The indignation that had driven Tag out of the hospital flared again, hot as cinnamon in the back of his throat. He leaned back against a light and let the rain soak him as he waited for the cab. For the last two months, he’d beenfuckingreasonable, held his tongue, and swallowed his anger, accepted his own “role” in what happened because he wanted to hang on to that last rickety bridge back to where they’d been.
Meanwhile Kieran had just moved on.
“Bad boy of medicine,” he muttered aloud with scathing self-contempt as he pulled his iPhone out of his pocket. “More like a scorned wife from the fifties, crying in my fucking gin. To hell with it.”
There were fifteen unread messages stacked up, but he ignored them. It was probably just Ned, eager for assurance that Tag hadn’t done something stupid like kill himself or key Kieran’s pride-and-Porsche.
Tag flicked through the phone until he got to the app, the one he was definitely not ever going to use but hadn’t deleted either.
“Like Tinder,” Ned had explained as he downloaded it, as though Tag had been in a relationship since 1983, not just the last few years. “Only with more cocks.”
Online had never been Tag’s scene, to be fair. He’d always preferred to find his hookups the old-fashioned way—sweaty bars and dangerous glances, setups from friends, a fuck-it kiss to see what happened. Tonight he didn’t want a chase or, God forbid, a challenge. He’d already lost once, come in a hobbled second to a hot young tattooed thing, and he didn’t want to put his dinged ego through any more rejection.
No. Guaranteed preapproved satisfaction, that’s what he needed.
“Okay,” Tag muttered as he tapped the app to open it. “Let’s see how fucking exciting someone new can be.”
Ned had set up the profile forHotDocwith a two-year-old pic of him on holiday, scavenged from the depths of his phone. It wasn’t that far off what he looked like now—happier, but his hair was worse. It would do for an online date. It was probably at least as accurate as everyone else’s photo.
All Tag had to do was find the right green box to tap. He impatiently flicked through the options. It wasn’t like he actually cared, or had to care. That was the point. He didn’t need a connection. That was the last thing he wanted.
Maybe that was what made him stop on one headless-torso shot. Broad shoulders and lean hips, worn jeans that sagged carelessly low over the pubic bone. The expanse of tanned skin on show was decorated with stark, tribal lines of ink—a blank hot slate.
A car service sedan pulled up to the curb and waited expectantly. Tag had never been so grateful for the opportunity to misuse the hospital’s “don’t drink and drive” policy.
Tag hesitated in the chat window, thumbs poised over the keyboard. How much advice had he heard over the years? Hell, how much advice had hegiven, smug in his castle of committed relationship?
Just be yourself.That was always a favorite.
The cabbie rolled the window down. “Dr. Hayes?” she checked as she stuck her head out, one hand up to ward off the rain. “Everything okay?”
“Sure,” Tag said. He quickly patted over the screen as he crossed the pavement. “Sorry, just finishing this.”
“Where d’ya want to go?” the driver asked as Tag got in. The back of the car—near midnight on a wet Friday—smelled of cheap perfume and damp. The driver reached up to adjust the rearview mirror, her eyes tired behind smudged glasses. “Home? Club? Can’t stay here. It’s no parking.”
“Just… go,” Tag said as he waved his hand absently down the road. “I’ll have the address in a minute.”
The driver shrugged and pulled away from the curb. Tag leaned back against the leather seat and stared at what he’d typed but hadn’t yet sent. He didn’t know what he was waiting for. Second thoughts? To suddenly be thrown back in time to when he was the hot young thing people wanted to fuck in an office?
In the absence of either of those options, he hit send. The message flicked onto the screen, bright green in the dark.
Wanna fuck?
“YOU SUREabout this?” the cab driver—Susan from San Diego, who’d been an accountant before her firm went belly-up and now had an upside-down mortgage and two side hustles to keep it going—asked as she pulled up in front of the bar. She kept the engine running as the rain hammered down on the car in heavy, unrelenting sheets. “This isn’t a part of town where you see people in tuxes.”
No kidding.
When they moved to Plenty, Kieran spent hours on Google to narrow down the “best” place for them to live. Gated community or hipster enclave had been a real dark-moment-of-the-soul decision for him. The Heights were one of the places that turned up consistently at the top of the “Worst Places to Live in Plenty.” It hit the trifecta of high crime rates, low property values, and poor infrastructure.
At the time Tag was skeptical. He’d been an ER doctor in New York, for fuck’s sake. There were shifts where all he did was dig out bullets and sew up knife wounds. The rough side of some hippy California town would hardly give him pause.
Apparently three years in Kieran’s hipster enclave had kind of blunted Tag’s edge. The boarded-up windows of abandoned houses, the scrawls of angry, overlapped graffiti, and the row of black primer bikes lined up under the half-lit neon light of the Sheep’s Shirt bar all made his stomach tighten with suburban anxiety.
Thatwas the guy who got dumped, Tag thought dourly. He stiffened his spine and handed the hospital’s account slip through the seats to Susan.
“I know what I’m doing,” he said.
Susan pursed her lips in disapproval but took the slip.
