My Bad
Page 3
I felt the edges of my lips turn up in a small smile.
“I…”
“MVA, Pru!” Dwight, the doctor that was working with us tonight, yelled. “Multiple injuries. One is a stick shift through a little girl’s chest.”
I felt something inside of my gut clench, and then adrenaline started to course through my body. All the while the man—Hoax—still held my hand.
I swallowed but didn’t pull away, and he noticed.
Eventually, once we could hear the first sounds of sirens, he let me go and said, “Until next time, Pru.”
Then he was gone, and I was left more confused than ever.
I wanted him to leave, right?
Chapter 3
I just wanted some leggings. Unfortunately, I think I might’ve joined a cult when I purchased them.
-Pru’s Secret thoughts
Pru
I walked into my parents’ house and groaned at the smell of the cookies that were baking in the oven.
“Oh, God,” I moaned as I followed the smell. “Please tell me you have more than enough for me.”
My dad, who was sitting on the bar stool next to the counter, grinned at me as I made my way into the kitchen.
I walked straight to him and wrapped my arms around his large, muscular chest.
“Bad day at work, baby?” he asked me.
His chest rumbled with his words, and I closed my eyes as I thought about how awful my day had been.
Well, not all of it. Just most of it.
“Mom yelled at me when I told her we needed to change the code to the ER,” I mumbled. “And that was only the best part. The worst part is that a motor vehicle accident came in and not one, not two, but three children were unrestrained in the car doing the shitty driving. The mom was drunk off her ass and hit a parked car. Two kids were ejected. The one that wasn’t was only held inside by the stick shift impaling her in the left abdomen. They’re all in really bad shape.”
My dad’s arms around me tightened. “Bad day.”
Seriously. Bad day didn’t even begin to cover it.
“I made cookies for your mother, but if she’s going to yell at my baby, then maybe you should eat hers,” Dad suggested.
“I heard that.” My mother, my spitting image, walked through the door off the side of the kitchen that led to their bedroom, and straight to the bottle of Dr. Pepper that was sitting on the counter. She spared me a glare and drank. Once she’d finished, she turned to me. “I also didn’t yell at her. I explained why we didn’t change the code to the ER. Which she argued with me in front of the entire ER. It’s not my fault that I got pissed. She’s supposed to treat me like her boss at work, not her mother.”
“You’re both,” I argued. “And you know it’s a good idea.”
She growled in frustration. “I do know it’s a good idea! I’ve brought it up to the freakin’ hospital board multiple times, yet they still haven’t quite figured out how to pull their heads out of their asses. They argued about what the code should be changed to, who should have access to the code, where the code would be stored and how much money it was going to cost them to change it. At the end of the day, the goddamn code never gets changed.”
“Maybe you should tell ol’ Fat Bastard that he needs to stop fucking himself with his thumbs and make that hospital safe for y’all,” my dad muttered. “Jesus, I hate that guy.”
‘That guy’ was actually the board director, Kelley Lowe. And Kelley Lowe wasn’t fat. He was actually quite skinny—well, fit was more the word I was looking for. He definitely wasn’t a ‘fat bastard’ though my dad liked to call him that because he talked like the guy from Austin Powers and made my dad think of him every single time he opened his mouth.
I tended to agree, but this was one argument I definitely wasn’t going to get into the middle of. Especially seeing as if we gave him any attention at all, my dad would go off on a tangent.
Apparently, when the hospital my mom and I were working for merged with a different hospital a few years before my tenure there, my mother almost lost her job because she was very vocal about the lack of safety in the hospital itself. Then, she’d been a charge nurse just like me, and hadn’t had the reach. But, when I took over her job for her, and she moved up to the director of the ER, she slowly started to implement new protocols. Kelley, the douche canoe, didn’t like that she was taking initiative. He also didn’t like her, my father, or me.
Well, I had a feeling he liked me. He’d asked me out once, and I hadn’t been able to decide whether it was to piss my parents off or because he truly had feelings for me. Regardless of his motives, I’d said no and had made it a hobby to stay as far away from him as possible.
But, unfortunately, there were days like today where I had to see him.
He felt it was his God-given right to be up in the middle of the ER and doing shit that he had no business doing because he was the head of the board. Apparently, that included inspecting the drug kiosks, making sure we didn’t have our phones out, and making sure that anything else wasn’t going on that he could scream at us about.
Honestly, he was a real dick.
“Let’s have cookies,” my mother suggested seconds before the timer went off. “But if you want some, you have to be eating them off your dad’s half. I’m going to eat all of my half. I think you gave me a new gray hair today.”
I snorted and let my father go, walking to the fridge to get the jug of milk out and then pouring four glasses.
“Why are you pouring four?” my father asked as he walked to the counter next to me.
“Phoebe is on her way,” I said. “She had some questions about her homework for class, so I told her to come over here because I wasn’t going home.”
He grunted. “She still mad at me?”
I grinned. “From what I hear, yes.”
He scoffed. “She has no reason to be mad.”
“You stole her car and had it crushed,” I said. “And it had all her stuff inside of it.”
“It had all her trash and bullshit inside of it. I made sure to take out everything that looked to be of some value. But Jesus Christ, there was so much trash in there I have no clue how she’d even know,” my dad argued.
“I had forty dollars in a small coin purse on the floorboard.” Phoebe came rushing in, looking harried, tired and stressed out. “I also had a new pair of tennis shoes in the back seat.”
“I got those out,” he pointed out. “Along with all your books. Plus, I gave you another goddamn vehicle. Most people would say thank you.”
“You gave me a new car that was your style, not mine,” she argued. “And you know how I hate Fords.”
Which explained why she wasn’t driving said car and was driving my mother’s old vehicle that was older than she was.
I snickered. “You do know how she hates them.” I felt it prudent to point out.
“Jesus.” He threw his arms up in the air. “After your accident, I wanted to make sure I got you the one that helped park itself, as well as give you that all around lane warning when you drifted, or something came too close. It even had adaptive cruise control!”
He did have a point.
“Why did she get a new car and I didn’t?” I pushed.
He looked at me. “I got you a new car.”
“You got me an old car,” I said. “Not that I’m complaining or anything. I love it. But still.”
“Why are y’all such ungrateful little shits?” he countered.
My mother, God bless her soul, didn’t burst into laughter, but she did chuckle. “You made them this way, Sam. What did you expect would happen when you gave them everything under the sun that you never had?”
A wave of sadness rolled over me at the thought of my dad not having what we had. But, the older we got, the more I was able to understand why he didn’t have it.
When he was young, his mother was married to a man that was undercover in a motorcycle club—a motorcycle club that was the complete opposite of the club that I knew today.
Back then, that club was hard. That club was dark. That club was everything that you didn’t want to be near…which was why my grandfather, Silas Mackenzie, did everything in his power to make sure that his son wasn’t around it.
“I…”
“MVA, Pru!” Dwight, the doctor that was working with us tonight, yelled. “Multiple injuries. One is a stick shift through a little girl’s chest.”
I felt something inside of my gut clench, and then adrenaline started to course through my body. All the while the man—Hoax—still held my hand.
I swallowed but didn’t pull away, and he noticed.
Eventually, once we could hear the first sounds of sirens, he let me go and said, “Until next time, Pru.”
Then he was gone, and I was left more confused than ever.
I wanted him to leave, right?
Chapter 3
I just wanted some leggings. Unfortunately, I think I might’ve joined a cult when I purchased them.
-Pru’s Secret thoughts
Pru
I walked into my parents’ house and groaned at the smell of the cookies that were baking in the oven.
“Oh, God,” I moaned as I followed the smell. “Please tell me you have more than enough for me.”
My dad, who was sitting on the bar stool next to the counter, grinned at me as I made my way into the kitchen.
I walked straight to him and wrapped my arms around his large, muscular chest.
“Bad day at work, baby?” he asked me.
His chest rumbled with his words, and I closed my eyes as I thought about how awful my day had been.
Well, not all of it. Just most of it.
“Mom yelled at me when I told her we needed to change the code to the ER,” I mumbled. “And that was only the best part. The worst part is that a motor vehicle accident came in and not one, not two, but three children were unrestrained in the car doing the shitty driving. The mom was drunk off her ass and hit a parked car. Two kids were ejected. The one that wasn’t was only held inside by the stick shift impaling her in the left abdomen. They’re all in really bad shape.”
My dad’s arms around me tightened. “Bad day.”
Seriously. Bad day didn’t even begin to cover it.
“I made cookies for your mother, but if she’s going to yell at my baby, then maybe you should eat hers,” Dad suggested.
“I heard that.” My mother, my spitting image, walked through the door off the side of the kitchen that led to their bedroom, and straight to the bottle of Dr. Pepper that was sitting on the counter. She spared me a glare and drank. Once she’d finished, she turned to me. “I also didn’t yell at her. I explained why we didn’t change the code to the ER. Which she argued with me in front of the entire ER. It’s not my fault that I got pissed. She’s supposed to treat me like her boss at work, not her mother.”
“You’re both,” I argued. “And you know it’s a good idea.”
She growled in frustration. “I do know it’s a good idea! I’ve brought it up to the freakin’ hospital board multiple times, yet they still haven’t quite figured out how to pull their heads out of their asses. They argued about what the code should be changed to, who should have access to the code, where the code would be stored and how much money it was going to cost them to change it. At the end of the day, the goddamn code never gets changed.”
“Maybe you should tell ol’ Fat Bastard that he needs to stop fucking himself with his thumbs and make that hospital safe for y’all,” my dad muttered. “Jesus, I hate that guy.”
‘That guy’ was actually the board director, Kelley Lowe. And Kelley Lowe wasn’t fat. He was actually quite skinny—well, fit was more the word I was looking for. He definitely wasn’t a ‘fat bastard’ though my dad liked to call him that because he talked like the guy from Austin Powers and made my dad think of him every single time he opened his mouth.
I tended to agree, but this was one argument I definitely wasn’t going to get into the middle of. Especially seeing as if we gave him any attention at all, my dad would go off on a tangent.
Apparently, when the hospital my mom and I were working for merged with a different hospital a few years before my tenure there, my mother almost lost her job because she was very vocal about the lack of safety in the hospital itself. Then, she’d been a charge nurse just like me, and hadn’t had the reach. But, when I took over her job for her, and she moved up to the director of the ER, she slowly started to implement new protocols. Kelley, the douche canoe, didn’t like that she was taking initiative. He also didn’t like her, my father, or me.
Well, I had a feeling he liked me. He’d asked me out once, and I hadn’t been able to decide whether it was to piss my parents off or because he truly had feelings for me. Regardless of his motives, I’d said no and had made it a hobby to stay as far away from him as possible.
But, unfortunately, there were days like today where I had to see him.
He felt it was his God-given right to be up in the middle of the ER and doing shit that he had no business doing because he was the head of the board. Apparently, that included inspecting the drug kiosks, making sure we didn’t have our phones out, and making sure that anything else wasn’t going on that he could scream at us about.
Honestly, he was a real dick.
“Let’s have cookies,” my mother suggested seconds before the timer went off. “But if you want some, you have to be eating them off your dad’s half. I’m going to eat all of my half. I think you gave me a new gray hair today.”
I snorted and let my father go, walking to the fridge to get the jug of milk out and then pouring four glasses.
“Why are you pouring four?” my father asked as he walked to the counter next to me.
“Phoebe is on her way,” I said. “She had some questions about her homework for class, so I told her to come over here because I wasn’t going home.”
He grunted. “She still mad at me?”
I grinned. “From what I hear, yes.”
He scoffed. “She has no reason to be mad.”
“You stole her car and had it crushed,” I said. “And it had all her stuff inside of it.”
“It had all her trash and bullshit inside of it. I made sure to take out everything that looked to be of some value. But Jesus Christ, there was so much trash in there I have no clue how she’d even know,” my dad argued.
“I had forty dollars in a small coin purse on the floorboard.” Phoebe came rushing in, looking harried, tired and stressed out. “I also had a new pair of tennis shoes in the back seat.”
“I got those out,” he pointed out. “Along with all your books. Plus, I gave you another goddamn vehicle. Most people would say thank you.”
“You gave me a new car that was your style, not mine,” she argued. “And you know how I hate Fords.”
Which explained why she wasn’t driving said car and was driving my mother’s old vehicle that was older than she was.
I snickered. “You do know how she hates them.” I felt it prudent to point out.
“Jesus.” He threw his arms up in the air. “After your accident, I wanted to make sure I got you the one that helped park itself, as well as give you that all around lane warning when you drifted, or something came too close. It even had adaptive cruise control!”
He did have a point.
“Why did she get a new car and I didn’t?” I pushed.
He looked at me. “I got you a new car.”
“You got me an old car,” I said. “Not that I’m complaining or anything. I love it. But still.”
“Why are y’all such ungrateful little shits?” he countered.
My mother, God bless her soul, didn’t burst into laughter, but she did chuckle. “You made them this way, Sam. What did you expect would happen when you gave them everything under the sun that you never had?”
A wave of sadness rolled over me at the thought of my dad not having what we had. But, the older we got, the more I was able to understand why he didn’t have it.
When he was young, his mother was married to a man that was undercover in a motorcycle club—a motorcycle club that was the complete opposite of the club that I knew today.
Back then, that club was hard. That club was dark. That club was everything that you didn’t want to be near…which was why my grandfather, Silas Mackenzie, did everything in his power to make sure that his son wasn’t around it.
