KDBookOnline
Share Us
Thanks! I should be back there soon. All patients discharged. Really appreciate it tho.
DYLAN
Derek scowled at that thumbs-up emoji and then dropped the phone onto the stretcher mattress like it had personally insulted him.
Joni’s expression X-rayed him. “Everything else okay?”
“Just a completely normal text from Dylan I’m overthinking.” Derek dug his fingertips into his upper legs. “I’ve been kind of a dick to Dylan since he moved in. And I’m pretty sure he didn’t deserve that at all—except for the whole being partially responsible for destroying my apartment thing. But recently I’ve just been trying to be nice, and I don’t know why I care about a stupid thumbs-up emoji anyway.”
“You really lost me with the emoji.”
“Okay, so this sounds like a silly thing to complain about, but lately he’s been nice, but in the way people are nice to strangers, and before that, sometimes…”
He would not be telling Joni about the heat he sometimes saw in Dylan’s eyes, and how a part of him had liked it. A big part of him.
Derek’s hands balled together. “He’s talking to me like a robot, but before, it was funny clapbacks and snarky jokes about my bathroom products.” He’d made Derek laugh even when he was freaking out about the disaster.
“So I’ll just leave the whole ‘jokes about bathroom products’ aside for the time being even though I’m curious… because, and I’m not sure exactly how to say this without just saying it, but did you do something specific to him since the night we were all over there? He wasn’t treating you like that then. Olive and Stella were pretty sure he was into you, actually.”
“I…” He couldn’t tell her about the humiliating conversation with Hudson either. And the whole possibly accidentally implying no one would want to watch him do porn. And the assuming he was a deadbeat mooching nephew thing. Oh, and he might have accused him of lying about the water problem originating in Derek’s plumbing… well, damn. “Thinking back… I might have been an ass at several specific points since then, yes.”
“You could apologize?”
“I could.”
Joni grinned. Before she could reply, the door opened.
“There you are.” Carolyn, a hospital social worker, popped her head into the room. “I just had a form for you, but I’ll leave it on your desk. Boy, sure is quiet here today.”
The word seemed to echo ominously after she left.
The forbidden Q word.
An urgent page overhead summoned Joni at the same time Derek’s charge nurse phone rang.
Joni groaned in horror. “What. Did. She. Do?”
Chapter 16
When Derek climbed the stairs to Dylan’s apartment, he had been at work three hours after his shift was supposed to end. His head was pounding, and he was still processing everything that happened since that conversation with Joni when they had thought the last part of their shift would be a breeze. Derek was used to the normal chaos of the ER, but the last few hours were less typical, though unfortunately not rare. There had been yelling, thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment destroyed, and because Derek had pulled the tiny Environmental Services woman out of the way of the incident, the patient wielding the top of an IV pole like a club decided he really didn’t like Derek’s face.
Derek was trying to decide whether he’d have the energy to eat before collapsing onto the bed when a smell stopped him in his tracks. An amazing scent was coming from the open window of Dylan’s apartment. If he didn’t know that Olive was in Maine, he would have wondered if she was here cooking.
When Derek opened the door, Dylan launched up from the small table like a starter pistol had gone off. But without looking at Derek or saying anything, he flopped back down onto the couch and pulled his laptop over his legs and began hitting the keys harder than necessary. A section of his long hair in the back was stuck out at a weird angle as if he’d been absentmindedly twisting it like he did when he was anxious.
“What’s wrong?” Derek asked.
“Nothing. Just needed to get back to work.”
Derek scanned the room and found a plastic bag of meat sitting there. “So… should I put that in the fridge?”
“Not if you want to eat it warm.”
“Eat it warm?”
“I was making food for myself earlier.” Gallagher pointed behind him at what looked like a fish tank on the small kitchen table. “I buy the meat in bulk, and I just figured I could make some extra, but it can’t stay in too long or the texture’s weird.” But… this wasn’t the glacial Gallagher. This was the amusingly and genuinely irritated Gallagher from those first few days.
“So that bag of meat is for—”