Page 6 of Always Salty

All thoughts on my life and what I was going to do with it were put on the back burner when I got to work and spotted a close-enough parking spot that I wouldn’t be walking for eight days in the dark.

I expertly backed into it, shut the engine off, and gathered my things.

The sleep lab, though nice during the day time, was a bit scary at night.

In the middle of a rougher part of Dallas, it didn’t give me the warm fuzzies when I got out of my safe car and headed down the street to work.

Like all parts of downtown, there wasn’t much parking to be had, and I was lucky to find one as close as I did at this time at night when everyone was usually home or getting home for the night.

I had to walk past six alleyways on my way into work, and all of them were occupied by questionable looking people. The trick was to avoid eye contact, and always have a knife in your hand to make you look crazy.

My brother, Chevy, taught me that.

The more crazy you look, the less likely they are to mess with you.

That was why I walked with a huge hunting knife that likely looked too big for my hand.

But it worked.

No one ever messed with me.

On the last alley I passed, a light caught my eye.

The burning end of a cigarette.

I glanced that way, which was a rookie mistake, and felt my heart flip when the burning ember illuminated a masked man standing in an alley. He was leaning against the exposed brick wall, shoulders against it, and one booted foot up against the wall.

My heart picked up speed because from what I could tell, the masked man had a great body.

He was wearing fitted pants, a pea coat, and the mask.

It was too hot out for a mask, well over eighty degrees, and not nearly cool enough to need a mask like that. And, since I had a sense of self-preservation, I didn’t dally for long.

But my thoughts were on masked guy for the rest of the night while I got our first two patients set up for the night.

A solid hour later, I met up with Dorie in the lab in the middle of the rooms and touched base.

Since she really was the only friend I had—outside of my brothers and Cutter’s wife, Milena—I, of course, opened my mouth when I shouldn’t have.

Then we were talking about our kinks all of a sudden, and I was blurting out things it’d taken me an entire year to work up the courage to even tell my therapist—who, might I add, was bound by law not to share my information with anyone.

Dorie, however, didn’t have that same code of conduct.

This was what happened with coworkers. They knew everything about your life.

Then again, I knew more about her life than I thought necessary.

Like right now, she was telling me that she wanted to fuck a werewolf.

“I think it would be really cool,” she said. “I mean, werewolves are awesome, right? I think my desire to do that stems from Beauty and the Beast. I mean, he was so dreamy as the beast, wasn’t he?”

I didn’t get the chance to answer before she was continuing on.

“I think you should go with it,” she chirped. “You know Craig?”

Of course I knew Craig. Everyone knew Craig.

He was a doctor at the sleep center that we worked at.

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