“No,” Sam says with a laugh. “He’s happily married with a few kids.”
“Dammit. All the good ones are taken. Maybe Nana was right to say that any guy worth settling down with would have settled down before he turned thirty.”
“Hey!” Mason looks up from the pie he’s shoveling in his face. I seriously don’t understand how he’s so fit when he eats like that. I just look at that pie and gain ten pounds. “I’m single.”
“Exactly.” I raise my eyebrows. “I said all the good ones. Even Sam has a girlfriend.”
“If I wanted to settle down, I would,” he counters, and really believes it. And it probably would happen, even with him getting reassigned all over the country for work. That’s Mason’s luck for you. “But why stop now when I’m on a roll? Women dig men in uniform, and I score more ass than—” He cuts off when Nana Benson whacks him on the back of the head. Ditching the walker she’s still supposed to be using, I didn’t even hear her come into the kitchen.
“Talk like that and no lady will want to settle down with you.” She picks up his Jack and Coke and takes a drink. “You keep those numbers to yourself.” She gives him a wink. “If I’d gone on blabbing, your granddaddy wouldn’t have asked me to marry him.” She chuckles. “He thought I was a virgin on our wedding night. God rest his soul.”
“Nana,” Sam spits out, face pulled back with horror. “Please don’t ruin the sweet old lady image I’ve had of you in my head all these years.”
She finishes the drink. “There’s nothing sweet about me.” Setting the glass on the counter, she comes over to me. “Don’t worry, Rory. You’ll find a job and a man. Ideally in that order. Don’t forget, anything a man can give you, you can give yourself.”
Mason and Sam exchange looks and if Nana was closer, she’d smack them both upside the head. “Get your minds out of the gutter.” She turns her gaze back to me. “You’re smart and capable. You’ll figure it out.”
“Thanks, Nana.” I smile, nodding to reaffirm it to myself. I will figure it out. “So, Sam, when do you think you'll be able to talk to Archer?"
“You really want me to?” Sam asks. “The hospital is in Eastwood, Indiana. It’s probably five hours away.”
My stomach tightens. “That’s far.”
“It’s not,” Mason counters. “You can do that in a day.”
“But I can’t come home for dinner.”
“You’ve never left Silver Ridge,” he goes on.
“I did too. College,” I remind him.
“Listen, sis,” he says gently, which is out of the norm for say-how-he-feels Mason. “Just try it. Getting out of here could be good for you,” he urges, not having to bring up my lack of friends in town or how being labeled as the “weirdo” in school has stuck with me even today. “You don’t have a job or a house right now, so it’s the perfect time to branch out. If it’s not a good fit, move back. Mom would let you stay here until you figured things out.”
I grind my teeth and reach for my Jack and Coke, still not taking a drink but needing to feel the cold glass against my fingers. “I guess you’re right.”
“I am right. If there was a time for you to take a bit of a risk, it’s now, when you have nothing to lose.”
I look up, pursing my lips. “Thanks.”
“You know what I mean. Look, if I didn’t take a chance, I never would have gotten where I am today. Silver Ridge will always be my home too, and I’ll end up here when I retire, I’m sure, but you got to live a little. You just said you want another nursing job and there aren’t any here. So you only have one option: go somewhere else.”
“Just agree with him,” Sam mumbles as he takes a drink. “It’s weird hearing Mason make sense.”
“I know, right?” I quip. “It’s like hell froze over or something.”
“Hah.” Mason glares at us both and gets up to make himself another drink. He limps slightly, making me look at Sam.
“Are you supposed to be bearing weight on that leg yet?” Sam asks, going into doctor-mode.
“I’m fine,” Mason huffs. “I should be out there, following leads. We were close to a breakthrough on this case before I got hurt,” he grumbles to himself as he adds a double-shot of Jack Daniels to his drink.
“I was in Eastwood not long ago,” Sam goes on. “They have a new hospital that’s pretty fucking nice with state-of-the-art surgical equipment. You’d be busy all day too. No more sitting around hoping for a tractor accident.”
“You two are fucked up in the head, you know that, right?” Mason limps back to the table.
“He’s the one who works in trauma,” I point out and then shudder. “You know the burnout rate is—”