“No problem.” I channel my best Nurse Rogers impression and give him a curt nod. “See? That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
“You ever had to ask one of your hot classmates for a plastic bottle to pee in?” he asks, lips twisting in a wry grin.
“No,” I say, collecting the plastic urinal from the bathroom and handing it to him, “but you know what they say. No good deed goes unpunished.”
“Good deed?” he asks, a deep groove forming between his brows.
Shit. I so didn’t mean to say that.
“The story is all over campus. Not to mention social media.” I shrug, feigning indifference. That part is true, at least. Girls all over campus are swooning at the prospect of a modern-day Prince Charming, willing to scale tall buildings and shatter bones to defend their honor and rescue lost sandals. “I think the hashtag was #princecharmingfallshard.”
Talk about on the nose.
“In retrospect, probably not my finest moment,” he says with a self-deprecating smile.
Tell me about it. There are no winners here. He’s got a broken leg and I’ve got a metric ton of guilt.
Not to mention a single lonely sandal to remind me of the worst night of my life.
Chase
“We all make mistakes,” Nurse Payne says, toying with her stethoscope. “Pretty sure it’s part of the whole college experience. I’m told the key is not to repeat them.”
“I’ll be sure to remind my parents of that when they visit this weekend.” Not that it’ll make a difference with my dad.
She winces. “I take it they’re not happy?”
I nod. “They’ve been pretty cool so far, but now that I’m out of the SICU, I have a feeling I’m in for one of my dad’s famous lectures.”
He’s always been hard on me, determined to make sure I have opportunities he never had growing up. I get it. Life hasn’t been easy for him, and he doesn’t want to see me struggle the way he and my mom have. I just hope I haven’t thrown it all away in one moment of blind stupidity.
“To be fair,” she says, eyes glowing fiercely in the afternoon light. “You kind of deserve it. You scared the crap out of m—them.”
“Trust me.” I point at the brace on my leg. “I’ve learned my lesson. No more dares for me.”
I’m done with that shit. If it weren’t for my stupid pride, I never would’ve scaled the drainpipe. I don’t remember much about that night—a result of the concussion—but I remember that much at least. I was so busy trying to prove myself to a couple of drunk assholes that I let myself and my team down. Hell, I could’ve died.
Talk about screwed-up priorities.
“Probably a good idea,” she says, flashing a brilliant smile. “I think one stay at WUMC is more than enough to fulfill the ‘make foolish mistakes’ graduation requirement.”
“Amen to that.” I laugh, a full belly laugh, and the movement causes my leg to shift. Searing pain lances through my left calf and I gasp at the painful reminder of my foolishness.
“Breathe through it,” Nurse Payne says, her voice a soothing balm as she rests a hand on my shoulder. Her touch is a reassuring weight and when she squeezes gently, I exhale, my whole body relaxing as the discomfort resides. “How would you rate your pain on a scale of one to nine and three-quarters?”
It takes me a minute to get the Harry Potter reference—I blame the concussion—but I smile. “As long as I don’t move around too much, it’s not so bad. Maybe like a two or three?”
“Let me know if anything changes, okay?” She gives my shoulder another squeeze, her touch lingering before she drops her arm to her side. “No need to suffer unnecessarily just because you’re a big strapping football player.”
“You think I’m big and strapping?” I wiggle my brows for good measure, which earns me an eye roll.
“You know what I mean,” she says with a huff. “Most people aren’t used to getting tackled by three-hundred-pound dudes running at full speed.”
This time, I roll my eyes. “And you said you weren’t interested in football. Sounds like you’ve got a pretty good handle on the game.”
“Doesn’t everyone at Waverly?” she asks, eyes going wide. “The student handbook said it was a requirement for admission.”
When Nurse Payne first entered my room, I thought it was another stroke of bad luck, but as it turns out, she’s far more relaxed without her supervisor peering over her shoulder. I’m all for it. Problem is, my bladder is about three seconds from complete and utter humiliation.
