***
Mina
I picked up the phone and answered it while also charting what I’d just administered to a patient in room three
“Mooresville ER, this is Mina.”
“Hey,” came the growly reply.
My eyes closed, and a knot formed in my throat, as a shiver stole over my body.
I hadn’t heard that voice over a phone line in such a long time that it was nearly debilitating to finally have that again.
“Hey,” I said, my voice coming out husky and choked with emotion.
“Baby,” came his whispered, gruff reply. “Are you okay?”
The computer screen in front of my face swam.
“Yeah, I’m okay,” I said softly, dashing away a tear with the back of my hand when it spilled out of my eye. “Are you okay?”
“Yes and no,” he answered hesitantly. “I need you to call Audrey and tell her that one of the boys over here is going to come get her.”
My brows rose.
“Is she in trouble?” I asked worriedly.
Audrey and I had turned into each other’s go-to person.
After Tunnel had died, we’d had no one left but each other, and we’d used that to our advantage and strengthened the bond we already had.
Sure, I’d had the club, but none of them felt the supreme feeling of loss that Audrey and I felt, making us closer than anyone else could ever be.
And I suddenly felt like shit, because I now had Tunnel back, and she didn’t.
“No, she’s not in trouble,” Ghost said. “Not yet, anyway. Not if we can get her back with us in time.”
I frowned.
“What’s going on?” I pushed.
“From what I hear, my parents have somehow cajoled her into moving with them.”
My heart started to pound.
Audrey had nothing to do with her parents. She hated them almost as much as Tunnel did.
There was no love lost between them, and Audrey would never, ever voluntarily put herself into the same breathing space as them, let alone move with them. Speaking of moving…
“Why are they moving?” I asked in alarm.
“Exactly,” Tunnel agreed. “Why the fuck are they moving?”
I bit my lip.
“What do I say to her to get her to go with some strange man that she doesn’t know?” I asked. “You know her just as well as I do. She won’t do it willingly.”
He cleared his throat. “Fender already has the permission to share that I’m alive. You, well you just tell her the truth about Josh. I know you’ve given her the runaround about it, but if she knows the full story, then she’ll willingly come up here. Just tell her it is for her protection and that it’s so she’s not followed to you.”
All of that was true. I wouldn’t be lying to her.
“Okay,” I finally agreed. “I’ll call her now. Is there anything else you want me to tell her?”
“No,” he said. “I’ll talk to her myself once she gets here.”
A smile took over my face. “That makes me happy, Tun.”
I hated the thought of having this knowledge about Tunnel being here, and her not aware.
We’d both made many drunken promises, over the last six years, and I hated the thought of keeping something of this magnitude from her.
“All right, baby,” Tunnel said. “I gotta go. I have to figure out what in the hell is going on to make my parents bolt right when we have the best lead yet.”
“What lead?” I whispered, staring blankly at the screen in front of me.
“Josh,” Tunnel said, confirming my fears. “He thought he could play ball with the big boys, but he’s about to find out how wrong he was.”
And for some reason, that made my heart pound.
“Alrighty then,” I said breathlessly. “Will I see you when I get off of work?”
He grunted in reply. “Spent enough nights without you, Minnie. I don’t want to spend any more time alone.”
With that he hung up, and I said ‘I love you’ to dead air.
But I knew that he felt it, just as he knew I felt the same way.
Sighing and tossing a look beside me at Dr. Tommy Tom, who hadn’t even acted like he wasn’t listening to the entire encounter, I stuck my tongue out at him.
Today I’d given him a reaming for withholding information about my dead husband not being so dead, and he’d only smiled.
Now, here he was, unabashedly listening to my conversations with my now very much alive husband, and he was listening in like he had something to do with my husband’s miraculous reincarnation, so to speak.
Glaring at the man who continued to just smile at me, I searched through my latest calls and hit go beside Audrey’s name. I’d called her a few days ago to let her know where we were, and she’d called me the next night to make sure I was settling in all right.
“Hello?” Audrey answered.
I immediately frowned.
“Audrey, what’s wrong?” I asked instantly, sitting up in my seat.
“Nothing,” Audrey lied.
We both knew when the other lied. We’d been doing it so often to each other over the course of our friendship that it was almost second nature to know.
Our ‘yes, I’m all right’ had always meant ‘no, I’m not all right. I’m hurting and it’s hard to breathe.’ But we always said we were all right, because admitting that we weren’t felt like we entirely way too close to the breaking point.
Audrey sighed. “I’m in trouble.”
I relaxed a small amount.
She wouldn’t admit that if she was in danger.
“What’s going on?” I asked, leaning back in my chair.
I noticed that Tommy had relaxed once again, too, going back to leaning casually in his seat as he listened to me instead of being on alert.
“I made a mistake.” She didn’t sugar coat it. “I got this package. It was delivered to my place by mistake, but it was addressed to my parents. Instead of opening it, or throwing it away like I should have, I delivered it to their place while I was visiting some friends in Benton. I was going to just drop it off on their doorstep, but when I got there, a guy was outside. He’d fallen and had hurt himself pretty badly. His arm was dripping blood from a gaping wound on his forearm and training just kicked in. I helped him stop the bleeding, and in return for staying as long as I did, my mother and father arrived home.”
I sighed.
“And they decided you were useful, and requested you to help them in some way,” I groaned.
“Yep,” she said.
I’d been getting that for the last five years. Calls to ‘check on my welfare’ that were also requests for me to come work for them at their company.
One drunken night, over a bottle of wine and some pizza, Audrey and I had compared stories, and then we’d questioned why a company that specialized in electronics would need a nurse at all. We’d come up with the fact that the parents were just trying to look out for us.
Now, I didn’t have such tame ideas. More likely it was due to them being into something they shouldn’t be, and needing a medical professional to help them or someone who worked for them if shit hit the fan.
“So what happened then?” I questioned.
“Then I told them no and drove home. After I arrived back home and got unpacked, I was woken in the middle of the night. When I went to investigate the noise, it was to find the guy who I helped breaking into my house.”
“What?” I screeched.
She started to laugh.
“I shot someone.”
“What?” I screeched again.
“Yep,” she confirmed. “I did. But the guy was wearing one of those vest thingies, and he ran away before I could get another shot off at him.”
“And?” I pushed.
“And now I’m packing all of my shit, and moving the hell away from here without giving two weeks notice on my job because my parents want me to do their bidding, and I don’t want to.”
Audrey wasn’t moving with her parents. She was moving away from them.
I was sure she didn’t even realize that her parents were moving, too, or she might not be bothering.
But I wanted her here. Tunnel wanted her here.
So that was what I did.
“I have a suggestion” I said, diverting from the plan. “How about I send out some help, and you come here?”
I heard her inhale. “That’s where I was going anyway, but I’m glad to officially have an invite.”
I started to chuckle. “I’ll send some muscle. You pack the small stuff, and leave the big shit for him.”
“Him?”
Now she sounded nervous.
“Him,” I confirmed. “He’s a sweetie.”
And he was. Fender was great and he was very personable. He had that good ol’ boy demeanor that made him come off like a man who would do just about anything to make you comfortable. And hopefully that continued to hold true with Audrey.
“Okay,” she said. “But just make sure he’s not cute.”
I snorted. “I’ll see what I can do. But the men down here aren’t ugly, that’s for sure.”
Tommy snorted at my side.
I rolled my eyes at him.
“Don’t you have anything else to do?” I suggested.
He shook his head. “Nope. This place is q…”
“Don’t you dare.”
You don’t say ‘quiet’ in a hospital. It’s just not done. And Tommy damn well knew it.
He held up his hands. “I gotta go, girl. If you need anything, let me know. Otherwise,” I paused, and covered the phone.
“What’s Fender’s real name?” I asked.
If Audrey knew that Fender was a biker, she might very well freak out.
She could handle professional looking men—men like Josh – had he not had that undercurrent of assholeishness to him. He at least looked normal.
A man like Fender, well, he just looked rough. Like a biker.
He had tattoos. He wore a motorcycle cut. He was just a typical biker in all ways.
And Audrey couldn’t control them, which made her nervous around them.
Hence the reason for the lie.
Tommy Tom looked at me. “Tobias.”
I uncovered the phone. “…Tobias will be there tomorrow.”
If not tonight, I thought.
However, Audrey didn’t need to know that part. She just needed to think this was me helping her out, not Tunnel protecting her.
Plus, I thought it would be better for Tunnel to explain to his sister himself why he had to die. That wasn’t something that you allowed someone else to share for you.
And Tunnel knew it.
He just didn’t want to deal with his sister’s anger, which he wholly deserved.
He got off lucky with me.
When I’d made those promises late at night, it was a vow between me and the universe. Something I wouldn’t break.
Audrey hadn’t made those vows. She needed to yell and scream at him for the both of us.
My smile grew.
My husband was in for it, that was for sure.