Page 9 of I'll Be Seeing You
“So, what’s it gonna be,Doc. Ya gonna spill all your dirty little secrets or do I have to jab a kidney next?” I smirked up at her, and she dropped the bloodied rag onto my lap, just barely covering the tenting fabric of the robe I was still wearing.
The fear I saw staring back at me had my cock rock-hard. It was a shame I wanted her to talk just as much as I wanted her to never say another word again.
“He never touched me,” she whispered.
“Right… and I passed the MCAT,” I grunted. She raised a questioning eyebrow, and I reached up and pulled the plastic mask off my head. That shit wasn’t as comfortable as they made it look in the movies. All the sweat was making me itchy. “Ya hang around enough of 'em and you pick up a vocab word or two. Burke failed his three times.”
“Four,” Jules replied before she could stop herself, quickly covering her hands with her mouth.
“Okay, new girl.” I grinned. “Guess there’s some history there.”
She shook her head again, her glare taking in my chiseled jawline and dark eyes. The tattoos that twisted up behind my ears and the hair I didn’t bother to maintain when they were gonna shave it all off anyway. She hadn’t noticed before with the way I’d flipped up the collar of my lab coat and kept my shoulders hiked. The hat I pulled low on my head before walking out of Briarwood that night. But I was pretty. Pretty dangerous too. But that just made me prettier, didn’t it?
“No history. Us nurses just talk. Always have more to lose than our physicians do. They never mentioned you, though?” She was trying to be subtle. I didn’t like subtle. Or maybe I liked it too much, and that was the problem.
“Why would they unless they were sending you downstairs…” I watched her face, waiting for my meaning to land. It seemed to breeze past her instead.
“Downstairs?”
“The basement.”
“There’s no—” she started to say, and I cut her off with another slap of my palm on the table.
“What the fuck did your old man do to you, Jules.” I pushed up from the chair, walked over to the sink,turned on the garbage disposal, and dangled a finger over the drain. “Last chance…”
Was I really willing to sacrifice a finger just to make a goddamn point? You bet your sweet ass I was. I didn’t need all ten of 'em to strangle her.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
HIM
“Don’t!” she screeched more than screamed. The sound so piercing—I hated to admit it—but I jumped back a little. Shocked, not scared. I didn’t scare that easy. She stifled a sob and added, “Please don’t.”
“You have exactly two seconds to tell me what I wanna know, Jules, before I’m serving up minced sausages for dinner. And unlike the eggs you wasted, you will eat 'em.”
“I’m telling the truth,” she whispered. “He didn’t touch me! My father didn’t touch me…”
I believed her. Couldn’t explain what it was about the woman. Could have been the fact I’d spent my entire life around liars so I recognized she wasn’t one of them. At least she didn’t want to be. We all had to lie when it was us versus them. When our survival was at stake.
“What he do then?” I pressed her as I switched the garbage disposal off and took a step closer. And another as I slowly guided her back down into her chair.She looked like she might faint if I didn’t. Her own damn fault for washing half a body’s worth of blood down the tub drain and refusing to eat.
I didn’t feel sorry for her. I was annoyed at how fucking stubborn she was being.
She chewed on a nail, her other hand aimlessly tugging at the fishing line in her arm. If she was in pain, it didn’t show. I flicked her fingers away from her mouth and her hand away from her stitches. Setting the knife down between us as I held her wrists in place. Not forcefully. I didn’t have to be forceful when she was letting me do it.
She swallowed down the lump I could hear bubbling in her throat and plastered on a tight smile. “It was me. I did it. I didn’t want to. I swear I didn’t want to. But if I didn’t… well, it was my responsibility. To take care of him. So I didn’t argue. I didn’t say no, and I don’t understand why. I knew it wasn’t right. It didn’t feel right. I swear I didn’t like it!” The words came pouring out of her, almost as if once she let one go, the rest rushed forward to follow until she was tossing a nonsensical confession at my feet.
Literally. The only thing keeping this ghost of a girl upright was my arms digging into her wrists.
I yanked her up off the floor and onto the table. I was afraid she would curl into a ball if I didn’t, and then there’d be no getting nothing from her. “Him touching you, him making you touch your brother. There ain’t no difference, Jules. You get that, right?” I grunted.
She was being ridiculous. Sure, I was as fucked up asthey came. But even I knew when shit was wrong. I just didn’t care to be any different.
She shook her head. “He was my brother. My baby brother.” She hid her face in her hands but I could still hear her rambling. “I touched my brother. Did things… And Robbie… he never got over it. The disgust I felt every time he looked at me… The disgust he showed me. Because we both knew I could have stopped it. I could have tried harder. He didn’t make it to seventeen before he… He hung himself in our living room. He wanted us to find him. He wantedmeto find him. To know why he did it.”
“Makes sense.” I shrugged, and her head shot up to look at me. “Why you became a nurse, not why he offed himself, Jules.” I rolled my eyes. “You couldn’t fix 'em. You couldn’t save him. So you made it your mission to save others. Really ain’t as deep as you made it out to be. Like Psychology 101 shit.”
“I… that’s…” She stared at me, shocked, for a moment.
