Page 11 of Grumpy Sunshine

But make that man look like Chevy Clayborne, with his sexy, dark good looks and his grumpy personality, and I was just lost.

Oh, and let’s not forget that he was part of a motorcycle club, though I didn’t know which one.

I’d done enough binge watchingSons of Anarchyto know that a biker would be just my style.

Though, that was imaginary me.

Reality me was too scared to do anything more than smile at the man.

And some days I couldn’t even do that.

I’d bet on my life he thought I was weird.

“Hey, Aella,” Dru called out.“Could you help me with a patient that just got out of surgery?”

I stood up, and that’s when Chevy turned.

I saw the look on his face before I left the nurses’ station, and I felt kind of bad, because it was obvious that he didn’t know that I’d been there.

Which made me feel like shit, because I hadn’t been hiding.

In fact, I’d been right there, out in the open, plain as day.

Was I that unremarkable that I couldn’t be spotted out in the open?

Shoulders deflating a little bit more, as if my day couldn’t get any worse after finding my rent gone and my mother the one to take it, now I had to be reminded that I was unnoticeable.

“What can I help you with?”I asked quietly.

Dru smiled and gestured toward a room that was about two doors down from the main entrance into the ward.

“Twenty-eight-year-old patient just had an ACL repair.She was going to go to same day, but they hit a snag with her surgery before our shift started and they admitted her.I just need help getting her bandages changed and her sheets changed,” she explained.

I didn’t understand the need for that until I got into the room and saw that the patient was well over six hundred pounds.

No wonder she couldn’t do it by herself.

Dru was five foot if she was wearing shoes, and probably a hundred and ten pounds soaking wet.

It felt super weird standing next to Dru because I wasn’t super tall for a woman at five-foot-six, but I felt like a monster standing next to her.

Dru was adorably sweet and vertically challenged.

She didn’t act like she was a tiny little thing, though.

She was all take charge and kill everybody that got in her way.

I liked her a lot, and she was by far my favorite person to work with when I was coming in for a shift.

Which was, sadly, quite a bit.

I worked my ass off, went to school full-time, and volunteered in what little time I had left at the local animal shelter.

I was anything if not strategic.

I knew that I was pretty mediocre when it came to life.

I wasn’t the best in my class, but I wasn’t the worst.

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