Page 71 of Theta

She rolls her eyes. "Kids these days. Fred and Ethel Mertz are characters from I Love Lucy. They're famous for bickering all the time like the quintessential old married couple."

I snicker. "Oh. Because I called you Ethel."

"Hunky fella is a perfectly normal thing to say."

"No."

She sputters. "No? Just no?"

"No."

She shakes her head, laughing. "Give me that clipboard, Fred. I'll give us fake names."

I give it to her. "Good, because my handwriting is chicken scratch."

She snorts again, thinks for a second, and then starts scratching away at the intake form. "I work with doctors. You don't know chicken scratch, sweetie."

“Okay, but real talk, here. How do you read that shit? The scribbles on a prescription form, I mean."

She frowns at me, but she's thinking, not seeing, and then fills in a few more lines. "Uh? It's all part of the training. A lot of the gibberish is actually medical abbreviations derived from Latin, and then you have the dosage and such, and it’s all pretty standard, so even if I can’t read one part, I can usually decipher the rest using context clues. If I can’t figure it out on my own, I ask the doctor to translate. And you'd be surprised how often even they have to stare at it for a minute to read their own writing."

"You'd think there'd be a better system."

"There are redundancies and checks built in to prevent mistakes, obviously. But yeah, the script pad thing is a holdover."

She checks the back of the page, but it's blank, and she hands me the clipboard. "We're good."

"Fred Rogers and Ethel Mertz," I read. I give her a droll stare. "Fred Rogers? Really?"

She gives me a cutesy grin and a demure shrug. “You in a cardigan? Yum."

I snort. "You're sleep-deprived or something."

"Or something." She glances away. "Still trying to get over the fact that I murdered two dudes."

"Self-defense, not murder," I say, sitting beside her on the bed. "But I get it. I keep seeing those first three every time I close my eyes. I opened the door, and they were there. The one guy's eyes went wide, and I saw him reaching for his gun, and I just…" I shudder. “His head jerked back. And the smell. God."

She leans against me, shivering. "There was so much blood, Kills."

"Kills?" I echo. "That's a new one."

She rests her chin on the cap of my shoulder. “Really?"

I nod. "It's been either Killy or Killian, my whole life." I turn my face to hers, nuzzle the tip of my nose against hers. "I hereby decree that henceforth only you may refer to me as Kills."

She grins. “Yay, that makes me happy."

I quirk an eyebrow. "It does?"

"Well, yeah. It's not every day you get a private nickname for someone." She wrinkles her nose. "Sorry, there aren't a lot of nicknames you can make out of my name."

"Not really, no." I nudge her nose with mine again. "Sweetheart works for me."

She melts at this. "Aww, Kills. You're too damn sweet, I swear." She searches my face. "So now what?"

"I do have an idea. It's a long shot, but possible. I'm gonna take this downstairs and step out for a few minutes."

She just looks at me. “You want me to stay here?" She sounds skeptical and unhappy.