Ash: A Bad Boy Romance (2 page)

“What happened to you, honey? Why didn’t you come back?” Deb puts her hand on mine, and the warmth feels like a shock. After three years away, changing teams of doctors from one month to the next, I’m not exactly used to being touched unexpectedly.
 

I choke down a piece of cake. It’s dry in my throat, scratchy. “It was my calling,” I manage to say, looking down and to the side. It seems as good a lie as any for why the preppy girl obsessed with making money would live in the Ukraine in an apartment with spotty electricity—and even spottier running water. “It was an experience I needed to have.” I shove another bite of cake in my mouth.
 

“I mean, why didn’t you come back here after you graduated from med school, honey? Not even to visit?”
 

“Plane tickets,” I say, nodding, as if that explains it all. “The Doctors Without Borders flight left from Charlotte. My mom came with me—”

“Okay, Summer. We need you here, and you’re here.” She squeezes my hand, and I’m transported back in time to when I was fourteen, and Debs was twenty-three, a new nurse at the hospital showing me how to empty bedpans and change linens. The memory is tinged with the guilt and regret that comes from years of hiding, of avoiding this place and all of its truths.
 

“Where do you need me today, Debs?” I stand and brush a few cake crumbs off of my green scrubs and pick a piece of icing from a stray curl of hair.
 

“Emergency. Fight from last night sent us some sorry looking assholes.”

“God, that’s still going on?” Fights were cool when I was seventeen, but now… fighters and their scars are sexy, but they’re out of my life—forever. Hopefully, anyway. “Fine. I’ll go.” My hands shake a little as I put my coat on and drape the stethoscope around my neck.
 

It’ll get better. This is okay.

I chant the words to myself as I stroll down the hallway to the emergency room. I can be on call there and not waste my time sitting in the locker room, waiting for something to happen. I know the ropes just as well as anyone does around here.
 

A girl—or what looks like a girl—pops through the doors to the waiting room. Her dark eyes go wide when she sees me, and she flips her long, dark hair over her shoulder.

“You a new resident? Patient room one. We’ve got a cut that needs sutures. Dude’s got a nasty attitude.” Before I can get her name, she pulls me back to patient room one and pushes me inside. “I’ll bring him to you.” She nods to me before she walks out of the door. “Name’s Priya. Head resident. Glad to have you—Colington, right?”

I nod, and the swinging door to the patient room swings back and forth on its hinges, nearly hitting my in the face. My heart nearly leaps out of my chest, and I stumble backward toward the bed.
 

This Bambi deer-in-the-headlights shit won’t cut it for the job I’ve taken on, so I press the uneasy feeling in my gut down and away. I’m back here. It was my choice. And this is just the first day. What could go wrong?
 

Surely it can’t be too bad.
 

Since Syria, I don’t
love
hospitals. But I’ll learn to love this one. It’s my new life, my new home. The place where everything comes together and starts over again.

I fall into a rhythm as I prep the suture kit, getting the shit together I’ll need to patch up some idiot fighter. At least, I assume it’s a fighter. Besides stomach viruses, idiots who get beat up for a living are about all we see around here at this time of day.

The door opens behind me, and a rush of air comes into the room. I hear what must be Priya fumbling around with a wheelchair. “These fucking things,” she mutters. “I’m leaving you in good hands. It’s her first day, but she was in the field for three years. She can probably suture with one eye shut in the middle of a dust storm.” She directs her voice at me as I turn on the sink and wait for the water to get warm. “Doctor, we have a white male here, mid-thirties I’d guess, though he won’t tell me. Says he got into a bar fight but his blood alcohol is zero. I suspect it was quite a beat-down he took.”

The man groans in pain, that groan that signifies he’s on the cusp of passing out. I hear him try to get up, and Priya trying to calm him so that he falls back into his chair.
 

“Just a minute,” I mumble. “The nurse will be in shortly. Right, Priya?”
 

I turn around, and after that, everything happens in slow motion. The man in the chair looks at me and smirks, his eyes steely blue.
 

I fall back on the hospital bed as the nurse enters and wraps a blood pressure cuff around his huge, freckled bicep. I gulp, tasting salt and metal, and my heart pounds so loud I think that it might start echoing in the room.
 

“What—” I start, but the words won’t fully form, and Priya turns and stares at me over his chart.
 

“Mid-thirties male,” she repeats. “Laceration on the right arm, and another on his right cheek. Pretty nasty. Says it was a bar fight, but his blood alcohol level was—” She stops and looks between the two of us. “You two know each other or something?”

One corner of his lip turns up into a smile, making the gash on his cheek open slightly. “You could say that,” he says, his voice a growl, deep and gritty. He’s at once intimately familiar and totally foreign. His eyes are the same, but there are fine lines at the corners, and his smile isn’t quite as eager as it used to be. His reddish hair is cropped close so that I can see his scars. My stomach drops, and I wipe my palms against the green scrubs. I absently wonder if my makeup looks okay, and then I realize I’m not wearing any, and I blush, my cheeks growing uncontrollably hot. The nurse looks at me and raises an eyebrow but doesn’t say anything.

“I don’t—I haven’t seen him in three years—” The words leave my mouth all at once. “I thought you were in New York.”
 

“I was, and then I came here. Cost of living, that kind of thing. Also, I was looking for this girl...” He looks at me pointedly. “But I found out she was in Syria. Imagine my surprise. And I didn’t have a red cent for a plane ticket. Had to stay and work.”
 

Three years have left their mark. He looks older, but his muscles are broader and more defined, his presence even bigger than it once was. The white t-shirt he’s wearing stretches across his chest and biceps. Before, he only had one tattoo on his right forearm, the sword that signified his membership in the Irish mafia. Now, that’s covered. New tattoos run up the length of both arms.

As the nurse listens to his heart, Priya is still staring at me. Her eyes flick over to the man for a brief second. “You okay with him? I can get another resident—”

“Don’t bother,” he says, his grin growing wider. “I heard she was back in town. I knew she’d be coming to see me anyway.” The way he looks at me sends a chill through my body, and I suddenly remember
why
I agreed to what he offered. I stand up, and my knees instantly go weak. I knew I’d have to see him, but I had no damn idea it would be so soon.
 

“I’ll wait for Summer to respond,” Priya says, looking at me pointedly.

“It’s fine,” I say. “I’ve got this.”

“She’s been looking forward to seeing me,” he says. “She’s my—”

“Old friend. We’re old friends. I met him when I was in school.” I nearly bark the words out, and Ash smirks. Priya shrugs, but she looks back at me before she leaves.
 

I watch as the nurse takes his vitals, then she leaves us both alone. He goes to stand, but he’s unsteady on his feet and leans against the hospital bed. I don’t stop him.

“A little bird told me you were back in town, Sunshine. I’m offended you didn’t come straight to see me.” He crosses his muscled arms and leans against the bed. I can see the definition in his legs through his jeans. It was always a shame that the universe had given him such a good body and such a shitty soul. I’d wanted him with every fiber of my being. But I was younger then, what seems like
so
much younger. I know him better now. I know all the things he’s capable of.

“Don’t call me that.” I make a decision to get my shit together, here and now. I handled a lot worse than this, going back as far as New York and the gambling. Four years I’ve known this man. He might have crept into my thoughts every day since I saw him last, but that doesn’t mean I can’t do my job.
 

He arches an eyebrow and raises his hand like he’s going to reach for me, then he drops it to his side. My hands still shake as I get the sutures prepared, but then an otherworldly stillness takes me over, and I slip into the zone that I know all too well. When your boss tells you that a bomb might fall, or you’re working out in the fields in below freezing temperatures, you know your zone. And that’s kind of what this is. It’s a hazard situation, just the same as any I saw abroad. Before I can think, I sit him down on the bed, clean the gash on his arm, and inject him with lidocaine. He talks to me but I shut him out, his voice coming to me from a long way off, almost like he’s underwater and I’m listening from above. I start to suture him, and he grimaces.

“Summer, are you listening to me?” My eyes meet his for a moment, and I notice that the tips of his eyelashes are blond. I never noticed that before. And to think, there was a time I should have known him better than anyone. “Summer?”

I clip the last of his sutures, then start cleaning the cut on his face. It’s a clean cut, and deep. My stomach flips. It was intentional. Tears prick the backs of my eyes. I’ve seen this before—on him and on a dozen other fighters who worked for the family back in New York. He
owes
somebody. He sees the change come over my face, or at least I think he does.
 

“It’s not what you think,” he says.

“What do I think, Ash?”

“It’s from fighting. Clean fighting. I have my own place. I’m coaching—not drinking, not gambling. I broke ties when I came down here to find you.”

My throat feels like it’s going to close, and the lights seem like they’re flickering. “I sent you the papers. You never signed them, did you?”

“No.”

“I tried to find you in New York the first month I was gone.”

And after all that I lost in Syria, I was too numb to look anymore.

“I was here instead.” He flinches when I numb his cheek and begin stitching him up. There will be another scar, among the many he already has.
 

“How convenient. Thanks for letting me know.” My voice registers as sarcastic, but I can’t conceal the hurt.

“I couldn’t find you either, Sunshine. Your mom didn’t know who I was, and your aunt wouldn’t speak to me. I didn’t know if it was Syria—or some other place.”

I roll my eyes. Bianca had every reason to refuse Ash, and every reason not to tell him where I was. I clip the last of his stitches. It won’t be gorgeous, but it’ll go along with his hawk-like features and the web of scars on his face. I touch his cheek for a moment, fingertips grazing over the red and blond stubble. “Get on out of here,” I say. “You’re done.”

He catches my hand. “We’re not done, Sunshine.”

“Oh, we’re done.” My voice is cold, and I snatch my hand away. “We were done three years ago.”

“I have a marriage certificate that says otherwise.” The look he gives me is exactly the one he gave me when we were together so long ago, the gaze that told me he owned me, that I was
his
until he said otherwise—that look that undid me every time and made me forget every shortcoming, every disappointment. I clench my jaw. He’s right. There’s a piece of paper out there that ties us together—but that’s the only thing that does. If he’d signed the papers when he said he would, there would be nothing. I can’t deny that his touch on my skin makes me remember what it was like with him—but that was only his body.
 

“Well, will you look at the time?” I say, my voice hoarse from the anger rising in my throat. “I’ve got to tend to a few other patients. Wouldn’t look good on my first day to hang around a man I
barely
know all morning.” I press the call button. “A nurse will come shortly, and she’ll get you the hell out of this hospital.”
 

Ash tries to catch my hand again, but I dodge him and walk out of the room. I hear his voice through the door as it swings shut behind me.
 

“I’ve been waiting a long time to see you. You won’t get rid of me that easy.” He chuckles. I hold my head up and walk away, but there’s a piece of me that wants to turn back, that wants to prove him
right
.

I
never
got over him.

I’m totally
fucked
.