Page 1 of Give Me What You Will

Chapter 1

“Why does the day shift get the new cleaning crew? They should be on the night shift. We need the ones they get in NASCAR, or Formula 1, that clean a floor in like five seconds and move on,” Dr. Samuels complained, surveying the massive wet spot on his ED floor. “Someone’s gonna slip.”

Steph, the day-shift charge nurse and central-hub mom, snorted along with her replacement, night-shift nurse, Nicole. The two older women were reviewing the charts and notes for the night-shift patients in the lobby, ready to hand them over.

“Hey, we all gotta start somewhere,” Steph chided him. “And Tanya likes you so much for your charming personality that you get the new pit cleaning crew instead of Johnny.”

Sam muttered a curse under his breath, clicking the computer screen alive with the wave of the mouse, clocking in to his shift. “When is John coming back? I thought they were supposed to be back by now.”

They—meaning John and the younger, newly licensed Dr. Wyatt Lawson, whom John started seeing a few months ago.

Steph side-eyed him, sipping her coffee out of her pink Stanley steel mug. He’d been complaining all week that John and Wyatt were gone. Probably because he had to deal with the night-shift psycho, Dr. Walsh, who was a certified asshole.

“Another week, Dr. Samuels. Need me to write it down on your forehead?” Steph drawled.

He smirked, preferring the sassy Steph over the parental one. He was a grown ass man that already had a mom. Granted, his biological mom was crazier than shit on toast, but still.

“Maybe. I prefer sticky notes, though,” he retorted with a lazy smirk.

“Great. I’ll tack it onto your forehead, then.”

He chuckled, clocked on, and straightened, tossing his stethoscope around his neck and tucking his golden necklace beneath his dark gray scrubs. It was his grandfather's military dog tag, and ever since Papi passed away eight months ago, it had never left his neck. Papi had only one tag on his necklace when Sam had found it among his belongings, and he didn’t know where the second tag was. It had been one of the many mysteries surrounding his grandpa that still bothered him, adding another reason to return to Boston and look through the boxes his mom had kept of Papi’s. Except that would mean going back to Boston, and he wasn’t doing that if he could help it.

“Wanna see the pictures Wyatt sent me?” Steph asked, already pulling out her phone from her pocket.

Sam glanced down at the screen, inwardly keeping his expression composed as he glimpsed the romantic, dark blue water canals of Venice, and Wyatt pressing a smooch on John’s graying, bearded cheek for a selfie on a gondola.

Christ, they were cheesy.

Sam swallowed the envy bubbling up in his throat like acid and managed to say, “Cool,” and felt like a total jackass.

Ever since John and Wyatt had become an official couple, they had been taking a ton of time off. This recent vacation was to celebrate Wyatt’s graduation from his last year as a resident, officially becoming Dr. Lawson, the ED Cowboy. Sam loved them like his own family, and while he wasn’t jealous of them, he was envious of what they had.

A loving relationship that fucking worked.

Sam bit back a sigh, reaching for his Papi’s tag beneath his scrubs and wondering if he was cursed to be alone like him for the rest of his miserable life. And if so, maybe being a workaholic was a better route than slowly drinking himself into a lonely grave. The irony was that Sam didn’t drink that much or smoke. Probably because he spent all of med school working in a bar and his mother smoked like a chimney, so those vices were definitely ruined.

He preferred ignoring all his problems until a cancerous tumor appeared in his body, and then maybe he’d deal with it by getting it surgically removed.

Sam glanced up at the evening patient board that was shifting into the day-shift one. The hustle and bustle of the ED calmed his frayed nerves. He liked the storm of the weekend shift. It was usually busier, messier, and more interesting in his opinion.

His Papi used to say, “It’s in the Samuels blood to be adrenaline junkies. If we aren’t pursuing the thrill of the chase, we’re boring men.”

Grief twisted in his gut.

I miss you, you cranky old bastard.

“Hey!” someone shouted from the lobby.

Mendez, the ED’s security guard, appeared at the doorway, blocking whoever was trying to come back.

“Hey! Sammy! You in there?”

Sam's heart stuttered to an unexpected halt.

He recognized that voice—that stupidly sexy Boston accent.

No. Fucking. Way.