It never did when we were on the phone together—he always waited for me to cut the connection. I wasn’t sure why, but I’d tested it out a few years ago. I’d called to check on him when he first started working at the hospital he was at now. He was working all of the time, sleeping more often at the hospital than at his condo, and I’d been worried about him overdoing it. I caught him one night just as he was getting off a shift and crawling into his bed at home. After chatting for a few minutes, we said good-bye, then I waited. The line didn’t go dead, just like it didn’t now.
I’d watched the clock on my stove for two minutes, and just when I was sure he’d fallen asleep with the phone still tucked to his ear, I said, “Good night, Matt.” His response came right after. “Night, Cora.” I hung up after that, guessing he’d never be the first.
This time was the same.
After stuffing my phone into my pocket, I chanced a look at Jacob. He was silent beside me, unmoving.
“Hey, I’m okay.” I moved the shirtsleeve away from my temple so he could see the bleeding was slowing. “A few stitches and a shower and I’ll be good as new.”
“No.” He had to work his jaw loose. “This is my fault.”
I sat forward in my seat, trying to get him to look at me. He wouldn’t. “I tripped on my own merit. What do you think is your fault?”
His head turned away from mine. “Everything.”
After that, the rest of the ride back was quiet. My head wasn’t bleeding nearly as much, but it was throbbing. I wanted to grab the bottle of pain reliever I kept in my backpack for exactly this kind of thing, but the mood in the cab was so somber, I was afraid to move.
When the driver pulled up to the hotel entrance, I let out a sigh, feeling like I’d just survived some kind of challenge. Jacob helped me out and paid the driver, looking like he wanted to carry me inside and through the lobby, but I stopped that by bouncing up the stairs on my own.
The few people inside the lobby gaped at me as I came in. I probably looked like I’d just been an extra in some new slasher movie. Checking out the panel of windows facing the ocean, I noticed the waves looked the same size as they had earlier today. The wind even looked like it had slowed down some.
“Any update on the storm?” I asked the woman at the reception desk.
She smiled and tried not to stare at me like I was a freak show. “It’s going to miss us. Looks like we’ll just get a bit of wind and a lot of rain probably.”
Jacob was waiting beside me, an impatient look on his face, but he wasn’t pulling on me to keep going.
“That’s good news.”
“Isn’t that the way it goes? You plan for the worst, hope for the best, and land somewhere in between.” The woman cleared her throat, looking away when her eyes shifted to where I still had Jacob’s shirtsleeve pressed to my head. “Can I call an ambulance for you, ma’am? Maybe give you directions to the nearest hospital?”
Beside me, Jacob sighed.
I shook my head. “Thanks, but I’ve got a doctor waiting for me upstairs. He’ll take care of me.”
The woman nodded as I started toward the elevators, while Jacob stepped in front of me so he could punch the up button. A door was just opening when I approached.
The ride up to my room was just as quiet as the one in the cab here. Although that might have had more to do with both of us knowing Matt was waiting for us a few floors away.
As soon as the doors opened, I practically lunged out into the hall.
Jacob moved up behind me a moment later. “In a hurry?”
I didn’t answer that, because I had no good answer to give him. I was in a hurry, and it wasn’t to get my head sewn up either.
Matt was already here, leaning into the door of my room, his eyes trained on the elevator like he’d known it was about to open. He wasn’t in my room, thank god. He had a key—I’d given him one—but he’d been smart enough not to use it, probably knowing what I did. Jacob would lose it if he found Matt in my room, room key in hand.
Matt started to smile when he saw me. That smile faded when he took a good look at me. Shoving off the door, he moved down the hall a few steps to meet us. “I thought you said you needed a few stitches, not a few hundred and a possible blood transfusion.” Matt’s messenger bag—which he kept the standard-fare doctor kit in—was slung over his shoulder, and he was already digging through it.
“It’s a head wound. They bleed like crazy. You’re a doctor—why do I need to tell you this?” I put on my best unconcerned face as Jacob and I moved down the hall, but I had plenty of things to be concerned about. The gash on my head ranked low on that list.
Jacob slid closer to me with every step we took, until our shoulders were brushing by the time we stopped in front of my room. Matt had barely acknowledged Jacob until now. Then Matt covered my hand with his and slowly pulled aside the shirtsleeve to see the extent of the damage.
His face didn’t give a thing away—but he was trained not to show any emotion when a patient’s guts were spilling out on the floor at his feet. He didn’t show any emotion until his fingers gently touched the area around the cut and I winced from the rush of pain that came with it.
Matt’s jaw locked up, his eyes darkening before they swiveled toward Jacob. Before the two of them could work that out, fists first, I hurried to pull the room key from my pack and kick the door open the moment the green lights flashed.
“What happened?” Matt snapped at Jacob.
It was me who answered him though. “I fell.”
Jacob echoed my response as we all moved inside the room. “She fell.”
Matt slid his bag off and set it on the desk, already flipping on lights and starting to grab towels from the bathroom. “Yeah, I got that terribly informative answer on the phone earlier. How about the details? Now that it looks like you fell off of a cliff.”
I headed into the bathroom as Matt glared at Jacob like this was all his fault. Though I expected a response, Jacob didn’t say anything to defend himself. Instead, he stayed quiet, falling into one of the chairs tucked into the corner.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Matt asked me when I started to close the bathroom door.
“Taking a quick shower to rinse the blood and dirt off.”
“I don’t think so. You need to get your head stitched up before your brains start falling out.” Matt moved toward the bathroom like he was going to physically sit me down in that chair by the desk if I didn’t do it myself.
So I hurried to close the door, knowing there was no way he’d open that door once I’d closed it. Knowing there was no way Jacob would let him either.
I didn’t want to leave those two alone for long, so I hurried through the shower as quickly as possible. Only a few minutes later, I emerged from the steam-filled bathroom with a towel twisted around my hair and wearing a swimsuit cover-up I’d had hanging in the bathroom.
The brothers looked like they’d spent a few years in some foreign prison though. Their expressions were hardened, their eyes blank, every muscle in their body looking trigger-pin ready for action.
“Wow. This isn’t a funeral, boys. Just a few stitches and a little loss of blood.”