by BETH KERY
The meter maid glanced up, watching him as he backed up the car a foot, swung it into a tight U-turn and accelerated down the dark street.
* * *
A half hour later, he leaned against the circular information desk at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. The security guard behind the desk was elderly, his snowy white hair a bright contrast to his dark brown skin. Everett had learned that his name was Nathan.
“We got some of the spillover from the traffic from that premiere of yours over here by the hospital the other night,” Nathan said, giving Everett a condemning glance.
“That’s terrible,” Everett said. “They should control traffic flow better around a hospital.”
“Especially when we’ve got the busiest ER in the city,” Nathan added pointedly. “Imagine how bad you’d feel if all those crowds got in the way of your sister—what’s her name? Joy Hightower?—getting treatment as quick as she needed it.”
“Yeah. All because of a stupid movie.”
“It wasn’t stupid, though,” Nathan said, his sudden amiability suggesting he’d admonished Everett sufficiently for being inconsiderate enough to plan his premiere near a hospital. “The missus and I saw it the other night. She wants to see it again.”
“I’ll send some tickets here to the hospital. Which theater would you like to see it at?” he asked, resisting a strong impulse to check his watch out of impatience.
“That’d be mighty nice of you! Margaret will be over the moon when I tell her about meeting you.”
Everett jotted down the name of the theater along with the security guard’s name.
“It’s a real shame about your plane getting in late and your missing out on visitors’ hours,” Nathan said offhandedly as he plucked at his computer keyboard.
“Yeah. Rotten luck,” Everett said, gazing longingly at the bank of elevators behind the security desk.
“I saw you in the spy movie—Killer Instinct. You reckon you learned anything about being sneaky in that movie?”
Everett blinked. “Tons. I may look clueless, but that’s just an act.”
Nathan hid a grin. “You’d have to be slick to avoid the night nurse on the eighth floor. Name’s Edna Shanoy, and she’d scare the daylights out of a real CIA agent if she ever caught him on her floor past visiting hours.”
“Thanks, Nathan,” Everett said earnestly.
“For what?” Nathan asked mildly, turning his attention to his monitors.
* * *
Everett took the stairs instead of the elevators, not having ever learned enough skills while playing a spy to know how to muffle the sound of an elevator door opening. He was glad he had, because the hall he stepped into on the eighth floor was amazingly hushed, dim and inactive at midnight. He saw no one as he hurried down the hall, peering into several doors and realizing he wasn’t on the medical unit proper. These weren’t patient rooms. He stayed in the shadows of a door recess and stuck his head out. Ahead, he saw a bright light and a young nurse with a sweet, round face and short auburn hair rise from her seat at the nursing station and walk into a room behind it. This close, Everett could see the patient rooms were straight ahead of the nursing station.
Ideal location for a nurse to see her patients’ rooms; less than perfect for an interloper.
He plunged down the hallway before the young nurse returned, dipping into the first patient room on the right. Four times, he struck out miserably, his only saving grace that all of the patients were sleeping when he snuck up to look at them. He checked the nursing station before he reentered the hallway again and held a curse. The nurse had returned. He waited until her back was to him as she returned a chart to the cart and darted into the room directly to the right of him.
The bed closer to the door was empty, the bed neatly made. The privacy curtain had been partially pulled, making it impossible for him to see the identity of who was in the other bed. He pushed the door closer to the “shut” position, but still left it open enough not to raise suspicion. How was it that hospital patients were granted no privacy whatsoever? he wondered irritably.
He knew he’d found Joy. He had no idea how. Maybe her singular scent somehow lingered in the air. Maybe he knew because of the way his already pounding heart started to do a battle-like drumbeat in his ears.
He stood by the side of her bed, looking down at her. They’d left on the light just above her head. The fierce beating against his eardrums seemed to wane and almost stop. She lay fast asleep, her face very pale, an IV inserted into her arm. He realized he was holding his breath, waiting to see her chest rise and fall. He couldn’t see the subtle movement in the loose-fitting hospital gown, and so, desperate, he moved closer to her and placed his hand over the top swell of her left breast.
He felt her warmth and the precious beat of her heart next to his palm. His pulse began to throb again at his throat.
There was a white bandage at the side of her neck. Was that from the biopsy? Had there been some complication with the procedure? Is that why she’d had to stay overnight and required an IV?
He looked around anxiously for a medical chart, but recalled they were kept behind the nursing station. Joy’s hospital room seemed barren. Only a plastic glass and pitcher of water, some Chapstick, a napkin and a book lay on the bedside table. In some of the other patient rooms he’d sneaked into, he’d seen flowers around the beds, cards from family members, he realized, a pain going through him.
He picked up the book and saw it was a worn copy of Razor Pass. He set it down and almost turned away before he halted. He picked up the napkin that had been partially covered by the book. His face looked back at him. Once again, he marveled at how Joy had managed to capture so perfectly in his gaze what he felt as he looked at her in that classroom—the essence of what he was only beginning to comprehend.
He set the sketch on the table.
He walked over to the far side of Joy’s bed and carefully lowered the metal rail, wincing at the squeaky metallic sound the hinges made. Hadn’t this thing ever been lowered? She stirred almost imperceptibly at the noise.
“Joy?” he said quietly, sitting on the edge of her bed.
She didn’t budge, but he thought he saw her eyelids flicker.
“You didn’t want anyone here, but I’m here anyway,” he said gruffly.
He touched her cheek, and then came down in the bed next to her. He curled on his side, trying to make his large body as innocuous as possible on the narrow bed. With his arm just above her waist and his hand opened along the side of her rib cage, he could feel her slow, even breathing more easily. Through the sanitized, slightly chemical odor that clung in hospitals, he inhaled her floral scent.
Her facial muscles tightened. She moved her mouth, speaking with no sound. Her head jerked slightly, and she tilted her chin in his direction. Her lips were dry. He reached across her, mindful not to disturb the IV tube, and grabbed the Chapstick. He rubbed some of the emollient onto his fingertip and carefully outlined her lips with it. Again, her mouth moved.
“Shh,” he soothed, slicking the emollient along her lower lip.
“Everett,” she said with what appeared to be great effort.
A muscle leapt in his cheek at the sound of her saying his name in a rough, hoarse whisper.
“I’m here. Go back to sleep,” he murmured, although he wasn’t sure she’d ever really awakened. Her facial muscles slackened, and once again her breathing grew even.
He recalled how she’d kissed his thigh and said his name before she’d come so sweetly back into his arms. Was that really just last night? he wondered, amazed. That memory of her saying his name while she dreamt had been what he’d clung to after he’d gotten the letter where she’d said everything was over. Joy might be convinced it was best for her to be alone during the waking hours, but her sleeping self thought differently.
He just lay there, alert and unmoving, looking his fill of her face.
* * *
When her mom had first been hospitali
zed, Joy had been twelve. When she sat next to her mother’s bed, gazing at her while she slept, she was small enough that she did so through the metal guardrails. They had reminded her of the bars of a prison cell.
Suddenly, someone stepped forward and lowered the rail, the metal hinges squawking. She could see her mother clearly now, sleeping peacefully. She glanced up to thank her uncle Seth, but instead saw Everett standing there, wearing his ragged plaid cap, his jaw no longer clean shaven, but darkened with whiskers.
He smiled at her—that flash of pure brilliance. Her heart began to beat erratically. Why did her eyelids feel so heavy? She wanted to see him, more than anything.
But she was seeing him. Wasn’t she?
“I know how much you cherish your privacy,” he said, suddenly sober.
“I know,” she said. Her throat was so sore, it was laborious to talk. “You said so—on that talk show.”
“You saw that? You knew I was talking about you?”
To nod took all of her effort, and she still wasn’t quite sure she’d managed it.
“It was the only real part of the interview,” he said confidentially as he sat on the edge of her bed—for suddenly it was she who was lying there, not her mother. Everett’s body was a welcome weight on the mattress. She wanted desperately to tell him how glad she was he was there, but it felt like her larynx had been tied in a painful knot. Her mouth felt so dry.
She drifted.
Everett touched her upper lip. Her body responded to his touch and scent: her breath quickened, her nerves tingled, her nipples tightened against the cloth covering them. He slid his fingertip along her lower lip. She wanted so much to thank him for lowering her prison bars and freeing her, but her eyelids and her throat and her voice were failing her. Then she couldn’t remember what she’d meant by prison bars and she had to narrow the focus of her willpower even more in order to utter the name of her desire.
She did so with terrific effort.
“Everett.”
“I’m here. Go back to sleep,” she heard his gruff voice say. But was it real? Or was she dreaming?
She felt the weight of his head on the pillow next to her. He covered her breast softly with his hand, and she felt her nipple press against his warm palm. He was here.
He was real.
She relaxed, surrendering her struggle, and sank back into the dark, peaceful realm of sleep.
* * *
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Everett started at the sound of the harsh female voice. His eyelids popped open. He stared at the blue-and-white print on the hospital gown Joy wore. He’d fallen asleep with his head on the pillow next to her. He immediately looked into her face, concerned, but Joy continued to sleep.
“Get your damn hand off that girl!” the scandalized voice said.
Everett blinked and gazed first at the large shadow looming on the other side of Joy’s bed. Edna Shanoy, he thought with a sense of dread, remembering what Nathan had called the fearsome eighth-floor night nurse. He glanced to where she was glaring with large, protuberant eyes. His hand lay on Joy’s breast.
He removed it hastily. “If you could just keep your voice down,” he said groggily. “I don’t want to wake her.”
“You know . . . I think that’s . . . I would swear that’s Everett—”
“I don’t care if it’s Everett Hughes!” Edna hissed, interrupting the soft, incredulous female voice. Her square jaw quivered with indignation. “No one sneaks onto my unit and paws at my patients.”
Everett clambered out of the bed, snatching his cap from where it’d fallen behind Joy’s pillow. Behind the boulder-like body of Edna Shanoy, he saw the slight figure of the young, auburn-haired nurse staring at him with wide eyes.
“All right, I’m going,” he said in a hushed tone, clapping his hat on his head. Edna bared her teeth at him menacingly as he rounded the bed. “I’m not some kind of degenerate,” he snapped. “I happen to be in love with her.”
“You can tell the officer about it,” Edna said, tilting her head smugly toward the hallway.
“But Miss Shanoy, I think it really is him. I saw that sketch next to the patient’s book when I was pouring her water earlier and I thought it looked like Everett Hughes,” the young nurse said breathlessly, “and now here he is—”
“Shut up, Cheryl,” Edna Shanoy growled.
Cheryl’s spine stiffened angrily, but she didn’t retort. Everett looked past both of them, hoping to see Nathan’s kindly face in the hallway. Instead, he saw a tall, burly outline dressed in black. His gaze skimmed the letters on the bulletproof vest.
Shit. Chicago PD.
“Our night duty officer from the ER, here to take care of you, pervert,” Edna said, giving him a beady, triumphant glance.
“Twisted cow,” he muttered. He ignored Edna’s snort of disbelieving fury and glanced back at Joy. Her eyes didn’t open, but her head moved on the pillow and her expression was anxious. He shot an annoyed glance at Edna and stalked out of the room. He didn’t want the woman shouting any more accusations and waking her. He rolled his eyes when the cop grabbed his elbow.
Could this night get any worse?
“You’re under arrest,” the police officer said.
Apparently, it could.
Twenty
Joy entered her apartment on Tuesday evening feeling like she’d just gone a couple rounds in the ring with a prizefighter. Except for the soreness at her throat, her aches had nothing to do with the procedure. Her fever had flared again this morning, delaying her discharge and causing her muscles to throb in protest. She felt like an eighty-year-old woman as she entered her bathroom and removed her clothing, the Band-Aid that covered where the IV had been and the bandage on her neck.
She hesitated before she stepped into the steaming water. Part of her wanted nothing more than to wash off the clinging remnants of the hospital from her skin, yet there was that other fragrance that she caught sporadically when she tilted her head to the right—spicy and complex, male and delicious.
How could it be that she kept catching Everett’s scent on her?
She blinked heavily, fatigue weighing her down. She wasn’t thinking properly. The lingering effects of the anesthesia, the fever, or both were making her have strange experiences and memories. Like how she could have sworn she’d woken up in the middle of the night and opened her eyes with extreme effort, only to see the oddest sight—men’s white-and-silver running shoes with orange stripes stacked one on top the other and pressing against the footrest of her hospital bed. She strained to recall what was attached to those shoes, but nothing came.
Very odd. Why should that unlikely memory make her want to weep? Was it because she’d seen how many times not only Seth but Everett had tried to call her between last evening and when she’d checked her cell phone on the cab ride home? She couldn’t find the energy to listen to the messages Everett had left her. It’d make her sad. It’d fill her up with more longing than she knew what to do with in her moment of weakness.
She’d barely had sufficient energy to call Seth, who was at the St. Louis airport. He’d been so frantic with worry that she hadn’t called him earlier that he’d been in the process of changing his flight from Los Angeles to Chicago. She’d assured him that she was fine and explained about the fever delaying her discharge. By the time she’d gotten off the phone with him, he seemed mollified.
She willed her exhaustion and ragged emotional state to the periphery of her consciousness and gingerly stepped into the hot spray. It was a blessed thing. She showered mechanically, taking special care in regard to the small incision on her neck, cleaning it as the discharge nurse had instructed. After she’d stepped out, she affixed another bandage, ran a comb through her hair, took her medication and brushed her teeth, her legs growing weaker and weaker by the second.
She dressed in a tank top and sleeping shorts, padded to her cool bedroom and threw back the comforter. It’d been after five o’clo
ck by the time she’d finally been discharged. It was past six now. Pale evening light peeked around the closed drapes. She sagged into the mattress with a sigh of relief. Despite her exhaustion, she couldn’t immediately sleep. It was as if she was forgetting something . . . some important detail.
She kept searching through her sluggish brain, anxious for some clue. Sleep claimed her before she could locate the crucial, elusive thread.
* * *
She swam languidly in the in-between world between sleep and wakefulness. Someone touched her lower lip, stroking her. She opened her mouth wider, granting permission for the intimate caress.
“Everett,” she whispered.
“Your lips can actually read fingerprints, can they? I shouldn’t be surprised; they’re so sensitive. They’re still chapped, though. Poor thing.”
A memory trickled into her sleepy awareness of someone gently applying an emollient to her lips while she lay in the hospital bed.
Her eyes popped open.
Her bedroom was almost completely bathed in darkness, save a dim light emanating from above the kitchen sink in the far distance. It cast enough glow for her to see the shadow of a man leaning over where she lay. She saw the bill of a cap.
“Everett,” she said through a raw throat.
“Shh,” he soothed.
Pressured-stored emotion frothed and boiled in her breast, threatening to erupt—fear, regret, shame, longing . . . love.
Love, most of all.
He cupped her jaw with his hand and put his cheek next to hers, his forehead next to her on her pillow. Did his tears mingle with her own? She wasn’t sure, because when he next spoke, his voice sounded sure and even.
“Let me get you some water. Can you use any throat spray or anything?” he asked quietly.
She nodded and croaked the word bathroom. She was overwhelmed. Everett was here. It wasn’t a dream. She touched the side of his rib cage and felt his lean, warm torso through his T-shirt as he sat up. He paused at her caress, sitting on the edge of the bed. He leaned down and kissed her on the lips very gently.