Big White Lie (Storm's Soldiers MC) (10 page)

Even if I wanted to, I was nowhere near it.

I shuffled up Lilly’s hair and ran off to my rounds before she could catch me.

By the time I went home for lunch, I had settled into a nice haze. It was the right level of happy. I didn’t want my family even suspecting what had happened in the living room last night.

Mamá, Elsa and I sat in the dinner nook off from the kitchen eating leftover pabellon criollo. The beans, steak and rice were scattered and not quite living up to the dish’s name, but even reheated, it was one of my favorite foods.

I still remembered the meat being such a treat for us when I was still a little girl in Venezuela. Even though we ate it almost every week now, it still felt like a trip back home.

At least the good parts of home. Like sitting around under a lightbulb in plaster and concrete walls watching a black and white TV. The room was cracked and stained, but it still glowed warm in my memory, because there were still four of us together and not three.

“Did you get your grades for summer classes yet?” Mamá asked Elsa.

My sister looked like she had just rolled out of bed. She deserved the rest. Her vacation was basically two weeks long thanks to summer school.

“Not yet,” she groaned. “I’ll let you know the second the report card shows up in the mail.”

“I think I will check the mail myself, actually.”

“But the mailman comes when you’re at work.”

“Let him come,” she said. “You leave the mail there, and I will pick it up after work.”

My sister stabbed extra viciously at a piece of steak. Mamá threw me a look. We both knew the grades weren’t going to be great. But a C was different than an F.

“I still can’t believe it’s your last year,” I said. “My god, my baby sister is going to be a senior.”

“
I
am going to be a senior this year,” Mamá said. “Elsa I am less sure about.”

Elsa dropped her fork.

“Mamá,” I yelled. “Go easy on her. I was awful at her age. Look where I am now.”

“Then she should learn from your mistakes and get there sooner.” She rapped the table with her knife. “What use is it to pray for good luck, without putting in the work.”

“I’ll put in work when I find something I like,” Elsa said.

“I hope you like McDonald’s.”

My good mood was quickly running out trying to prop up this room.

“It’s still better than running around with gang bangers,” I said. “You forgot how bad I was in high school. Elsa is neutral at worst.”

“And now?” Mamá asked through a mouthful of beans.

“Now what?”

“Who are you running around with now?”

“What? We’re not talking about that.” I gulped water way too loudly.

By the time I realized what a tell I’d given, Elsa had straightened in her seat. Her amber eyes shone right through to the middle of me.

“Oh my god,” she said. “There
is
a guy.”

“What?” Mamá’s utensils clacked down on the table. “Who is it? Is it the doctor?”

“No! I told you that went awful.”

“Or maybe you were lying to us, so you would not be embarrassed.”

“Embarrassed of what?”

“That you’re dating a responsible doctor instead of some hunk gangster,” Elsa taunted.

“Ok, I’ve
never
dated an actual gangster. Only gangster wannabes and only back in high school and I grew out of it.” I glared at the little brat. “
That’s
what we were talking about.”

“So who is this one then?” Mamá asked.

I flapped my lips, but no lies poured out. I threw up my arms. “Ok, fine. There’s a soldier that I met at the hospital.”

“A patient?”

“A former patient,” I said. “And, yeah, he does look like my type. But he’s a great guy. He served in Afghanistan and has an amazing record.”

“What was he in for?” Elsa asked.

“A gunshot wound,” I said, mostly to my plate.

“Gangster,” Mamá said.

“He’s an active duty soldier, Mamá,” I protested. “It was just an accident.”

“Active duty? There are no wars here.”

“There are bases in Georgia.”

“He shot himself at an army base?” Elsa asked.

I really needed to get her on the student newspaper or something. Her questions were like scalpels.

“At home,” I said. “He was off duty.”

“Gangster.”

“This isn’t Venezuela, Mamá. You can’t just keep throwing that word around. The police came and checked him out. And the army will too.”

“And you?” she asked. “Did you ‘check him out’?”

My ears seemed to burn, but I was able to casually say, “I’m not answering that.”

Elsa shook with barely contained laughter. I threw her another death stare. She crinkled her eyes and mouthed, ‘Sorry.’

Sorry wasn’t going to cut it. I truly had the heat now.

“You are grown up,” Mamá said, “But not completely. Be careful around this man. I don’t trust him.”

I rolled my eyes, feeling my inner teenager emerge. “You don’t even know him.”

Mamá clasped her hands and leaned toward me. “Do you?” she asked.

****

Even before that, I knew the crash was coming. The guys I went for always came with a crash, whether it was days or weeks or - once - five months away. Eventually the broken thing at the heart of them would show itself and usually in the worst way possible.

Calix had been so different. He had given me more than that sliver of hope that maybe, finally I had picked right.

Instead, he broke all the damn records.

I went back after lunch and felt a silence descend over the nurses’ station as I walked in. All of them looked at me with wide eyes.

“What?” I asked, locking up my purse.

A new girl, Amy, finally answered. “Rhonda and Dr. Geraldi were looking for you.”

Rhonda was the day shift manager for us. She conducted performance reviews, but I saw her once a month or so for other smaller things.

Dr. Geraldi was the chief of medicine for the whole
freaking
hospital. I had talked to him once: on the day I got hired.

This felt an awful lot like the opposite of that.

My balloon was well and truly punctured now. With shaky legs, I went over to Rhonda’s office. She was a big, round caramel-skinned woman, who normally had on a big plastic smile.

It was nowhere in sight.

“Rosa, please shut the door,” she said. “Sit.”

“Am I being fired?” I asked. The last thing I wanted was to be trapped with that news in this small dusty place.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “Just come and sit.”

I shut the door and took the bench at the side of her desk. “Amy said that Dr. Geraldi was looking for me, too,” I said.

“He is, but let’s talk first.”

“Ok,” I said. “About what?”

“What you were doing last morning, around…” She checked her screen. “Ten forty.”

“Just my rounds.” I curved around and tried to read the screen but she had some sort of protector over it. “What is that?” I asked.

“Your keycard record.”

A chill went up my arm. “From yesterday?”

“That’s right.”

“I didn’t use it yesterday except to check in. I even ate at my desk.”

Rhonda studied my face, unblinking, then went back to the screen. “That’s not what your record shows.”

“What does it show?” I asked.

She checked my reaction again before answering. “It says that around ten forty in the morning you accessed Surgical Storage.”

“Surgical storage? That closet where they keep the junk they pull out of people?” It had always seemed like a very misleading name.

“The surgical facility that stores that material, yes,” Rhonda said.

“Well, I didn’t. I don’t even see what I could get from there.”

“Anything they pull out in an operation. Broken glass, blades…bullets.”

A shiver ran up my spine. I could only hope it didn’t look guilty. “Bullets?”

“That’s right. Now, two military police came this morning to collect fragments we pulled from a patient here. Those fragments were gone.”

“I see.” I desperately wanted to ask the case name, but I was afraid of how I’d react.

There was really only one possible patient she could mean.

“The only unusual person to access that room was you,” Rhonda said.

“Well, I didn’t,” I said. “I don’t think I even know where it is. I haven’t stood in on an operation yet.”

“But you had your keycard the whole time.” Rhonda rapped her fingers along the table.

“No,” I said, carefully measuring out my words. “I didn’t say that. I actually went home and realized I couldn’t find it.”

Her eyes flared. “So you didn’t have it with you?”

“No,” I insisted. “You can ask Lilly. I called her to see if she’d seen it. “

“And had she?”

Her face remained stony. I thought a missing keycard would cause a bigger reaction.

“You talked to her right?” I said. “You already know she didn’t.”

“She says she didn’t.”

I shook my head slowly. “We’re not in on some weird conspiracy. I saw my badge was missing. I asked her and she didn’t see it at the nurse’s station.”

Rhonda nodded slowly. “So why didn’t you report it missing?”

I took careful breaths. The silence expanded and I knew it looked guilty, but hopefully just the guilt of not reporting a missing card quickly. My hands squirmed under the table, out of sight.

Should I tell her about Calix? Or would that just open up a bigger can of worms? My mind burned with the memory of riding him, of being injected by him over and over.

Christ, he really had fucked me.

Maybe I should just pretend I still didn’t have it. No that would be stupid. She could see me checking in with it this morning. Wait, had I? I often just followed someone in while we talked.

The seconds ticked on. I just shook my head.

“Rosa?” Rhonda seemed to sniff the air.

“Ok,” I said. “I’m sorry I didn’t report it, but I found it this morning.”

“What?”

I flailed to pull this thing together. “It was at the nurse’s station when I came in,” I said. “I thought someone had just left it there for me.”

She glanced at her screen. “I do see you didn’t check in this morning. How did you get in?”

Thank god for small miracles. “I don’t check in most mornings. Someone else probably held the door open for me as I walked in.”

“And what time was that?”

My heart flared. There were cameras near access points. They could easily find me if they decided to check. And I had made no effort to hide the card clipped to my waist. Why would I?

“Around nine ten, I think.”

It had been much earlier. I was digging my hole deeper, but it was too late to get out of the lie. Even if I told them everything about Calix, they wouldn’t believe I wasn’t hiding something more now.

The only option was to make them think I had nothing to do with him other than be his nurse. Anyone who used my badge probably
would
have just dropped it off at the nurse’s station.

It’d be far less cruel than coming to the nurse’s house and offering it in exchange for fucking her.

My ears scalded with rage now as I thought of the calm collected way he had showed up at my door with my card:
Oh this little thing? Yeah I just found it lying around, and I didn’t want you to get in trouble.

Last night roared through my head, every thrust of him, from every angle. He had made me beg for him, convinced me he was everything I wanted.

And now I was left with this.

Rhonda made me run over my story again, and I went over it more firmly. It was real. It was possible.

It was just a little white lie that covered up a huge white problem.

I walked out of her office, feeling every eye and camera on me. I had no idea what was coming next. I had gone from flying high to dropping down a well in a span of five hours.

And the same man was at fault for both.

Gangster
, Mamá said in my memory.

I had no idea what he was anymore. But I knew one thing. If I was getting interrogated, so was he.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Calix

“You’re back?” Velez swiveled behind his desk in the medical office and checked his calendar. “Nope, it’s just like I thought. I didn’t sleep for two days by accident.”

“Check me,” I said, standing as erect as I could. “If you don’t like what you see, then I’ll go.”

“What I see is a man who won’t listen to good advice.” Velez sighed and hung a stethoscope around his neck. “Man, most of these guys are chomping at the bit for downtime. What’s the issue with you?”