The realization of love must have made everything shine brighter and everything become clearer for me. “It’s not appalling.” I chewed on my cheek before I let go of the words I was holding in. “I’m happy, Dante. Happy in a way that makes me scared it’s all just a dream—that I’ll blink, and all this will be gone.”
“Lilah, I’ve always been here. I’m not going anywhere.”
“You weren’t always here.” I chuckled at him as I watched him lean over to his nightstand and open a drawer. He grabbed a small vial of oil before he closed it back up, but not before I saw the pink color of my vibrator. “Also, I need that back.”
“If you were fucking your vibrator to my name, I must have been there in your mind. Always. Right?” He motioned for me to turn my back to him on the bed.
I scoffed but did as he wanted because my body was already yearning for his hands to migrate back to it, to smooth out any of my kinks. I was getting used to us bound together by touch, and I wasn’t sure if I was ever going to be able to extricate myself from him when the time came.
I could smell when he opened the glass container and dropped a few beads of a minty scent on his fingers. He smoothed it over a particularly sore spot on my hip.
“Maybe it wasn’t always to your name.” I bit my lip as his hands started working around the sore area and up my back, massaging, kneading, and pinpointing my body in the way only he knew how. My muscles shifted under the pressure of his strong fingers, and I moaned when he turned me to face him and laid me down on the bed.
“I should be getting dressed for work, Dante,” I groaned when he dripped a bit of oil onto my stomach and smoothed it over my skin.
“This should help. I was too rough with you.”
“If you were too rough, I would have used the safe word.”
“You don’t know what’s too much for you, Lamb.”
“Or maybe I know exactly what’s enough.” I winked at him and scooted up and off the bed quickly. “Now, work. I have to get ready.”
I made my statement clear and giggled when he tried to grab me. “You ever play hookie and not go to work? Should we add that to your new list?”
“You can’t keep changing the list.”
“Of course we can. That’s life. Change, adjust, find what you love. Plus, I know this island better than you. You need help navigating it.”
“Is voyeurism part of the island?” I popped a hip and lifted a brow.
Dante’s laugh boomed through the room, so big and bright that it infected me—and the whole atmosphere—with joy.
My heart swelled with it too. I clung to it and hurried to get ready for work.
The night should have gone off without a hitch. We had three great nurses working our floor, and the rest of the team was great.
A gunshot wound victim rolled in screaming, but we’d seen a ton of them before. We operated quick, but blood was everywhere. Our doc was yelling for more when the man’s hand shot out to grip mine. The red of it smeared all over my rubber gloves, and I tried to yank it back since I needed to be able to handle tools for the physician operating on him.
He didn’t let me go. His grip was tight, and as I caught his gaze to tell him he had to settle down, he stared at me with dark eyes.
“You’re Izzy’s sister. You’re that girl with the boyfriend who got her out.”
I shook my head immediately.
“You look just like her. I knew she was bad news. And you. You’re worse. Your boyfriend did this. I saw him. I saw him!”
My eyes widened. I yelled, “Necesitamos intubar ahora.” His oxygen saturation was dropping, and I needed him to shut up.
One of the nurses nodded and agreed with me, but Allan froze and stared like he’d seen a ghost. He stood staring so long that the head physician screamed at him.
More blood poured from the victim. His oxygen kept dropping.
We couldn’t get it to stop.
His life ran away from him just like my joy fled from me at his words.
For the rest of the night, I tried to remember the joy Dante and I shared. I tried to relish it. Then, as the cases got worse and my mind kept concocting ideas of what he was doing out there, I fought to hold on to it.
A mother lost her baby at eight months that same night. She held my hand as she cried and cried, then she stared up at me and said, “I wish I’d never even tried.”
I watched the joy flee from me. Fear and sadness and loathing crept in. So many hours at the therapist's office, so many check marks on a list, so many smiles and bouts of laughter hadn’t stopped the darkness from inking over it.