Presley is freaking out in every sense of the word—crying, screaming, yelling, though definitely not making any moves to grab her phone from her purse if I had to guess. The second dog shakes his head with my arm still inside its mouth, then releases and bolts off toward the office. Jake takes this golden opportunity to mosey out. His face twists in shock and immediate remorse when he gets close enough to see the scene and puts two and two together. The dog under me has stopped writhing because he recognizes defeat. Jake locks up the dog nearest him in a pen off to the side before jogging over.
“How did they get out?” Jake says, face pale and terrified as his gaze darts between me, his dog, and Presley. “They were in the fenced-in area. I checked when we first came out.”
“Funny thing is I was wondering the same fuckin’ thing,” I say, adrenaline coursing through my body. Presley snivels and my rage simmers as spots of blood spread on my gray sweatshirt and she notices. Jake stoops down and grabs the spiked collar. Standing slowly, I grab the injured arm and cradle it. It’s not broken, but I’m sure I’ll need stitches.
As Jake drags the confused dog to the pen with the other one, Presley lays a palm softly on my shoulder. “Let me see. How bad is it?” When I meet her eyes, they’re round and fearful.
I shrug. “It’s a scratch. I’m fine.” If I showed her the wounds she’d pass out. I’m sure of it. “Are you okay?” The question slips from my mouth before I can sugarcoat the words with a joke or insult. It sounds like I give a shit about her, which I do. It is my job to care, but she can’t know I do because then she’ll wonder why. That complicates things more than I need.
Presley doesn’t seem to catch the slipup. “I’m shaken, and I’m only okay because you jumped in front of the dogs.” Her voice shakes. “Why did you do that? How did you know they were about to… attack?”
“I grew up with dogs. Big ones. That protect,” I offer. “It was instinct. No big deal.”
Her body trembles. “Well,” she says in a quiet voice. “Thank you.”
I grumble, scowl at my arm, and ignore her question. “Let me guess. There’s no doctor in this godforsaken town is there?”
Jake comes back, a dirty first aid kit in his hand. “I’m so sorry, let me see what Tiger did to your arm. We do have a doctor in town, but he’ll be leaving for the day soon.” He offers the kit. “I have a steady hand and know how to patch things up.”
“Things?” Presley shrieks. “He’s a human, not a car!” There is a little satisfaction that comes with knowing she’s irritated with Jake, and it shocks the shit out of me. “I’ll escort him over to the town physician. We’ll call on our way so he stays.”
I eye the first aid kit warily. It will almost certainly get infected if I let him do field medicine right now. I slide up my sleeve and peer at the gaping holes, with light-colored flesh poking out around the edge, and dark, red blood pooling in the center of four, visible puncture wounds. “I’m going to go ahead and agree with Presley here.” I slide my sleeve back down just as Presley leans over to try to get a look. “And thanks for… nothing, I guess. We’re both leaving without a vehicle, and I’m leaving disfigured.”
Jake’s eyes flare as he drops the kit by his side. “I can’t apologize enough. I’m so sorry.”
“You could give her the Jeep for a fair price so we can get to the doctor before he leaves? That’s a solid enough apology. For me. What about you?” I raise my voice so Presley knows I’m asking her the question.
She stammers, then says, “Yes, yes. That’s fine. I’ll come back tomorrow with the money.” Her neck works as she swallows. “It’s not like you and the rest of this town don’t know where I live.”
Jake reaches into his pocket and throws the keys to her. She catches them. Barely.
“Deal. I’m sorry, again. I’ll go open the side gate so you can drive out. I hope your arm is okay, man.” He walks over to the gate after telling us where to find the doctor.
Presley gets into the driver’s seat, but her hands are shaking on the wheel. “It’s a scratch. I’m fine. Can you drive a stick?” I ask, staring straight ahead out the window over to where the truck I was looking at is parked.
She scoffs at my question as if it is stupid and starts the car easily. “I can drive all of the sticks,” she retorts, chuckling. “If it was a scratch, you would have let Jake patch it up. You used the word disfigured.”
I groan. “I was manipulating the situation to get you a good deal on the Jeep.” She cranks the engine and it doesn’t sound great. I’ll be working on it before the week is over if I want peace of mind while she’s driving. “You’re welcome.”
“I already thanked you.” Presley drives out of the lot carefully, avoiding debris and tires as she accelerates through the shithole maze. “Plus, I’m still kind of creeped out that you, a stranger, would take a proverbial bullet for someone you don’t know.”
“You’ve obviously never met a gentleman,” I say.
She laughs, turning onto the main road and braking at a red light. “You are not a gentleman.”
“How can you say that?”
She tilts her head. “Your eyes.”
This, I laugh at. “My eyes? Do you think I’m a werewolf or something?”
Her neck works down a swallow. “You’re a liar. Your eyes. I know it. I know when I’m being played.”
“And yet you’re here with me, alone.”
I narrow my eyes at the doctor’s office that appears to be, you guessed it, an old house.
Presley slides it into neutral, pulls the parking brake, and meets my eyes. “Jake knows I’m with you for starters, so I’m not alone even though I am. You took a dog attack for me so you earned a little credibility.” I don’t say anything, I sit with her assessment, and thank God, the dog bit me. I didn’t take into account that Presley has been surrounded by people who lie for a living since the moment she was born. “And if it’s actually true that you like to bake, like you say, that gives you a few bonus points. Something I’ll easily be able to determine at work. If you’re lying, Nate, I will know. I will catch you.” Presley takes the keys out of the ignition. “We’re here. I’ll wait here for you.” There is no way she will stay, she’ll leave my ass here and I haven’t even bugged the Jeep yet.
“Will you come in? In case he needs an eyewitness account of what happened?”
She narrows her eyes at me. “Okay,” she replies, exasperated.
“Am I an inconvenience?”
Presley shakes her head. “No, just a little confusing. Are you going to call your girlfriend?”
I swallow hard. “I don’t want her to worry. I’ll call her later.”
Presley scoffs as she opens the door and gestures for me to go in first. “But she’d worry about a scratch? Liar.” The last word she says under her breath, but I was meant to hear it.
“Hello,” I call out when I see an empty front desk.
Presley steps in front of me. “We have an emergency.”
Cradling my arm, I step up to the desk and ring a bell on the counter. Three times for good measure. As predicted, an old, weathered man comes from somewhere in the back, briefcase in hand. “Oh, I was leaving for the day.”
Had we have walked; we would have missed him. “Jake’s dogs down at the junkyard attacked, and I need to be stitched up.”
The man’s face is ruddy, and the wrinkles beside his eyes deepen. “Why did they attack, were you trying to steal from them?”
Presley looks like she might rage on him. “We didn’t steal anything! The dogs came out of nowhere while we were looking at cars to potentially purchase.”
The doc nods his head to the Jeep through the window. “You paid for that vehicle out there then?”
I have to laugh. The doc turns his suspicious gaze to me. “You from around here?”
“Listen, I haven’t bought it yet, but I’m bringing Jake the money tomorrow,” Presley butts in. “We’re both new to Gold Hawke, and I have to
say everyone has been so welcoming.” She folds her arms across her chest and looks like she’s about to rail into him.
“Can you blame those of us who have called Gold Hawke our home for most of our lives? Newcomers come into our small town, steal our cars, barge into our businesses at closing, and order us around.”
I groan, shocked at how awful, and hopefully misunderstood these people are. “The car isn’t stolen. Call over to the junkyard if you don’t believe us. Jake let us take it to get here quicker, which doesn’t seem to matter because I’m bleeding and you don’t give a shit.” I pull up my sleeve and let the blood start dripping on the tile floor. “If you point me in the direction of a med kit, I’ll gladly take care of this myself.”
That gets his attention, but only barely. “There is an ER up the freeway.” He pauses, rubbing his salt and pepper beard.
“But obviously, you won’t make us drive up the freeway when you could fix him up right here. Do not make him stitch himself up. Please. I’m not sure I could exist anywhere near his ego, if in fact, he is also capable of doing such a task.”
Turning, I smirk at Presley, and the annoyance dripping from her words. It’s cute. “Matter of fact, I can stitch up myself. I’ve had training.”
The doctor grumbles under his breath about the liability and nods his head to the back. “Come on then.”
“Wow, your bedside manner is something to behold. I’m not lying,” I say loud enough for her to hear. “I was a medic when I was in the military.”
And, now I have his full attention, clearly this man is a veteran. Sitting on the bench I shrug out of the sweatshirt and ball it under my left arm. He scoots toward me on a stool and opens a storage cabinet next to me. Presley tentatively stops at the doorway and leans against the frame. She’s trying to learn about me so she can dissect me. Or worse, make up relevant jokes. “What branch?” the doctor asks. Not because he’s trying to distract me from the pain, because he really is curious.
“The Navy. I don’t really like talking about my time served though.” A lot of shit went down before I tried out for The Charge Men. While the SEAL Team resume bullet point is probably the main reason I was accepted into the fold, it’s also the reason I’m mentally fucked, and distance myself from everyone and everything.
“He’s a baker, too,” Presley pipes in. “And probably a candlestick maker.”
I roll my eyes. “That wasn’t a good joke,” I deadpan, but when I meet her eyes, I will her to hear my nonverbal thanks for changing the direction of our conversation. “I picked up a few skills here and there by necessity is what she’s not so eloquently trying to say.” The doctor grunts, and begins stitching. The antiseptic burns.
“Everything I say is eloquent,” Presley says. “What’s the highest-ranking popcorn?”
“Don’t humor her,” I tell the doctor. “This is her twisted way of repaying me for jumping in front of the dogs and taking this injury for her.”
“A kernel! Colonel. Hah!” Presley interrupts.
The man winces. “That’s an Army rank.”
“Great, you don’t have a sense of humor either,” Presley drawls. “Just trying to lighten the mood. This place is kind of…drab. Navy. Army. Military. It’s all the same.” My innards twitch from her last sentence. If only she knew how different they actually are. How Navy SEALs are the only group who were granted access to The Charge Men tryouts because of the skill set they possess.
Instead of roasting her, I say, “What should it be? It’s a doctor’s office.”
Focusing on her face as she scans the beige walls and outdated artwork from the eighties, I think how they couldn’t have chosen a place more different than where she came from. I have no idea how they select locations for Principals, but this time it seems they threw a dart at a map. Presley lifts and lowers one shoulder as the spark drains from her eyes. “I don’t know, I guess. The whole town is kind of drab.”
The doctor finishes suturing the fourth hole, tugging to close it. He’s quick, I'll give him that. “Do you need me to fill out paperwork?” I’d rather not, it’s another glaring difference between Gold Hawke and basically anywhere else I’ve ever lived so it may work in my favor this time. Is nothing official around here?
“What’s your name?” he asks, snipping the end of the thick suture with a pair of scissors.
“Nate Sullivan,” I reply, pulling my arm up to look at his handiwork. “Dissolvable?”
He shakes his head. “Nope. Stop by in a week and let me take a look.” He rolls his chair over to another shelving unit and opens it up and rustles around for an empty orange bottle and extends it to me. “Antibiotics. Take two a day, morning and night until they are gone. Those dogs are pretty nasty. I’ll call over there and find out when they last had a rabies shot.”
“He might have rabies?” Presley’s voice shakes as I eye the random bottle in my palm. No name, no dosage, just the name of the antibiotic and the milligram.
“No,” I reply. I hope not. “It’s a precaution. Their mouths are filthy and are filled with bacteria. I’m sure they don’t have rabies.”
“Gosh!” Presley exclaims, stomping out of the room and into the lobby. “What is going to happen next?” She says it to herself but both the doctor and I hear.
He nods at her. “She’s a strange bird. You know any of her backstory?”
I feed him the lies we created for her and he seems to hang on my every word. “She’s a little flamboyant, but she means no harm,” I add. I clear my throat. “If the dogs had bitten her, I knew it would have been the end of the world.” There’s a viable explanation for my misplaced heroic act. “No one would have wanted to deal with that. Especially a man as busy as yourself.”
“Agree. You did the right thing.” He narrows his eyes. “That’s because you’re a Navy man.” Ah, the other easy sell. “Even if you didn’t plan to take the fall, you would have because you’re a solid man.”
I nod. “Yes, sir.” I hold up my arm gingerly. “Thanks for sewing me up.” I tell him my address so he knows where to send the bill.
He grunts. A noise that I understand means he won’t be sending me a bill. “Take the pills,” he calls after me.
Presley is sullen, pacing around the gravel parking lot when I exit. Her head down, and curses molding around her lips as she hisses. She kicks a rock with her dirty Converse sneakers, then curses louder when the dust kicks up high enough that it’s near her face.
She’s waving her palm back and forth in front of her nose when I walk up. “You doing okay?” I ask.
“This place. This place. Are you ready to go or is rabies eating your brain and we need to go to the hospital?”
I slip my hands into my pockets. “No rabies.”
“Of course,” she says, sighing loudly.
“I’ll take you home then.”
“My home is far away from here, but if you’d be so kind as to drop me off up on the mountain, I’d be grateful.” My arm is starting to throb as the adrenaline wears off. “I could walk it if you have somewhere to be.” I smirk.
She scowls at me. “Real funny. I could have plans. There’s a casino down the road. Maybe I have plans to play penny slots for the free, watered-down drinks all night long.”
Narrowing my eyes, I shake my head. “You don’t strike me as a penny slot kind of woman.”
I crank on the handle and get into the passenger seat as she scurries into the driver’s seat. Curiosity gets the better of her. “What kind of woman do you take me for then?”
Silence hangs in the cabin of the Jeep until she starts the engine. I purposefully stay quiet, as if I’m being thoughtful. I know every detail about her life and want it to look like I’m just now thinking about her personality. “Well, you agreed to befriend me to blend into our new town better so that makes you at least a little vain.”
Another scowl, but she keeps her eyes on the dirt road. “Remember I’m doing you a favor, too.” She glance
s at me briefly. “Does it hurt?”
“It’s a scratch. I’m fine.”
“Sullivan, huh? Nate Sullivan.” She tastes my name, trying to judge me by a name. I know her kind. Names mean everything to them. It’s an unfortunate thing, because her name is the reason why her life is over and she’s here.
“Are you trying to determine the kind of man I am by my name?”
Presley presses her lips together. “No, I guess it doesn’t strike me as your real name.” She eyes me again. Longer this time.
“Hmm. You should take it up with my parents.”
She rubs the back of her neck, pinching it between her fingers. “You never finished. Tell me what kind of woman you think I am based on today’s events.” That’s actually easier when she says it that way. Today. I can base her off today.
“I think your jokes are bad, and you know they’re bad. I think you like Junkyard Jake. More than just enough to get a good deal on a car. I think you hate Gold Hawke. I don’t think that will ever change.” I sigh. “I also think you’re going to miss the turn onto my road.”
She skids on the dusty gravel and makes the turn at the last second. Presley eyes me, shaking her head after she barely makes it. “You thought wrong.”
“You have better reflexes than I gave you credit for. I didn’t think anything wrong. In fact, I’m one-hundred-percent sure I’m right.”
“You didn’t say anything profound. Everyone hates Gold Hawke. Look around, these people are barely alive. And maybe my bad jokes are how I’m dealing with how dead this place makes me feel. Also, Junkyard Jake is my best shot, again, have you looked around?”
I focus on the one statement she speaks about her life. The only thing I care about. How dead this place makes me feel. Her words cut to my core. I cannot make the same mistake twice. I vow it. No matter the cost. It is my duty. Presley tugs on the wheel when my house, the only residence on this road comes into view. There’s more gravel in the drive up to the side of the cabin where she parks.
“Well, you could come in and watch the sunset out back or we could go drink watered-down vodka sodas at the casino. If you want. Since we are friends now, gotta keep up appearances.” What I want is to fuck off and relax while I halfheartedly listen to her watch shit television, but God knows I never, not even once, get what I want. The bite wounds sting, and I wince, then meet her gaze. After everything that has happened today, I need to know she is safe right now. The pain in my arm be damned, I love this job and I want to keep it.
The Love You Hate: A Charge Man Novel (The Charge Men Series Book 1) Page 3