Page 34 of Black Wave

I laugh, and so does Gustavo at this. Gus finally pipes up. “She knows you, Boss. Is that good?” He looks at me in all seriousness.

I keep my focus on Emma only. “Yes, that’s very good indeed.” Emma blushes and turns her back toward us, gathering some supplies from the cabinet.

“All right.” She looks at Gus. “Let’s see what we’ve got here.” She starts to unwrap his hand.

Gus pulls it back a little. “You’re not queasy, are you, Emma? Of a little blood?”

I can’t tell if he is testing her or seriously concerned after how the lady at the check-in desk reacted to his injury. He doesn’t show much emotion, so it’s hard to gauge his line of questioning. Emma just snorts.

“Please,” she says. “I’ve seen it all my life.” She must realize what she has said because she stops to look at me and then at Gus. Now, it’s time for Gus to raise an eyebrow in question. She looks at me and smiles widely, displaying her perfectly straight white teeth. I can’t help but return the smile. Gus watches the exchange.

“I think I’m getting the full picture now, Eduardo.” He extends his hand for her to treat.

When she smiles at me like that, I imagine coming home from our line of work and seeing her welcoming me. I envision her pregnant with my child, her hand on her round belly, looking at me with that smile and a… future? Could that be in the cards for me after all? I’m unsure, but I know I’m not giving up on her again.

She unwraps the bandages and looks at the wound, frowning. “I need to clean this up to see what I’m looking at.”

She puts Gus on a monitor and has him lie on the stretcher, which makes Gus grumpy, but he doesn’t dare say a thing to her because he must sense that Emma is mine, and he won’t disrespect her like that—friend or not.Definitely not as an employee, I think to myself. It dawns on me that I have now thought of Emma as mine for the first time in years.

After she cleans it up, she tells us that she’ll be right back but needs to get the doctor to look at it. “Can you do it?” I ask her before she leaves.

She nods, then says, “I can’t do it here because my license doesn’t allow me to do this.”

I smile at her. “Perfect,” I announce and see Gus’s recognition of my question dawning on him. Not only is Emma the perfect girl for me, but she can also help when I need to trust someone, and discretion is imperative. He nods in silent agreement.

She returns momentarily with a doctor in tow, and I frown because he seems too comfortable talking to my future wife.Well,I think to myself,that escalated quickly.

CHAPTER 19

Emma

Idespise doing the night shift, but one of my friends asked if I could please work it for her because she had a wedding to go to. Well, at least I have the day off tomorrow because I’ll be sleeping most of it away. I make a mental note to set my alarm for noon to shop. Then I have light plans to meet up with some people from work. I’ll have to get Liv to come out with me. I have a ton of preparation to get done for the girls’ visit to Houston. They’ve always treated me like one of them, and I can’t wait to see them.

As soon as I walk through the door of this place, there is one emergency situation after another, and it’s only going to get worse after midnight. My parents used to remind me that nothing good ever happens after midnight, and as I look around this hellhole, I tend to agree with their assessment and stance on the issue. Nothing is good in this place.

I sigh in resignation as I take a much-needed sip of my coffee, looking around the forty-five-bed ER from the inner core nurses’ area. The music in the nurses’ station plays“Paint it Black” by Hidden Citizens. Rånya’s chilling vocals just add to the vibe.

Everything that is harmful or evil seems to live in this place. The sounds of pain and crying combined with the sight of vomitand blood harden my emotions to when someone comes in mostly dead and we have to act quickly to save their life. I don’t know how Liv did this god-forsaken shift all those years while attending school. This graveyard shift is a fitting name, and it royally sucks ass. I have a new appreciation for anyone who works the night shift because it is pure hell.

I’m pulled from my thoughts as the devil himself sets his gaze on me heading out of the triage room.

Lucifer, Satan, Beelzebub, or as we call him here at work, Brett, walks up to me with a purpose, and I fight the urge to roll my eyes at him. He is so condescending and full of himself. He thinks he is so good-looking, flexing his muscles. It just doesn’t do it for me, which irks him to the max. Imagine a woman not throwing themselves at his feet—the horror.

“Em-ma,” he calls my name using two-syllables, making me instantly annoyed. He brings his cupped hands forming a funnel appearance around his mouth back down after calling my name. He’s such a jerk. He can’t call me short, and he says my name like this because he thinks I am slow to hear things. You know, since I am short, the words have to travel down until I hear them. I get the meaning of his act; it’s just not funny. I once tried to tell him that I knew I was short and could hear just fine. He smiled, knowing that he got to me, so he kept doing it every so often. To other people, it doesn’t look like anything when he does things like this, but I know what he’s implying. I decide not to react to his childish behavior. He knows how I feel when people call me short. Schooling my features to Lucifer, I smile brightly at him.

“Yes, Brett.” I look up at him. He tries to stand too close to me as a means of intimidation. He doesn’t realize I am thinking about punching him in the balls—one benefit of being vertically challenged.

As I look back up, I realize that I may not be throwing my best poker face on because he smirks at me. Ugh, he must be interpreting this all wrong.I wasn’t looking at your balls. I was thinking about punching you in the balls.I shake my head to obliterate the appalling mental image from my mind.

“What is it, Brett?”

He hands me a chart. “Here. Your next patient is over in trauma bay four.”

Brett is so smug, and I bet he thinks he is upsetting me by giving me a more complex patient, but it would take more than this to rile me up. I quickly glance over the chart and see his narrowed eyes focused on me.

“Is the knife or object still lodged in the wound?” I ask.

“No, it’s not,” he replies quickly.

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