Page 40 of Devil and the Deep Blue Fish

HE HATEDthe hospital with the fierce passion of somebody who once had the nurses schedule memorized so he knew who to hit up for things like real chocolate and paperbacks.

Dave, who had been there the night before, and his boyfriend, Alex, were frequent visitors at Jackson and Ellery’s house for dinner. They were fond of saying that Jackson had been their worst patient—but he was a fairly decent friend.

Today he walked the familiar corridors of Davis Med Center with what he hoped was a relaxed posture, while he inwardly cursed himself for that damned doughnut two hours ago.

He had to keep his teeth from chattering every time he turned a corner or heard a footstep or the clatter of a gurney. The halls themselves were hushed—there weren’t a lot of party people in the critical care wards—but somebody was always going somewhere, doing something, even in a darkened room.

It made it damned hard to sleep.

Maybe it was his visit to Cowboy’s mom or his sudden loneliness without his backup, but a freight train of memories plowed through his head, flickering like a slideshow on speed.

The explosion of pain in his shoulder, his chest.

The numbness of shock, the confusion of people over him, touching him, shouting about him.

Darkness, so much darkness, while the inside of his body was pushed, pulled, stitched, irrigated, but in his head, just darkness.

He must be dead.

His body shattering into life, to light, to pain.

He must be in hell.

Seriously, that was the only explanation. He was in hell.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa” came a familiar voice. “Oh, sweets, you’re blacking out on me, aren’t you?”

Jackson took in a breath and realized he’d been holding it for too long. “Alex?” he asked, feeling a little bit of déjà vu. For all he knew, those were the exact same words Alex had used eleven years ago when Jackson had come to in critical care after he’d been nearly fatally shot.

Well, he’d died more than once on the operating table. Did that count asfatallyshot?

“Yeah, sweetheart. You’re here to see your friend, aren’t you. Dr. Luna’s hot boyfriend—that one.”

“Yeah,” Jackson said, forcibly shaking off the freight train. “Sorry—PTSD flashbacks. Fucking hospitals.”

Alex had tucked his hand under Jackson’s elbow and was walking with him, slowly, toward the ID-only hydraulic door into the ward.

“Yeah, I hate them myself,” he agreed, and Jackson’s chuckle took them both by surprise.

“Alex, you’re a nurse!” he said.

“Well, yeah. But I mean, work. Who wants to bethere?”

Another chuckle, and another step, and Jackson was taken, one breath at a time, back from that early trauma, thatfirsttrauma, into the here and now.

“I don’t mind so much,” he said. “Work, that is. I mean, I meet the nicest people.”

It was Alex’s turn to chuckle, but the slight, blond, practically elfin man grandly escorting him down the hall burbled more than chuckled.

“You say that, but Dave tells me that nice Dr. Luna tried to beat the shit out of you last night. Well done, by the way. I didn’t think Dr. Luna was flappable, but you got him well and truly flapped.”

Jackson grunted this time, suddenly too tired to chuckle. “He was mad at me because Henry got hurt,” he admitted baldly, trying to pull that mantle of maturity on his shoulders. The interview with Reba Milton had stripped it away, apparently, and a lot of his thick skin with it.

“It was your fault Henry was shot by some crazy woman trying to hunt down a kid?” Alex said, sounding legitimately puzzled. “You weren’t even there.”

“Yeah, but, you know. I’m, like, this black hole that pulls people into my bloodbath,” Jackson told him bitterly, and Alex paused in the corridor andsluggedhis arm.

“Ouch!” Jackson pulled back and rubbed his bicep. “Alex, thefuck!”

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