Burn

Burn by Jenny Lyn Read Free Book Online

Book: Burn by Jenny Lyn Read Free Book Online
Authors: Jenny Lyn
since the puking incident
several shifts ago.
    The hospital had
protective booties and gowns to cover clothing when working messy cases like
they’d had this evening. Tate found them mostly cumbersome, and usually by the
time she thought about putting something on, she was already too focused on the
patient to care about her attire. Besides, they were scrubs—if they didn’t come
clean in the wash, she tossed them out.
    She’d worked
many overwhelming, stressful nights, but for some reason this particular shift
hit her with the force of a locomotive. She felt drained of life, as though
she’d been one of the accident victims, too.
    Strangely, tears
began to sting her eyelids. Not wanting anyone to see her lose it, she ran for
the nearest bathroom, locking herself inside a stall and collapsing on the seat
of the toilet. She rolled off a wad of tissue and dabbed at the wetness on her
cheeks, cursing this abrupt, crashing vulnerability. A few minutes later, she
heard the door open and the squeak of sneakers on the linoleum.
    “Tate, is that
you?” Colleen asked.
    “Yeah.”
    “You okay?”
    Tate sucked in a
deep breath through her mouth in hopes of avoiding more of the blood smell, then slowly released it. “I will be. Everything just got to
me out there for a second.”
    “Want to grab a
coffee and talk?”
    Tate exited the
stall and walked to the sink, splashing her face with handfuls of cold water.
“Thanks, but I think I’m going to head home.”
    Colleen placed a
hand on her shoulder, squeezing gently. “Something’s going on with you, and
it’s not work. Does it have anything to do with the sexy chef from your past?”
    “He wasn’t a
chef in my past.” Tate dried her face with a hand towel and tossed it in the
trash. “He was just the cute guy from my Dramatic Lit class who hated
Shakespeare as much as I did. Then one day he brought me chocolate chip muffins
after I casually mentioned they were my favorite. He’d made them himself from
scratch.” Tate smiled weakly. “To this day it’s still the best fucking muffin
I’ve ever tasted. So I guess maybe he was born to be a chef, and he just hadn’t
realized his full potential back then.”
    “Why does his reappearance
have you so emotional?”
    Tate sighed.
“Things ended badly between us. Not with either of us cheating or fighting all
the time. If we’d broken up over something like that it might’ve been easier to
accept and recover from. Instead, he just up and disappeared. Not one word of
explanation as to why.”
    “Not even a note
or a phone call?”
    “Nope.”
    Colleen looked
as perplexed as Tate had felt the day it happened. “God, who does something
like that ?”
    “Never in a
million years would I have thought Ryan.”
    “Obviously you
were deeply in love with him, though.”
    Rubbing the back
of her neck, Tate had to agree. “Obviously.” Otherwise
it wouldn’t still hurt as much as it did after all this time. She wouldn’t
still carry it around inside of her like an ulcer, an open sore that wouldn’t
heal.
    “Did he love you
back?”
    “He never said
the words, but I felt sure he did. But then again, I never professed my
feelings either. Not verbally anyway.”
    “You don’t
always have to speak the words to convey the sentiment.”
    “Then why do we
hear so many people say they wished they’d said ‘I love you’ one last time?”
    “Because they
weren’t doing the rest of it right. If you show them every day, they’ll know without having to hear the words.”
    “Is leaving
someone in the middle of the night showing them you love them?”
    Colleen shook
her head. “Not at first glance, no. But he doesn’t
sound like the type to just give up on someone overnight. He went to the
trouble of baking you homemade muffins. After all these years, he remembered
your favorite flower, and he cooked you and practically the entire ER staff an Irish dinner.   Amongst all of the hospitals and care centers in
Atlanta, he

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