After Hours by Cara McKenna Read Free Book Online Page A

less depressing. Sometimes
     it can feel like people are just wasting away on the ward, but not the way they do
     in a cell block.”
    “I’ll bet.”
    “What’d you do, before you came here? You said it’s your first clinical job.”
    I told him about caring for my grandma. “I lived with her for about six years, and
     I got my LPN certification while I was doing it.”
    “What’d you do before that?”
    “Worked a bunch of retail jobs, saving up for when I figured out what I wanted to
     study,” I said with a shrug. “I’m only twenty-seven.” Twenty-eight tomorrow, actually,
     but I decided to round down.
    He blinked, clearly surprised.
    I laughed. “Oh, great. How old do I look?” How many miles had the day’s stress put
     on my formerly munchkin-like face?
    “I hadn’t really thought about it.”
    “Well, after today I feel about fifty, so no offense taken. How old are you?”
    “Thirty-eight.”
    I nodded. Ten years’ age difference wouldn’t bother me, had I been interested in Kelly.
     Which I didn’t want to be. I’d been heaped with at least a decade’s more adult responsibility
     than most of my peers. I had more to talk about with a guy Kelly’s age than some twentysomething
     dude. The years most people dedicate to getting wasted, I’d spent changing my once
     so strong and sharp and independent grandma’s diapers, soothing her night terrors.
     Trying to simultaneously support my mother and distance myself from her self-manifested
     drama. Then my sister and her chaos, her pregnancy . . . Just thinking about it, the
     whiskey in my hand took on a new appeal.
    “You’ll do okay,” Kelly said after a long lapse. “Give it a week or two. You’ll scab
     over quicker than you think.”
    “Ew. I’m not sure I want to, when you word it like that.” And the thought scared me,
     the idea that I’d get numb to the ward. I’d end up all hard and detached like Jenny
     and the other older staffers, not jaded, but . . . yeah, all scabbed over. Skin like
     tree bark. I sipped the liquor, suddenly appreciating how soft I usually felt.
    “I’m not sure I want to stop feeling stuff,” I told Kelly.
    “You still feel stuff. You just get good at choosing which provocations are worth
     getting upset over. And in the end, hardly any are. Your BS filters will be industrial
     grade. Month from now I guarantee if you get cut off in traffic, you won’t give half
     a shit.”
    I pictured the guy he’d just run off, some stranger whose only crime had been trying
     to order Kelly’s coworker a drink. This philosophy clearly had some macho nuances
     I wasn’t grasping.
    “Why won’t I care?” I asked. “Because I’ll know it’d be so much worse, getting my
     ear bitten off by somebody in the midst of a psychotic break?”
    Kelly laughed and his smile caught me off guard. It changed his face, like clouds
     had broken and a big beam of Jesus-light had shot down from heaven to paint the world
     gold. Heat pooled between my legs, some latent bad-decision gland kicking in, one
     I’d always assumed I hadn’t inherited from my mother.
Shit
.
    “Just trust me,” he said. “I know nothing I say tonight’ll make you feel anything
     but more freaked out, but you’ll be fine. You’ll find a balance.”
    “Maybe I’ll find out I’m not cut out for this.”
    “Maybe. But if you had the balls to see your grandma at her worst, probably take her
     to the toilet and bathe her and watch the woman you knew go away, years before she
     actually died . . .”
    Get out of my head, Kelly Robak.
    “You could be good at this,” he said. “And it takes about three good nurses to balance
     out the damage a single shitty one can do, so I’m hoping you’ll stick it out.”
    His flattery warmed me like a blanket, draping me in the strangest sense of comfort.
     This gigantic, hardened man thought I had what it took to do his job.
    And right then I decided, I hoped I did, too.
    Kelly drained his