“Oh, don’t leave us in suspense, Ell,” Mia said.
“It was…it was John and Credence.”
I cocked my head. “What? Berretti?”
“They were—” She held up her index finger and with her other hand made a circle, she then proceeded to stick her finger through the hole, back and forth, back and forth.
Cringing, I held up my own hands. “Okay, okay, we get the picture.”
“You mean—” Mia lowered her voice and her head. “They were fucking?”
I pointed. “Swear word.”
“Shut up, Grady.”
Swallowing hard again, Ell nodded. “Yeah. That’s what they were doing. Completely nude. I wasn’t sure what I was looking at for a few seconds. It was like some weird, shifting pale alien.”
I sat next to her and rubbed her shoulder. “It’s okay, hon. It’s okay.”
“No, it’s not,” she replied, head in her hands again.
“She’s right, dude. It ain’t okay. That’s pretty…gnarly.”
“Did they see you?” I asked.
“I don’t think so. They were…very into it.”
“Literally!” Mia said, laughing. She looked around, and then back at us with a frown. “Aw, where’s Stone when you need him?”
I smiled. Stone would’ve loved that joke. Ell didn’t find it amusing, however. She bared her teeth at Mia and said, “C’mon, Mia, I’m going through a crisis right now!”
“I know, I know, but since you can’t trade eyeballs with someone or take out bad memories, you’re gonna have to deal with it, sister.”
“I saw them getting pretty close at dinner not too long ago,” I said. “He was eating off her plate. Gave her a back massage too. Made me lose my appetite.”
“What?” Mia gasped. “You saw this and you didn’t think it was noteworthy enough to tell us?”
I shrugged. “I didn’t want to relive it.”
“I don’t blame you there,” Ell said.
“Well, I like gossip. I miss it! If you haven’t noticed, there ain’t much in the way of entertainment around here,” Mia said. “I’ve already watched the entire Three Stooges collection, and I hate The Three Stooges.”
“How can you hate them?” I said.
“I don’t know. Reminds me of how you, Stone, and Mikey—” Mia shook her head, risking a glance at Ell. “Sorry, never mind.”
Ell said nothing about it. Mikey hadn’t been gone long, not that it mattered; the wound his death left on all of our hearts would never heal. I couldn’t tell if Mia’s words had gotten through to Ell or not. She seemed too shaken up about what she'd witnessed in the hospital and wasn’t paying attention to the banter between Mia and I. Thankfully. I guessed her walking in on Berretti and Credence was a bit of a blessing in that regard.
But after a few moments of silence, she spoke up. “What do we do?”
“About the new lovebirds?” Mia said.
Ell nodded.
“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing we can do. They’re adults, they can do what they want.”
“In this case, each other,” Mia snickered.
“You’re so gross,” Ell said.
She was really filling Stone’s role, and I liked that, but I missed the hell out of my best friend and wished he was back on his feet and out of the hospital already. Soon, though, if Doc Hart’s estimate was to be believed—which I did believe. She was a hell of a doctor.
“I mean, should I tell anyone? It’s probably against City rules to do…that in there,” Ell continued.
“Unsanitary, that’s for sure,” I said, “but it’s probably best to let it be for now. If it happens again, we’ll say something. But Berretti, God knows why, has a decent amount of pull here. I’m already on his shit list. You don’t need to be too.”
“Yeah, I agree,” Mia said, “let ‘em be.”
“And in the meantime, it wouldn’t hurt to try and scrub your eyeballs,” I added.
The next night, Ell came back with a notebook. I asked what it was.
“I found it in the room Berretti and Credence were in,” she answered.
“You think it’s one of theirs?”
“Maybe. There’s no name inside or anything like that. Could be someone else’s. Nina talked about a few people who’d worked in the hospital before we got here. Some of them, she said, were kinda weird. They’re dead now.”
“That’s terrible.”
“Yeah.”
“Did you look through it?” I asked.
She nodded. “Just flipped through the pages. It’s mostly…well, it’s mostly weird stuff, gibberish. There’s some poems and drawings. Dark and odd, but good.”
“Can I see?”
“I don’t know, Grady. That’s an invasion of privacy.”
“Says the lady who just admitted to flipping through it…”
“Finders keepers. I gain that right by law…probably. Plus, it wasn’t like I was doing it to be nosy. I was hoping I’d find some information about whose it was.”
“Uh-huh, sure… You’re full of fake rules today, aren’t you?”
She frowned, eyebrows coming together. “How’d you like it if some stranger went through your personal journal?”
I wrapped my arm around her waist and pulled her close, grinning. “Well, then the stranger better like erotic retellings of our more intimate nights.”
Ell fanned herself and put on a laughable Southern accent. “Oh my, Mr. Miller, you really know how to make a girl blush.”
I winked. “I do, don’t I?” My hand slid from her waist to her backside. “I’d like to make you blush tonight.”
No idea what that meant. Ell went with it, though.
“I bet you would.” She slapped my hand away. “But I’m tired, and you have to go to work in”—she checked her watch—“about forty-five minutes.”
“I only need twenty.”
“Minutes?”
“Seconds.”
“Aren’t I a lucky gal?”
“Hey,” I said, “that’s just a testament to how sexy you are.”
“There I go blushing again,” she said flatly. She definitely wasn’t blushing.
I watched as she stripped out of her scrubs and wrapped herself in a towel.
“Now you can’t go teasing me like that.”
“I can do whatever I want, Mr. Miller, and you can’t do anything about it. Now, I need to shower. Believe it or not, running around the hospital and stocking shelves works up a sweat, and I smell like a pair of sweaty gym socks.”
“Annnnnd there goes the mood.”
She winked. “I thought you were into feet?”
“Only on Sundays.”
Gagging, she left
