Page 12 of Playing with Fire

She sounded so sweet on the phone, the exact opposite of me. Maybe the universe didn’t hate me after all. “Hey, Mom.”

Silence. Then again, I was probably wrong. I elevated ‘don’t cry’ to the top of my list of things to avoid in the next ten minutes. “Uh, this is going to sound really bad, but the CDC napalmed my apartment. Is there any chance I can stay with you for a few days?” I hesitated. “Please?”

“No.” She hung up on me.

I should have known. The universe really did hate me, and so did my parents, and I had earned every bit of their loathing. I placed the phone in its cradle and forced a smile. “Thanks.”

I left. Without a credit card, few hotels would let me rent a room for any period of time. If Mary had given me my earnings, I had a hair over six hundred and twenty dollars. What the hell was I supposed to do on six hundred dollars? With that little, I couldn’t afford to pay out the first and last deposit. In a month, the first bill for my hospital stay would arrive, I wouldn’t be able to pay it, and my battered credit rating would tank completely. While the CDC would likely compensate me for my hospitalization, even before I had quit my job like a spoiled rotten brat, I wouldn’t have been able to afford the additional expenses, not without a great deal of overtime.

My mother had been right to reject me. I never left anywhere on a good foot, and I specialized in burning bridges. Instead of asking Mary why she had abandoned me for a ride in Chief Quinn’s car, I had lost my temper and quit. If she wanted to go somewhere with Samuel Quinn, that was her choice and none of my business.

I had no right to be jealous or upset over it.

What I had done to Samuel Quinn put me on the list of terrible people who deserved to suffer. How could I be so vindictive, stupid, and selfish? Why couldn’t I be a normal person, someone people actually cared about?

Even my own mother didn’t want me, and I didn’t blame her for it in the slightest. At eighteen, I’d made my stance clear: I had wanted to earn my way in the world without their version of charity, which meant I’d grow up in the job they wanted me to do, carrying on the Gardener name with pride.

I had chosen to pursue certification with the CDC while working at a coffee shop specializing in legalized narcotics. They hated everything pixie dust stood for and the fact I dared to lower myself to working as a barista. They hated magic.

Then again, they had hated me from the day I had been born, so it didn’t matter. Nothing I could do would make them happy. That didn’t change facts, however.

They’d been right all along. I hadn’t been able to afford a college education on my own, and even with certification, I was too poor to transition from my job as a barista to something else. Ten years had gone by, and I ran the treadmill from one day of my life to the next without going anywhere.

Worst of all, I truly had no one to blame but myself.

My search for a hotel that accepted cash took me to the worst part of Queens, and by the time I got checked in, my coughs rattled in my chest, promising a world of misery for the foreseeable future. On the bright side, one-twenty got me a room for a week, and it even had a microwave and a can opener. A trip to the bodega down the street stocked me with enough soup to last until I needed to check out or extend my stay, and I bought a few bottles of water to be on the safe side.

Even if it took me two weeks to recover, I had enough time to find a job somewhere. One-twenty for a smoke-stained, dingy hotel room beat the alternative. I’d be miserable, but I could manage.

I choked down a dinner of soup, curled up on the rock hard bed, and cried myself to sleep.

Big mistake.

Sobbing drained the little energy I had left. I’d been warned in the hospital to avoid exertion. I’d been told to get rest, take my medicine, and take it easy. I still had the prescription slips in the back pocket of my jeans. Without my insurance card, it’d cost more than I had to fill the damned things.

I could tough it out. I’d done it before. All I needed was to get a lot of rest. My hike across Queens to get my new driver’s license card and debit card hadn’t helped me, but I had needed a place to stay. Why couldn’t people understand that?

I didn’t have anyone to take care of me, and that was that. I probably never would, but I had no one to blame for that but myself. Through a blur of fever and chills, I forced myself to get up and take care of the bare minimum. I drank all my water, thanked God the tub was somewhat new, and even managed to eat my soup like I was supposed to. Every waking moment I spent coughing so much I could barely breathe.

Several times I considered reaching for the phone to call a cab and return to the hospital. That would’ve been the smart thing to do, but I stayed put and weathered the storm instead.

I considered it an accomplishment I managed to leave my room to stagger back to the bodega, pet the owner’s new kitten, and hike back to the hotel burdened with cans of soup, bottles of water, and packs of cough drops. I stopped by the desk and paid to extend my stay. If I didn’t feel less like a plague bearer by the end of the week, I’d succumb to the inevitable and call for a cab.

The soup would have tasted a lot better if I had heated it before pouring it down my throat. I plunked a bottle of water on the nightstand, flopped into bed, and passed out.

Hindsight, as always, was perfect, and I should’ve just returned to the hospital on my own like a sane person, as I ended up there anyway. Unfortunately, I had no memory of going, which was never a good sign. Another not-so-good sign was my hallucination of Chief Quinn beside my hospital bed wearing a button-up shirt and a pair of jeans he must have stolen from an incubus.

Instead of his normal, clean-shaven jaw, the scruff of a new beard turned him from pristine model to rugged and lethally sexy.

Only my twisted psyche would produce an illusion of my heaven and hell wrapped in one glorious package, present him in clothes I wanted to strip him out of, and leave me to wallow in my misery and guilt over my bountiful stupidity.

Stupid, stupid, stupid me.

My hallucination was a persistent little bugger, sticking around while I contemplated why I might be imagining him in a chair beside me, close enough I could touch him if I could move my arm. It took me a long time to understand they had me hooked up to a ventilator, which explained the whole sexy hallucination thing.

Bummer.

I contemplated trying to say something, but the mask on my face made speaking difficult. Not only did ventilators suck, they blew, too, and made it far too much work to do anything other than stare at the gorgeous imaginary Chief Quinn my twisted little brain had thoughtfully provided for me. I gave up trying to do anything productive and decided to take a nap, hoping for a suit-clad model when I woke up.