She swung on him, and he dropped into a squat just in time for her splint to fly over his head.
“Will you stop?” he yelled. “You’re going to hurt yourself again if you keep this up!”
“I need my knives.” She stalked off.
He followed. “Secondary wasn’t the right word.”
“Fuck you.”
“I mean, it all—it had nothing to do with you, okay! I just…happened to run into you and didn’t want you to call the police.”
“I will kill you,” she said, in a monotonous scary voice, like a relentless robot, striding out the hospital doors.
“Vi! Damn it.” She hailed a taxi. “I can’t talk about this. Just—can you trust me that I had nothing to do with the food poisoning thing?” Well, maybe nothing wasn’t quite the right word, but…but… “I never meant you to get hurt!”
A taxi pulled up.
Damn it. Ten taxis in a row would drive by him in this city, and she got one within five seconds? How could a man do a proper grovel in these conditions? Rain started to spit at his head again, and it was all he could do not to shoot a bird at the sky.
She yanked the door open and then grabbed the edge of it, locking her eyes with his. “You had nothing to do with it?”
Well…he shoved his hand through his hair. It still felt absurdly short to him since his shift to Europe. In Afghanistan, he’d had a beard and shaggy hair. “More or less nothing,” he said. “I mean—it wasn’t my fault.”
“You’re pathetic,” she said, and climbed into the taxi and slammed the door.
He stared after her as the heavens opened up and started pouring icy rain down on him again.
Pathetic?
The next time he saw one of those movies about romantic, magical Paris, he was throwing popcorn at the damn screen.
Chapter 10
Anyone would think a woman who had frequently had to shower off with sliced fingers or second-degree burns on her hands could handle having a hand in a splint. Vi even had a variety of vinyl gloves and plastic bags around to keep a wounded hand dry, although the doctor had said that wasn’t necessary with this splint.
But somehow, standing under the water with her arm thrust out past the shower curtain and the pain from the fracture trying to eat its way through her brain, her head suddenly thumped against the dripping wall.
At least with the water pouring over her face, she couldn’t tell if she’d lost the battle against the stinging in her eyes. At least she’d broken down in private, not like some nineteen-year-old in a chef’s reality show, when everything went wrong and the top chef judges tore her work to pieces in front of everyone, and the video of her flushed cheeks and wobbling voice was on YouTube forever for the whole world to see.
Fucking YouTube. She’d drowned the clip with as many TV appearances and “how to make Vi Lenoir’s famous so-and-so” video clips as she could, but that old reality show clip still rose to the top.
This one would, too. Everything from today—her face when she learned her restaurant was being closed for salmonella, her getting arrested, probably her hitting Chase. It would take over the Wikipedia page on her. It would drown out all her accomplishments, everything she’d done.
Her eyes stung harder, and she stared up into the water to make sure that sting was coming from the shower and not inside her.
Idiot. She kept her face turned up into the shower, until the water was cold, until it was icy, and finally she had to drag herself out from under it, shivering uncontrollably as she bundled herself in pajamas and bathrobe and fuzzy slippers. Normally she just blazed right through the chilly weather, barely noticing it, but this afternoon, the cold summer had seeped into her bones. She felt like ashes, trying to remember the glory of when she had been flame.
The knocking on the door made her brace. The code on the building door had so far kept out the media who had been lying in wait, but eventually some journalist would be enterprising enough to duck in after a legitimate resident, pretending to be someone’s friend.
And she couldn’t even call the police. Maybe she shouldn’t have thrown her phone away without having a landline.
She checked the peephole. Chase.
She hesitated. But then she did open it, mostly because it was hard to hit someone through a door, and braced it, ready to slam.
“I brought you something,” he said hopefully, drawing his hand out from behind his back. A pair of red boxing gloves dangled by a string from his finger.
Vi almost laughed. A little start of a laugh that got choked by pain and exhaustion and anger.
“That way, if you want to hit anything…” He held them out.
She closed the door immediately, before he could get to her again. Hadn’t she already let him ruin her life once?
She stood for a moment on the other side of the closed door, expecting another knock, expecting him to argue or plead or state his case.
But there was silence. She peeked through the peephole again.