by Alie Garnett
“He’s a patient,” she reminded the other woman.
“For now, but he’s going to get better. Fully mobile and fully functional. Not that I looked, but I see things.” Elissa winked at her.
“Was that before or after phone sex?”
“Hey! I just noticed, okay? I didn’t touch it, but you can.” Elissa mimicked caressing a penis.
Dylan rolled her eyes, but she couldn’t help but laugh. “Why do I even talk to you?”
“Because you are the straight man, I am the crazy partner. Now go talk to the sexy guy and tell me all the details about it later. That way, I’ll have more to talk about with Todd than blood and gore.” She grabbed the folder back and looked it over again, mostly at the picture.
“You tell your husband about me?” Dylan demanded, realizing she had no idea who this man actually was.
“Just the good stuff, and he loves you too. You’re coming over for Christmas the first year we’re both back.”
Dylan wondered when that would be—years from now, most likely. It had been a long time since she had been stateside for the holidays. She wished she had known Elissa back then. The one time was home, she had ended up at the hospital she was working at, it was so lonely in her apartment. Holidays were always the hardest, especially when she wasn’t working.
“Count on it,” she promised, taking the folder back and tucking it under her arm. She wondered if their friendship would survive after leaving the war zone.
Chapter 6
“I’m fine, Mom, just a little gunshot wound,” Holden said as he stared at the giant bandage on his leg. It was throbbing like a mean son of a bitch.
“No gunshot is small.” His mother’s words sounded distant. The hulking building that had been turned into a hospital didn’t offer great cell reception.
“I’m okay, seriously. They’re not even sending me home,” he reminded her, wishing he hadn’t even called her.
“They need to send you home to heal! The Navy would, you know.”
“I will be healed before I even make it back. By next week, I should be back on duty. I can barely feel it,” he lied to her.
“Just ask to come home, they don’t need you.”
“I have to go, Mom. I’ll call you soon,” he said and quickly hung up; his mom could say goodbye for hours.
Closing his eyes, Holden let out a long sigh. He hated calling his mother. She had been against him enlisting in the Army since the beginning and wasn’t afraid to say it. And she did say it—a lot.
“Lying to your mom, huh? Isn’t there a law against that?” Dylan smiled from the doorway. He wondered how long she had been there.
“More like bending the truth,” he replied. For some reason, he was actually happy to see her smile.
“How are you feeling? For real.” She put on her doctor's face, which matched the gray scrubs that covered her body. No blood on them today.
“Hurts, but I suspected it would.” He shrugged. He was shot, after all, not pinched.
Without any hesitation, she ran her hands over the white bandage, the one her nurse put on after the surgery. She deftly pulled on thin plastic gloves and peeled back the bandage from his leg. As he watched her, he wished the wound was a few inches more away from his penis. Looking at her scrunching up her nose as she looked at his wound made him feel a little defensive.
Her plastic-covered fingers brushed his stitches, then probed the area around the wound for a while, checking for any sign of infection or excessive swelling. Then, just as fast, she placed a new bandage over the wound. She hadn’t said a word, just concentrated on the job in front of her.
Watching her pull off her gloves, he said, “I thought you would have let me die after what I said.”
Giving him a half-smile as she tossed her gloves away, she replied, “Marquez would’ve killed me if I’d let his brother die. You owe your brother for this one.”
“Why do you call him Marquez?” He had noticed it right away. In all their conversations, she hadn’t said his actual name.
Her eyes went to the window for a moment, then back to him. “During basic, we were just friends, so we started to call each other by our last names, just like everyone else. Things got more personal as training went on, but we kept the last name thing. Neither of us knew what the future held or if we could even make a relationship work. We did, but the last name thing just sort of stuck. I don’t think of him as Chase; I never did.”
“Even after you got married and were a Marquez also?” He liked listening to her talk. She relaxed when she did.
“I guess we weren’t married long enough for it to be an issue. If he had come home, that might have changed.” She folded her arms, a protective gesture if he ever saw one. “Anyway, you’re healing well. At this point, I see you in here another three days, then out but off-duty for a week. After that, you’ll be part-time, working toward full.”
“That’s what the other doctor said.” He smiled when he saw her flinch, realizing he knew she had no reason to be there.
She started toward the door. “Okay, then. Good luck on recovery.”
“Can I get you back as a doctor in case the new guy wants me dead? No brother making sure I am alive.”
“Sorry, I’m usually not post-op, and I’m off for forty-eight in a few hours. You’ll be out by the time I get back.” She stopped at the door.
“Visit me when you’re off? You can’t run all the time,” he teased her. As long as he held his tongue, it appeared that they could get along.
“We don’t have anything to talk about.” Her hands slipped into her pockets. Was she being shy?
“You can tell me about Chase. I was so young, I didn’t really know him. I want to know more. You know more.”
“I’ll see how I feel tomorrow. Maybe,” she answered and walked from the room.
He felt the conversation had been a success; they hadn’t yelled at each other, at least. Add to that a genuine smile, not just a fake one today.
Holden ran his hand over the bandage that she had put on him. He hoped she hadn’t noticed his erection as she had checked out his wound—he didn’t see her that way and didn’t want that getting in the way of learning more about his brother’s life.
Chapter 7
With nothing better to do with her time, Dylan headed over to the hospital after she had finally slept the night before. It wasn’t losing the soldier that had kept her up longer than it should have; it was Holden. Finding him wounded, she hadn’t hesitated to treat him. It was simply her job, and a body was a body, no matter what that body thought of her. But afterward in his room… That was something she had never done before. Sewing them up was easy. Pleasant conversation was something she had never mastered, never really needed to.
It didn’t take any of the years of schooling she had gone through to realize he’d had an erection as she checked his wound. Elissa had been right about it being worth a glance. Definitely impressive, she thought to herself.
She regretted her decision even as her feet led her toward Holden’s room. Since she was off duty, she was wearing her usual off-duty uniform, which was a gray Army T-shirt, one of many she had with her. After twenty years, she was more comfortable in fatigues than jeans.
Her Army-issue boots were nearly silent as she went down the quiet hallway. Nobody paid much attention to her as she went. This was her domain, and there was no reason to wonder why she’d be there on her day off. Nobody’d guess, however, that she was visiting her brother-in-law.
At this point in her life, she didn’t even see him as that. He was more like just another soldier. Their connection to a man long dead didn’t mean anything. Even at this point, she couldn’t tell you which of his brothers Holden was, and there had been only two of them. Three of them?
She stopped at his door, knocking loudly. His eyes had been closed, and she regretted waking him, hoping his leg wasn’t bothering him today.
“Doc.” He smiled but didn’t lift his head from the pillo
w as he spoke.
“Captain.” Dylan took a step into the room. She took a look around, making sure everything was as it should be. Seeing that he was no longer hooked up to any machines and seemed to be in good spirits, she was relieved, realizing that she had been worried about him. Dylan pushed the thought out of her mind as she went to the row of cabinets and reached into the box of gloves.
Without thinking, she slid them on and quickly checked his wound again, happy with the progress. She re-bandaged it, then pulled off the gloves and tossed them in the corner trashcan. Today, he had no reaction to her being there. Had that just been a fluke? Am I imagining things?
“No infection; looks like everything’s healing as it should.” She couldn’t help giving him a progress report—it was ingrained in her.
“I had a great surgeon.” He raised his bed so he was sitting up.
“If you were sleeping, I can come back.” She took a step away from the bed, gesturing to the door with her thumb.
“No, just resting. Bored. I’m happy you’re here.”
“Have you gotten up today?” she quizzed him.
“The evil nurse makes me every time I have to pee.” He grinned.
She crossed her arms. “Good, you need to move around.”
“Do you want to sit?” He waved at an uncomfortable-looking chair in the corner of the room.
“No thank you. I’ll stand.” She didn’t want to be too comfortable around him.
“Okay. I forget you’re actually in the Army.” He nodded at her clothes.
“A major. In a few months, I’ll have been in for twenty years,” she admitted, but it didn’t seem that long to her.
“Are you retiring?” he asked. She would have her years in soon.
“No, I have no plans for that. I’ll most likely stay until they kick me out.” She leaned against the cabinetry that ran along the wall at the foot of his bed.
“Did Chase like the Army?”
For a moment, she had forgotten why she was there. It wasn’t just a patient visit, it was a dredge through her past. A past she hated talking and thinking about.
“Yes, he loved it. Even loved coming here. Truthfully, he wasn’t supposed to have been in Iraq when he died. He volunteered to come back early due to troop shortages. Your mother doesn’t know that. He went because I would start med school while he was gone and would have been busy. He decided it was better to be gone when I had no time than when I would have had more time to spend with him. All of it was for more time.” She bit back tears. He had asked one stupid question, and she was going a bawl like a baby.
“Mom likes to say he wasn’t happy with the Army and that he regretted his decision.” Holden admitted it sounded like a woman who was disappointed in her oldest child.
“Your mom lied to you.”
“That’s what I always thought. She bends things to look the way she wants them to.”
“Marquez had a hard time with your mother. She wasn’t happy with his life choices. The Army, me, not moving home between every deployment...”
Holden nodded. “Yeah, she likes everyone to live close to her.”
“I know, they argued about it often. I was in Florida and couldn’t just pick up and leave. She didn’t think I was going to get through my program, figuring I was just looking to get out of actually being deployed by getting pregnant or something. As if the Army would care about either of those things.” She chuckled at the woman who had thought she was so smart about why Dylan was with Chase.
“You signed a contract. You were in.”
“Still am. I keep signing on that damn dotted line.”
“Did your parents at least like Chase?” he asked.
“They never met him. I was estranged from them at the time,” she said it as succinctly as possible, not wanting more questions about her—this was about Marquez.
“Sorry about that. You two went at it all alone. I wish I had known.”
“You were a kid; it wasn’t your place,” she reminded him, offering a small smile.
“Where’s home when you aren’t here?” he asked.
“Wherever I land. I don’t have a home base. I’m usually in the DC area but have been in California, Texas, and New York. Mostly, I’m here, in the desert. Right now, I’ve been here for twenty-three months with no plans to leave.”
“That’s a long time.”
“I keep getting by the medical board.” She flexed her hands involuntarily; they didn’t always listen to her anymore, but she hoped they held out for a few more years.
“But this is a stressful place.”
“Ever been in the ER in Detroit? I had more gunshot wounds there then here on any given day. Fewer limb amputations, but the shotgun wounds made up for it.” She shook her head in disappointment—she was never going back there.
“Why were you in Detroit?”
She shrugged. “I had a few months off a few years ago and took a three-month gig. I have trouble dealing with downtime.” It was the absolute truth. She couldn’t just sit at home, she’d do anything but that. Which was why she was still here in the sandbox.
“What did Chase like to do on his off-time?”
“Fishing, hiking…just about anything outside. If he was trapped inside, he was crawling the walls. We were alike that way.” She was relieved to talk about Marquez again.
“That’s what I remember also. He was never actually at the house when he came home, always out and about.”
“Yep, that was him. His big plan was to hike the entire Appalachian Trail before I got my doctorate. He had started and was probably going to finish it. I always worried when he went; he was doing it alone, and it made me nervous.” As she talked, she saw his eyelids droop, the medication was making him tired. So, she kept talking, hoping it put him to sleep. “Not that I ever told him that. Every time I told him I was nervous about something, he would give me the biggest hug to ‘squeeze the fear out of me.’ It always made me laugh and relax. It was just how he was.”
After watching him sleep for a few minutes, she was again surprised that he didn’t resemble his brother at all. Every once in a while, there’d be something. Maybe she didn’t remember the man she loved like she thought she did.
She left the room and quietly closed the door behind her. Holden needed sleep more than talking about his long-dead brother. Back down the hall, she still didn’t get any unusual looks.
It had been nice talking about Marquez, remembering him. Usually, she spent her time trying not to remember life with him, trying to make the way her life was now seem normal and not just a poor substitute for the life she couldn’t get back again.
Looking back on it, she knew she was painting life with a rose-colored brush. Was it possible that they never fought? Were they always happy, even when separated for months at a time?
Of course not. They hated being separated, but they both accepted it because that was their normal. They were Army—they would rarely be together until their careers ended. They weren’t happy about it, but both had accepted it.
They were young, passionate people with big opinions, and they fought all the time. Over what, she could barely remember. The only thing was his family and hers. His family was easy, they weren’t happy with them as a couple. Hers wasn’t so, she had cut them from her life at eighteen. By the time she got on that bus for basic she was alone, joining the Army had given her a family. They may not be close, but it was a family.
Chapter 8
Two o’clock passed, and Dylan hadn’t come back. For some reason, he expected her to come back today. Holden cursed himself for falling asleep while she was talking, but it was her fault for having such a soothing voice.
He was surprised that she’d actually shown up in fatigues. For some reason, he couldn’t get his head around the fact that she was an officer in the Army. He could only see her as a doctor.
Over the years, he had seen many a woman in fatigues, but not a one that had made them look feminine…not until Dyl
an. The formless outfit had begged to hug her curves.
Holden cursed himself for looking at her body. All he wanted was to get to know this woman who had loved his brother. Nothing else.
“Looking for company?” Accompanied her knock on the door.
Tamping down his excitement, he watched her walk into the room. She was in the same outfit as she had been in the day before, the caduceus on display for all to know she was into medicine.
“Yes, I am. Sorry I fell asleep on you,” he said as she briskly walked to the bed.
“Medication will do that. Or my boring stories.” She pulled on a pair of gloves she had grabbed from a box near the door.
“It’s the medication; your stories are great.” He watched her check and redress his leg again.
Watching her pull the blue gloves off and ball them into her hand, he noticed something on her wrist. Sitting up, he grabbed it and looked at it. He noticed the large caduceus on her left arm whenever he saw her, but never the small tattoo on her right arm. Running up her blue vain was his last name written in fancy cursive.
“It’s a copy of his signature,” she whispered and gently pulled her arm from his grasp.
“Why didn’t you just show me this when I was being an ass, saying you weren’t mourning enough?” he demanded, feeling like the heel he was that day.
Her hand covered the entire tattoo as she answered, “Because I don’t have to prove I loved him, not to anyone. He knew, and that’s all that mattered.”
With effort, he swung his legs off the bed and took two careful steps toward her. Without a word, he put his arms around her and hugged her as tight as he could. Her body was as solid as he thought it was going to be, solid and soft all at the same time.
At his first touch, she had stiffened, but her stance had softened instantly as he held her tight. In his arms, she wasn’t a small woman, she was tall and willowy.
Bending his head so that he was near her ear, he whispered, “I’m sorry I ever said anything to hurt you, Dylan. My brother couldn’t have found someone better, and I’m a little jealous. Nobody has my name tattooed on them.”