Take and Give

by Amanda G. Stevens

  Violet set the bloody gauze on the metal instrument tray that rested beside Piper on the bed. “Be right back.”

  Lee covered the stitches with a thin gauze pad and stepped back to face Gary. “I’ll return you to your car now.”

  “How much do I owe you?”

  “We’ll discuss that on the way.”

  Gary hoisted his daughter into his arms. “Thank you. So much.”

  “One final thing. Wait here a moment.” She didn’t have time for a clash with Sam, and he’d paused in the kitchen. But Piper had earned a sucker, and she needed sugar.

  Halfway down the hall, Lee sidestepped to let Violet pass with their next patient.

  “Look, Lee, I made it.”

  Ray Donnelly’s voice didn’t carry far. Lee attempted a smile for him. “I see. Are you staying off that foot?”

  “Sort of. I’m trying to do better.” He bobbed his head, and his gray ponytail dipped above his collar. “I’d say I’m definitely doing better. And no walking barefoot, like you said.”

  “Good. Go have a seat.”

  “I bet the ulcer’s smaller today.”

  “That depends on how much you’ve walked on it.”

  “Not as much as before you found it. I swear, I never felt a thing.”

  “Go in and have a seat. I’ll be there shortly.”

  “Okay. Thanks, Lee.”

  “Ray, I need you to stop that.”

  “Stop—? Oh!” His cheeks flushed. “Sorry, I never remember. About your name, I mean.”

  “Please try.”

  He nodded and hobbled down the hall—yes, he was walking on his foot. She sighed. Unfortunate that his three-centimeter diabetic ulcer had startled an “Oh my gosh, Lee” from Violet six weeks ago.

  Lee entered the kitchen and tugged open the sucker drawer. Sam leaned his lanky frame against the counter, and his legs stretched halfway across the room, an image of nonchalance. Hardly.

  “Hello, Sam.” She chose a mystery-flavored sucker and shut the drawer. “I see you interpreted my text.”

  “Refined sugar? That’s not for you, and it’s not for Ray Donnelly.”

  Lee faced him and folded her arms. “It is for my patient.”

  His dark eyes sparked. “So not only did you drive yourself here, you brought a patient with you. A new patient?”

  “That’s correct.”

  Sam crossed his arms and drummed his long fingers against them. “Do we need to review our roles here?”

  “She’s seven years old, and she was bleeding from a head wound. Did you expect me to call you and make her father wait in a cold parking garage while you determined he wasn’t a Constabulary agent?”

  “That’d be a yes.” Sam pushed away from the counter and strode halfway across the kitchen. His finger, lighter brown in the underside creases and cuticles, poked toward her face. “You call me, and you wait.”

  “Sam, the Constabulary aren’t injuring children and sending them out to—”

  “That is not the point. Would you be okay with it if I started setting bones and handing out antibiotics?”

  The sucker stick dug into the tips of her fingers. “If waiting endangers a patient’s life, then—”

  “Would it have endangered hers?” He jabbed his finger down the hall. “And that doesn’t even cover all of it. Where’s your car?”

  “In the barn.”

  “So you drove up the driveway like you own the place.”

  “I do own the—”

  He kicked his heel against the cupboard door behind him. “Oh, and we really want the Constabulary putting that one together, don’t we.”

  She held back the flinch. Sam didn’t get angry, not with her. She worked to level her voice. “I’m also capable of spotting a tail, even if they were changing cars, and I drove past Indian Trail the first time and doubled back to it. No one followed me.”

  “You can’t know that. Not as long as there’s an open case file on you, and last I checked—meaning two days ago—”

  “You need to trust me, Sam.”

  “Do not go there right now.” He scrubbed a hand over his coarse black hair. When had gray begun to pepper it?

  Lee held his glare. “I’ll debride Ray’s ulcer while you take Piper and her father back to their car. He approached me as I was leaving work.”

  “Don’t go thinking we’re done with this topic.”

  “I won’t apologize for choosing to treat someone who needed my help.”

  “I don’t care about an apology. I want your word you won’t do this again.”

  His ire didn’t conceal the concern nested between his eyes. As if her decision might be based on something other than her patient’s well-being. Sam didn’t understand the identity that blazed every day at the core of her. Nurse. Fusion of duty and concern. She left the kitchen and returned to her patient.

  2

  Every week, the small-group classroom emptied the same way. A trickle of students here, there, several stopping at Austin’s chair to ask questions or remark on the discussion of the evening. Extra questions normally didn’t bother him, but tonight … High school kids could be so clueless.

  “So, about sin.” Vinnie braced his hands on his hips an inch above the top of his black jeans. “It’s, like, an actual thing?”

  “Self-Imposed Negation.” Austin gathered his textbook and Bible and stood.

  “So it’s not a thing, then. It’s all in our heads.”

  “To an extent, sure.” Austin stepped toward the door, but Vinnie didn’t move. Okay, then. Austin faced him and recited the curriculum’s foundation. “Sin’s the part of your mind that weighs you down, Vin. The part that keeps you from your potential because it refuses to believe in your potential. So yeah, it’s based on your perception of yourself, not your real self. But it affects you in real ways.”

  Vinnie blinked. “Uh-huh.”

  “That make sense?”

  “Think so.”

  “Good.” Austin tested another step forward, and this time Vinnie fell in beside him.

  On his way to the back of the room, Austin straightened a few upholstered chairs that had been pushed forward or pulled back as people joined the group circle. He never used the whiteboard on the far wall, so no cleaning was needed. At the folding table near the door, his coleader Tamara was bagging up the leftover brownies.

  “Are you taking them all home?” Vinnie said with a gesture.

  “Not if you’d like some.” She flashed a smile, not at Vinnie but at Austin.

  “Great.” Vinnie grabbed two baggies and headed out the door.

  Tamara’s dark hair dipped around her shoulders, smooth and soft. She propped one heeled shoe behind her, pressed to the wall, raising the hem of her jean skirt.

  “It’s a tough topic, sin,” she said.

  “It can be.”

  “Know why I wore this skirt?”

  Pretty obvious. Austin raised an eyebrow.

  “It’s my coffee shop skirt.”

  Sure it was.

  “Whenever I wear it, I get asked to join a guy for coffee.”

  Austin blinked. Not like Tamara hadn’t dropped hints before, but … “Good luck.”

  When he sidled past her to the door, she curled a hand around his arm. Her perfume was a mix of citrus and vanilla. Austin freed himself and stepped back.

  “Tamara—”

  “I heard you and Rick discussing degree programs last Sunday. It’s totally my goal to go for a Master’s, as soon as I graduate, and you mentioned you’re working on philosophy.”

  “Yeah, I just got accepted into U of M for the fall.”

  “Focusing on philosophical crime and rehabilitation?”

  She didn’t get those details from accidentally overhearing. Maybe her interest was more seriou
s than he thought. Not that he cared. If Rick tried once more to set him up on a blind date, Austin would slug him.

  “It’s been four months since you went out with that Violet chick. Come on, man, move on.”

  Tamara’s hazel eyes sparkled from under thick black lashes. “I’m so fascinated by that stuff. How the illegal religious texts can still be around. What makes people so … I don’t know, addicted to them. And how do we help them?”

  “You guys are perfect for each other.” Rick hadn’t been kidding. Well, talking at Elysium couldn’t hurt anything, didn’t mean Austin had to ask her out to coffee or anywhere else. His grip on his books relaxed. Before he could respond, a skinny blue-haired girl scurried into the room.

  “Hi, Tamara, hi, Austin. I left my purse under my chair.”

  “No problem,” Austin said, but the girl had already grabbed her purse and scampered away again.

  “When it comes to cyan hair, tolerance is not a virtue.” Tamara’s wink held more than humor.

  Austin cleared his throat. “You didn’t tell her that, I hope.”

  “Only as a joke.”

  Right.

  Tamara ran her thumb and finger along the seal of a bag of brownies. “I’m an up-front person.”

  “I noticed.”

  “So, can I tell you something? I usually don’t bare all before the first date …”

  Uhh. Okay. Now she was just being silly. Silly and attractive.

  She didn’t seem to notice his brain had melted. “… but given your degree, I think you’ll, well, appreciate this. More so than my parents, for sure.”

  Um. Wait.

  “I told them last week, and they weren’t thrilled. Anyway, I’m hoping to get recruited after college. You know, into … the Constabulary.”

  The thrumming of Austin’s body went still, like a guitar string pinned to the neck midnote. Too much. She’d tipped over the edge of believability.

  Rick. Had to be Rick. Somehow, at some point, Austin had given himself away. And Rick wanted to confirm his suspicions—probably wanted to wring Austin’s neck—but couldn’t the guy come to him and ask? Man to man. Dude, do you work for the Constabulary? Not so hard. Austin wouldn’t have denied it.

  Instead, Rick tried to set him up with a sexy spy. Coward. Austin ran his thumb along the spine of his Bible to avoid making a fist.

  “Of course, my folks are like a lot of people their age.” Tamara opened the bag she’d just sealed and took out a broken corner of brownie. Nervous eater? Nervous liar. “They accept the Constabulary’s existence and all. I think they even understand society’s need for it. But their own daughter making that her life’s pursuit … kind of botches their plans.”

  He forced himself to nod. Tamara offered him the bag of brownies, and he forced himself to take one out, chew it, and swallow. To wrap his mind in an old green coat that kept him warm the winter he turned six, the winter Esther was born. He closed his eyes for the briefest space of time—one Mississippi—and buttoned the coat around him. The coat of calm.

  Tamara’s prattle had stopped, replaced by the low drone of voices in the room next to theirs, a meeting of some kind that must have adjourned.

  “I said too much,” she said quietly.

  “Not at all.”

  Tamara dropped the bag, and brownie crumbs showered the floor. “Oops. Um.” She crouched in her tiny skirt.

  A spy move. One of those intentional spills to redirect conversation. Rick, I’m going to—If she burst into tears right now, she was a plant for sure. But she didn’t. In fact, the bright pink seeping from her cheeks down her neck … Could a person fake that?

  “Tamara.”

  Her eyes shot up to his.

  “What did Rick tell you?”

  “Rick?”

  “About me.”

  The blush deepened. “Oh, nothing.”

  Austin shoved the nearest chair, and it tilted too far. He barely caught it. Well, better than shoving her while she stood back up in her heels. He shouldn’t blame her, didn’t. If Rick’s Sunday morning messages were any indication, the man could have talked her into this with a single well-uttered sentence.

  One phone call, and Austin’s boss would approve an audit on Rick’s precious Elysium Fellowship of Believers. The guy would lose half his members. Forget revenge for a second—Austin should have audited them a year ago, anyway. Two thousand people attending the same church? Talk about common ground for revolution, even if they did submit to Constabulary monitoring.

  “I’m sorry.” Tamara set the bag on the folding table. “You’re right, we talked about you. If you’ll sit down, I’ll tell you everything we said.”

  “Sure you will.”

  “Austin, I—I really wanted to go out. With you.” She twisted the hem of her skirt with one hand, and it crept further up her leg.

  “And you’re trying to distract me now? I’m a guy, not an animal.”

  Her hand jerked then smoothed the skirt back down. “Rick told me you’d never ask me out.”

  “No kidding.” Austin sank into a chair, and Tamara sat next to him.

  Her face puckered, but she didn’t cry. “Here’s what Rick said. That you’re a great guy, which I knew already. That you’re smart, which I knew. And that the right things matter to you, and that you’d be a great conversationalist.”

  He wanted a lie to lurk in her eyes, but … no. If she was spying for Rick, she didn’t know she was.

  “And … he said …” She pinched her skirt hem, but this time, the gesture looked unconscious.

  He said he doesn’t trust me? Needs more information about me? Thinks I might be keeping official tabs on his church? The irony pulled his lips into a smirk. Rick would never believe Austin attended and worked at Elysium on his own time.

  “He said you’d only take me out once, if that, because of the other girl.”

  Oh.

  “He wasn’t trying to gossip or anything.”

  Gossip. That’s what she thought this was about. A sigh fell out of him.

  “So I know there won’t be … you know. Happily ever after.” Her mouth quirked in self-deprecation. “I admire your teaching at Elysium. The way you see things. And I told Rick one date would be fine with me, and he said, ‘You won’t know unless you ask.’”

  It was a sincere crush, or it was carefully constructed flattery. Either way, Austin held the badge and the gun and the upper hand. Something Rick needed to know. Austin buried the lingering impulse to find him and bounce his head off a wall.

  “I’m sorry, Austin. I promise he didn’t tell me what happened with you and … her.”

  “He doesn’t know.” No one did or needed to.

  “You could tell me about her, if you felt like it. Or we could talk favorite philosophers. Or we could … not go at all.” She ducked her head and swiveled her legs away from him, prepared to stand and walk away.

  “Just a minute.”

  She waited.

  The door to their room was open, but they were at the end of the hallway. No one would walk by now that small-group sessions had let out and most people were headed home. Austin pulled his wallet from his pocket and flipped it open. The gold badge glinted under the fluorescent ceiling light.

  Tamara’s tiny gasp held surprise, not fear. The sigh that followed it held something else altogether. Fascination, maybe.

  “No way.” She stretched a finger toward it.

  He pushed it toward her. “Here.”

  She cupped her hands around it as if cradling a treasure.

  Look at that, Violet. Some girls appreciate what I do.

  “Michigan Philosophical Constabulary,” Tamara whispered. “I can’t believe it.”

  A smile pushed onto his face, and he didn’t push back. “Me, either, sometimes.”

  “Yeah, hey, wait
a minute.” Her saucer eyes jumped up to meet his. The rubbing of her skirt, the edge of tears had vanished. “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-two.” He could blunt it, doctor it. Twenty-three next year. Sure, in September. The calendar had entered October a week ago. Anyway, his age only made the whole crazy story more impressive.

  “That’s … that’s unheard of. I didn’t know it was possible.”

  Neither had he, when Special Agent Jason Mayweather recruited him last year, straight from his undergrad. Summa cum laude had major advantages.

  “I can’t believe it. You’re only three years older than I am, and look where you are, what you can do, for society and—” A twinkle lit her eyes. “Are you … carrying?”

  He laughed. “Always.”

  “Can I see it later?”

  A pleasant heat traveled his body, and the way her teeth bit her lower lip, released it too slowly … She knew what she was doing. He didn’t want to give Rick a concussion anymore.

  “Please?” Tamara leaned toward him, pushing his wallet into his hand and tapping it with one manicured nail. The skin of her wrist smelled like vanilla and oranges.

  “Nope.” He slid his wallet back into his pocket and stood up.

  “Come on. I’ve never seen one up close before.”

  Wow. He shook his head. “A firearm is not a status symbol.”

  “Sure it is.”

  “Or a toy.”

  “Hmm.” Tamara flipped her hair over one shoulder. But then the playfulness abated, and she shook her head. “This is the most unbelievable … You thought Rick sent me here to find this out, didn’t you?”

  “You offered me a brownie and started lauding the virtues of the Constabulary.”

  “And naturally, I couldn’t mean it.” She pinned him with a glare.

  “In my experience, no.”

  “Tragic.”

  Yeah, it kind of was. Violet, I would’ve made you happy. I would’ve … The memory sucker-punched the breath out of him. Appropriate. Could he ever make it right? He wouldn’t know until he talked to her. And he couldn’t talk to her until he found her.

  He walked Tamara to her car, a flimsy thing that would probably blow right off a bridge in bad weather. He opened the door. She hugged her leather jacket, crossed her arms. Her body inched closer.