Page 124 of Dirty Pool

Gabbie threw another pillow.

Michel let that one hit him.

Their laughter colored up the bedroom with the sound—it felt like love, really. She knew they still had so much to figure out, like where in the hell they went from here, and what they were going to do.

That was fine.

That was okay with her.

Because they were together.

Just like they were forever meant to be.

EPILOGUE

Eight years later …

“This isn’t right.”

Michel glanced upward, the ceiling staring back at him, and he swore if it could taunt him, it would be saying, keep looking, fucker. Warm ceramic met his lips as he tipped the mug up for another drink. Bitter heaven coated his tongue, the coffee sliding down his throat and waking him up even more.

And upstairs?

Chaos reigned.

Michel was not a dumb man, nor was he a stupid husband. Being just two years shy of a decade in marriage to Gabbie taught him a single lesson, one that was simple: the worst thing a man could tell his wife was to calm down.

Now, most times, men didn’t even think before saying it. They just did. The dumbness slipped out of their mouth because the first thing normal humans thought to say to another human when they were in a panic was the obvious thing—to calm down.

No, that was foolish.

And a death wish.

So, as Michel thought he was quite smart because so far, he’d not died from being dumb, he knew better than to go upstairs and step in his wife’s path. Every morning for the past week, she woke up the same way.

Confused and then chaotic.

His first need was to make his wife happy—always. But she was not going to be happy when Michel did the dumb man thing when all else absolutely failed.

He knew how this worked.

Gabbie’s footsteps pattered above Michel’s head as he quickly finished what was left of his coffee. He needed to get that into him now if it was going to do him any good when he finally arrived back at the hospital. With only ten months left to his residency, Michel was looking forward to really starting his career as a doctor.

He had options. Continuing in the trauma bay was high on his list, but so was not spending every waking hour at the hospital. Despite finding all his life that he worked best under intense pressure, Michel knew it couldn’t last forever. Someday, he was going to burn out, and he didn’t want that to be the day he lost a patient not because nothing had worked, but because he made a mistake.

He planned to spend two weeks in the hospital working trauma, and two weeks in the clinic he wanted to open up as a private practice for … well, he’d not decided on that quite yet. Possibly a second, shorter residency was in order if he wanted to focus elsewhere.

He had options.

That was the thing.

People asked him often what he planned to do once he was finished with his trauma residency, and Michel liked to joke private practice. Even to his own mother and father when they asked, followed up with a statement about more money. Which wasn’t entirely a lie, but really, he was just telling people nothing.

Because options.

And he’d never been one to do what others expected.

It was Gabbie’s footsteps echoing in the stairwell of their three-level Long Island home that finally drew Michel’s attention away from the only thing keeping him awake after two weeks of twenty-four-hour shifts in the trauma bay. His wife came to stand in the entryway of the kitchen, but she didn’t look happy to be there.