by Kendall Duke
The nurse was a good girl, a decent girl—a decent human being, even. She was way out of my league, but it felt nice to make her blush a little bit. It felt… I don’t know. Something I didn’t recognize any more, some emotion so distant I didn’t have a name for it any more.
Prison is exactly what you think it is. Nothing too terrible happened to me—I had some new scars, but none in a place that really hurt—and I made it out just fine, no real horror stories of my own to tell. But I’d seen some things. Heard some things. And I was glad I only spent two years locked in the zoo with the rest of the animals.
It changed me, like it was supposed to; the judge told me I deserved to be punished, which I found ironic at the time, but he sent me to the right place. I was punished.
And now here I was, technically a free man, but still punished in all the ways that matter.
Two years is long enough for people to forget you. Long enough for the people who remember you to want to forget you, because of what happened; because of the tragedy, the shadow of it, the way it stained your life and everyone who was touched by it. I knew when I got out there’d be nowhere to go; no one was left.
And I felt like I deserved it. I wasn’t a good guy. The cop had it right. You couldn’t be a decent human being like that nurse and survive the things I had; you couldn’t survive anything. Then again… Was this survival? Sleeping on a hard hospital bed at the mercy of the woman that stitched you up after a knife fight at a rainy bus stop?
I guess survival was all it was. Definitely wasn’t living.
Still, I slept. I slept like the dead, which worked for me.
The only people worth my time were dead now, anyway.
Except, maybe… For the nurse.
~~~
Trinity
I went back to wake him up at eight thirty, and it was almost difficult to do. I could just see the exhaustion in his body, once his guard was down and he was actually asleep. Dark circles were under those luminous eyes that I hadn’t noticed, between the fluorescents and that intensely distracting shade of amber; smaller nicks and tears covered his upper arms from the fight, showing up once the blood congealed and the larger wounds were dealt with. He was still incredibly beautiful—long, lithe, stronger than a steel cable, with that shock of silky black hair and a jawline so severe it could cut glass—but he looked… Worn. Weary.
“Hey,” I whispered, trying not to startle him. He’d only gotten five hours of sleep, but I couldn’t let him lay here any longer. I’d already clocked out. “Mr. Marchado?” I reached out and gently laid a hand on his arm, but that was a mistake—he was sitting up and breathing heavily, his hand clamped on my wrist with a vise-like grip. “I’m sorry,” I said, and the haze of sleep instantly left him as he registered my face and sprang back, dropping his hold on me immediately.
“No, I’m sorry Miss,” he said softly. “You alright? I didn’t mean to—”
“I’m fine,” I said, rubbing my skin, trying not to grimace. He hadn’t really hurt me, but I knew he could’ve. My mistake. “I’m sorry—”
“For giving me a place to sleep?” He was watching me rub my arm, his eyes cloudy. “Please stop saying you’re sorry,” he told me, his gaze flicking up to mine. “I’m sorry. I forgot—I didn’t mean to.”
“It’s fine,” I told him, seriously. “Stop looking like that.”
His gaze sharpened. “Like what?”
“Guilty,” I said. “I’ll stop saying I’m sorry if you stop looking guilty.” Again, with that abrupt laugh; it felt like a sunbeam burst through those eyes, the fire was so bright for a moment. I almost laughed with him, but I was swept away by the view. After a quick second he seemed to realize what he was doing and quieted himself, but his eyes stayed trained on mine. We stared at each other for a beat too long. “Come on,” I said, taking a step back and gesturing towards the door. “Let’s go deal with the police and find a clean, dry place for you to recover. If you have no objections to things that are clean and dry.” I didn’t understand why I could talk so freely around him; I was reserved at the best of times, although I was already with a joke if it would alleviate the tension. Then again, certain circumstances definitely loosened my tongue—but not these circumstances. Generally, if I thought a guy was hot—let alone a living flame—I clammed up.
He said nothing, as usual, but stood up and turned his back to me, the length of it revealed for the first time. So many tattoos… So many scars. I was distracted by the one on his left shoulder: a bullet hole. No mistaking it. It was completely healed over, but by the discoloration I’d say it hadn’t happened more than five years ago. Probably less. Even this history of horror didn’t detract from the physical flawlessness before me, and I spun on my heel to stop staring at his naked flesh.
He wordlessly joined me a moment later, having gathered his meager possessions, and we walked out of the ER together towards the back entrance where I was parked. He didn’t seem in the mood to say anything, and it rubbed off on me; besides, I’d gotten even less sleep than he had before I turned up for my shift. When he saw my car, he wordlessly slipped into the passenger side and we made our way to the police station.
We made it all the way to the front entrance without speaking. “Yes?” The officer raised her eyebrows as he approached the bullet-proof glass, and I waited behind. He didn’t meet her eyes, and told her that the police were expecting him. She asked for his name and disappeared somewhere behind the counter. When she came back, I could see a new hardness in her face, as if she hadn’t heard the whole story—the one with the ending where he saved my butt.
We went through the opened door to a large array of desks with officers sitting here and there. The two policemen from last night stood up when they saw Mr. Marchado. “Come back here,” the younger one barked, and started marching through a dim door in the back.
“Why?” I called out before I could think about what I was doing; this was one of those circumstances, I could already tell, where I wouldn’t be able to shut up. I could already tell these guys had it in for Mr. Marchado, and I brought him here.
They hadn’t noticed me before. The older one blanched immediately, but the younger one narrowed his eyes. “For the interview,” he snapped, not bothering with the pretense of politeness while Dr. Vendell wasn’t around. “The one he managed to avoid last night.”
“The one about him saving my life? I’m pretty sure he answered your questions,” I said, pointing at Mr. Marchado, “moments before I went back and sewed up the gashes all over his skin.” We were starting to get some attention from the other officers, and the older one of the pair glanced around with a nervous expression.
“He was arrested during a brawl.”
“Let me guess,” I snapped, my temper crackling. “A brawl that involved the gentlemen that threatened to kidnap me at the business end of a scalpel? The same man that managed to slip—”
“Miss, may I ask who you are?” A third man joined the officers, and the room hushed around us.
“After you tell me what’s back there,” I said, pointing at the door they’d been leading Mr. Marchado towards. This gentleman was older, and he wasn’t wearing a badge; he was dressed in a suit, and something about his courtly demeanor belied a sense of power that might not have been obvious in any other context. The door in question swung open and I heard screamed obscenities; there were several men back there, and all of them had more in common with my attacker than my savior. I could practically smell the detox sweat from here. Heck, that guy might be back there right now, I realized, and a cold fury swept over me.
“The interview rooms, and the cells.” The third gentleman, the oldest one in the suit, was examining me with a calculated look. The other two were still and silent as a grave.
“The interview rooms are for suspects,” I snapped. “For criminals, correct?”
“He is a criminal, Miss,” the older officer pointed out, trying to save face, but I wasn’t having any of it.
“If
you want to speak to this gentleman again,” I told them, “you need to call Dr. Vendell down at County General first. He’s the Director of Operations for our Emergency Department, and on the Board—he’s run for mayor twice, too, though some say his temper made him unsuitable.” I pointed a finger at the older cop, who visibly recoiled from me, knowing his time was done; the younger one, on the other hand, was defiant. He pissed me off even more. “You should be thanking him,” I snarled, “for preventing a bloodbath. Good day.” I turned on my heel, slipped my arm through Mr. Marchado’s elbow, and headed back the way I came.
I didn’t even care if they followed, or what it would look like—a woman in dirty scrubs, clutching the arm of a convict and marching out of the police station. Was I wrong? No.
These were the only situations where my temperament didn’t fail me. I had a powerful sense of justice, my father always said, and it moved me to speak when just about nothing else did. Good old Manuel Espinoza, the sweetest man I ever knew. I wasn’t a wall flower, he told me once, trying to give me a compliment. I was an orchid. I only bloomed when the conditions were just right.
Well, the conditions were apparently very right. My outburst flared through the room, and people moved aside. We were back out in the lobby and headed towards the parking lot in less than five minutes.
Mr. Marchado stopped dead when we got to my car. I looked back at him and waited a moment for him to speak, and was almost ready to just get my butt in the seat when he peered at me over the hood. “Why did you do that?”
“Why wouldn’t I do that?” I stared at him. “Were you expecting me to just let you get taken back to jail?”
We locked eyes over the hood of the car for an uncomfortably long minute. Finally, I put my head down on my arms and gathered my breath; when I looked back up, the flinty resolve I saw hardening in his eyes was gone. “Listen, it’s been a long night. Really long. I haven’t had time to process everything that’s happened, and I just want to go home. I don’t want to argue with you about whether or not to let you go sleep in a ditch, I don’t want to worry about you when I wake up tonight, and I don’t feel manipulated by you in any way, so can we just go home? Please?” I ignored the plural possessive, and hopefully he would too; I was just really tired. All of a sudden, I didn’t feel twenty four years old—uh-oh, forgot about my birthday again: I was now twenty-five, the world’s oldest virgin—I felt about a thousand and four.
He saw something in my eyes that allowed him to say yes with a subtle nod of his head, and we got in the car and drove off.
~~~
Eric
Some people are lonely.
I’m lonely, but you could make a very good argument that I deserved to be. The nurse didn’t. She deserved to have an adoring lover that wanted to count the curls that cascaded down her back, someone who would rub her feet when she got home after working the graveyard shift, someone that would kiss those beautiful coral-ochre-raspberry lips and say, I would never let anyone hurt you. You are safe. No matter what your dreams say about what happened to you last night, you are always safe with me.
But I could tell she didn’t.
I could tell by the way she collapsed on the hood of the car, by the flush of tiredness that filled her whole body. Part of it was the adrenaline crash after confronting those prick cops, part of it was coming down from a night she’d spent working as an ER nurse without even a five minute break after someone tried to march her off to certain death with a scalpel, and part of it was the kind of tiredness that hits you when you know you’ve to go home and deal with all that shit by yourself. I recognized it immediately.
We drove the whole way without speaking. I didn’t know what to do—an ordinary man, one who didn’t have a past like mine, could offer to hold her hand or go buy her some breakfast or even give her something she probably really needed, like licking her pussy until she fell so deeply asleep she wouldn’t even be able to have bad dreams. I hadn’t thought about doing that in a long time, but in that moment I wished, real bad, that I was an ordinary man.
Instead, all I could do was offer her the truth.
“Listen,” I said, turning towards her as we pulled up in front of a condo somewhere in the West End, “I need to tell you something.”
“Okay,” she said, and her eyes were already tired again. What now, they asked, and I took a deep breath and forged ahead, wishing I could spare her but knowing that when she’d gotten a decent rest she’d kick herself if she did this without asking. Which it looked like she wouldn’t.
“I went in for armed robbery—I only got two years because I was an accessory. I drove. But I’d driven before—that was the only time we got caught. I’m not a good guy,” I told her, looking into those emerald-and-azure eyes, “but I will never hurt you, never, for as long as I live, even if you tell me to fuck off right now. I know you think this is somehow easier on you, because of… Whatever personal moral code you’ve got, I guess, but you can tell me to leave at any moment, and I will. You can tell me tomorrow, you can tell me in five minutes, you can open the door right now and tell me to walk to the shelter, which I can, because they open at ten. I just want you to know you don’t owe me anything. You’re a good person, and if I’ve done anything in my life worth doing, it was making sure no one hurt you.”
And then something happened I really should’ve prepared myself for, and absolutely didn’t: her lip started to tremble, and then her chin did, and then… She cried. Just a little bit, just enough to make me want to punch something and yell and not be able to do any of that because it would scare the hell out of her and that was the absolute worst thing I could imagine. But then, of course, it did get worse. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered, “I’m so sorry.” And fuck me, what the hell was I supposed to do? “I can’t believe I’m crying right now,” she said, putting her head on her hands again, and I… I didn’t know what to do—would it scare her if I hugged her? Should I carry her inside? Should I just wait, or should I leave? What the fuck?
But I did something, and I didn’t know I was going to do it until it was already happening. I stood up, went to her side of the car, and opened the door. I crouched down so our heads were level, and pulled her towards me, wrapping my arms around her. And I heard myself saying, “I promise it’s going to be alright. I promise,” and I heard her cry even harder then, and I held on as tight as I could. And then she stopped, and pulled back, and I brushed her hair out of her face. My body moved without my consent or knowledge, but I didn’t mind.
She let me help her stand up, and then I took her keys and locked the car. We walked up the sidewalk together and when she pointed at the door on the left I unlocked it, and we went inside. It was a pretty nice place, a duplex with one of those fenced in courtyard style backyards with a little patio and two bedrooms on opposite ends of a long hall. She kind of slumped on the couch, her face listless, and I got down in front of her and undid the laces on her shoes. When she still didn’t move, I took her shoes, socks, and sweater off, then found the kitchen and got her a glass of water. She was watching me now, though, instead of just staring off into the distance. She drank a little bit, her eyes all crimson around the edges, then put down the glass. “My room-mate is gone,” she said, and stared down at the floor. “So you can sleep on her bed. There are clean sheets in the hall closet. And the… The hot water heater is broken, and one of the windows in the kitchen has a crack, and…” Her lip was starting to tremble again, so I sat down beside her and put my hand next to hers on the couch, just close enough so that our pinkies brushed against one another. I just wanted her to know I was there for her, without freaking her out by touching her too much.
“I’ll take the couch,” I said. “Let’s get you to bed, okay?”
She turned and looked at me then, full in the face, and frowned. “Hey… I never asked what you like to be called. Should I keep calling you Mr. Marchado?”
“No,” I said, and stopped myself just in time from making some lame joke about
how that was my dad’s name. He was dead now, so it wouldn’t be funny when she asked why I wasn’t with him instead of headed to the shelter. “Call me Eric.”
“My name is Trinity,” she said, looking down at her hands again. “I can’t believe I just cried in front of a stranger.”
“Been a hell of a night, Trinity,” I told her, trying to make her feel better, and she nodded down at her fingers. Salmon, cream, another splash of raspberry, a little bit of peach with a dash of ice white. Burnt sienna, cocoa, orange blossom. Maybe I was hungry, but that was a lot of colors that also happened to be edible. I shoved away the thought that maybe the nurse was giving me an appetite again, and probably not for food. Not helpful, asshole, I told myself.
“I’m really tired,” she said, her voice barely more than a whisper. I nodded. Her pinkie hooked over mine for a second as she looked up at my face, her eyes seeking mine. “Thank you,” she whispered.
“Don’t,” I said, making sure I sounded as gentle as I could. “Don’t apologize.”
“Don’t feel guilty,” she told me, smiling suddenly as she remembered. I nodded, although I did feel guilty; I would never stop feeling guilty. It was the price I paid for living, but I didn’t tell her any of that either. “Alright Eric,” she told me. “I’m going to bed.”
“Good night, Trinity,” I said.
I sat up for a long time after she left, staring at the door that closed behind her; when I was sure she was asleep I thought about leaving. It would be much simpler—she didn’t need me in her life. She might be thankful she had someone around right now, but eventually the reality of who that someone was would interfere with whatever positives she might find in this situation. I didn’t want to do that to her.
But then… I thought of her face. Her beautiful, achingly lovely face, the tears that trembled on those copper-and-russet lashes, the sadness she felt once the world slowed down again and it was time to go home.