"Stay on with me until they get there," Roman says, urgently.
I look down at the girl in my arms, she's painfully light. It's dangerous to be holding her if someone attacks us. However, if there's someone waiting in that apartment, I don't think they'rein any shape to come after us or they would have by now. I tighten my hold.
Pushing the door open wider with my foot, I see the bloody bulk of a man. He has huge fists, one still gripping a torn piece of the shirt this girl is wearing.
There's a low humming behind me and an occasional spark. It's the collar I'd torn from her neck. Still active, vibrating like a snake, eager to strike.
Chapter One
In which there are random naked men and terrible ex-fiancés.
Ava…
One month before Moving Day, May 1st…
I knew something had to change when I walked into our shoe-box sized living room and there was a naked man on the couch.
“Carla? For fuck’s sake! Again? Get him off the furniture! Isitthere!” I screech down the hall.
“If it makes it any better, we did it on the counter, not the couch,” groggy Naked Guy offers.
The kitchen counter. That I am leaning on. Yanking my palm off the chipped formica, I pull my hand sanitizer out of my backpack.
“Why do you always think it’s me?” Carla stumbles down the hallway, not looking much better, dressed in what is probably Naked Guy’s t-shirt.
“Because itisalways you.” I pull my hair up into a tidy ponytail. “Look, I have to get to the hospital. Please have the common decency to cover both the couch and this countertop with bleach. And anywhere else your private parts might have rubbed against.”
Naked Guy is pulling up his jeans, thank god. “Oh, there’s my shirt. I’m gonna need that, babe.”
“Yeah, sure,” Carla yawns, pulling it off and tossing it at him. It is the only item of clothing she had chosen to don for this engagement, and she sits her naked ass down on the couch, ruffling her hair. I leave before I set fire to one of our few items of furniture and her with it.
Seething quietly, I scan my phone, combing through the rentals in neighborhoods close to Bellevue Hospital on my way to work. Twelve to eighteen hour shifts mean I have to be close enough to walk or take a short bus ride. I lived out in Brooklyn in a nice place for a while until I fell asleep on the subway one night and was shaken awake twenty-six stops past mine by a MTA employee. He told me that he was sorry, but I couldn’t spend the night on the train and offered me a list of nearby homeless shelters.
Living with three roommates is killing me.
I’m tired of fighting through Melina’s drying underwear, hanging like spiderwebs from every surface when I use our bathroom, or attempting to hide my takeout so Amber won’t eat it. I could live with those little challenges. However, Carla’s predilection for bringing random men home, having noisy sex, and then leaving them sprawled in our common area is my hard limit.
It’s bad enough thatI’mnot having sex, being forced to listen to her nocturnal adventures is piling on insult to injury.
“Focus,” I whisper, dodging a businessman staring at his phone. “Time to focus. Nothing is more important than work. All your attention goes there.” My daily mantra is one I’ve practiced since college, when my ADHD bloomed into something thornyand unmanageable. Meds help a little, just enough to let me pay attention to stitching up a head wound without being distracted by the screaming biker with a compound fracture in the next cubicle.
Marching through the sliding doors of Bellevue's staff entrance, I straighten my scrubs.
Focus.
***
“...then he shoots back with ‘Well, what if there’s a varicocele? How are you going to handle the Inguinal hernia then?’ And it’s like, for fuck’s sake Kevin, stop being such a constipated prick!” Priya’s waving her sandwich around so aggressively that I have to dodge a little missile of aioli as it shoots past me.
“He was really questioning how you were conducting a standard herniorrhaphy?” I ask. “What an asshole.”
“Yeah,” she says, taking another bite of her ham andswiss sandwich. “I can’t believe you were going to marry that loser.” She watches me flinch. “Sorry.”
“No, I’m sorry,” I sigh.
Dr. Kevin Sinclairisa loser. And a misogynistic, condescending douchebag. Also, a cheater, which I discovered six weeks before our wedding when I walked in on him getting an ‘oral examination’ from an ICU nurse in the supply room.
“Working in the same hospital with him is bad enough, but he attempts to corner me at every possible opportunity,” I sigh, rubbing my forehead. “He gets that fake, concerned expression and asks me how I’m doing. Am I okay? Like losing him is the worst thing that could ever happen to me andsurely, I must be heartbroken and distraught.”
