All To Myself Read Free

the kitchen, and hugged herself through her embarrassment. The bathroom was tiny, with just a dingy little shower stall. She heard him rooting around in there and her chest ached when he emerged with the small red emergency kit she kept under the sink and one of her dollar store face cloths.
    “You really, really don’t have to do this,” she said as he dropped the kit on the floor in front of her and moved to the kitchen sink. She wished she had done the dishes after her morning shift at her other job. If she hadn’t flopped out on the sofa, he wouldn’t be running the cold water over the scummy remnants of her boxed macaroni and cheese lunch.
    “Stop complaining. If you’re not smart enough to ask for help after being hit by a car, I don’t trust you to be smart enough to clean yourself up before slapping a bandage on there.”
    He returned to her and knelt. Dripping washcloth in one hand, he drew her legs apart with the other.
    She wanted to clip her knees back together. His expression was all business, but for Rory it still felt like such a dirty move.
    “So where were you going today?” he asked as he swabbed the wound.
    “Work.”
    “Where do you work?”
    She curled her toes in her cheap canvas sneakers and flailed for an answer that wasn’t The White Tip. He looked up at her with a grin. “Gotcha, didn’t I?”
    “Sorry?”
    “I saw your uniform when you went for your key. You work at The White Tip, like your sister.” He refolded the washcloth into a clean square, then wiped up the dried river of blood that ran from her knee to her ankle. “Why didn’t you want me to know?”
    “I didn’t want to get fired,” she said, but it wasn’t true. She couldn’t say for sure why she didn’t want him to know. As soon as she’d realized who he was she’d wanted to scurry away and not be a bartender working for squat.
    “I hit you. If anyone is going to get fired, it’s going to be me.”
    “Fired from what?”
    She hadn’t meant to sound so derisive, but seriously? From surfing? From sunning himself? From fucking?
    “I’m shadowing my father this summer. I … well, I had a work term last year and screwed around too much. I can’t graduate until I put in the hours somewhere and get a decent evaluation, so rather than wait until next semester to start from scratch, I’m getting a crash course from my father.”
    “I’d heard you already graduated.”
    “That’s what my folks are telling people when they ask. It sounds better than, ‘Noah? Yeah, he’s a screw up barely scraping by with a C-average, and he called in sick for sixty percent of his work term.’”
    “Why didn’t you just work for your dad in the first place?”
    “I did, at the ski lodge in Ontario. He gave me a shitty evaluation and told me he wouldn’t hire me to clean toilets.”
    He rose up and returned to the bathroom. She listened to the water running and worried her stomach into a gurgling mess wondering if this role at The White Tip would put him as her supervisor at any point. Hopefully he’d be relegated to the office and stay the hell out of the lounge.
    “And what’s your story?” he asked when he returned, and gave her leg another rubdown.
    “I work in the lounge.” There was no point in hiding it now that he knew she had been on her way there. “This is my last summer. I’m going to the mainland to go to school.”
    “Undergrad?”
    “Community college.”
    “Doing what?”
    “Human resources.” It sounded so small and insignificant coming out of her mouth now compared to his expensive albeit spectacularly wasted education in business.
    “Do you really want to work with a bunch of people complaining about their benefits?”
    “I like people, and there are no jobs here. I don’t want to stay and serve drinks all summer, then go work in the grocery store all winter.”
    “I don’t like people,” he admitted, and set the wet rag aside. “I like them if they do what I say, but otherwise I