My Best Friend Used Me, Now She Pays novel · Chapter 7 of 24

Chapter 7: Cold Weather

"Sit," I said. "On the table."

Donal looked at me as though I'd asked him to take his own head off.

"I'm not your patient."

"You've been pressing your thumb into that knee since I got here. You do it every time you think nobody's looking."

"That's called thinking."

"It's called being in pain and calling it a rumor."

That landed.

He gave a low sound that was half a laugh and half something harder.

Then he turned the sign on the door to CLOSED and shut off the front lights, so the clinic went blue in the glow of the vape shop's neon.

He sat on the high table and rolled his scrub pants to the thigh.

I had seen scars before.

His ran in a pale curved line along the inside of the right knee, thick as a pencil, with the little white dots of old stitches on either side.

"Ten years," he said. "Two surgeries. Nothing left in there to cut."

"Okay."

I washed my hands again, slower this time.

I stood between his knees to reach the joint, because there was no other way to reach it.

His leg was warm and hard under my palms.

I found the line of the joint with my thumbs, and pressed, and felt him go still.

"Tell me when," I said.

"When."

"That's the spot?"

"That's every spot."

"Then I'm doing it right."

He huffed.

I worked the soft tissue above the kneecap with slow, firm circles, and then behind it, where the scar tissue had hardened into a rope.

He closed his eyes.

His throat moved when I found the worst of it.

"Seidel told me it was nothing," he said, to the ceiling. "I was a twenty-two-year-old runner on someone else's scholarship, and he said I'd be fine in a week. I trusted him."

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