Page 3 of Forever Fighting
“You got it.”
“Come here, Hercules,” Braelyn teases, her voice soft but commanding. I know what she wants, and she won’t let me get away until she’s examined me, ever the nurse. “He got your lip good, and you’ll have a nice shiner by the end of the night. You also look tired.”
And for the first time all day, I smile a genuine smile. “Says the woman who just worked a twelve-hour shift in the ER,” I quip, sitting on the edge of a metal table.
“Yes, but I’m genetically blessed. You’re just pretty, which requires maintenance, including sleep.”
“I’ll get some later,” I promise her. “Where’s Adam?” Adam is her fiancé and one of my closest friends, but I’m not upset he didn’t join her tonight.
“Getting his beauty rest,” she teases.
She removes the tape from my hands and cleans up my cuts and scrapes with a solution and then dabs them with an antibiotic ointment. Her gloved nail brushes along the underside of my left ring finger against my tattoo, and my heart gives a jerk that quickly passes as she continues her assessment.
“That cut’s not too deep,” she tells me, applying an antiseptic solution to my face that burns like hell. “You don’t needstitches unless you decide to do something stupid before it heals.”
“Define stupid,” I retort, staring at her face as she places a butterfly bandage over it.
“I think you could define that better than I could.”
“Probably. How was your shift?”
“Not bad. Three overdoses after a party we managed to save and a kid who stuck a Lego up his nose. No fatalities.”
“How do you deal with people like that?” Forest asks, shuddering to himself.
She laughs. “Unlike the two of you”—she points at Forest and me—“I happen to like people.”
“I don’t hate people,” I defend. “I just prefer them at a distance. Preferably separated by a kitchen door.”
“Says the man who voluntarily gets into a ring and exchanges bodily fluids with strangers.”
“Are you trying to make us all throw up?” Hayes grouses. “That’s fucking nasty.”
Braelyn shrugs as she rips off her gloves and sanitizes her hands with her travel pump. “Just saying I’d get a few extra vaccines if I were you. And I want to take a look at your eye in a couple of days to make sure it’s healing well.”
“I’ll be fine,” I assure her.
“You two sound like an old married couple,” he continues. “Explain to me how it is you’ve never hooked up before?”
My shoulders tense reflexively. Typically, no one asks us this, but every now and then, Hayes likes to be a dick and push shit he shouldn’t. Braelyn and I have been best friends since I lost my brother, who was her boyfriend at the time, when I was twenty-four and she was eighteen. It’s also how I became so close with Adam, who was best friends with both of them. My friendship with Braelyn has only grown stronger over the years, and now we’re all but inseparable.
But it’s not like that with us. It never has been. At least not from her side.
Yet she nails me with, “I tried to kiss him once. He rejected me. Bruised my ego terribly, and I’ve never recovered.”
“That’s not how it happened,” I interject, shocked she’s even bringing this up when she never does. “You were trashed after party hopping. You tried to kiss me on your apartment front steps, nearly falling over in the process, and because I’m not a total fucking asshole, I didn’t take advantage.”
“Please,” she scoffs. “I was perfectly coherent. I remember every detail, including you pushing me back and saying, and I quote, ‘Not like this, Brae.’”
“Because you’d been doing so many tequila shots, you could hardly stand up.”
I get an eye roll and a folding of her arms across her chest. “Three. I had three.”
“It was six,” I counter, standing to my full height because what the fuck? “And you threw up in the bushes of the party like twenty minutes before, which was why I was driving you home.”
She tilts her head. “Oh, right. I sort of forgot that part of it.”
Now it’s my turn to fold my arms. “Yeah. Shocker there.”
