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I didn’t have an answer for that one, so I went looking for the drugs I needed instead.

“Did you get a name out of him yet?” Her question surprised me and enough that my hand stopped on the cart.

“What?”

“A name.” She said it like it was the most ordinary question in the world, because to her it was… to me it felt like a loaded gun.

“You were in there an hour with him, and nobody in this building knows what to call the man. Karen’s been on the phone about it twice.”

“He didn’t say,” I replied, trying to keep my voice as even as possible.

“You didn’t ask?”

“I didn’t want to push him too soon.” I almost choked on my tongue saying this, as it was like some sick joke. Push him… oh I had pushed him alright, but mainly when trying to get away from him before he could pin me against a wall or tie me to a fucking shower pipe.

As for Roz, she shrugged and moved on to somebody’s clozapine blood work, and that was the end of it for her.

However, it wasn’t the end of it for me.

Because she was right. And worse than that, she had just asked me the one question I had been avoiding for two months without ever admitting I was avoiding it.

I had never asked him once.

Not in that infirmary with his blood on my gloves. Not in a treatment room with his hands on my waist. Not even when the man had brought me to orgasm with his fingers inside me.

I still didn’t know his name.

Two months of thinking about that man every single day and I had never once asked him what he was called. But I knew it wasn’t because I wasn’t curious. I had wondered. Many times, in fact, and most likely too many to count. I had wondered at two in the morning when I couldn’t sleep. I had wondered while brushing my teeth. I had wondered when cleaning the dirt out of my nails. Or when I was standing in the supermarket when I should have been thinking about what to eat for dinner. I had thought about it a fuck load. Whether it was something soft or something hard, whether it suited him, whether anybody alive still used it.

But by this point I was almost afraid to know. Like some fabled character brought to life if I knew.

A ghost was a thing that happens to you. A ghost has no family or friends. No birthdays or anyone who ever calls him just to see how he’s doing. Because you could be terrified of a ghost and it costs you nothing at all, because there is nothing there to be tender about.

Give him a name and he becomes a man.

And a man is somebody a woman can find herself thinking of by that name, in the dark and in a rented room above a hardware store.

So, I never asked. And he never offered it to me.

“Although, you’d think a man that size would have a name you’d remember,” Roz said, jarring me out of my thoughts and in a tone that screamed of a woman who hadn’t moved on from it at all.

But before I could think of a single thing to say to that, she looked over my shoulder toward the double doors and her whole face changed.

“Oh, and speaking of men who can’t take their eyes off you.”

Briggs came in the way he always comes in, so confident that it bordered on arrogant. His hands loose, saying something to one of the techs on his way past that made the tech laugh like they were best friends.

Roz turned back to the cart and said, quietly and without any humor at all,

“God, I hate him.” I was with her on that one. I didn’t say so, but my sigh did it for me.

He didn’t come around to the med room door the way staff are supposed to. He came at the hatch from the day room side and stood close enough that when he leaned in on that shelf his shoulders came through the opening and blocked most of the light out of it.

“Ladies.”

“Officer Briggs,” I said, and kept counting which was when he leaned further in on that shelf.

“Now, I’ve been thinking about what I said the other day, about you and me getting a coffee somewhere that isn’t a staff room, and I reckon…” he paused when he saw my gaze move past him. Then he looked back over his shoulder down the length of the day room and stopped when he saw who I was looking at.