Page 58 of Darling Venom
And another label, in green:
Full Price.
My chest hurt as I decoded the not-so-subtle message he’d tried to give her. I took a deep breath, grabbed my phone, and texted Jonah again.
Me: Hey, Jonah?
Jonah: Sup?
Me: Please don’t give up. She’s worth the wait.
“I need a loan.”
Terry leaned against my doorframe at ten o’clock at night, about as welcome as a flaming bag of dog shit.
He didn’t smell much better than said bag. The mixture of piss, cheap alcohol, and his own impending demise gave him the exclusive scent of a nineteenth-century brothel.
His nose had turned a permanent shade of Santa red sometime last year, and I wondered how many rock bottoms he’d hit before he finally took a hint. By my count, he’d plowed through at least six of them in the past decade.
Clearly, rock was not a hard enough material to stop him from plummeting down the abyss of self-destruction. He was so far gone I was surprised we were still in the same atmosphere.
I propped my shoulder against my wall, finger-shooting my own temple as my cheeks popped.
Boom.
“Very funny.” He staggered back. “I need help.”
“Please enlighten me as to why you think I care?”
“You’re my son.”
“Right. Your son who has already paid your rent for the past couple of years. Get a job, Terry. I’m not social services. You can’t ask me for money and throw your children at my doorstep when shit gets tough.”
I slammed the door in his face.
Another knock invaded my space, followed by a loud burp.
God-fucking-dammit.
Full disclosure: I’m not exactly the happy-go-lucky type.
Today, I was in a particularly sour mood. One of my patients had delivered a stillborn six months in. She’d been through hell and back trying to conceive, and this marked her last-ditch attempt. It was supposed to be her rainbow IVF baby.
Last month, she’d turned forty-five. We both knew what that meant after I delivered the baby, blue and small and pulseless, curled into herself.
There would be no going back to the drawing board for this patient. Her lifelong dream would not be fulfilled.
When I’d left the operating room, dumping my medical mask into the trash, her husband was there. He looked out the window of the tall building, and I knew what he was thinking.
I knew, because the same thoughts had swirled in my head in the months after Kellan had taken his life.
The thump on the door became a kick.
I opened it again, scowling. “What?”
“You know…” He pushed past me, shoving at my chest as he wobbled inside. I could knock his ass down with a finger, but I let him in anyway. I didn’t need my neighbors talking about this tomorrow morning. “One would think you’d at least be a bit more remorseful about killing the only son that meant something to me.”
This old tune again.
