Apparently, at thirty-three, getting drunk off your ass wasn’t the best way to get over a bad day.
I’d proven that fact over the last two days, and even now, two days later, I was still just as ragged and worn down as I’d been before this episode started.
Note to self: Spending all day in bed trying not to throw up after binge-drinking the night before is not nearly as restful as it sounds.
The first hour that I worked with her, we circled each other like opponents about to start fighting.
The second hour, she tried to get me to start an IV for her on a child, and I gave her a look that would wither a lesser man’s heart.
She just took my glare and continued to stare at me until I got up and did it.
Why I did it, I didn’t know. It might’ve been the pout that she gave me right before I accepted, though.
However, I would neither confirm nor deny that the pout was effective.
I couldn’t very well give her the ammunition that would work on me…every single time.
“What’s that look for?”
It was now hour three, and I was sitting at the table in the break room, contemplating ordering a pizza.
“I’m hungry,” I replied tiredly. “I’m trying to decide if expending the energy to order a pizza, something I’d need to move in order to do, is actually worth the effort to not be hungry any more …and I’m not sure which one is better at this point.”
“Don’t you have another nine more hours?” Tally asked as she went to the fridge in the small break room and pulled out a brown paper bag that looked like it came from the local barbeque joint, Piggies.
My belly growled loudly as she popped the lid off of what I assumed was their famous sloppy joes, and she looked at me over her shoulder.
“Want some?” she asked. “I’m willing to share.”
I swallowed, and then shook my head.
No, I was still mad at her.
“No,” I grunted, then completely ruined any and all credibility when my stomach growled so loudly that there was no way she could miss it.
She sighed and turned to stare at me.
“Are you going to stay mad at me forever?” she asked, crossing her arms over her chest once she put her food in the microwave.
And I was right. It was Piggies, and it was also their world-famous sloppy joes.
I wanted them badly…but I was a proud man. I wasn’t giving in to her on this one.
No, she’d have to crawl back to me and grovel to convince me that she was truly sorry for what she did, making me feel like I was nothing at all to her.
In answer to her question, I got up and walked out the door.
I was sitting in my normal seat at the nurses’ station when she walked out of the breakroom, stopping behind me just long enough to place three sloppy joes down in front of me before heading back to her own seat, two down from mine.
I would like to say at this juncture in time that I had enough willpower to throw the damn sandwiches in the trash…but I didn’t like to lie.
I ate those bitches.
Every last one of them.
But I didn’t say thank you.
That was how I convinced myself that I wasn’t a complete sellout.
Hour five I found myself with nothing to do but twiddle my thumbs.
I’d seen Tally make her way around the corner towards the bathroom.
However, I realized at the first hint of raised voices that something was wrong. Tally.
“What?!”
I turned at the shriek I heard in a voice that I would know anywhere, and watched as some woman I’d never seen before tried to calm her down.
The man at the woman’s side, however, I knew.
Russell, her ex-boyfriend, and baby daddy.
My feet started moving me in their direction before I was even conscious that I’d made the decision.
“This is not happening,” Tally seethed. “You’re not going to do this. And no, I do not care that you went to all this trouble to do this.”
“It’s a normal thing,” the woman insisted. “This used to be done all the time back in the medieval…”
“Don’t,” Tally hissed, taking a threatening step in the brown-haired woman’s direction. “I don’t care what you think, or why you think it. I don’t care whether you want to see her. I know that he,” she pointed at Russell, who’d hooked an arm around the woman and started to pull her back. “Doesn’t want her. The only reason he’s pursuing this is because you have created in your mind some fucked up reason for suddenly wanting to play a role in my daughter’s life. You, not him. You are behind all of this.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “So let me tell you something,” she growled. “I don’t need your help. I don’t need his help. I don’t need anybody’s help.”
I got there just in time to hear the woman’s whispered reply.
“We’ll fuckin’ move and file this in a different court so that your daddy and his cronies won’t screw us over like they did last time.” She poked Tally in the chest with one long, manicured finger. “What do you think about that?”
“I think that you can go fuck yourself,” Tally replied smoothly. “Now please leave. I’m at work, and this wasn’t the place to have this discussion.”
“I tried to do it at your parents’ house, but they said that you were at work,” she sneered. “Why, if you’re at work, can’t we have Lula…”
“Don’t call her that God-awful name!”
The woman huffed and Russell showed that he actually had some brains behind that pretty package.
“Let’s go,” Russell ordered, taking a hold of the woman’s arm and pulling lightly. “This isn’t getting us anywhere.”
The woman harrumphed.
“Fine,” the woman sniffed. “But this isn’t over, bitch.”
Tally moved forward to reach for the woman’s hair, but I caught her before she could get even a footstep into her advance.
“Tally,” I murmured quietly so the oglers couldn’t overhear what I was saying. “There’s a time and place, and this isn’t it.”
She huffed.
“You were doing really well until she called her Lula,” I murmured. “Wow, you really don’t like it. What is it about that name? Is it synonymous for anti-Christ or something?”
Tally’s lip curled in distaste, then she practically wilted in my arms.
“It’s not really that bad of a name,” Tally admitted softly. “The only reason I hate it is because that woman uses it.”
“And who exactly is that woman?”
“Sheena Morton.”
I blinked. “I can’t tell if you’re joking or not.”
Tally’s mouth kicked up into a grin. “I am most certainly not. That woman may be a joke, but her name’s not.”
I let go of her once I realized that she was calm enough to answer coherently.
“What did she want?” I asked, glaring at a boy who came up, offering Tally a pen.
She took the pen and nodded at the boy—who was more like nineteen so not really a boy—and shoved the pen in her pocket before answering.
“She wanted to breastfeed my child.”
I blinked, then blinked some more, until a furrow appeared on my brow.
“What?” I grunted, completely stunned that someone would offer that for another woman’s child. “You’re kidding me, right?”