Six

EVERETT

Someone is going to pay for this. Someone is going to pay for this in every sense of the word.

Well, to be clear: I’m paying for Cora’s medical bills. In fact, nobody else is going to pay for anything she needs ever again except me .

But in the sense of revenge—steaming hot, unfiltered revenge—someone is going to pay dearly.

“How much longer is it going to be?” Essie, one of Cora’s two best friends, asks before she falls into the chair next to me. Even though she’s small, the chair creaks under her weight. The vinyl is old and scratchy, torn in a few spots where the stuffing pokes through the gray fabric, and Essie wrinkles her nose while she shifts to find a comfortable position. Over the last two hours, I’ve learned there’s no comfortable position in an ER waiting room.

“No clue,” I admit. “I’ve never been interviewed by MPD before.”

MPD: Metropolitan Police Department. In cases of intentional bodily harm, a patient is legally required to give a statement to MPD before they can speak to anyone else. It’s standard protocol after a patient completes a surgery or triage or whatever they do when someone gets shot.

Shot. Fucking hell.

“It’s a good sign, right?” Essie continues. She’s speaking absently while she picks at her thumbnail. When she arrived at the hospital, her nails were painted with glittery green nail polish, and over the course of the two hours she’s been here, she’s whittled them down to glittery green stubs. “MPD wouldn’t be able to interview her if she were…”

When Essie trails off, I glance at her. The distant look in her brown eyes lingers until I clear my throat.

“Did you get a hold of Valeria?”

Essie blinks. “Oh, shit—I did,” she confirms, shaking her head like she just remembered why she left the waiting room. “I convinced her and Lander not to come home early, but they were packing.”

Valeria is Cora’s other best friend, and along with Essie, they’ve redefined co-dependency—which is a big statement coming from me because I would literally wage a land war if someone tried to come between Dalton, Lander, and me, and I’m a pacifist.

Was. Before today, I was a pacifist.

I look at my wrapped hand. The ache is gone, but the foreignness of the gauze on my fingers is starting to set in—as is the reality of this ordeal.

I want to destroy something. Not in the physical sense, of course. As of a few hours ago, I’ve been there, done that. Breaking shit isn’t my thing.

No, I want a million people to loathe the man who hurt her. A billion, if I’m shooting for the stars, but I’ll settle for a million if I have to. I want his name to be synonymous with bad decisions and regret.

I’m going to print his social security number on reams of wallpaper and sell it in an Etsy shop. I’m going to write a bestselling novel with a protagonist who shares his name and has an exceptionally small dick, effectively ruining this cuntnugget’s digital footprint for life.

Better yet, I’m going to ask Cora what she wants me to do to him— and then I’ll fucking do it . She’s far more cunning than I am. The shooter will beg for me to open that Etsy shop. Hell, he might even give me the startup capital to launch it faster.

Essie lets out a protracted sigh. “I want to see her. Can’t you pull some strings?”

“Believe it or not, my connections are no match for HIPAA. Plus, I doubt I’m the most popular guy in the ER right now.” I look over at the triage desk where the nurse on shift narrows her eyes, probably replaying the words I murmured through the glass partition: “ If you don’t let me see Cora Flores right now, I’m going to buy the hospital, rename it ‘The Everett Carlisle Logan Medical Hospital,’ and you’ll have to wear my name and an embroidered image of my handsome, pissed off face on your scrubs every day until you retire. And in this economy, your retirement might take decades . ”

Her hand was less than an inch from the security button when I remembered I was running for office and retreated back to this hideous chair.

“I don’t do well in hospitals,” Essie mentions before sinking lower. “Plus, you wouldn’t happen to know anything about Bayes’ Theorem, would you?”

The unassuming computer science major next to me looks like a normal Georgetown girl, albeit always a touch overdressed, but a college girl, nevertheless. She drinks too much iced coffee and takes a ton of selfies like most college girls. And yet she regularly strips off her clothes and plays with herself online—allegedly, Dalton says.

“I was a politics major,” I answer, blinking. “Do I look like I know any theorems?”

Essie’s shoulders slump. “I have a paper to write,” she explains, being extraordinarily evasive, which annoys me. Come on now, Essie. We both know where this is going . “I know—”

“Go,” I interject, impatient, sure—but efficient too, so it’s a wash.

“I’m not leaving my best friend alone in a hospital.”

“Who said she was going to be alone? Go. This conversation isn’t doing either of us any favors.”

If Cora were here, she would chastise me for being flippant to one of her two best friends. Go fuck your own face, Everett . That’s her favorite one. It’s my favorite too because she always says my name at the end. She spits it like a profanity—like she can feel me down to her toes.

I love it.

“Text me when she’s free,” Essie requests while hoisting her bag. She rushed over from the library, and I don’t think she realized she was clutching a crushed energy drink in her fist for the first fifteen minutes. “And it would be great if you could also refrain from making out with her and then deciding you’re over it while you’re still holding her bare ass cheeks.”

I bite down to keep from reacting. Of course Cora told Essie about the elevator. She tells Essie and Valeria literally everything.

Last night, I waited for her to come home, but when sunrise came, I figured she crashed somewhere. The thought of Cora spending a night in a college dorm, of all places, irks me. Cora shouldn’t be sleeping in a bed used by hundreds of coeds. Frankly, the only thing that should touch her gorgeous body are three thousand thread count organic linen sheets—or my hands.

“I’ll try my best to avoid that,” I respond, keeping my expression stoic.

“Again,” Essie emphasizes, glaring. “Avoid it again because you already did it. You already—”

“Can I at least apologize to her before I apologize to you?”

“Apologize? Everett, I hope you brought knee pads because you should be groveling,” she informs me.

Groveling? “What for?”

Her eyes widen. “Have you lost your mind?”

It’s bold of Essie to assume I have a mind left to lose. I likely lost my mind seven months ago on the night Cora entered my life. “What am I groveling for?”

“For everything ,” Essie snaps before she breathes out like she’s calming herself. “Not that it’s any of your business, but Cora has dealt with enough rich assholes to last a lifetime. Don’t make things worse for her.”

My pulse spikes. “What rich assholes are you talking about, Essie?” I inquire, and the way I keep my tone in check is a masterclass in restraint.

“Forget it. I have to go. Promise you’ll text me?”

I nod.

Once Essie is gone, my pacing begins. I go from one end of the shabby waiting room to the other, back and forth, probably wearing a path in the horrendous linoleum tiles.

This goes on until one of the nurses gets lazy (or maybe someone winked at her, thereby distracting her, but who knows), and doesn’t stop me from slipping through one of the restricted doors beyond the waiting room.

For the next few minutes, I look into rooms or through gaps in the interior blinds, navigating the maze of gurneys and IVs and charts I don’t understand. It’s invasive. Hell, it’s likely illegal. I could wait, I know. I should. Most people would.

But I’m done waiting.

After five minutes, I round the corner of the first hallway and venture into a second. It’s the same deal over here: no sign of her.

Luckily, the third hallway is the one. When I turn the corner, there’s an MPD officer standing in front of a door. The look he sends me is clear: No one is allowed to enter . But the blinds are open enough for me to see inside.

It’s her.

Cora is seated on a bed, wearing a seafoam green hospital gown and speaking to two more officers. She’s reclining against a pile of floppy hospital pillows, expression serious, and she’s just so fucking beautiful.

Even under fluorescent lights, her skin shimmers with warm undertones, like sun and heat. Her dark hair rests on her shoulders, thick, shiny, and long—like I could wind a handful of it around my fist a few times before I pull her head back to kiss her.

I wish I’d done it last night.

She says something to one of the officers, who scribbles on a notepad. While he writes, Cora bites her lip. Her lips are the best thing about her: not quite puffy, but full and plump. She always wears dark lipstick—black or as close to black as red can get—and when she delivers a particularly clever insult, she occasionally scrapes the edge of her thumbnail along her lip line like she’s wiping blood from her fangs.

Whenever she does it, I want to suck the taste of her lipstick off her thumb.

But what I’ve always appreciated most about Cora is her understated liveliness. It’s partially because she’s so striking—credit to the combination of her high cheekbones, her round nose, and the graceful column of her neck, yes—but that liveliness really comes from her eyes. They’re big and brown, set under delicately arched, thick eyebrows. The corners of her eyes are set level with her lower lids, and their distinct shape seems to amplify whatever emotion she’s experiencing at the moment.

Something the officer says makes Cora’s shoulders slump, and she rolls her eyes. Current mood: annoyed as fuck.

But hospital gown aside, she does look like herself, which feels like a Cora Flores move— Shoot me, fine, but I’ll make it look like a minor inconvenience at best.

Right then, she glances to the side and her eyes meet mine. She turns back to the officers, immediately does a double take, and looks at me again.

She did a double take the first time she saw me at Smoke and Shadow on the night we met. That night, I set out to do a favor and play wingman for my lifelong best friend and ended up meeting the woman of my dreams.

That night, the woman of my dreams turned out to be a camgirl.

That night, the woman of my dreams unnerved me in such an unprecedented way that my stone-cold, unflappable demeanor abandoned me, and I became an awkward, dickhead who insulted her.

That night, the woman of my dreams dumped a gin and tonic on my head.

I remember the song playing in the club: the downbeats, the fuck-me lick of the bass line, and how Cora swayed her head to the chorus. I remember the exact earrings she was wearing in the seven piercings in her ears—exactly seven. I counted. I remember the borderline nonexistent dress she was wearing: this black one trimmed with leather—tight as fuck. I remember the black polish on her nails and the silver decorations on the tips. I remember the lock of deep black hair caught between her breasts for the first ten minutes of our conversation, taunting me without even trying.

That night, I was positive of five things.

The first: Nobody—with the exception of my two best friends—had ever spoken to me with so much confidence, dismissiveness, and cleverness all rolled into one.

The second: Cora Flores was, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the most stunning woman I had ever seen.

The third: I had to have her.

The fourth: She would scandalize the shit out of most voters.

The fifth: Due to the four previous reasons, I needed to avoid her at all costs until I established my political career.

The plan has always been—and will always be—to get Cora. Avoid her for now, build my credibility as a politician, and then quietly launch our relationship in, like, I don’t know… a few years . But after tonight, one thing is for certain: I’m never staying away from Cora Flores again.

Strategy. Being together will depend on strategy.

Lucky for us, I was born and bred for this.

***

Except an hour later, we haven’t discussed any strategies because I still haven’t spoken to Cora. I’m anxious enough to fight a grizzly bear—and I would never inflict violence against an animal, especially not grizzly bears because they’re a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act.

And typically, I don’t get anxious. Cora does this to me though; she does it a lot.

Once MPD finished interviewing her, they took my statement, which is why I’m just now heading to her room with pockets full of the sour candies she likes from the vending machine.

This conversation is going to be momentous for us.

She’ll see me bearing gifts and a reassuring smile. She hasn’t seen me smile before, but it’s dazzling, frankly. She’ll love it. I’ll finally tell her about my feelings for her. She might be surprised at first, but she’s brilliant and she’ll understand why I had to keep my distance.

I’ll thank her for saving my life and apologize again for the misunderstanding in the elevator—for everything.

Then we’ll get on the same page.

We’ll keep our relationship under wraps for the next five months, and once I win the election, we can come out publicly. She’ll be down for it, I’m sure. Excited—because who doesn’t like screwing in secret?

My heart is racing, and I don’t try to hide my grin. Finally, we’re going to—

No. Fuck me .

Even when the figures are distant shapes through the blinds, I know exactly what’s happening. I quicken my step.

My father is here— and he brought a photographer .