“Excellent choice.” I take out an egg salad half before my stomach threatens to jump out of my mouth and sweep everything up, but then a shadow in the hall catches my attention. A hopeful idea blooms, followed by a familiar squeak I would know anywhere in any lifetime. I bound offthe bed and dash through the door, skidding in front of Francine’s lunch trolley and surprising the poor, plump woman with my abrupt appearance. With a devious grin, I scoop up a juice box, one in each flavor, and an extra jelly cup, too. Then I dash back into the room and place the apple juice on the tray. Orange beside it. Tropical beside those. Setting the jelly aside, I gesture toward my offerings. “Pick.”
She chews and considers. Frowns and peeks up at me from beneath long lashes. “Which is your favorite?”
I grab my already-opened apple juice and sip from the paper straw.I’m all for saving the planet, but fuckkkkk, I would do nasty things to secure the return of plastic straws.“I’m not particularly opinionated on the subject. I tend toward apple and orange more than blackcurrant and tropical. But I like them all.” I nudge the tray just a quarter of an inch closer. “Which do you choose?”
She swallows. It’s slow and pained, unenthusiastic and wary. But she reluctantly takes the tropical, peeling the straw off the side and opening the plastic sleeve with her teeth, all to avoid setting her sandwich down. “Thank you.”
“I’ll be sure to pass your appreciation on to Francine.” I take a loaded bite of egg salad, knowing that just-on-lunch-Ollie has no choice but to be Doctor Ollie the moment someone turns up in the ER. A lunch break is never truly promised when you work at Plainview General. “I think we should continue our game.”
She stabs the end of the straw through the top of her juice box. “What game?”
“Word association. Beach or mountains?”
She sighs, exhausted by me. If this were high school and she weren’t plagued by a pesky head injury, I reckon she’d be the exact type to tell me to fuck right off. She’s too cool for me. Too pretty and popular to waste her time slumming so low. But she’s stuck here, all alone and with no visitors, so she sips her juice and grumbles, “Mountains, I think.”
“Summer or winter?”
“Summer.” She answers this one quickly.Tooquickly. The word is sharp on her tongue and has nothing to do with our game, and everything to do with hating the cold. “I don’t even remember being in the snow the other night, but I know I don’t wanna do it again.”
“So mountains, which implies snow outside, but you’ll have a nice warm fire crackling in the hearth. Hot chocolate in your mug. A dog on the rug, maybe.”
“You’re projecting.” Her lips curl into a teasing smirk. “Also, it feels kind of weird knowing words. Knowing their meaning, but not knowing how I learned them.”
“You’re smart.” I pick up my juice and hold it in the space between us, waiting, hoping, and then grinning when she lifts hers and taps themtogether. “Maybe you’re a rocket scientist and you were up in space testing your theories.”
She rolls her eyes.
“Maybe Billy was right. You dropped out of the sky, ya know, ‘cos you fell out of your rocket. Only the smartest women get into the NASA program.”
“Sure, but that would mean I’m employed by the US government, which would make the police’s job quite easy, don’t you think? Facial recognition and fingerprint records would be popping off.”
“Unless you’re working undercover. It’s entirely possible a rogue criminal cartel is running black-market space lasers through the Milky Way, so NASA assigned you the mission of shutting those bandits down. That would require a top-secret identity, or you risk the aliens scooping you up and performing weird alien experiments on you. Billy’s a small-town nobody; no way he’s got the clearance needed to receive that kind of intel.”
“Well…” Amused, she sets her juice and half a sandwich down. But then she reaches across and takes the extra jelly cup—lemon, as opposed to my raspberry—and peels the foil lid off. “If that’s all true, then I guess some pretty important-looking agents will come knocking soon. If I disappear in the middle of the night and no one briefs you on my next mission, then I suppose it’s safe to assumeyoudon’t have the clearance either.”
From fun to dread, I drop my smile and frown. “Leave a note or somethin’, okay? I don’t think I could go the rest of my life without closure.”
ROUND SEVEN
OLLIE
I rummage through Eliza’s closet in search of clothes. Warm clothes. Clothes she hopefully won’t miss, since I’m kind of stealing, and I’m not entirely sure I’ll ever return them again. I noisily whip a heavy knee-length coat free of its overstuffed confines, so not even the metal hanger swings on the rack, then, looking at the floor, I select a pair of boots.
Moving to the shelves, I take a pair of sweatpants I know she only wears in the dead of winter when her period is approaching and her whole life—according to her—sucks, and stuffing the lot into a flimsy save-the-environment plastic bag, I scoot to the drawers and yank the top one open.
“I don’t even wanna ask what the hell you think you’re doing, Oliver, but stay the hell out of my underwear drawer.”
“Fuck!” I startle and spin, left hand up and right foot back. I’m ready to fight, if not for the plastic bag dangling from my thumb, crinkling with each swing.
Smirking, Eliza looks me up and down. She studies the bag, her brows sitting high on her forehead. “Everyone thinks Doctor Oliver Darling issooooorespectable, ‘cos you got that fancy degree and an ability to save lives. But here you go, escalating from candy theft to home invasion. Explain yourself.”
“No. Shut up.” I turn again and continue my work. “I’m borrowing some of your stuff.”
“Because you’ve taken a sudden interest in squeezing into women’s clothing that absolutely won’t fit you?” She wanders forward, her hair inmessy braids that prove she’s been rolling around at the gym today. She stops on my left, her shoulder brushing mine, and digs her hands into the pockets of her faded Love & War gym hoodie. “Oliver?”
“Jane doesn’t have any clothes.” I select a pair of regular socks from the drawer, the kind we wear with sneakers, but then I grab a pair of extra thick, extra-long, hanging-out-at-the-house socks, too. Because Jane deserves a lazy weekend just as much as the next person. “She’s been stuck wearing hospital gowns for a week already, and it occurred to me she has no money and no way to buy something else. She can’t even swing by a second-hand store.”
“So instead ofyouswinging by the second-hand store for her, or ya know, dropping a fifty in her palm and telling her to go nuts, you thought stealingmystuff was a better idea?” She takes the plastic bag and pulls her coat out. “This cost me four hundred dollars, by the way.”
