She huffed but allowed me to use the one I wanted without too much grumbling.
Another woman joined the first, both working in companionable silence as they got the miles and miles of tube figured out and untangled from the little bag.
I watched the TV, which was on a soap opera that I hadn’t watched in years, and waited for them to get ready.
It didn’t take long with two of them, and it wasn’t but seconds later that the original lady was sitting on her stool, huge cotton ball stick covered in alcohol swiping uncomfortably at my skin.
“Don’t bend your elbow,” she ordered as she reached for the needle.
I rolled my eyes.
I was here religiously every six weeks, and the woman had taken my blood every other time for the last six months.
I knew not to bend my arm, just like I knew that I couldn’t lift anything heavy with the arm I gave blood in for at least twelve hours. Or that I couldn’t do any strenuous activity for at least twenty-four hours after.
“Yes, ma’am.” I sighed, wondering if I had time to go to the Dollar Store after this and get a Coke before I was due back to work.
Likely I didn’t. I didn’t even have time to give blood, but the damn people called me constantly if it was my time to give, and I was ready to have six weeks of peace.
I’d never tell them to stop calling me. I knew they needed my blood. I was O negative, the universal donor. They’d continue to call me, and did, despite my efforts to get them to stop.
“Big prick.”
Was it bad that my mind automatically went to a certain ‘big prick’ that I couldn’t stop thinking about?
And Jesus, was Con’s cock big. Massive came more to mind.
The minute the woman pierced my vein with the needle, I heard a sharp ‘bang!’ from the other room and a male curse.
The two women looked up, confused at the sound.
“I’ll go check.”
That came from the other woman. She was standing next to a man donating plasma, but he was there religiously, just like I was. How we always ended up coming the same day three out of every four times was beyond me, but we did.
I even knew he had a wife, four kids, three dogs, two cats, and two grandbabies on the way.
“Oh, I’m sorry!”
I looked up to see the woman apologizing to someone and froze.
Blue eyes that haunted dreams peered out of the cracked door, and my heart started to speed.
His eyes narrowed on me, where I was sitting holding that stupid yellow smiley-faced ball.
I turned away, upset that he was there.
I shouldn’t have come.
I’d had a feeling that this place belonged to him.
I wasn’t sure why. It was just a gut instinct. I mean, how convenient was it that a privately owned blood care center was in the middle of Con’s territory?
But to have my suspicions confirmed was hard to digest.
Especially when I saw him there, standing and watching the blood being taken from my vein.
An irrational urge rolled through me as I hoped that Constantine was the one to drink it, causing me to squeeze the ball harder than I probably should have.
“You bleed fast,” Tracy, the phlebotomist currently taking my blood, observed.
I nodded my head.
“I’ve heard that quite a few times.”
And I had. From everyone that ever took my blood.
The man giving plasma, Jim, started to beep, and Carol, the other phlebotomist, came rushing back. She’d been just standing there, looking dumbly at Constantine.
I didn’t know what she was waiting for, but seeing her start back to life after being caught in the force field that always seemed to surround Con was quite hilarious.
Her face blushed, and her eyes were wild.
Her heart was beating a little too fast—and how the hell I knew that was beyond me.
But I could tell.
Yet I couldn’t ask the one man that I wanted to ask about it.
Instead, I looked down from that penetrating gaze, returning my gaze to the television screen.
Though, I wasn’t nearly as entranced now by the TV as I’d been only minutes before.
Now all I could do was absently flip pages and wonder if Con was watching me or not.
I couldn’t chance looking at the man. He’d see me and immediately know that I couldn’t keep my eyes off of him.
And the man didn’t need any more ego stroking. It was plenty big enough already—just like other parts of his anatomy.
His arms.
Yeah, those were big.
“Almost done,” Tracy said. “Let me have the ball.”
I released it to her grip and allowed my eyes to flick up, only for my heart to fall when I didn’t see him watching me anymore.
Though, I knew that to be a lie.
I couldn’t see him anymore, but that wasn’t to say that he wasn’t watching me in some way. Likely he was watching by way of the security cameras that I could see sitting in the very corner of the room.
Why a blood donation place would have security cameras, I didn’t know.
Then a story popped into my mind from a couple of months ago. People were stealing the blood that’d been stored at the center, convinced that the blood wasn’t going to the hospitals like Worth Enterprises had assured the general population. Instead, they were convinced that the vampires were using it illegally for their own consumption, and the new human activists’ criminal population had resorted to stealing blood to prevent anything untoward happening with the blood.
The only thing they’d accomplished, though, had been causing a missed shipment of blood donation going to area hospitals, and two people dying when they couldn’t find the blood that they needed—blood that’d been supposed to be arriving on the truck that never came, thanks to the criminals.
“All righty, ma’am,” Tracy said as she unplugged and unhooked me. “All done. Now, I want you to make sure you grab some cookies and juice before you leave.”
Yeah, no. I didn’t like the cookies, nor the juice that they offered.
I’d pick something up on the way to work.
Or would have had I not gotten to the parking lot and felt a wave of lightheadedness roll over me.
I had to catch myself on the car beside mine, and would’ve fallen forward had something strong and unyielding not gripped my arm to keep me from kissing the pavement.
Looking down at the arm, I realized very quickly that the arm didn’t belong to anyone that I knew. It belonged to a well-dressed man in a pin-striped suit, and he looked really out of place in between the blood place and the McDonald’s.
“Hi,” I said. “Thank you.”
His smile was warm but calculating.
“You’re most welcome, ma’am,” came his syrupy sweet reply. “Do you need assistance to your car?”
I pulled away and would’ve backed up, but I ran into something immovable.
This time, I had no need to look up at the man at my back. I knew this one about as intimately as anyone could know someone.
And I instantly relaxed.
Whatever part of me that had been up in arms about the man that’d caught me from faceplanting was instantly at ease with Constantine at my back.
“Amari.”
That rumbled reply was directed to pin-striped guy, and I shivered at the cold look this ‘Amari’ shot Constantine.
“Hello, Mr. Worth,” Amari replied coolly. “I’m surprised to see you actually doing something for once.”