Angel:Same time tonight?
I look at her Instagram profile one more time. Lena. Still no last name. But Lena.
Wouldn't miss it
Angel:Maybe tonight you'll tell me your name
Maybe tonight you'll tell me yours
Angel:Maybe
Angel:Or maybe we stay strangers who know each other's orgasm sounds
I record another voice note. Twelve seconds of telling her exactly what I'd do if she was here. How I'd push her against the van wall. How I'd make her come with just my voice and my hand around her throat.
Angel:JESUS
Angel:I'm in the supply closet
Angel:AGAIN
Angel:You can't send that when I'm at WORK
You love it
Angel:I'm going to drop something sterile and it's your fault
Good
Angel:Menace
Angel:Gotta go. Trauma coming in
Angel:Tonight...
Tonight
Angel:[skull emoji]
A skull emoji. From a woman named Lena who saves lives in a van.
I'm completely fucked. And I know her name.
Chapter nine
Phone Sex
Lena
Phone sex with a stranger whose face I'd never seen was the hottest thing I'd ever done. Which, considering my brother Miguel would literally dismantle said stranger with his bare hands if he knew, probably qualifies as both a medical emergency and a death wish.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Again. It's becoming a pattern, like my inability to maintain normal sleep schedules or make choices that wouldn't make my dead parents spin in their matching graves.
Friday night, 1:47 AM. I'm in bed after a twelve-hour shift that included a machete wound (MC-related, but not Miguel's MC, thank God), two overdoses (fentanyl's having a moment), and agentleman who superglued his penis to his stomach (still don't ask). My scrubs are in the hamper, I've showered twice, and I'm pretending this is a normal Friday night activity—lying in bed, waiting for a call from Bad Decision.
The name fits. Every interaction with him is a terrible choice I'm making with enthusiasm.
I heard Miguel's bike pull up twenty minutes ago. My brother, who has his own place three blocks away but installed a Ring camera on my door "for safety" and shows up whenever he sees my lights on past midnight. Because apparently being thirty-one doesn't exempt me from big brother surveillance. The methodical footsteps on my stairs, then the quiet—he's sitting on my couch, cleaning his Glock. The same ritual from when I was seventeen and he was twenty-one, playing parent with a gun instead of a rulebook.
