Just Good Friends (Cheap Thrills #5) - Mary B. Moore Page 0,7

started to hold the box out with the other one.

Today was the day that things were going to change between us, and it all started with what was inside it.

Except, just as I was opening the door and saying hello, the door hit something hard. There was a squeal, and seconds later, something shattered loudly.

And then came the screaming.

Oh, fuck me, the screaming.

I’ll never forget it. In fact, I don’t think the whole neighborhood would ever forget it. I sure as hell wouldn’t forget what was waiting for me as I pushed the door open even more and moved quickly through it.

The first thing I came face to face with was a chair, wedged between the door and the wall behind it. Beyond that were moving legs—thank Christ—and shards of glass everywhere, with Zuri lying on top of what I recognized as the remains of a nest of glass-topped tables that I’d carried in last night.

Putting the pieces together, I figured out what’d happened pretty quick, especially when a heavy picture frame landed on my right shoulder from right above where I was frozen in place. And then came the sharp burning sensation that made me grit my teeth.

Seeing as how she wasn’t screaming anymore, it wouldn’t look good if I started. Would it?

“Well, Miss Hadid. You have a fractured wrist and hand, a good-sized egg on your head, a mild concussion, and there are a couple of glass fragments that need to be removed from some of the wounds on your back before we stitch you back up,” the doctor informed her in an overly happy manner. “We almost had that partridge in a pear tree, but not quite.”

Neither of us smiled at the joke.

“Which bones?” she asked through clenched teeth, the fingers on the obviously broken arm twitching and making her groan.

Tapping the screen of the iPad in his hand, he turned it around. “It’s really quite interesting. You’ve broken your radius here,” he pointed at a place on the screen, “and you also have a small fracture on the metacarpal bone of your middle finger, right here.”

Without moving her head, Zuri’s eyes cut to me, and she glared even harder.

Not sensing the tension in the room, the doctor turned it back to face him and swept his finger from one side to the other. “Now, if you look at this x-ray, you can see some small fragments of the glass. With how they’re showing up, I’d say that was some thick glass you landed on.”

“It was meant to be, yes,” she ground out. “I loved those tables.”

Tipping my head back to look up at the tiles of the ceiling, I did my best not to look as guilty as I felt. I’d been apologizing for the last hour after I’d picked her up and ran with her to my truck, ignoring the fact my shoulder was bleeding. For someone who was obsessive with how clean the interior of his car was, it’d been torture, but she was more important.

I’d repeatedly told her how sorry I was the whole time we’d driven here, the entire time we’d been waiting in this room, and I’d be telling her again after we left.

“Ah, and you as well, Mr. Evans,” he said as he turned toward me. “We’ll need to remove that piece of wood and make sure there’s nothing else in the wound, but I think stitches should fix it.”

Yeah, the frame had a chunk that’d been glued back on it at some point with shit glue after a previous break, so when it’d hit me, the broken piece had come loose and gone into my shoulder.

The odds of it happening the way it did were probably one in a million, yet here I was with a small piece of light blue wood sticking out of my shoulder. I hadn’t even noticed it until the doctor had pointed it out while Zuri was getting her x-rays done.

Now that I thought about it just pulling it out would get a majority of the bullshit out of the way so he could focus on her. So, I reached up and pinched the piece of wood between my finger and thumb, giving it a sharp yank to get the job done.

Holding it up in front of the doc, I raised an eyebrow. “Just sew me up and focus on her.”

Looking at it, the doctor frowned as he glanced back down at his screen. “Hmm, there’s a piece missing. The piece on your x-ray