Bad For You: An Enemies to Lovers Romance

by Taylor Holloway

  “Oh yeah?” Lara asked quizzically. “What happened at the civilian hospital?”

  “An emergency,” I managed weakly. It was true. Sort of. “I got held up.” I paused. That part was true. Aimee didn’t let me leave on time. It was all her fault I was late. It didn’t ring true even in my own mind.

  “What kind of emergency?” Lara asked. “Anything exciting?”

  Yes. The naked and exciting kind. The naked enemy sexy times in a locker room kind.

  “I don’t really want to talk about it.” And honestly, what would I say if I did? I couldn’t even explain the situation to myself. My mind was still spinning.

  “It might make you feel better to talk about it,” Lara suggested to me. “I mean, that’s what they’re always telling us in therapy, right?”

  I made a face at her, but the truth was that I was glad she and Mark happened to be in town. The fact that Lara, Mark, and I had served together and were now unlucky enough to be in group PTSD therapy together was probably the only reason I could tolerate the therapy.

  “How about we skip it and go straight to the beer?” I offered.

  Lara grinned. “Sounds like a smart prescription to me, Doc. Especially if you’re buying.”

  That’s what she and Mark and everyone from our unit always called me, Doc. Again, not something I’d tolerate from anyone else, but they were special. We’d been through enough together that I didn’t hate the stupid nickname. Secretly, I actually kind of liked it. From them. Only from them.

  “Wow, Doc’s being emotionally unavailable? Who’d have thought?” Mark joked. I rolled my eyes at him, but I knew he was just messing with me. Besides, I was emotionally unavailable. It was kind of my thing. Thanks dad.

  “Did you get the part?” I asked Mark to distract him from me. He and Lara were both in the entertainment industry now that their military careers were over. By chance, they’d both ended up in Austin, drawn to the growing film industry here.

  “Yeah, I did,” Mark replied proudly. “My first real film role is officially happening. It feels totally surreal.”

  I grinned at him, not surprised his movie star good looks would actually lead him to be, well, a movie star. “Congratulations.” I turned to Lara. “And you?”

  She frowned and shook her head. “No. Not this time.” She shrugged her shoulders.

  “You’ll get it next time,” Mark told her.

  She smiled at him mischievously. “Sure. Just promise you won’t kick me out of the apartment when you get famous first.”

  “I promise. Besides, I still owe you that Wookie life debt for dragging me out of Fallujah.”

  “That’s very true,” she said immodestly. “I could have left you there to bleed out. You owe me your leftovers and spare bedroom for life.”

  Lara was an honest-to-God badass. She was now working as a stunt woman, but during our time together overseas, I’d seen her do some things you only see in the movies. She’d knocked out a man twice her size with one punch, reloaded a rifle while driving, guided a Humvee backwards through a firefight, and piloted a helicopter with a damaged blade under mortar fire. She was kind of like a Chinese, real-world mixture between Ellen Ripley and Uma Thurman’s character in Kill Bill. Tall, sleek, and athletic, she was not exactly my type, but she was definitely Mark’s.

  I had a theory about Mark and Lara. They swore they were just best friends, but I didn’t quite believe it. Can a man and a woman in their late twenties be “just roommates”? Was a platonic relationship even possible? I seriously doubted it. I wasn’t sure who had who in the friendzone, but it was only a matter of time that they’d be sleeping together. That is, if they weren’t already. It was an inevitability.

  Kind of like me and Aimee. It was destiny that we’d hook up eventually, right? I mean, now that we’d gotten it out of our systems, we could go back to hating each other. It was probably good we’d taken care of it now.

  “So, are you seeing anyone?” Lara asked me, staring at me like she might have developed telepathy in addition to her other impressive repertoire of skills.

  “What?” I managed to say. “Why?”

  “I’ve got a friend I want to set you up with,” she told me. “She’s hot, too,” Lara added. “Mark, you think Brandon and Annie would get along, don’t you?”

  Brandon shrugged. “Maybe. Do you like the innocent, wholesome type?”

  Yes. I did.

  Aimee was the innocent, wholesome type. Aimee was the epitome of the innocent, wholesome type.

  I shook my head. “No thanks, Lara. I’m not interested and I’m not going to be in town long enough anyway.”

  “You really think you’re going to get out of here in three months?” Mark asked. His expression was doubtful.

  “Of course,” I replied churlishly. “The assignment was only for six months. I’m halfway done already.”

  “The initial assignment was for six months. You know these things tend to get extended…”

  “It won’t get extended,” I snapped. Then I paused. “It can’t. It just can’t. Working in my dad’s hospital is killing me. He’s constantly reviewing my cases and giving me recommendations, and every time I have to see him I want to grab a scalpel and stab him in the eye.” Lara and Mark looked at each other uncomfortably. “Metaphorically,” I added weakly. “I metaphorically want to stab him in the eye.”

  “You have serious daddy issues,” Lara told me. “You know that, right?”

  I made a dismissive noise and signaled the waitress to bring another round. I had all kinds of issues right now. Daddy issues. PTSD issues. Anger issues. Professional issues. And Aimee issues most of all.

  And the worst part? Against all my better judgement, I couldn’t wait to see her again.

  12

  Brandon

  Aimee avoided me for weeks after the shower incident. Not that she’d been exactly keen to see me before, but now she went the other way if I walked down the same hallway. She’d take one wide-eyed look at me, turn a terribly unpleasant shade of puce, and run for the hills. Instead of ignoring her and pretending she wasn’t real, now she was all too real. I did nothing but think about her.

  I couldn’t even make an appointment to see her with Lucy because it kept getting inexplicably cancelled at the last minute. Short of hunting Aimee down in the parking lot and demanding she hear me out, I couldn’t get a moment of her time. It wasn’t the greatest thing for my pride, but it helped make a few things clearer for me.

  First, I’d been a gigantic, absolute dick to her when we were kids and she never deserved any of it. It wasn’t Aimee’s fault that my mom had cancer or that her mom had been my mom’s caretaker. It definitely hadn’t been her fault that she’d moved into my life when I was at my most confused, hormonal, and generally unpleasant. But I took out all my anger and loneliness on her like it was. I probably made what was already a tough time in her life much tougher.

  Aimee had moved to a new school, in a new city, in a neighborhood where most of the kids were much richer and more privileged than her. And she’d skipped several grades, meaning she was younger and less mature than all her classmates. Then she had to deal with me at home. It couldn’t have been easy for her. I’d been immature and cruel, and it was no wonder that she hated me.

  Second, she’d grown into a force of nature. All signs of the timid, awkward little girl I used to know had been efficiently excised from Aimee’s life. She was now a sophisticated, powerful presence in the hospital, deftly maneuvering herself into my dad’s second-in-command, and probably fated to one day run the whole damn hospital.

  Third, Aimee clearly hated me even more now than she had before. Otherwise why avoid me like the plague? She must really despise me.

  Fourth, and most importantly, I wanted to have sex with her again. Badly. She was lightning in a bottle and now that I’d had a taste, nothing else would satisfy me. Every night for weeks, I would wake up rock hard and desperate for her, only to remember that she hated me and the l
ikelihood of ever repeating our interlude in the locker room was next to zero. If it were any other woman who hated me and didn’t want to sleep with me, it wouldn’t bother me so much. But it wasn’t. It was Aimee, my childhood nuisance who’d grown up into my ultimate fantasy.

  My chemical addiction to her was out of control, but it wasn’t just that, either. At some point during her long period of avoiding me, I felt a rising duty to fix what I’d broken with Aimee. Guilt had begun to eat at me, and only her forgiveness would satisfy its hunger. I knew she probably wouldn’t ever want to touch me again, but I needed something in order to move on and forget her. I told myself it was absolution that I needed. If I could just get her to forgive me, then I was sure I could finally get her off my mind.

  The challenge was just to get a second in her presence to ask her forgiveness. She wasn’t an easy woman to track down. Eventually, after weeks of fruitless pursuit, I was reduced to swiping a copy of her duty schedule and attempting to find her while she made her rounds. I finally found her in the ER one Saturday morning.

  “How would you rate your pain on a scale from one to ten?” I heard the familiar sound of Aimee’s voice from behind the flimsy curtain that separated the ER beds. Her pretty silhouette was visible against the blue fabric.

  “Ten out of ten,” her patient replied. “I need some codeine. I had it when I got surgery and it works.”

  I paused. This was going to get interesting. I settled in to eavesdrop on the other side of the privacy screen.

  It was time to figure out what kind of a doctor Aimee Ford actually was.

  “How does your arm feel when you hold it straight out in front of you like this?” The blurry silhouette of Aimee extended her right arm.

  “It fucking hurts, that’s what it feels like,” her female patient replied irritably. She didn’t attempt to extend her arm and stayed seated on the cot. “I need some medicine right now. I’ve been waiting for hours.” Her voice was a distinctive, familiar, plaintive whine.

  I could basically guarantee that this was going to get bad. She was a drug seeker, one of many unfortunate addicts that ended up in the ER each week. The opiate epidemic was worse than I ever expected to find when I got back to the states, and the sheer number of average people who ended up addicted blew my mind. The hospital had clear protocols for the prescription of heavy opiates now, but it was too late for a lot of people. They were already hooked and generally only weeks away from graduating from pills to heroin.

  “I’m sorry about the wait,” Aimee said, not sounding sorry at all. “It’s just the nature of emergency departments sometimes. We have to treat the sickest people first. Now, can you bend your elbow at all?” Aimee asked the patient. Her voice was as even and calm as always, but because I’d lived right next door to her for multiple years, I could detect the note of resignation in her voice. She probably knew the woman was addicted, too.

  “It hurts to bend it,” the woman replied. “You don’t understand how much it hurts. I need some medicine right now. I’ve been waiting…” she trailed off like she’d forgotten the rest of her sentence.

  “I don’t see any swelling or bruising on your arm,” Aimee said patiently. “It’s not even red. What did you say happened again?”

  “I fell from a ladder. It’s broken. I know it’s broken. It hurts.” She was starting to get agitated.

  “You were here a week or so ago with an injury to your ankle. Is this from the same accident?”

  “No. It’s new,” she snapped. “It hurts so much. Can I get the codeine now?”

  Repeat visits to the ER with painful physical injuries was one of the number one red flags of drug seeking behavior. So was instantly rating pain as ten out of ten and requesting drugs by brand name. She was either not trying very hard or just really, really desperate.

  “How long ago was your fall? This morning?” Aimee was cool as a cucumber.

  “Yes. It was this morning, around nine a.m. I already told the nurse.”

  “From what distance did you fall? Do you remember?”

  “Twenty feet. I was up on the ladder trying to flush some raccoons out of the attic. There’s four of them. Babies too. God, it hurts.”

  “Are you sure it was a twenty-foot ladder?”

  “Of course, I’m sure it was a twenty-foot ladder.” She sounded like she was getting agitated.

  “And you fell from the top of it?”

  “Yes. The last rung. The raccoons lunged at me and I fell. I heard my arm break when I hit the ground. It sounded like a tin can getting stomped. The raccoons are still up there.”

  There was about a fifty percent chance of survival from a fifteen-foot fall. At twenty feet, a broken bone or head injury was almost guaranteed. She would have doubtless at least briefly lost consciousness and never would have heard the bone break. If this woman had fallen from a distance of twenty feet, she wouldn’t be walking. She definitely wouldn’t have managed to drive herself to the hospital, check herself in, and then wait for several hours in the waiting room.

  The curious level of detail that the woman provided helped prove to me that she was lying. The story about the raccoons was cute, but obviously fake. We were all trained to count up the number of irrelevant, florid details that get shared by drug seekers. A woman with a compound fracture in her arm would not be talking about raccoons, even though on average women deal with pain far better than men. She wouldn’t be talking, period. She’d be in shock, either crying and throwing up or passed out from the pain.

  “Did you hit your head at all in the fall?” Aimee asked. She sounded almost hopeful that her patient was just concussed, but I’d already reached my own conclusions about this woman. She was here for a ‘script to get her through the weekend and nothing else. Maybe a nice injection of fentanyl if she could somehow swing it. But there was almost certainly nothing wrong with her. Well, nothing but a raging addiction to pain pills, that is. The poor woman was really sick, but not with something that could be fixed by a visit to the ER. But Aimee had a job to do either way.

  The patient must have shaken her head to indicate no, because the next thing Aimee said was, “alright, we’ll need to do an X-ray if you fell from twenty feet.” I could hear the resignation in her voice. “We can refer you to an imaging center to have it done this afternoon.” I could hear her annoyance too, but it was well hidden. The truth was that there was no way an X-ray would be anything but a waste of time and money. However, the patient had told Aimee that she’d fallen from a dangerous height, and Aimee would be a bad doctor if she didn’t at least evaluate her for the injury, even if Aimee thought she was lying. The patient might just have a head injury. Maybe.

  “I need something for the pain,” the woman said. “It hurts so bad. It’s broken. I just need some codeine and then I’ll go to my regular doctor on Monday.”

  “I don’t see any evidence of a break, but I’ll have a nurse bring you some ibuprofen and Tylenol. We can give you a combination of the two that will safely help with the pain. If it’s broken it needs to be treated immediately.”

  “Tylenol? That won’t do anything. I need something that’ll actually help with the pain.” Her voice had risen considerably.

  Aimee sighed. “I’m not going to give you any heavy-duty pain medication,” she told the patient. “I see no evidence that you’re injured enough to require it, and it’s too risky to give you that sort of medication before we’ve tried the non-prescription meds.”

  “I want to see a doctor.”

  “I am a doctor.”

  “I thought you were a nurse.” She sounded annoyed. Maybe she was saving her good story for the doctor and was just trying to get through Aimee to someone who would actually give her drugs.

  “I’m not a nurse. I’m a doctor.”

  “You’re way too young to be a doctor.”

  “No, I’m not,” Aimee said. I could imagine her frown, although I couldn’t see it.

  “You look twelve. I want to see a different doctor
.” I winced at her error. Knowing Aimee, this would not be an effective approach.

  “I’m afraid that’s not possible,” she replied sharply. “I’ll write you a prescription for the arm x-ray. Do you want the over-the-counter pain medication or are you fine without it?”

  “I need to talk to a real doctor. Now.”

  “I am a real doctor.”

  I heard something crash. “You don’t understand. I’m in pain.”

  “I can give you the over-the-counter medication and then we’ll reevaluate.”

  “No. I need it now. I can’t wait.” She was standing up now. I could see that the woman was taller than Aimee by at least seven or eight inches. That meant she probably outweighed her by a good fifty pounds. The woman loomed over Aimee.

  In the busy ER, no one noticed what was happening. It was too noisy and too frenetic. The situation was starting to get out of hand, and no one but me knew it.

  “Ma’am, the registry indicates that you received a prescription for three powerful painkillers within the last month. I cannot prescribe you more dangerous, addictive drugs when you have no physical need,” Aimee explained patiently. She was still talking to her like she was rational. But she wasn’t. She was beyond rationality. Her mind was hijacked by a dependency on drugs. Her body was in horrible pain, but it wasn’t something Aimee could fix by giving her more drugs. It wasn’t her fault that she was ill, but she could also be dangerous.

  “You think I’m lying? You think I’m a liar?” She was really yelling now. I tensed. She shouldn’t be yelling at Aimee.

  “I didn’t say—” another crash swallowed her reply and I sprang into action.

  When I pushed the curtain aside, the patient—a woman in her late forties with grey hair and a middle-school gym teacher vibe—had Aimee’s wrists in both of her fists. She froze when she saw me and dropped her. She looked at Aimee like she was shocked and disgusted with herself. Aimee stepped back with a little chirping noise of surprise and fright. The patient sat down on the bed abruptly, seeming to shrink into herself in an instant.