriousness of some of the other stuff. We were nurses; we had to resort to something to get through it all.
At the tail end of my break, shortly before six in the evening, I got up and headed to my car to put my phone away. I got all the way to my vehicle, a blue Toyota Camry, before I heard the familiar sound of a motorcycle approaching. I didn’t mind the sound of a motorcycle, and I could see the appeal in riding one. I just disliked who typically rode those bikes.
But when I turned around, I realized that the guy on the bike was approaching me. I recognized him—he was a black man with good arms and an apparent lack of emotion whom I had treated a couple of weeks ago. If memory served me right, he liked to go by Axle, although I always referred to patients by their real names, which I believed was something like LeCharles.
I crossed my arms and stood up, not wanting to show any fear or intimidation at the sight of a biker confronting me. LeCharles pulled up right in front of me, killed his engine, and placed his helmet on his handlebars. I didn’t need to remind myself not to budge; there wasn’t anything he was going to say that was going to scare me.
“Hi, can I help you?” I said. “If you need medical attention, you should—”
“I don’t need it,” he said. “But we might in the future. I remember you. You helped out the doctors.”
“I did, I’m a nurse, it’s what I do,” I said. “But I’m not a fortune teller. I can’t tell you if you’ll need treatment in the future, so—”
“Yes, but if such a thing happens, we need to be able to have people help us on the spot,” LeCharles said. “We can’t be going to the hospital and drawing attention like that.”
“So then don’t get hurt,” I said. “Look, if you came here for a conversation on this, then you can leave now. No one here is going to help you with what you’re saying, and—”
Very subtly, LeCharles reached into his jacket for something and casually showed me a few hundred-dollar bills, held together by a rubber band.
