Free No Good For Anyone by Locklyn Marx

but he couldn’t think of anything but the fact that he needed to protect her.
    “I’m fine,” Lindsay kept saying, repeating it over and over again, like if she said it enough it would be true.
    “Oh, yeah? Let me see your wrist.” She held it up. It hung there limply, and it was already starting to swell.
    “I’m taking you to the emergency room.”
    “No.” She shook her head. “I just landed on it the wrong way. It’s just a little sore.”
    He ignored her, grabbing his coat off the hook behind the kitchen door, then leading her into the dining room.
    “Can I have your attention please?” he said to the preservation society ladies.
    “We’ve had an emergency here. This poor woman – ” he pointed at Lindsay “--has fallen and hurt her wrist very badly.”
    A murmur rushed through the crowd as the old women looked at each other.
    Emergencies were something they understood.
    “Finish your meal,” Chace told them, “and it’s all on the house. Chuck will help you with anything you need.” He looked behind him to where Chuck was standing by the kitchen door.
    Chuck nodded.
    There was another excited ripple through the crowd as Chace guided Lindsay outside.
    But as soon as they hit the parking lot, someone began calling after them.
    “Hey! Hey! Wait!”
    He turned around. Shit. It was the crazy mother. Chace had forgotten all about her.
    “Oh, Lindsay!” she wailed, rushing toward them. “What happened?”
    “It’s okay, ma’am,” Chace said. He remembered Lindsay telling him about her mother’s tendency to overreact, and how it annoyed Lindsay and only made her feel worse. “Lindsay hurt her wrist, but I’m taking her to the emergency room.”
    “Lindsay hurt her wrist!” the woman exclaimed, like Chace had just told her Lindsay had been in a knife fight.
    “Yes,” he said patiently. “But I’m taking her to the doctor now. It’s going to be fine.”
    “Oh, my God!” The mother twisted her hands in front of her, then fluttered them like she was some kind of bird. “How is she going to type? She has a mortgage now, you know. I was always telling her she should have gotten that disability insurance, it’s the kind of thing young people never want to think about, but with her insisting on being self-employed, I told her she really– ”
    “Yes, well,” Chace said, wondering why she was talking to him as if Lindsay wasn’t standing right there. “Lindsay will call you as soon as she’s done.”
    He didn’t wait for her answer, just steered Lindsay toward his truck and opened the passenger door. Lindsay got inside, and he shut the door behind her before heading for the driver’s side.
    “You doing okay?’ he asked as he slid in next to her.
    She nodded, but her face had gone white. “Do you think it’s broken?”
    “No.” It was true. He’d been on the soccer team in college and had been involved in enough “adventures gone wrong” -- bar fights, dares, stupid ideas – to know what a broken bone looked like. “If it was broken, you’d be screaming.”
    “It hurts,” she said, “but not enough to scream.”
    He handed her the bottle of water that was sitting in the cup holder. “Drink this.”
    “Thanks,” she said, taking a sip.
    He didn’t deserve her thanks. If he hadn’t been messing around like that, making fun of her for working at Bob’s Big Boy, none of this would have happened. She would be safe and sound in the booth of the restaurant, her biggest worry being how she was going to get rid of her annoying mother.
    His jaw set as he pulled out of the parking lot. It was the first time he’d had someone he cared about in the car with him since… well, in a long time, and it was making him anxious.
    Ten minutes later, they pulled into the parking lot of Cape Cod Hospital, and he got Lindsay out of the car and inside.
    The ER was surprisingly deserted.
    A bleach blonde receptionist handed them a clipboard with forms to fill out.
    Lindsay insisted on