Fly with Me: a novel by Andie Burke

chapter 30

Olive Murphy was too old to sleep on a couch. Maybe if it wasn’t a couch she’d bought at a thrift store two years ago because she loved the velvet and didn’t care that it was obviously too squashy, she wouldn’t have woken up and been unable to move her neck to the left. Sometime during the six hours she’d been wedged between a Great Dane mix and a pile of books that seemed to have fallen on her without waking her up, her spine rebelled. The settled spasm forced her head into a permanent lean, giving the world an oddly tilted appearance.

Her alarm went off again. She silenced it and flipped on the coffee maker. She had a short shift today, getting off at 3:00 P.M., which would leave her enough time to shower and get dressed before Stella picked her up. She peeled herself off the couch and dragged her lazy, slightly hungover ass to the bathroom. The vision in the mirror was atrocious. She rubbed her face to work blood flow back into it before hopping in the shower.

She’d been drunk.

And called Stella.

Fuck.

She really couldn’t let that happen again.

She could have said all the things swimming around in her head after the conversation with Derek. He had a point. They were essentially dating. But Stella was so sure that dating her would lead to the other person getting hurt like her exes had been hurt. Though honestly it didn’t sound like Stella was that into her exes in the first place. Maybe she did want to date Olive but she was scared of hurting her. Maybe one of the exes made Stella believe she was incapable of a relationship?

Unless she was being friend-zoned.

Shit, was she being friend-zoned?

Maybe Stella would be interested in dating someone, but maybe not her for a million reasons. Olive’s cheeks burned at the memory of Lindsay literally telling Stella that Olive was an emotionally needy mess. Was that why they couldn’t be in a relationship? With this alarming thought echoing in her head and her neck making her feel increasingly like a person in a horror film during an exorcism, Olive took Gus for a walk before work. After she got back, she went through her usual morning routine and made it into the car on time, which was a miracle given that her neck was only barely functional.

Drinking a hot beverage at a forty-five-degree angle was exactly as difficult as one would imagine. So, when she arrived at work, she was pitifully crooked, pulsing with anxiety, and also speckled with coffee. A great start to a Murphy’s Law kind of day.

Her first patient sneezed directly in her face.

Fan-fucking-tastic.

She ran to the nurses’ station and used fifteen tiny alcohol wipes to rid the exposed areas of any germs. Thank god she was wearing a mask. She saw a few more patients, though no more face sneezers, and then settled in to do some management/administrative work while waiting for orders.

Derek was off today, so she wouldn’t have to face another round of philosophical debate over the existential question of what it actually means to be dating someone. She couldn’t handle it. She would work and then go hang out with the only person she knew who wasn’t interested in talking about what their relationship meant. Stella.

It was after 2:00 P.M. when a flash of blond hair caught her eye from the other side of the unit.

Shit.

Lindsay sometimes had to cover for her ER colleagues when they were at lunch, but thankfully less often lately because of her new ICU lead responsibilities. Still, Olive did not need a run-in with her right now. Olive’s stomach growled, a reminder that she hadn’t eaten anything since getting to work eight hours earlier. Not the best choice when slightly hungover. She was scheduled to leave work at three, but she was still supposed to take a half hour to eat, and now was definitely the right time for that.