by Faye, Amy
By the time the excitement had ended, Caroline had a vague sense of hope that Dad was going to be awake. She had the Toyota, even after Shannen left, and the only thing that she had to worry about at that point was whether or not Brian O'Connor was going to be coming back around when she wasn't there to make trouble for her.
She didn't exactly have any room to worry, though; after all, things were going to be bad no matter what she did or how she tried to deal with it. If trouble was brewing then she wasn't in a position to deal with it.
Caroline was a nurse, not a soldier. Not a fighter. Not anything like that, really. She wanted to help people. If there was some reason that people wouldn't or couldn't accept her help, that was something that she needed to accept.
But the idea of fighting some kind of mobster? To call it unthinkable was an understatement and a half. She wasn't cut out for any kind of fighting, and that would be a fight that turned real ugly, real fast. She shrugged and forced herself not to think too hard about it. That was going to be the only way out of her problems anyways.
Her eyes scanned the street, hoping that she would see someone sitting right out in the open, watching the house. At least then she could justify locking herself up in the house and never leaving again.
Instead, she saw an empty street. Nobody was even parked on the side of the road for the night. They'd all gone off to work hours ago, and it would still be hours more before they were anywhere near ready to come back from work.
She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Her body still felt tense from the anticipation of sex to come, but she had to admit that she wasn't exactly in the mood any more, either. The physical desire was still there but her mind was tied up in other things.
She checked the clock on her phone and decided that she'd waited long enough. Back to the hospital, then.
The car eased out of the driveway easily, and she kept it moving slow, keeping one eye on her rear-view mirror. If she saw someone following her, then that was a clear sign she was being followed.
If she didn't see someone, though, it didn't mean she wasn't being followed, and that was a big part of what had her so spooked. It was only a matter of time until the trouble began but she wasn't one bit prepared for it. She shut her eyes and forced herself to calm down.
The calm came, sort of. Her breaths came a little deeper, her hands steadied on the wheel. She picked up speed until she was a little over the speed limit, and as long as she kept herself concentrated on driving, she even managed to keep herself moving at an almost appropriate rate.
But there was more to it than that, she knew. Because her eyes still lingered a little too long on the rear-view as she drove. Her mind still caught on any two cars that looked a little similar. It was only when she pulled into the hospital parking structure and nobody pulled in after her that she was finally able to calm down a little bit.
She showed her badge to the guard on duty, not that it was any more than a formality. He smiled and waved her in without taking a second glance at it. They knew each other, after all. It was just a matter of routine at this point.
She took the stairs, in spite of herself. The elevator always made her jumpy, but she'd ignored it every day up to this point. She was already jumpy, though, and going on the elevator might push it onto downright panic. She wasn't remotely prepared to accept that right now, and she wasn't in any special hurry.
Dad was out of surgery by the time she arrived. The nurse on duty wasn't someone that Caroline recognized, but she was polite and helpful all the same, and that was all that Caroline could really ask for at that point.
He was sitting up when she went into the new room. There was another bed on the other side, empty. The sheets were pressed in tight and she knew instinctively that there was nobody there at all. Eventually, someone might be moved in, but for now, Dad had the room to himself.
"Hey," he said. His voice sounded weak and far away. She had to remind herself that it was the painkillers that did it to him, more than anything.
"Hey yourself. How are you feeling?"
"They've got me on some real bang-up pain medicine. The best. You've gotta try it."
He winked and she smiled. At least there was something left of her dad in there. That was what she had to cling to because otherwise, she was going to have to worry about him, and she wasn't ready to do that just yet, either.
"I'll pass."
"They said you came to see me earlier while I was in the operating room."
"Yeah," she answered. Her throat choked a little, but she kept herself under control. She didn't have any other choice but to keep herself under control, after all. If she let herself go for even a moment, then she wasn't sure what was going to happen, except that it wasn't going to be good.
"Sorry I wasn't where you expected me," he said.
She looked at him hard. "Do you know a man named Coogan?"
He looked at her with mild surprise. "Where'd you hear that name?"
"Don't worry about where I heard it, just answer the question. Do you know the name?"
"I might have heard it somewhere, I don't really remember."
Between the painkillers, the medicine, and the surgery, there was a real chance that he didn't remember anything about him, whether Dad knew Coogan or not. But something in the way he was acting made that hard to believe.
"Don't lie to me, Dad. I'll know. Now just tell me the truth. What do you know?"
He shrugged and turned the look out the window. The tops of buildings were just barely visible over the windowsill. She squeezed his hand. "He's just a tough, nothing special."
"Is that what happened to your shop?"
"It's not a big deal."
"It's a big deal to me," she told him. "I don't want to have to worry about them deciding to come around here next."
"That won't happen," Dad told her. His voice didn't sound certain, and she tried to remind herself that it could easily have just been the painkillers again, but she couldn't make herself believe it.
"I know a guy," she told him. "I met him a few days ago."
"Oh? How's that?"
"He's…" the question of how much to lie about the answer suddenly loomed large in her mind. There were plenty of ways that she could have gone with it, but the truth was probably the best of them, and it was currently eluding her quite a bit. "You remember that roommate I told you about?"
"Shannon, yeah. I remember. Why?"
"I met him through my roommate," she said. It wasn't totally inaccurate. The fact that he was her roommate was easier to dismiss.
"Her boyfriend or something?"
"Yeah, something like that. I haven't really gotten into it."
"Okay," he said. "What's your point?"
"Well, I kind of mentioned it one time, and then he came back the next day and said he'd talked to Coogan about it. Said that he should be off your back."
"Your roommate's boyfriend knows Sean Coogan?" The expression on his face was somewhere between disbelief and dissatisfaction.
"I don't know anything about it," she told him, halfway true. "I asked who Mr. Coogan was supposed to be and he said he just asked around."
"So before I told you, you only knew the name? Where'd you even hear it?"
"One of the cops said it," she told him. Hadn't she told him this before? She wasn't sure any more, and if he remembered it then he was playing awfully coy. "I just mentioned the whole thing. I don't know about you but I was really upset by the whole thing."
"Yeah? I bet you were. I'm sorry that happened."
"Don't be sorry for me," she told him, her temper flaring just a little bit. "It's not my shop, Dad."
He made a face that she didn't have any interest at all in unpacking. "No, I guess it's not. I'm not worried about it, okay? Your Dad can take care of himself. I'm not decrepit just yet."
He gave her a halfway smile, one that made her throat choke up. She came dangerously close to losing it, and she hated herself for it.
"Miss Rice?"
"Yeah?"
"Dr. Strand is calling for you. He says it's important."
She nodded, tired, and followed along behind. Whatever Dad's doctor had to say, if he said it was important then she'd go, even if every bone in her body said not to.
17
The day had already been too full by the time that she got home. She let out a long breath and closed her eyes, leaning her head up against the steering wheel of the old Toyota, hoped that the strange pulling she'd been feeling as she drove was just the road playing tricks on her, and tried to forget everything that had happened.
It wasn't going to work, she knew. There was too much that needed to be forgotten to make it work, and none of it was likely to happen. But that didn't mean that she wasn't going to try.
The electric garage door made a loud grinding noise as it went down behind her, like it always did. She tried to force herself out of the driver's seat but her body started to stage a protest and Caroline knew that she wasn't in any sort of position to argue with it. Not when she was this tired.
She at least turned the keys in the ignition, and the Toyota went quiet. If only she could have turned everything else in her life off so easily, she might not have had all the trouble she was currently in.
Her eyes scanned the garage, lit only by her dim headlights. This was Dad's place, mostly. He had never complained about her parking the Toyota in there, even though it was obvious that it made it tricky to get to the workbench tucked into one corner.
Over it, on a pegboard, hung dozens of tools, each one hanging from its own special hook. She looked over at them tiredly. The steering wheel was almost totally uncomfortable, but she couldn't bring herself to quite hate laying on it, and she couldn't bring herself to lift her head off of it, either.
She'd never known what a man could use three different hammers for, but he assured her how much he needed them every time she questioned him about it. That wasn't even getting started on the saws, for which she was convinced there could not possibly be a real use. It was a joke, right? There were practically a dozen of them, all lined up one next to the other like there was a difference between them.
Caroline was surprised when the hot tears fell from her eyes. As surprised as anyone, really. What was she so worried about? Dad was going to be fine, she reminded herself. There really was nothing to worry about.
She forced her body to move, in spite of itself. There were a thousand other things she needed to worry about, and getting out of the car was the tiniest one of them. If she couldn't even manage that, how was she supposed to deal with the rest of her life?
She forced her arms to move to the door handle, pull the handle and push the door open. The car started making a loud, annoying beep until she pulled the keys out and turned the headlights off.
Then she swung one leg out. Then the other. That was progress, and if she could make progress on this, she reminded herself as if it was going to make a difference, then she could make a difference on anything. Right?
Her body hurt, not from any sort of fatigue but from a general sense of tiredness that wasn't going to go away no matter how much she slept. No matter how many days off she had.
The back porch light flicked on the minute that she opened the side door of the garage, illuminating the large, slightly overgrown back lawn. She should have mowed, but there was just too much to worry about, and now it was going to be twice as annoying.
But she was going to have to force herself regardless. That was how it was going to be no matter what she did, so there was no reason to kill herself over it. What was done, was done, and she wasn't going to cry over spilled milk when there was so many better things to cry over that she was trying to get herself to ignore.
The door was unlocked. It probably shouldn't have been, but Caroline was past the point where it mattered, and when the den seemed to be in perfectly orderly condition, she took it as proof that there was nothing to worry about.
"You're home," Shannen said. He looked at her from the easy chair, and closed a leather-bound book with a snap as he came to his feet. "Everything okay?"
Caroline shrugged. He was so big that he seemed to practically dwarf her. It felt like everything did today, though. She was too small to deal with any of this, and yet there wasn't much choice but to make sure that she managed somehow.
"Everything's fine." It was a lie but it was the lie she had to tell herself. If she could ever make herself believe it, then she would be telling Shannen the truth.
"I may be an idiot," the big man growled. "But I'm not stupid, you know. I can see you're upset. You want to talk about it?"
"No," she answered. That was even closer to the truth. What she wanted was to pretend that there hadn't been any interruption earlier. To pretend that she wanted him to fuck her senseless as much as she had earlier.
But she didn't. The whole thing was a mistake, and she had known it from the very first instant. She'd been willing to ignore the fact that she knew that, though, when her hormones were pumping and the blood was rushing through her ears. Now, she couldn't even make herself feel any of it.
"If there's something I can do, then…"
She looked up at him. "I think that it was a mistake, earlier."
"You mean when we…"
"That's exactly what I mean."
He let out a long breath as if he were either relieved or frustrated, but she ignored it because she had to ignore it.
"Alright," he said, finally. He pressed himself up to his full height and started to move towards her. Caroline could feel her skin start to prickle. If he was going to make her feel like this, then maybe it hadn't been nearly as much of a mistake.
"It's not you," she said, as if it were going to change something about the way he was feeling. She knew better than to believe that, but she said it regardless. Something told her that she had to tell him, that she'd regret it if she didn't.
"I know that," he said in a voice that sounded remarkably like it had never been in question. "You sure you don't want to talk about it?"
She wanted to talk about everything, she thought glumly. First, she wanted to know the truth about whatever had happened with Coogan. Then she wanted to know why he kept showing up in her life, over and over again, in spite of the fact that he was nobody and nothing to her.
Then, once all that was settled, they might be able to talk about all the other stuff. But that wasn't really an option at this point.
"I'm sure," she answered instead. "Just leave me alone for a little while."
He nodded at her. "Well, whatever I can do, just let me know."
He started past her and Caroline didn't know what she was doing until her arms wrapped around his chest and pulled him in close. "Don't go."
Shannen stiffened in her arms, but he didn't move to pull away from her. "Okay," he said, at last.
She felt like she was there forever, holding him close, but it couldn't have been more than a minute or two. Her body started to shake, with something between silent, dry sobs and the shiver of feeling that went through her when his arms drew, finally, around her shoulders and pulled just the tiniest bit tight.
"I don't know what's wrong with me."
He squeezed her tighter still. She wasn't sure which part of her felt better when he did it, between her body that relaxed into it or her mind, which finally decided she could let herself believe that someone might be on her side.
But he didn't answer. If he knew what was wrong with her, he kept it to himself.
"I'm sorry," she said, finally. Caroline forced herself to relax her arms, and pulled away. Shannen let her go without any argument, without even a comment.
"I'm here if you need me," he said. His own voice sounded as uncertain as hers, as if he didn't know what it was that she wanted and didn't know how he was going to give it to her when she asked for it. But he offered, and that was something at least.
The door
to her bedroom was right there, and part of her wanted to drag him right in with her and finish what she'd started. There was a bigger part of her now, though, and that part was whispering in her ear when she opened the door and slunk inside, over and over. 'What's the point?'
She didn't have an answer for that, and she wasn't likely to come up with one any time soon, she knew. That was the hardest part. No matter what she did, no matter what she thought, she knew that there was no way she was going to be able to get away from that question.
What's the point? Why fight? Why worry about any of it at all? The only thing that she'd get out of it was a few minutes, maybe as long as an hour, and at the end of it, the only hole in her that would have been filled would be the one that she was the least worried about.
18
Work was supposed to be hard, Caroline told herself. There was a lot of it, and the day was twice as long as she would have liked. There was more to worry about in a single day's work than she should have had in a month of her everyday life.
Instead, it was a welcome reprieve from the rest of her life, as if there was nothing to worry about as long as she could keep forcing herself to do a little bit more.
It felt wrong, but she couldn't even hope to deny it. That was the hardest part, she thought. The idea that she had become weak or something. It shouldn't have felt that way because if she were weak then she wouldn't have been able to deal with the nursing, either.
Seeing other people in trouble pulled at her heart strings, but not enough to make her lose her composure. Not like everything else she'd been dealing with lately. And the day moved so fast that she only had a few fleeting moments to wonder what was going on with Shannen. To wonder what she was going to do about him.
For that matter, what he was going to do about her, as well. He'd been different last night. Kind, in a way she couldn't explain. But he'd seen her weakness, no doubt he'd sensed it for what it was, and apparently he wasn't interested in exploiting it. She should have thanked him for that but she just wasn't going to.
Maybe if he'd decided to take advantage, and forced himself on her, she'd feel better somehow. It felt like there was a plug in her brain, and if he could pop the cork free then she wasn't going to begrudge him the methods he used. Not for a moment.