Page 43 of Over & Out
“Why are you so interested?”
“Oh myGod!”
Now I laugh, and fuck, it feels good.
“This is inappropriate, Hopper,” she laughs.
“Do you want me to stop?” I’m serious this time. She’s right. This is not professional.
“No,” she says, and there’s a little flash in her eyes. “It’s cute when you think you have the upper hand.”
That look she’s giving me—that glint in her eye—sends something spiking through me. An image pops up, then, of me having the upper hand in a different way. Like a pinning her to the bed way, those stockings wrapped around my thighs…
“Keep going,” Chris purrs, and I swear to God if I weren’t jogging, I’d probably hear the flood of blood to my lower half.
“Like literally keep going,” she says. “There’s definitely nothing behind you.”
I frown, but not before I slam ass-first directly into some kind of buffet thing. “Oh shit!” My legs get tangled as I try to keep a vase from falling over. What the hell is itwith me and vases? I manage to keep it upright, but not without falling ass over teakettle myself. I land on my back, the vase held over me like an offering. I rock a little, having taken the fall easily thanks to all the fight training I’ve had to do over the course of my career.
Chris looks me over, her hand over her mouth. “Oh no!” It’s a very unseriousoh no. “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” I manage.
“Are you sure? That was quite the spill!” Then she grins and keeps walking.
I twist around on the floor to look at her as she walks away. “Are you leaving a wounded soldier behind?”
Chris looks over her shoulder at me. “Yup.” Her hips swing as she walks away from me.
My mind drifts back to another woman who looked just like that as she drove away on a dirt bike, staring back at me. A woman who, moments later, lay in a crumpled heap in the dirt.
Just send the biggest bouquet you have. I don’t fucking care how much it is. Room 614…General Hospital…
I open my eyes to the flowers in the vase in my hand.
I’m calling about Room 614.
Sir, do you have a name?
I don’t have the name.I can’t have it. Knowing it will destroy me, that’s what Mabel said.
Fucking chicken.
Room 614. Tell me she’s okay. Just tell me she’s goddamned okay!
Then I’m looking at my bloodied fists; at three holes in the wall. At the TV, hung incorrectly and loosened from its frame. I watch it smash to the ground all overagain. Feel myself slump to the ground. Mabel calling me, telling me the girl is okay. “She’s in bad shape, but she’s alive. You just stay away and I’ll take care of this. Do not mention it ever again, do you hear me?”
The flashback was that day, but it was also a day years earlier. Mabel saying almost exactly those same words.
I get to my feet, my ears ringing.
“Hop?”
I hear her voice as if from a million miles away. Absently, I think about how Chris has never called me that before. OnlyHopperorDonnach. I set the vase back on the table and keep walking.
“Hey,” Chris says. But I can’t answer her. I see a limp body on the grass, the ridiculous red outfit I thought was so sexy now looking like blood. She was so small in my arms, so different from the firecracker on the track I came back to see over and over again.
And that other night? It haunts me too.
