Page 24 of Story of My Life
“Are you going to throw up again?” my patient yelled to her friend. “Ow!”
She winced and shot me an accusing look when I cupped the back of her neck and slapped the wipe to her face.
“I told you to hold still.”
“Well, I’m sorry. This is my first time getting in a fight with a bald eagle. I’m a little traumatized.”
I cleaned up the blood and dust as best I could.
I reached for a bandage and rolled my eyes. My mother had gotten sick of us raiding her first aid stash and had swapped out her normal-looking Band-Aids for fake mustache bandages. I kept forgetting to stock up on less stupid first aid supplies.
My patient leaned in closer, examining me like I was something under a microscope she’d never seen before. She had thick dark lashes and a faint scattering of freckles over her nose.
“What?” I said gruffly.
“You look familiar, and you have really pretty eyes,” she said.
Great. I was stuck with a concussed stranger and her hysterical fish-fearing friend. “Yeah? Well, you have head trauma and no business being behind the wheel of a car.”
“I’m serious,” she insisted.
I ripped open the mustache bandage. “So am I.”
“They’re green but with all these little gold flecks.”
Trouble’s eyes were brown. Like the forest floor. I pressed the bandage into place before she could move again.
“Are you Campbell Bishop?” she asked.
I gripped her by the back of her neck again and pressed the heel of my hand to the bandage. “Cam. And what’s it to you?”
She let out a chuckle that turned into a snort. “You really have the mean-nice thing down.”
There was no way I was touching that statement with a ten-foot pole. “What’s your name, Trouble?” I asked.
“Hazel,” she said. “Hazel Hart.” Her eyes widened suddenly. “Oh shit! What time is it?”
“How the hell should I know?”
“I don’t know. You look…” She looked me up and down. “Reasonably responsible.”
“It was about one fifty when I saw you run down our national bird.”
She grimaced. “I’m late for an appointment. And now I’m going to be even later since I have to find a bird hospital.”
“What?”
Hazel wiggled to the edge of the tailgate, which put her in direct, unanticipated contact with my crotch. All the parts I’d been too busy ignoring for the past year suddenly came to fullattention. Had it really been that long? I hadn’t gotten laid since I moved back, which was…an entire fucking calendar year.
Oblivious to my instantaneous, inconvenient physical reaction, she slapped a hand to my chest and pushed me back a step. Her sneakered feet hit the ground, and she tilted her head to look up at me. “How far is the downtown from here?”
“Story Lake’s downtown?” I couldn’t think of a single reason a stranger from New York would have a meetingdowntown.
“Yeah. I need to get to 44 Endofthe Road. Can I walk it?”
“Do you walk better than you drive?”
“I’m too stressed to take offense to that at the moment,” she said. “Thanks for the first aid.”
