Rachel's Accident (11 page)

“It’s okay. This time was my fault. Last time was, too, actually. I won’t fire you over something you didn’t do.” He looked at me seriously. “And if it hadn’t been for those accidents I wouldn’t have gotten to know you.” At that he smiled at me.

In spite of the pain he must have been feeling right then he still stayed calm and rational.
He directed to gather my purse, his wallet and the car keys. I drove him to the hospital so that he could get treated.

He was done in record time. The nurses already knew him from all the time he
had
spent there already
and had admitted him as soon as he came through the emergency room doors.

How did this always happen? Why was I such a magnet for bad luck? If it hadn’t been for me, Ethan would have had four different visits to the hospital he wouldn’t have needed to make. Every time we came here it was either him or me who was in need of treatment and all because of me.

He came back with a beaming smile on his face. Was he under the influence of pain meds again?

“All done,” he stated proudly. “And it wasn’t even as bad as the last time. Now we just need to pay
and then we can get going.” He turned to the nurse at the counter, but stopped and looked back at me. “We have to pay for the last two visits, too, since I forgot my wallet both times.”

“Yes, I remember.”

He was about to turn away again when my words sunk in. He jerked back around and stared at me.

“You do?”
He
asked hopefully.

At my nod he threw his arms around me and hugged me tightly, always careful of his hands. But to my dismay he quickly let go and took a step back.

“I’m sorry. You said before you didn’t like that.”

I made an impatient noise in the back of my throat. “It’s not that I don’t like it. I do like hugs, but I don’t think it’s appropriate to be this close for an employer and his employee.”

“Right, right, sorry,” he apologized again and looked to the floor.

This was exactly the same behavior as before and it made me crazy. I huffed and stalked around him to the counter. As the nurse showed me the bill I sputtered a little. They had to be kidding. That bill was more than I earned in three years.

“It’s okay. Just give her my credit card,” Ethan said right behind me.

As I looked over my shoulder he took a step back again. I clenched my teeth. He was acting like I had some contagious disease. I grumbled under my breath and took his wallet out of my purse and rooted around in it until I found the card in question
. Reluctantly, I handed it over and the nurse rang up our bill.

I was still in a bad mood when we got back to the house. He was ignoring me again and keeping his distance more than ever.
I’ve
had enough. Before I even parked the car I started with my tirade at him.

“You do that every time, every fucking time. It’s driving me nuts. If you want to hug me, fine. But don’t fucking ignore. I loathe when people do that.
I’ve
had enough already.”

“Sorry,” it came from him in the tiniest voice possible.

“And stop fucking apologizing. It’s my fault you always end up in the hospital. Why are you apologizing?”

I was cursing like a drunken sailor and felt really liberating. All this pent up anger and frustration was finally finding a way out. Unfortunately, it was Ethan who had to take the brunt.

When I was finished with my tirade I blew out a big breath.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said all that.” I felt a little pity for the big man, who now looked so small in the passenger seat.

“It’s okay.”

“No, it’s not. Come on
I’ll
help you out.”

In my anger I had completely forgotten about his newly bandaged hands. I helped him out of the car and we went up the stairs to the front door
s
. This time around I hadn’t forgotten to lock up behind me before leaving for the hospital.
I took out the keys and opened the heavy door.

As he had said the burns weren’t as severe as last time and the scar tissue from the old burns had protected him additionally. He would still need help with everything, but he didn’t need as strong
pain medicine
, which meant for me he was going to be lucid and hopefully wouldn’t start acting strange again.

Now my first task would be cleaning up the mess we made in the kitchen and make something else for dinner. Everything had exactly the same feeling to it like the first time we went through this. It was creepy.

I made us sandwiches and this time he ate them with me in spite of the still lingering awkwardness between us. We started talking and finally relaxed again. We talked architec
ture and other things we liked.

I found out he liked the same kind of music as me and when he wasn’t chained in front of his laptop computer he liked to read occasionally. The library on the first floor, where he had first conducted my ‘job interview’, could probably attest to that. It stacked with shelves from floor to ceiling with loads of books weighing it down.

When I got home I found a note pasted to our apartment door. In short, it said the building was going to be demolished and we had a week to move out all our stuff. It was a final notice before the demolishing crew started working. Well, shit. They hadn’t said anything before. No mention whatsoever.

I had only heard from a conversation between our neighbors in passing about such a plan, but had completely disregarded it. Usually, they were always talking about some crap that wasn't really true anyway. But now, all of sudden the building was sold and we had to move out.

The new owners, Rowe Reconstructions, Inc., wanted to reconstruct the whole building, which meant we weren’t the only ones, who had to go, either. I knocked on a few neighbors' doors, wanting to get some answers, but nobody opened. It seemed they were all gone already.

I went back to our apartment, opened the door and put my things on our small kitchen table. I immediately called Jess and left her a message to come home as quickly as possible. I didn't know what to do. I had nowhere to go. This had been my home for the last two years.

I let my body fall heavily onto the worn couch and looked around our run-down apartment. We had bought the furniture at different yard sales a few months after we had moved in. Until then we had been sleeping on air mattresses and eating on the floor. It had been fun, though. Like a pick nick we had sat on an old blanket with our plates in our laps.

Once the furniture was there it had seemed much less empty and had a homey feeling to it. With the limited budget we had we had made our best effort to make it an apartment comfortable to live in. And in comparison to some of the neighbors' apartments I had seen we were the ones living in luxury.

The couple on our left had only ever had a bed and a TV in their even tinier apartment. No couch, no table or cupboards. They had lived off of fast food and didn't even have fridge. I kind of pitied them. They had it worse than us and now the roof over their heads was gone, too. I hoped they found a good place to stay.

I knew Jess had some relatives a few towns over, where she could crash for a while. But I had no such thing. I was an orphan and had no family left. Maybe with my current salary I could live in a cheap motel for a while, but the idea alone made my skin crawl.

I had once rented a room in a motel after my parents had died and our small house had been taken by the bank. It had been a nightmare. More than one guy tried to come into my room and pay me for an hour of sex. All around me I heard the distinct sounds of moaning and beds banging against walls.

To top it all off the bed itself was just disgusting. The cheap linens had holes in them and weren't washed properly. There were spots not only on the linen, but the blankets, pillows and even the wall behind the bed. I had tried to sleep in a chair, standing in a corner far away from the bed, but hadn't managed to shut my eyes for even a minute.

For the next few days I had slept on my university campus.
No, not in a dorm, but on the campus itself.
I had had to be extra careful to not be seen by anyone.

After a while I read on the black board that someone was looking for a roommate. The room was cheap and I jumped on it. It was my luck that the one running the ad was a girl I instantly liked. It could have been a real problem if it had been a guy. So Jess and I had become best friends over the years. And now it seemed like we had to part ways.

I was on my feet when the keys clattered in the lock and showed Jess the eviction notice the first thing she opened the door. Then we tried calling the new owners, but their secretary would only tell us that the company’s owner wasn’t available, but we would get this month’s rent back since it had already been paid in advance.

There was nothing we could do about it now except to pack our bags and move out. Jess made a call ahead to her relatives, where she would stay for the time being. Me, though…I had nowhere to go. I sat there on the couch staring into space, contemplating what I should do.

Suddenly something pushed me from the side and I fell to my side. I looked up. Jess was standing over me, glaring down at me.

“Are you listening now?”
She
asked angrily.

She must have been speaking for a while, if she had realized that I hadn’t been listening. Usually, she could go on forever while she did a hundred other things. Right now, though, her attention was solely on me. I nodded in answer.

“I said
,
you need to call Ethan.”

“What for?”

“You at least have to tell him about this and that you may not be able to come to work for a while because of that.”

“I can’t do that. He burned his hands again because of me and now I have to help him get around with work and everything. It’s just like before, but at least this time he won’t be as drugged by his pain meds.”

“Do you mean you remember everything?” She looked at me with the same expression Ethan had given me earlier accompanied by that question.

I nodded, smiling at her. She beamed and threw her arms around me. If I hadn’t already been lying on the couch, she would have knocked me over with her sheer momentum. She definitely knocked the air out of me. I coughed a little, trying to regain my breathing.

“Wait, doesn’t that mean you need to stay with him to take care of him?”
She
asked.

At the repeated bob of my head she beamed at me. “I was just coming back here to get some clothes, so I didn’t have to borrow from him again.”

“See, your problem is solved.” She was really excited for me.

“Yeah, but now I have to tell him that
I’ll
be moving in for longer than the two weeks it would take for him to recuperate.”

“Right, you need to call him.” She paused. “Is he even able to pick up the phone?”

“We’ll just have to find that out, won’t we?”

I dialed Ethan’s number on my cell phone. It rang and rang and I was just about to hang up again when I heard his voice come over the speaker.

“Hello?”

“Oh, hey, Ethan.
It’s Rachel.”

“Yes, I saw your number on the screen. Is there a problem?”

“Yeah, well, kind of.”

I told him about the eviction notice and asked him if I could stay at his place a while longer than planned.

“Just until me and Jess can find another place,” I tried to persuade him.

To my surprise he didn’t even pause before he agreed.

“Sure, of course,” he said. “That’s no problem at all. You know there is more than enough room here.”

“I just don’t want to intrude.”

“Oh, please, you would never be an intruder, always a guest. Just come over and tomorrow we can go pack your things and move it all here.”

“One more thing.
How did you pick up your phone?” I asked with intrigued curiosity.

He laughed. “I used my nose. It was a little tricky, so it took me a while, but I managed.”

I was still laughing when I hung up and told Jess. Then we were laughing together and everything seemed okay again. We packed as much of our stuff as we could and loaded them into the Mustang I had driven over here to transport my clothes and be back for Ethan as fast as possible. Our deadline to move out was a week from now, so we still had a little time, but not much.

I threw the clothes I had packed in a duffel bag onto the back seat and thanked Jess for her help. I then got into the car and drove back to Ethan’s.

We didn’t even bother to make a new schedule again. It was changing regularly because of this accident or that incident and I was going to be with him 24/7 from now on again, anyway. We were just taking it one day at a time.

Assisting him with his everyday chores was becoming increasingly harder for me to bear. It was downright torturous to help him change clothes and shower. When I only touched him my body got needy and tingly all over.

When I helped him shower I had to run my hands over his muscled chest and abdomen to soap him up. I felt heat run up my arms and down my whole body, pooling in my stomach. It didn't help either that he was watching my every movement with desire in his gaze. His obvious erection was another indicator that he enjoyed my touch immensely.

Day in and day out we repeated this torture. It seemed that one day he’d had enough. He completely ignored the bandages on his hands as he snatches me around the waist. I had just been running my hands up and down his flat washboard stomach when he startled me out of my reverie.

I let out a cry of surprise as the water hit me and I was pressed against his body. I was still fully clothed and getting soaked through. He didn’t seem to care that his bandages were getting soaked through right along with my clothes. I started to protest, but suddenly his mouth was crushed to mine and all the thoughts of sto
p
ping flew out the door
.