Friends & Fortune Cookies: A Sudden Falls Romance (9 page)

She whipped a couple of sheets off her clipboard. “Here’s a prescription for a painkiller and that follow-up appointment with the orthopedist.” She held them out to Gracie. “Mrs. Baker?”

Gracie’s face blushed red, and she didn’t immediately reach out for the pages. “Oh, I’m not...”

I almost laughed at her discomfort until Dr. Stark pulled her hand back and reattached the papers to her clipboard. “Oh. You’ll probably want to have someone around for the first couple of days. You’re going to have limited mobility and a fair amount of pain.” She sighed. “Maybe we should admit you.”

I tensed up to protest when Gracie put her hand over my arm. “What I meant is we’re not married,
yet.
” She squeezed my forearm. “Of course, I’ll be there for him.”

I could have kissed her at that moment. Even if she drove me home and kicked me out at the curb, it would be preferable to being cooped up in a hospital for several days. I nearly shuddered at the thought.

Alex’s gaze went back and forth between Gracie and me. But fortunately, he didn’t blow our cover.

The sheets of paper came back off the clipboard, and this time Gracie took them. “All right, then, Mr. Baker. No more falling off roofs. I’ll have the nurses keep an eye on you tonight, and if everything is okay, we’ll send you home in the morning. Good luck.”

The doctor stepped away from the curtain, and I finally met Gracie’s eyes. Her makeup — which I had noticed had been pristine every time I took her to Café Diem—was a little worse for wear. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear she’d been crying.

“I’m glad you’re okay.” Her voice sounded a little quiet and hoarse.

Had she been crying?

“I’m going to go fill these prescriptions at the hospital pharmacy,” she said. “Do you have your insurance card?”

Alex grabbed a bag hanging from the end of the bed, dug around inside, and came up with my wallet. I didn’t protest as Grace opened it up and plucked the insurance card out. Had she noticed the photo of us that I kept sealed in the thin vinyl photo pocket that came with my wallet? It had been in there for years, since just after the camping trip where we’d taken it. The trip where we managed to repair our post-prom fallout. Before she’d starting dating some guy from her freshman English class, and before I went through a long, miserable tour in Iraq and two not-quite-as-long-but-equally-miserable tours in Afghanistan where that picture was one of the few things that got me through.

If she had noticed it, she didn’t linger over it for long. Snapping the wallet closed, she handed it back to Alex. “I’ll be back in a few,” she said as a nurse came in. My cousin plopped down in the chair Gracie had vacated as the nurse took my blood pressure and asked me a few questions about what day it was, who was president, and where I was.

I answered without giving her any sass, and she rewarded me with a small, white pill. “Percocet,” she said. “It should take the edge off your pain and help you sleep.”

I took the pain meds, and she made her departure.

Alex rolled his head on his neck like he was trying to release tension.

“How did Gracie get here?”

“I went to get her after they took you back for the CT.” He raked a hand through his hair. “Remember? You told me where she was having dinner.”

I started to remember vaguely getting the message from Gracie and wanting to chuck my phone over the side of the roof. It figured on the day I left her alone she met someone she wanted to have dinner with.

“Thanks, man,” I said.

“She was... really broken up. That girl likes you more than she’s willing to admit.”

My heart beat a little bit harder in my chest. “We’ve been friends for a million years. Of course she’d be upset that I’d been hurt.”

“Not upset.
Broken up.
” He shook his head at me as if I were a slightly dumb child. “She cried—no. She
sobbed.
Dude. You should totally marry that girl.”

I tried to roll my eyes at him. Unfortunately, they were not well-coordinated right now for some reason.

Alex had literally married the girl next door. Lisa and her parents were Uncle Tommy and Aunt Marcy’s neighbors. Alex and Lisa started dating somewhere around the eighth grade and neither of them had ever looked at anyone else since. It made Alex weirdly able to see romance everywhere. Not that he was a big girl about it or anything. But he was pretty vocal about life being better with someone beside you.

I thought about giving him crap about his rosy outlook on everyone else’s life, but I didn’t get the chance because somehow the Percocet had robbed me of consciousness.

Chapter 15 — Grace

“Dating and drugs do not mix.”
~ Luddite in Love: A Cautionary Tale of Dating in the Modern Age,
Grace Mendoza

The pharmacy promised to have Joe’s prescription filled within thirty minutes, and even though it wasn’t far from the emergency room, I decided to wait rather than go back. Seeing Joe all banged up and vulnerable did something to me I didn’t like and wasn’t sure how to deal with.

When Alex had said, “Joe fell off the roof. They’re doing a CT Scan to see if he has brain damage,” I thought I might throw up, right there in the middle of the restaurant. Shane rather ceased to exist at that moment.

I kind of lost it after Alex settled me into the cab of his truck. I don’t typically cry in public if I can help it, but this seemed to be one of those occasions where I couldn’t. Alex might have regretted his decision to come get me, but I was certainly glad he had.

I had been so relieved to find out Joe only had a mild concussion that my hands started to shake. I didn’t want him to see me that out of sorts, so I dove on the excuse to go to the pharmacy like a drowning woman on a life preserver.

While I was waiting, I stopped into the ladies’ room only to find my face ravaged by my emotional outburst. I’d always envied those women who could cry a few dainty tears, dab them away with a hankie, and go about their day. I could not. I had swollen eyes, a big red nose, and smeared makeup made ever so much worse by the fact that since the big makeover, I wore a lot more makeup. So there was a lot more to smear.

Pulling a paper towel from the dispenser, I moistened it in the sink and tried to wipe off the worst of the damage. I did not look any better when I was done, but at least I was no longer a hospital cliché.

The prescription was ready, so I picked it up and headed back to the emergency room. I wasn’t sure whether I was ready or not, but there wasn’t much else I could do to delay it either.

When I got back to Joe’s curtained-off cubicle, he was sound asleep, and Alex sat in the chair by the bed, staring intently at in his phone. “Oh, hey, Grace,” he said when he finally noticed me. “I gave Lisa an update. Do you want me to give you a ride home?”

I thought about staying with Joe, but they’d given him a couple of happy pills so he was likely to sleep for a while. “If you don’t mind?” I could sleep a couple of hours then come back to get Joe in my own car.

I left a note for him on the small table by the bed, pulled his keys from the bag with his wallet, then went in search of a nurse so I could leave my name and number in case there was any sort of emergency and to let them know I’d be back to fetch him in the morning.

Alex dropped me off at my apartment, and I immediately fell into an exhausted sleep. My alarm woke me at four in the morning. I took a shower, put on some comfy clothes, tidied up the apartment, and then went to go get Joe some clean clothes.

Sudden Falls wasn’t that big, so I knew where Joe’s apartment was. However, in the two weeks that he’d been back, I hadn’t actually been there. I wound my way through the Chesapeake Landing complex to the back where the older buildings were. Kind of bleak, actually. The paint was worn, and the landscaping wasn’t as well-tended as the part of the complex closest to the road. He’d told me that he went for cheap so he could funnel as much money as possible into the house, and he hadn’t been lying.

His apartment was on the third floor — an outdoor walk-up. I let myself in and immediately felt... depressed. Two framed pictures hung on the wall. One of his unit in Afghanistan, and one selfie of the two of us taken on a camping trip the fall after he’d gone through basic training and I’d started college. I’d noticed the same photo in his wallet.

Along the edge of the kitchen was an eat-in bar with two built-in stools. The kitchen had a very small stove/oven combo, a small fridge, and a single, stainless-steel sink with plastic knobs. No dishwasher, but a dish drain next to the sink contained a bowl, plate, coffee mug, and some spoons.

No dining room, and the bedroom doubled as the living room. Management had painted the apartment in standard “relocation-beige,” and the carpet was a slightly dingier version of the same color. The main room featured a pull-out sofa—pulled out and not made—and an end table with a yard-sale lamp and a closed laptop on it. A dresser doubled as a TV stand with a small flat screen and cable box with an assortment of change, pens, and receipts dumped on top. I could picture Joe scraping everything out of his pockets at night and dropping it on the dresser.

Even hotel rooms had more character since most were at least decorated in some fashion.

This apartment had to depress him as much as it did me. And part of the reason it depressed me was that it was the kind of place you stayed when you weren’t staying for long. Which, of course, he wasn’t.

The look I’d been trying to interpret in Joe’s eyes of late was loneliness. Besides Alex and me, he really didn’t have anyone. His dad was gone. His mom, while finally sober, had never been exactly reliable, and they weren’t close.

I came to see this last year through very different eyes. While I’d certainly suffered from my breakup with Mike, I had friends, colleagues, and my family. My parents were amazing, giving people who’d always showed my sisters and me all the love in the world, made our childhoods safe and happy, and had helped us grow into good, happy adults. Katie, Inky, and I were very close. If I needed them, I could call either anytime, and they would drop whatever they were doing and come to my aid.

Who came to Joe’s aid?

I decided in that instant that I couldn’t let him come back here to convalesce. First, I wouldn’t be on hand to help him if he needed it. Second, I was pretty sure I couldn’t haul all two hundred and ten pounds of him up three flights of stairs. My apartment was on the ground floor right off the parking lot, and I had a guest room. And, you know,
furniture.

Grabbing some clean clothes out of the dresser drawers, I packed them into the olive canvas backpack sitting on the floor. In the small bathroom, I packed his toiletries and shampoo into a shaving case. It would take Joe about an hour to pack all of his worldly belongings and move.

Which shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me as Joe had always been nomadic, even if it hadn’t been by choice when he was a kid.

I was glad to leave his place and get back to my car. The trip to the hospital took a few minutes, and I made it in before six o’clock. I asked at the nurses’ station if I go back to Joe’s room. “Ahh. I’m sure he’ll be glad you’re here. I think he’s ready to go as soon as Dr. Stark releases him.”

I found Joe lying in bed looking fairly miserable. His face was swollen from a giant knot on his forehead, down over his purple-and-blue right eye, and into his cheekbone, giving him a misshapen alien look which I wouldn’t necessarily have recommended for him.

“Ouch,” I said. “That looks like it hurts.”

He shrugged and then winced.

“I got you some fresh clothes.” I lifted the backpack in my hands.

“Thanks.” If he was surprised or uncomfortable with my breaking-and-entering routine, he didn’t show it.

Chapter 16 — Joe

Gracie looked a little more like the Gracie I used to know than she had since her makeover. Her riot of messy curls was caught with a clip at the back of her neck. She’d scrubbed her face free of makeup and now wore jeans, sneakers, and an oversized, ratty gray hoodie that read “ARMY” in block letters across the front. In fact, that hoodie looked suspiciously like one I’d let her borrow when we’d gone camping years before and she’d never returned it.

It did something to my Percocet-addled brain to see her wearing my shirt, especially when I contemplated how many times she’d probably worn it in the last six or so years. New when I’d lent it to her, it now looked in dire need of retirement. The letters were faded, and a corner of the top of the “A” had washed off. The cuffs, fabric edge next to the zipper, and the front pockets all showed signs of fraying.

Did she think about me when she wore it? Did she think about that camping trip? Maybe the sweatshirt was the same kind of reminder for her that the photo in my wallet was for me.

Or maybe I was over thinking this, and it was just a warm sweatshirt that fit her well.

She set my rucksack on the bed. “Thanks.”

“Hope you don’t mind that I ransacked your place.” She was biting her lip nervously again. How could I get mildly turned on by that when I was in this much pain?

It was a mystery.

As was the fact that it didn’t bother me at all. After living in barracks for years, I was pretty militant about my privacy. If some girl I was dating had taken it upon herself to go through my stuff, I suspect I would have felt pretty hostile about it.

Dr. Stark came in and turned to the computer screen set up beside me. “Well, Mr. Baker. It looks like you were pretty lucky. Your vitals are good.” She looked over at Gracie. “Keep an eye on him. If he starts to slur his words, complains of visual or hearing disturbances, or says things that don’t make sense, bring him back right away.” The doc turned back to me. “Otherwise, try to take it easy while you’re healing. Someone will bring in your discharge papers and instructions shortly.”

And then she was gone.

“I’ll go out and let you get dressed.” Gracie stepped outside of the curtain and pulled it closed. I opened my duffel carefully, ribs twinging as I moved my arm. She’d packed several pairs of shorts and sweatpants as well as some tee-shirts, undershorts, and two sweatshirts. One a zip-up. I didn’t really need that many clothing choices to get home, but I appreciated the consideration.