Page 85 of Grumpy Sunshine

I glared harder at the doors, then sighed and let her pull me out of the hospital lobby.

“My sister,” Aella said, surprising me.

“Your sister?”I asked, confused and wondering if I’d missed something.

“That’s who I was texting,” she explained.“I, uh, had a little crisis as I was leaving, and started to explain to my sister what happened today.”

“What kind of crisis?”I snapped, suddenly angry on her behalf, despite not knowing who I was angry at.

Honestly, I was pretty angry at the world.

It’d been a very hard day, and likely wouldn’t get any better any time soon.

Not with funerals to plan, anyway.

“The kind where I shared four whole days of sickness with a man, and we’ve slept in the same bed every second of that time, and then we kiss before he goes into surgery.Followed with him fucking me in a supply closet the moment he’s out of surgery,” she replied sarcastically.“Then me trying to figure out if I should call him, then realizing that I don’t actually have his number to do that with.Then realizing that the only real place I would know to possibly find him would be a clubhouse that is over forty-five minutes away, with no guarantee that he would actually be there.”

I grinned and twisted us so that we were facing each other in the middle of the parking lot where security had moved my bike.

Despite the fact that a car was headed our way, I said, “I’ll give you my number as soon as I let you go.”

“There are cars,” she pointed out.

“I don’t really care,” I admitted.“Two things.”

She waited, her eyes wide and sparkling in the large streetlamp that was glowing harshly above our head.

“One, the moment you let me into your house when I was sick, you became mine.”I tugged on a stray lock of hair that’d escaped her ponytail.She’d had a rough day, and it showed.“And two, we may be new, but there’s a connection here that I’ve felt for two whole years.I’ve just waited for you to show a sign that you were interested.Now that I’ve seen that sign, I won’t ever let you go.”

She shivered.

The car behind us honked impatiently.

“We really should move,” she pointed out.

“Are you with me, Aella?”I asked, squeezing her hip.

“With you?”She licked her lips.

I picked her up and got her out of the middle of the parking lot when the car behind us started to creep too close.

The woman driving rolled down her window and called us assholes as she passed.

Aella flipped her off over my right shoulder, which caused me to smile.

“With me,” I said as I stopped in the darkest part of the lot, which just so happened to be one of my favorite places to come out when I was working and catch a few minutes of fresh air after surgeries.“As in, on the same page.Do you understand that you’re mine now?”

“I, uh, I…” she stuttered.

No, she didn’t understand.

But I’d make sure that she did before we left the parking lot.

“Where are we?”she asked as I kept walking us into the shadows.

“The hospital owns all this land back here,” I explained as I stopped us just short of the concrete, right next to a bench that I’d had installed just for me.“Future developmental opportunities.”

“Wow,” she said.“Is that a bench?”

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