Lucy brightened. She aimed her megawatt smile at me.
“Don’t worry,” Lucy told me. “You can count on me. I’m pretty good at gossiping and everyone likes to talk if you warm them up right. I love stories. I can fix this.”
It was probably a lost cause, but what else could I do?
23
Brandon
“Major Koels, this discussion is over. I’m sorry if you don’t like it, but you have your orders.” My commanding officer, a man I previously thought was reasonable, shook his head at me over the Skype call. “You’re going to be at St. Vincent’s for eighteen months. Try to make the best of it.” His expression shifted. “Maybe you’ll learn something. And your mandated counseling will continue as well.”
I wanted to scream at him or fly to Virginia to grab him by the shoulders and give him a good shake, but given the possibility of ending up in a court martial and then a military prison, I managed to keep my anger to myself. But just barely.
There was really nothing I could say or do to change his mind; the actual decision-making was probably made many levels above him. There was an appeals process, but it wasn’t very viable. It could take me six months just to find the right person to beg for clemency, and even then, they would probably not have a meeting slot for another six. Then they’d take six months to make a decision. Government bureaucracy was an inscrutable mystery like that, or rather, an intentionally opaque one. If you didn’t know the right person or the secret handshake, you were just plain old screwed. So, I simply said, “Yes, sir,” ground my teeth, and waited for the call to end. My head hurt.
I should have known better than to hope there was a way out. No good deed ever goes unpunished. Choosing to save Aimee from herself at my father’s wedding was no exception. I didn’t regret taking her home and carrying her sleeping body to a safe place, and I’d do it again, but consequences are a bitch. Now, because I’d broken my deal with my dad, I’d have to pay the price for leaving the reception early. And God, it was a heavy price. I’d be here for another year.
Weirdly, and despite the fact that I thought this all was unfair, I was not nearly as frustrated or put out as I had expected to be. I chalked it up to the fact that I was developing some kind of Stockholm syndrome—it certainly wasn’t because I was in love with Aimee or anything completely insane like that. I just wanted to sleep with her again. That was all. It was a sex thing and nothing more. Much less troubling.
Lara and Mark were happy that I was sticking around, and I wouldn’t lie that it was nice to have friends in town, but outside of them, Austin wasn’t much of a home to me anymore. I’d cut ties with my former life in Texas. I didn’t have contact with any of my friends from childhood, unless you counted Aimee. And predictably, after the wedding, she probably wanted to go right back to ignoring me.
The other doctors at the hospital were not huge fans of yours truly. I’d done a pretty terrible job of making friends when I first arrived, both because I was resentful at being assigned to St. Vincent’s and because I didn’t think I’d be here long. I’d been a huge ass. Now that I was stuck here longer, I regretted being such a giant prick, but it was too late. I’d made the worst parts of my somewhat unpleasant natural personality much too obvious. Now no one wanted to be my friend. Again, consequences were a bitch. I was looking forward to my first lunch with Aimee later that week.
I was sitting in the cafeteria one afternoon when someone pulled out the chair opposite me. I’d just been feeling sorry for myself and lonely, and at first I thought it might be Aimee or at least someone willing to give me a second chance, but it was just my dad.
Great. The one person I didn’t want to see. We stared at one another across matching lunch trays.
Was he here to gloat about how I broke our deal? I waited for him to say something about it, but he didn’t. He just sat there in front of me with his sandwich and his frown.
“You’re leaving for your honeymoon, right?” I asked warily.
He nodded. “Yes.”
“Have you been to Fiji before? I hear it’s nice.” I’m not sure why I was making small talk. I didn’t excel at making chit chat in the best of circumstances. My dad certainly didn’t either. Together, we didn’t have a chance at a normal conversation.
“No, I haven’t been,” he replied. “But it looks very tropical.” He paused. “You broke our deal, Brandon. All I wanted was for you to behave yourself at the wedding, and you wouldn’t do it. I never even saw you at the reception.” His disapproval was palpable, but I hardly cared.
“Sorry.” I shrugged, he nodded, and we didn’t say anything else for a good five minutes. Given that it was the first five minutes that we’d spent in private but not actively fighting in the past eighteen or so years, it was something of an achievement. Kind of sad, but true. I’d been in middle school the last time we got along so well.
Finally, he sighed into his ham sandwich in apparent frustration. I thought it was because it was so underwhelming, I know mine was, but then he set it down and regarded me seriously over the edges of his glasses. I tensed.
“Brandon, I’m going to be retiring soon,” he told me. “I assume you’ve heard?”
“The rumors are true? I didn’t believe them.” I’d heard them. Nobody wanted to talk to me, but they talked to each other. I could listen if I wasn’t too obvious about it.
My dad nodded and I blinked into a moment of disbelief.
“I want to spend more time with Rosary, and I want to travel,” he said eventually.
Resentment rose in the back of my throat. He never wanted to spend time with me when I was a kid or with my mom. He’d worked nonstop and without regard to how it affected me or her. Even before she got sick, he was a shitty parent and bad husband. Years went by when we didn’t even see my dad at Christmas. I remembered my mom crying in our huge living room after dinner once when I asked for my dad for Christmas. I’d come downstairs for a glass of water to find her sobbing in the dark room. She did a lot of crying over him even before she got sick. Then, she’d died almost completely alone because he didn’t know how to deal with her illness or a teenager who just wanted his love.
In all my childhood, I only remembered two birthday parties that he’d even bothered to attend. He never attended any of my sports games, school plays, science fairs, or field trips. He was always just too busy and too important for his family. Now, in his twilight years, I guessed that he’d finally realized his mistake. Too damn bad. Eight-year-old me would have been absolutely ecstatic. Thirty-three-year-old me was just jaded and resentful.
“How nice for you both,” I spit out. The venom was obvious in my voice.
My dad nodded. “I have to try to make up for lost time. In a lot of ways. Including with you, if I can.” His tone was filled with obvious regret and I could see it in his eyes, too.
I swallowed. This was starting to get much too real for me. “It’s too late.”
“I thought you might say that.” He sounded resigned.
We lapsed back into silence. We were at an impasse. Neither one of us knew how to get past it, and in my case, I didn’t want to. I was still so furious at my dad that it would take a lot more than one conversation to get us past it. It probably required skills neither one of us had. Or a miracle.
I’d been dutifully attending my military-mandated therapy for the nightmares and depression that prolonged exposure to catastrophic war wounds had provoked in me, and I was not hating it. I was making some incremental progress, despite my initial skepticism. I was gaining some skills around communication and self-reflection. But my issues with my dad were somehow even harder to work on than anything I’d seen in a trauma bay. I just didn’t have anything further to say to my dad. I was just too damaged, angry, and hurt. Eventually, he got up and walked off, sensing defeat. I felt relieved, but it didn’t last.
He hadn’t been gone for ten minutes before a woman in her forties dropped down into his vacant seat. After a moment’s struggle, I placed
her as Melinda, the head of hospital HR. The look on her face indicated that she’d been eavesdropping. I steeled myself for something I wasn’t going to like.
“I have a proposition for you, Dr. Koels,” she told me. “I can see there’s no love lost between you and your father, and trust me, you’re in good company at this hospital. Maybe we can help one another…”
24
Aimee
On the first day that Brandon and I were scheduled to have lunch together, I got an unusual summons from one of the residents in the ER. Ordinarily I had no patience for their bellyaching about difficult patients and irritating nurses, but Dr. Lee was one of the most competent and level-headed of the current batch, and she’d never been one to come crying to me because there was something she couldn’t handle. She was a smart, capable, compassionate physician with a bright future in whatever specialty she chose to pursue. So, when she needed me, I was downstairs in five minutes.
“Thank you for coming. He’s being a huge pain in the ass. He wants Dr. Koels specifically,” Dr. Lee told me when I arrived down on the floor to see what the fuss was about.
“Why?” I asked. Nobody requested Brandon. Sometimes they requested not to be treated by him.
“The patient says he doesn’t trust anyone else and drove here just to see him.” Dr. Lee had her arms crossed over her chest and her face was flushed. If I knew her at all, she’d been arguing with the patient for at least half an hour before she ever called me. She was well and truly at her wit’s end.
“You explained that this is an emergency room, right?” I felt her pain. Sometimes people were just irrational. “We don’t accommodate requests for specific doctors. We’re here to treat emergencies.”
Dr. Lee’s cognac colored eyes rolled back in her head. “Only about twenty times. He’s ridiculously stubborn and kind of a dick. Military guys, you know? They think they know everything about everything.”
Unfortunately, I did know the type. I knew Brandon, although his stubbornness and overall arrogance had predated his military career by several years. He must have been perfect for the military.
“And you confirmed which Dr. Koels he means, too?” I confirmed. “He doesn’t mean Martin, does he?”
“He meant Brandon Koels,” Dr. Lee said irritably. “Apparently they’re friends or something? I tried to explain that he’s in surgery right now, but it didn’t make any difference. The patient just said he’d wait.”
One of Brandon’s friends is here? That was absolutely fascinating to me. All of a sudden, I wanted to see this patient. What kind of friends did Brandon have these days? Curiosity took ahold of me.
“Okay. I’ll deal with him,” I told a relieved looking Dr. Lee. “You’re off the hook. What’s the deal with the patient?”
Just then, I heard a bang down the hall followed by a man’s howl in pain. A woman’s voice rose a moment later. “If you’d just hold still long enough for me to pop it back in, it would be over in five seconds!” she shouted.
“Dammit Lara, you aren’t coming near my shoulder again with those violent man-hands of yours,” a male voice replied angrily. “I’m waiting for Doc.”
“There are other doctors here, you moron!” the woman yelled. “Let them fucking fix you!”
The voices continued arguing with one another but were talking over each other so much I couldn’t make out the words.
“He has a partial forward subluxation of the humerus,” Dr. Lee answered with a roll of her eyes. “And he’s a huge whiner. The woman with him is reasonable, but he won’t listen to her. Or anyone.”
Dislocated shoulder, huh? I’d be whining too, although I’d also be excited to get my arm back in its socket as soon as fucking possible. “Ligament damage?”
“Most likely, but we won’t know until after the closed reduction. He has chronic anterior instability from a military injury that wasn’t properly rehabbed, so I wouldn’t be surprised if he has a tear.”
“What caused today’s dislocation? A fall?” Ligaments, particularly the unreliable ones around the shoulders, could be weakened and become prone to dislocating. But the arm bone doesn’t just jump out of its socket for no reason. There’s always going to be some reason behind the injury.
Dr. Lee’s expression was wry. “I guess you could say it’s a fall. Or maybe a crash. He fell off a dirt bike going thirty miles per hour while attempting some kind of macho stunt off a ramp.”
We exchanged a look that clearly communicated “wow what a dumbass” in the universal language of womanhood. We’d both worked in the emergency department long enough to see the difference between the sorts of injuries that women come in with and the sorts of injuries men come in with. There were pretty clear and obvious differences. A dirt bike accident was definitely an overconfident alpha jerk kind of injury. Can women be overconfident alpha jerks? You bet we can. But mostly it was guys. Testosterone is a poison in high doses.
Oh, and do emergency room doctors always judge their patients? Yes. Abso-fucking-lutely we do. We judge the crap out of our patients. Especially if you did something stupid to get yourself here.
“Okay, here goes nothing,” I said.
25
Aimee
“Mark Rodgers?” I asked, pushing open the bay curtain and getting my first look at the patient and his female companion. “Good afternoon. I’m Aimee Ford, a friend of Brandon’s and another one of the physicians here at St. Vincent’s. I hear you’re having kind of a bad day.”
Mark Rodgers was an obviously very good-looking guy, even under what were not the best of circumstances. He smiled at me through obvious discomfort. His sandy-colored hair was plastered to his forehead by sweat and he was covered in scratches and what would soon be livid, purple bruises. He had to be in a lot of pain. But he was still pretty hot, regardless.
“Brandon has friends?” he joked.
At his bedside, an incredibly tall and beautiful woman laughed in apparent disbelief. “I didn’t think Doc knew how to make regular friends,” she remarked. “I’m Lara,” she said after a moment’s stunned silence. “Mark, Brandon, and I were in the same unit for a couple of years.”
They all served together? I guess that made sense. Maybe that was why Mark only trusted Brandon. People in the military could get pretty attached to each other in close quarters and dangerous circumstances. I wondered, just for a second, if Brandon and Lara had ever been, um, attached to each other. She was beautiful, with wide-set dark eyes, high cheekbones, and full lips. And so incredibly tall, too. She had to be six feet tall. I felt like a dwarf next to her.
I blinked, recovered my composure, and shook the woman’s hand before I could let my bizarre jealously get away from me. Despite what Mark said, Lara didn’t have man hands at all. They were perfectly normal, feminine hands. Her neat, manicured nails looked better than mine, which were always chapped from the constant hospital hand washing. “Well, maybe friends is a bit of a strong word,” I revised with a small smile. “We’ve known each other since childhood.”
Mark and his female companion exchanged a stunned glance. “Brandon was a child?” Mark asked in the same incredulous voice a moment later. “I just thought he was born in middle age and just got more crochety every year. If I know Brandon, he’s waiting eagerly for the day when he can yell at kids to get off his lawn and shoot at them with a pellet gun.”
I smirked. He wasn’t wrong. Brandon had a bit of temper.
“I thought he was Benjamin Button-ing,” Lara said. “One day he’s just gonna’ turn into a disgruntled, grumpy, foul-tempered baby.”
I liked that even better.
“I never knew him as a baby,” I replied, “but I can imagine he was a disgruntled, grumpy, foul-tempered baby at least once already. He was certainly a very disgruntled, grumpy, foul-tempered teenager.”
Lara and Mark exchanged another look. “Tell us everything,” Mark said, trying to sit up and then biting back a curse. “God, this hurts,” he mumbled. Given that the pain of a disl
ocated joint is similar to the pain of labor, I could only imagine. He was remarkably coherent given the circumstances. He was tough. Dumb, but tough.
“I could put that shoulder back in about ten seconds if you’d let me,” I told him.
Mark looked at me skeptically. His eyes were very green. “Lara couldn’t put it back and she’s a lot bigger and stronger than you are.”
“It’s not about size, it’s how you use what you’ve got,” I chirped suggestively. This wasn’t how I usually did things in the ER, but you had to adapt to your patients.
He laughed again and then winced again. “I think I’d rather wait for Doc,” he said. “No offense, but I don’t really like doctors much. I trust Doc because I know what he’s made of and he’s already saved my life more than once already. I’ve seen him work miracles. This hurts worse than anything I’ve ever felt, and I don’t want to risk it without Doc.” His voice was almost reverent. Lara looked similarly affected.
“Who’s Doc? Do you mean Brandon?” It had to be him, but I couldn’t understand their devotion to him.
“Yeah, that’s what we call him,” Mark explained. “He hated it at first, but it grew on him after a while. We all got pretty close. He’s the only one I trust to deal with this. I mean, I’ve been shot before and this is way worse.” He shook his head. “I’ve seen Doc bring back someone that’s been dead for almost ten minutes. Once I saw him work ten hours straight to save a little girl who’d been hit in the crossfire and had her leg turned into mincemeat. She walked again. He’s something else. There’s a reason he has so many medals.”
I blinked. That was incredible. I hadn’t known Brandon had any medals. A new respect for Brandon’s skills as a doctor started to take root. I’d have a lot to ask him about at lunch. But right now, I had a patient to deal with.
Bad For You: An Enemies to Lovers Romance Page 11