Page 18 of Tips and Trysts

The unprecedented sensation is a bolt of heat penetrating my arm—scorching, stinging,burning.

My vision blurs. My hand is sticky. Something aches. Something else pulses. I’m not standing, but I’m not falling—not even sure if I’m sitting. There’s shouting—so much shouting.

And then Everett is in my line of sight, mouth agape, and he’s handsome—so annoyingly handsome—until he loses definition.

I stop seeing. I stop hearing. All I can do is feel. I feel everything.

And the last thing I see before everything fades is red—so much red—and the static-tinged, waning sight of Everett Logan’s green eyes looking down at me in horror.

Six

EVERETT

Someone is going topay for this. Someone is going to pay for this in every sense of the word.

Well, to be clear: I’m paying for Cora’s medical bills. In fact, nobody else is going to pay for anything she needs ever againexcept me.

But in the sense of revenge—steaming hot, unfiltered revenge—someone is going to pay dearly.

“How much longer is it going to be?” Essie, one of Cora’s two best friends, asks before she falls into the chair next to me. Even though she’s small, the chair creaks under her weight. The vinyl is old and scratchy, torn in a few spots where the stuffing pokes through the gray fabric, and Essie wrinkles her nose while she shifts to find a comfortable position. Over the last two hours, I’ve learned there’s no comfortable position in an ER waiting room.

“No clue,” I admit. “I’ve never been interviewed by MPD before.”

MPD: Metropolitan Police Department. In cases of intentional bodily harm, a patient is legally required to give a statement toMPD before they can speak to anyone else. It’s standard protocol after a patient completes a surgery or triage or whatever they do when someone gets shot.

Shot. Fucking hell.

“It’s a good sign, right?” Essie continues. She’s speaking absently while she picks at her thumbnail. When she arrived at the hospital, her nails were painted with glittery green nail polish, and over the course of the two hours she’s been here, she’s whittled them down to glittery green stubs. “MPD wouldn’t be able to interview her if she were…”

When Essie trails off, I glance at her. The distant look in her brown eyes lingers until I clear my throat.

“Did you get a hold of Valeria?”

Essie blinks. “Oh, shit—I did,” she confirms, shaking her head like she just remembered why she left the waiting room. “I convinced her and Lander not to come home early, but they were packing.”

Valeria is Cora’s other best friend, and along with Essie, they’ve redefined co-dependency—which is a big statement coming from me because I would literally wage a land war if someone tried to come between Dalton, Lander, and me, and I’m a pacifist.

Was. Before today, Iwasa pacifist.

I look at my wrapped hand. The ache is gone, but the foreignness of the gauze on my fingers is starting to set in—as is the reality of this ordeal.

I want to destroy something. Not in the physical sense, of course. As of a few hours ago, I’ve been there, done that. Breaking shit isn’t my thing.

No, I want a million people to loathe the man who hurt her. A billion, if I’m shooting for the stars, but I’ll settle for a million if I have to. I want his name to be synonymous with bad decisions and regret.

I’m going to print his social security number on reams of wallpaper and sell it in an Etsy shop. I’m going to write a bestselling novel with a protagonist who shares his name and has an exceptionally small dick, effectively ruining this cuntnugget’s digital footprint for life.

Better yet, I’m going to ask Cora what she wants me to do to him—and then I’ll fucking do it. She’s far more cunning than I am. The shooter will beg for me to open that Etsy shop. Hell, he might even give me the startup capital to launch it faster.

Essie lets out a protracted sigh. “I want to see her. Can’t you pull some strings?”

“Believe it or not, my connections are no match for HIPAA. Plus, I doubt I’m the most popular guy in the ER right now.” I look over at the triage desk where the nurse on shift narrows her eyes, probably replaying the words I murmured through the glass partition: “If you don’t let me see Cora Flores right now, I’m going to buy the hospital, rename it ‘The Everett Carlisle Logan Medical Hospital,’ and you’ll have to wear my name and an embroidered image of my handsome, pissed off face on your scrubs every day until you retire. And in this economy, your retirement might takedecades.”

Her hand was less than an inch from the security button when I remembered I was running for office and retreated back to this hideous chair.

“I don’t do well in hospitals,” Essie mentions before sinking lower. “Plus, you wouldn’t happen to know anything about Bayes’ Theorem, would you?”

The unassuming computer science major next to me looks like a normal Georgetown girl, albeit always a touch overdressed, but a college girl, nevertheless. She drinks too much iced coffee and takes a ton of selfies like most college girls. And yet she regularly strips off her clothes and plays with herself online—allegedly, Dalton says.

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