Ambulances were having trouble getting to the scenes of accidents, and it wouldn’t be long before they couldn’t get there at all without risking their own safety.
“My boat’s in storage on Pine Street,” I was saying into my speaker phone to Ghost, my club brother. “It’s not locked up during the day. The key to the motor is in the glove box towards the left side.”
“All right,” Ghost’s deep baritone filled the area surrounding me. “We’re gonna start looking for anyone that needs help. Get them where they need to go.”
Meaning the shelters or higher ground.
The water was flooding the lower half of the city, and it was slowly creeping up into dangerous territory.
It wasn’t there yet, but it would be soon.
“Sounds good. I’m here for the long haul, so don’t expect me to come help. The other doctor that was on call is stuck outside of town thanks to the officers refusing to let him in due to a power line being down and threatening the immediate vicinity. He’s pissed, but that’s probably for the best since they’re not letting anyone else in anyway. It could get dangerous.”
“Agreed,” Ghost said. “Over and out.”
I hit the end call button but shouldn’t have bothered because when Ghost was done talking, he was done. There were no niceties or quick goodbyes with him. He was short, abrupt, and I wouldn’t have him any other way.
“He sounds rough,” Tally said as she made her way up to me. “Did he gargle with gravel or something?”
I snorted, surreptitiously adjusting my cock underneath the desk.
Why, at thirty-three, I got a hard on just at the sound of her voice, was beyond me.
God, I was going to hell.
“No,” I shook my head. “He had some smoke inhalation damage to his throat and lungs a few years back. Makes him sound rougher…though he looks like a tough son of a bitch. The voice is just icing on the cake.”
She grimaced. “I lost a brother to a fire.”
I blinked, then cursed.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I apologized. “I didn’t realize that you had any other siblings besides your brother and sister.”
She shrugged.
“It was before we moved here,” she explained. “Or, more correctly, it was why we moved here.”
“What happened?” I asked, leaning back in my office chair at the nurses’ station and staring at her as concern started to roll through me.
“Mom and Dad used to live in California,” she explained. “In the hills. A wildfire swept over the mountain and started burning hot before we even had a chance to react. Phillip was out with friends. He and the entire car of boys got caught up in one of the fires. They burned alive.” She licked her lips. “I was five. Morgan was ten. Brett was Eleven. Phillip was sixteen.”
My heart started to ache.
“That’s terrible,” I murmured. “I’m so sorry, Tally.”
She looked at me, those green eyes of hers so wide and filled with pain, and I wondered how the hell I’d missed the sadness before. I could see it clearly now, the heartbreak that lived inside of her.
“Tallulah, the poor girl, was stuck with a mouthful of a name, since I ended up naming her after him.” She smiled wistfully. “Tallulah Ophelia Slater.”
“Not too bad. You could shorten it to Lula,” I grinned. “Though, I sense a touchy subject there, seeing as every time one of the nurses asks about ‘Lula’ you get all stony faced.”
Apparently, her mother called Tallulah ‘Lula’ at work when she spoke of her, causing the other nurses to refer to her as that.
It was clear after the first four times that someone had called her Lula that Tally didn’t like it, and I’d been wondering why ever since the first time I noticed her reaction.
“I don’t like the name,” she admitted. “There’s really nothing to it. I just don’t like it. I named her Tallulah because that’s what I wanted her to be called.”
I grinned.
“It’s a mouthful, as you said. Gotta be hard for her to say,” I informed her.
She sighed.
“I’m sure it will be,” she confirmed. “I just…”
The ER doors opened, and a soaking wet Seanshine, another member of the club, came barreling in with a patient. Seanshine was a medic, and he was damn good at his job. I’d work with him at my side any day of the week and twice on Sunday.
Seanshine walked past me, not even acknowledging me, and headed straight back for the room that he’d been instructed to use while en-route with the patients. Once he’d transferred over care to one of the nurses, he came back out, a thunderous scowl on his face.
“What’s up?” I asked him as he made his way in.
He growled at me, walking straight past me and to the refreshment room for the paramedics.
I got up and followed, curious now as to the reason for his anger.
I found him muttering obscenities to himself.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Someone took the last Dr. Pepper,” he grumbled. “Who’s the chick?”
I turned to see Tally in the seat I’d vacated. “Tally,” I answered, not giving any more information than that. He didn’t need to know that she was my student, and I was having some very not-so-teacher-like thoughts about her.
“Fuckin’ A,” he grumbled. “We lost an ambulance.”
I blinked.
“What?” I barked. “How the hell does that happen?”
He glared at me as he pulled out a Mountain Dew and started chugging it, all the while keeping angry eye contact with me.
“I mean,” he said once he was finished, “that we parked it to go to a scene. Got as close to the accident as we could, but ended up having to walk to the scene where some dumbass tried to drive into high water and got carried off. Just got to the car when I hear a god-awful crash and look back to see the ambulance floating away down the fucking creek-turned river.”
I blinked.
“Ummm,” I stifled my laughter. “How the fuck does that happen?”
He glared.
“A semi slammed into the back of it—flashing lights on and all—and pushed it into the water. We got the guy out of the car, and I hoofed it all the way here from Tenth Street.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “That woman is hot as fuck. Have you fucked her yet?”
I turned to find him staring at Tally.
Then burst out laughing.
“Uh, no,” I said. “She’s a nursing student.”
I refused to admit that Tally was my student, though. Not to him.
I was about two seconds away from breaking the goddamned law, not to mention the moral code, when it came to Tally Slater, and I’d rather not admit it out loud.
Because if I didn’t admit it aloud, it didn’t really count…right?
***
The first part of my long day started not long after she arrived.
One second we were sitting at the nurses’ station, and the next we were at a woman’s side whose daughter was having an asthma attack.
I was practically on top of Tally, my body pressed to hers as we worked.
“Have you been able to get anything in her?” I asked the woman.
“No,” she frantically replied. “I tried to give her meds in her spacer when I realized what was going on, but by then she was already too far into it.”
I nodded and started to work, as Alessandria, the other nurse who Tally was shadowing, was helping me.