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Everybody wears one. It came with my lanyard and keys on my first morning. A black fob about the size of a matchbox with a red tab you pull. And honestly, I had never in my life wanted to laugh and be sick at the same time as much as I did when a very nice woman in an office handed me one and explained how it worked.

I wore it anyway and every time I did, it took me right back to that day. To his hands. To his voice. To the way he made me scream in his arms.

As for the rest of my life outside of work, there was very little to say about it. I had spent six weeks at Corwin and the two weeks before it I spent turning myself into somebody who could apply for it. Which meant it had been a total of two months since that day in the shower block. And here I was with a new name and a new job and a rented room above a hardware store. But more than anything, I felt safe. I was working, I was eating properly and I had saved enough that soon I could exchange my shit car for a slightly less shitty one.

But I still could barely sleep and when I did, it was always about him. Which meant that I thought about him every single day and I always asked myself why. I would berate myself and call myself a fool. Even more so when I nearly wrote to him one day, screwing up the paper before I finished it.

No matter what I did, I couldn’t get him off my mind. And even after everything that had happened, I still couldn’t think about him the way that I should do. I didn’t fear him the way I should do and that was the problem.

Because I had been afraid of a man before, so I know exactly what that feels like. It’s a cold thing that sits in your stomach and makes you check the street before you get out of your car. It’s the kind of dread that makes every loud, sudden noise hit your chest like a gunshot.

But this… this wasn’t that.

This was worse, because it came at me sideways and usually out of nothing. In the middle of perfectly ordinary things, the memory of him would assault me. Cleaning a dressing on a man’s forearm had me thinking about a different forearm. Hearing an accent on a television in the break room had me going still for a second with a cup halfway to my mouth. Even when I was handing out medication, there was one patient that had neck tattoos and as my eyes rose for a flash of a second, I would see his face staring back at me.

As for when I was alone, this seemed to be the worst and best of times. When I was free to act on impulse. Like when standing under my own shower with one palm flat against the tile and the other between my legs trying to convince myself it was his hand.

I couldn’t even bring myself to be ashamed of that part as every time I brought myself pleasure it was with him in mind.

I finally got rid of his shirt in my second week here, thinking that would help… it didn’t, it just gave me nothing to smell as I came on my own fingers.

I tried to tell myself it was a sickness. That it was nothing more than some dark fantasy. I had laid out the whole list of reasons why I ran and every time my mind agreed that it had been the smartest decision I had made since arriving at Ashlock. But then as quick as this thought came it was then taken over by another. The one thing that stayed with me and couldn’t ever argue away.

Nobody has ever looked at me like that.

Not once, in twenty-six years. Not my father, who loved me and was in prison for most of it. Not Duke, who keeps me alive out of a debt owed to a dead man. And certainly not the man who put four marks across my belly, who used to look at me the way you look at something you have already broken and have gotten bored of.

That man in the shower looked at me like I was the only light he’d seen from a lifetime of darkness. He touched me in a way like he knew exactly what I needed and he did it with his eyes open. He did it knowing exactly what I was and exactly what he was, and he didn’t once look away.

And because of that, there was now a small, ruined, disgraceful piece of me that would walk back into that building tomorrow just to be looked at that way one more time.

His name was Jason Briggs, but nobody at Corwin ever called him that. He was just Briggs, the way some men are, and he was assigned to Cedar. My ward. Which meant he was on that floor every hour I was, escorting patients out to the courtyard, standing behind me at the med hatch, sitting in on handover with his boots up on the next chair.

I noticed him in my second week, which was later than I should have, and that was on me. Because I have three years of practice at noticing people like him. But I let it slide because I was tired, and because he was very good at it.

He was somewhere in his late thirties and handsome in the way that has plainly always gotten him exactly what he wanted. Good jaw, good shoulders, the kind of face that gets a man out of trouble at a traffic stop and has been getting him out of it since he was a boy. He knows exactly what the attraction is worth, and he uses it the way other men use their hands. He also had the bad habit of standing about four inches closer to me than the conversation required, instantly screaming red flag.

He was popular, that much was obvious. Roz told me that he held a barbecue at his house every summer and two of the nurses on my unit call him a sweetheart. And he had never once let me through a doorway without touching me.

That was my second red flag.

Because I had known men like him before. One in particular that I had been too young and too naive to know at the time was actually a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

And it was that hand that told me everything. One on the small of my back to guide me through a doorway I have gone through four hundred times on my own. Fingers on my elbow. A palm between my shoulder blades that stays half a second longer than it needs to. Standing so close at the med hatch that I had to duck under his arm to get past, and have him laughing about it, saying sorry, sweetheart, it’s tight in here.

I had given him excuses to leave in a bright pleasant voice. I had stepped back. I had even started carrying the med chart in front of my body like a shield. And more and more frequently he seemed to be making excuses to be standing next to me. As if he was working out when I would be alone and making the most of it.

To say that this was making me more uncomfortable by the day was an understatement. But in the beginning, I chose to ignore it because I was only supposed to be there for six weeks but a few days ago, they asked me to stay longer. Longer meant more money and more money meant a more reliable car when I moved on. It meant a deposit on more than just a rented room above a hardware store. It meant more security for when I finally left this town.

And the only catch was putting up with Briggs for a little longer. I knew I should have reported it, especially after he ‘accidentally’ touched my ass the other day and apologized for it with a grin.

But I hadn’t.

Of course I hadn’t reported it. Because Erin Shaw doesn’t make complaints, because a complaint is a form, and a form is a statement. A statement meant sitting down with someone in an office with a screen looking up a nursing registration made by a seventy-one-year-old man with a bad hip in a workshop I have never been allowed to see.

So, I smile, I step back, and I get through the door.

Roz was the only one who noticed and bless her heart, she started being there whenever he was. But then while she was busy on her rounds, three days ago, he found me and told me I looked tired. Then he asked whether anybody was keeping me up and put his hand on my hip while he said it.