JOSH
“Don’t say it.”I cracked open my beer, ignoring Clara’s amused expression. The cute female bartender she’d been flirting with had left to deal with the happy hour rush, and she’d been watching me with a knowing smile ever since.
“Fine. I won’t.” Clara crossed her legs and took a demure sip of her drink.
She was an ER nurse at Thayer University Hospital, where I was a third-year resident specializing in Emergency Medicine, so our paths crossed often. We’d been friends since my first year of residency, when we bonded over our mutual love for action sports and cheesy nineties movies, but she had as much sexual interest in me, or any member of the male species, as she did a rock.
Clara certainly wasn’t my date, at least not in the romantic sense, but I hadn’t corrected Jules’s assumption. My personal life wasn’t any of her business. Hell, sometimes I wished it wasn’t my business.
“Good.” I caught the eye of a pretty blonde at the other end of the bar and flashed a flirtatious smile. She returned it with a suggestive one of her own.
Thiswas what I needed tonight. Alcohol, watching the Wizards game with Clara, and some harmless flirting. Anything to take my mind off the letter waiting for me at home.
Correction: letters. As in plural.
December 24. January 16. February 20. March 2. The dates of the most recent letters from Michael flashed through my mind.
I received one every month like clockwork, and I hated myself for not throwing them out the instant I saw them.
I took a long swig of my beer, trying to forget the stack of unopened mail sitting in my desk drawer. It was my second beer in less than ten minutes, but fuck it, I’d had a long day at work. I needed to take the edge off.
“I’ve always liked redheads,” Clara said, drawing me back to a conversation I didn’t want to have. “Maybe because The Little Mermaid was my favorite Disney movie growing up.”
Her face creased into a smile at my long-suffering sigh.
“Your lack of subtlety is astonishing.”
“I like to have at least one trait that’s astonishing.” Clara’s smile widened. “So, who was she?”
There was no use trying to sidestep her question. Once she sniffed out something she thought was juicy, she was worse than a Pitbull with a bone.
“My sister’s best friend and a pain in my ass.” Tension knotted my shoulders at the memory of my encounter with Jules.
It was just like her to be prickly even when I tried to help her. Forget an olive branch. I should hand her a bouquet of thorns and hope it pricked the fuck out of her.
Every time I tried to make nice—which, to be fair, wasn’t often—she reminded me of why we would never be friends. We were both too stubborn, our personalities too similar. It was like pitting fire against fire.
Unfortunately, Jules and my sister Ava had been thick as thieves since they roomed together their freshman year of college, which meant I was stuck with Jules in my life no matter how much we got on each other’s nerves.
I didn’t know what her issue with me was, but I knew she had a penchant for getting Ava into trouble.
In the seven years they’d known each other, I’d watched Ava trip out on Jules’s pot brownies and almost streak naked at a party, consoled her after she drunkenly dyed her hair semi-permanent orange at Jules’s twentieth birthday party, and rescued them from the side of a road in Bumfuck, Maryland after Jules had the brilliant idea to join some strangers they met at a bar on a last-minute road trip to New York. The car broke down on their way there and, luckily, the strangers turned out to be harmless, but still. It could’ve gone so very wrong.
Those were just some of the highlights. There were a thousand other instances when Jules had convinced my sister to go along with one harebrained scheme or another.
Ava was an adult and capable of making her own decisions, but she was also too damn trusting. As her older brother, it was my job to protect her, especially after our mom died and our father turned out to be a fucking psycho.
And there was no doubt in my mind that Jules was a bad influence. Period.
Clara’s mouth twitched. “Does the pain in your ass have a name?”
I took another swig of beer before answering with a curt, “Jules.”
“Hmm. Jules is very pretty.”
“Most flesh-eating succubi are. It’s how they rope you in.” Aggravation crept into my voice.
Yes, Jules was beautiful, but so were wolfsbane and blue-ringed octopi. Pretty exteriors hiding deadly poison which, in Jules’s case, came in the form of her viperous tongue.
Most men were blinded by all those curves and big hazel eyes, but not me. I knew better than to fall for her trap. The poor sods whose hearts she broke at Thayer were further proof I needed to stay far away from her for my personal sanity.
“I’ve never seen you so worked up over a woman.” Clara’s face was now a mask of delight. “Wait till I tell the other nurses.”
Oh, Jesus.
Gossip Girl had nothing on the nurses’ station. Once news reached their ears, it spread through the hospital like wildfire.
“I am not worked up, and there’s nothing to tell.” I switched the subject before she could press further. I had no desire to discuss Jules Ambrose a second longer than necessary. “If you want real news, here’s something: I finally decided where I’m going for vacation.”
She rolled her eyes. “That’s nowhere near as interesting as your love life. Half the nurses are in love with you. I don’t get it.”
“It’s because I’m a catch.”
It wasn’t arrogance if it was true. I would never hook up with anyone at the hospital, though. I didn’t shit where I ate.
“Humble, too.” Clara finally gave up trying to pull more information about Jules out of me and went along with my obvious deflection. “Okay, I’ll bite. Where are you going for vacation?”
My grin was real this time. “New Zealand.”
I’d been torn between New Zealand for bungee jumping and South Africa for cage diving with sharks, but I finally decided on the former and bought my tickets last night.
Medical residents had crap schedules, but those of us in emergency medicine had it better than surgeons, for example. I worked a mix of eight and twelve-hour shifts with one mandated day off every six days and four stretches of five days off annually. The tradeoff was we worked nonstop during our shifts, but I didn’t mind. Busy was good. Busy kept my mind off other things.
I was, however, pumped for my first vacation this year. I’d been approved for a week off in the spring, and I could already picture my time in New Zealand: crisp blue skies, snow-capped mountains, the sensation of weightlessness as I free fell and the adrenaline rush that set my body alive whenever I indulged in one of my favorite adventure sports.