Bad For You: An Enemies to Lovers Romance

by Taylor Holloway

  “Okay, who’s in charge down there right now?” I stuttered.

  “Dr. Koels,” she answered in a frightened voice. “He’s triaging the cases and assigning them out. Look, I have to get back down there…”

  Someone called her name and she shot me an apologetic look before rushing off. I stood stunned for a moment before the adrenaline hit. I ran for the stairs, feeling out of my body and terrified.

  Even though I was expecting it, the reality was worse than my fears. If I thought it was chaos up in the administrative offices, it was hell in the ER. The corridors were filled up with people on gurneys. EMT’s were lined up out the door. The patients were screaming and writhing in pain. Family members and babies were screaming in fear as the nursing staff tried to keep them out of the ER. The police were swarming around trying to sort out the regular victims from the urgent victims. There was blood smeared on the walls.

  In the middle of the ER, Brandon had taken control of the center desk. He was barking orders at the residents, instructing them to stabilize and move on. “Don’t waste time or energy on anyone who isn’t bleeding out!” he yelled at them. He sounded like a drill sergeant. “Let the nurses do their jobs. They can handle more than you think.”

  “Use a tourniquet and go,” he was telling Dr. Mendez when I got closer. “I know it’s not best practice and it seems crude, but it’ll keep him from bleeding, and we’ve got other people that need you more. Then go to bay nine.”

  The young resident nodded. She was pale and clearly terrified. This was only her third week out of medical school. She shouldn’t even be working independently. We almost never used tourniquets in the hospital, either. That was a technique better suited for the battlefield than a hospital setting. I could say with certainty that I’d never done one myself. Although, I had a feeling that might be about to change.

  Brandon turned to look at me. We locked eyes in a tense, frightened moment. More feelings than I could parse in an hour snapped through me in succession. It left me feeling weak in the knees.

  But I snapped out of my trance. Our issues could wait. People were dying.

  “Where do you need me?” I asked him. Although this might be almost my hospital, I’d never been in a warzone. This was the closest I’d ever seen to the aftermath of a battle. Brandon clearly knew what he was doing though, this was his world, so I was going to follow his lead. Sometimes being a leader means knowing when to follow. This was obviously one of those times.

  “Bay six,” he replied. “There’s a kid in there with a femoral bleed. I sent Ayala, but I don’t think he can handle it alone.”

  “On it.”

  55

  Brandon

  I’d seen worse trauma wards after an influx of casualties, but not lately. The staff was terribly underprepared for the results of mass violence. It simply wasn’t something that happened in Austin, Texas. Austin is a very safe city. We don’t have much violence, period, especially not mass violence on this scale.

  It was several hours before I found out that this was a mass shooting at a football game. My heart hurt thinking about it. I’d thought most of the kids seemed too young. I’d been right.

  The idea of it was absolutely horrible, but the actual reality was something that can only be seen to be believed. It looked for all the world like the aftermath of war. And I’d seen more than my share of battles.

  I’d learned to shoot an automatic rifle in basic training. It’s a part of being in the army that everyone has to do. I had been okay at it, and there had been a certain excitement to handling something so powerful, especially considering that I’d been all of eighteen at the time. But after seeing my first gunshot victim through the army’s medic-to-doctor program, I would be happy to go the rest of my entire life never touching another firearm again. I hated them with a deep and irrational hatred.

  I knew it wasn’t the gun’s fault. The gun was an inanimate object, obviously. No more dangerous than a shoe. It was the person using the gun, technically speaking, that was evil. But it was hard not to hate the gun, too, especially if it’s the sort of gun that can mow down thirty people in three minutes like what had happened here in Austin today.

  I personally watched three people flat line as I tried to save them. The problem with most gun trauma victims is that bullets don’t travel in straight lines. They splinter. They explode. They bang off bones and shatter them and then head off in another direction. There are all types of physics involved, and the result is that it’s not always possible to figure out where the bleeding is and how to stop it before it’s just too late. It takes only about five minutes to hemorrhage to death if the damage is in the right place.

  Aimee’s patient in bay six died too. I knew because I saw her face, and the front of her scrubs stained dark red, as she rushed to the next patient. She was wearing that resigned, shell-shocked look that doctors wear in warzones that says, “I lost this round with the devil.” I didn’t like seeing that look on her. It was horrible. She shook her head at me as we passed by each other in the hallway.

  The time ticked on and on, but I didn’t feel it passing. But before I knew it, the sky had gone dark and then light again. The whole night had disappeared as the thirty-person trauma team worked through nearly that many patients.

  “We’ve got the next shift coming in,” I heard the staff nurse saying to me as I stepped out into the hallway after stabilizing someone who’d only been grazed. “You’re officially off the clock.”

  She put her hand out to stop me from continuing down the hall. I blinked at her.

  “Go home,” she repeated sternly. “It would be unsafe for you to continue treating people. Look at you.”

  “I—” I stared around myself in confusion. Where was I again? I was starting to feel delirious. I hadn’t been this tired since coming back stateside. I’d forgotten how bone-tired and emotionally depleted patching up war wounds could make a person. My entire body was sore, but hey, I was alive. That was still better than a lot of my patients…

  “Dr. Koels!” the nurse snapped. She was waving her hands in front of my face. “Go home.” Her voice was firm. “I’m sending everyone home, on Dr. Ford’s orders. Don’t come back until tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Afternoon?” I repeated.

  “Yes. Go home. Sleep.” She pointed at the elevator doors. “Go.”

  I nodded numbly. Aimee and this mean nurse here were right. I should be sent home. I was running on empty. I was filthy, too, soaked in other peoples’ blood. Hardly a good look. I washed up and headed home to find Aimee just finishing her own shower in my bathroom. Wordlessly, we crawled into bed together.

  “I’m—” I started to say, but Aimee just placed her soft fingers against my lips and kissed me.

  “Later,” she promised. “Sleep now.”

  “I love you, Aimee.” No matter what else was happening, if the sky was falling, if my life was ripping us apart, I knew I loved her.

  She didn’t reply, just touched my face with her hand and kissed the tip of my nose.

  There was nothing to say in that moment that would do any good. No words that could fix what we’d seen and done tonight. This night would be with me for the rest of my life. I looked into her eyes and saw her fear turn into something less urgent. I felt gratitude, love, and joy that she was here with me when we were both so… lost. I didn’t want to be alone. We had a lot to talk about, a lot we had to decide about ourselves and our futures, but we were too exhausted for it to happen tonight. I could tell her I’d been fired tomorrow. We held each other and went to sleep.

  56

  Aimee

  “Austin is in shock and mourning from yesterday’s mass shooting at a high school football game,” the stone-faced newscaster said from Brandon’s impressively large TV. “Mass shootings are becoming alarmingly common in the United States, but we certainly never expected it to happen here. Nobody did.”

  While Brandon was still sleeping, I slipped into the living room and turned on
the local news. In the late morning light, I was finally starting to feel like myself again. Unfortunately, the city wasn’t faring quite as well. It was still reeling from the shooting the day before.

  Nobody knew why it happened, but the news media was reciting the same story that every mass shooting seemed to end up with. A twenty-two-year-old man had a psychotic break, obtained a high caliber weapon, and decided to kill as many people as he possibly could. This one left no manifesto, only more questions. Questions, dead bodies, and families torn apart forever. The one thing that differentiated this shooting, however, was that the shooter had survived. And not just survived. He escaped. Somehow, in the confusion to secure the scene and stop the slaughter, the gunman slipped out. The whole city was on alert.

  There was a city-wide manhunt underway, but so far, nobody knew where he was.

  “He’s on the loose?” Brandon said, startling me and causing me to turn around sheepishly. “How?”

  “Yeah, apparently so,” I told him, reaching out and feeling comforted when he came to hold me on the couch. “It’s so awful.”

  “How could he get away?” Brandon said. He looked furious. “What if he hurts more people?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. Maybe he won’t get very far though. The police said he got shot in the leg.”

  “Maybe he bled out in an alley somewhere,” Brandon said. “That’s the best-case scenario.”

  Medically speaking, the leg is one of the worst places to get shot. There are a lot of arteries in the leg. Big, dangerous ones. In general, you wanted traumatic injuries to be as distal as possible, that is, as far away from the heart as possible, but damaging a femoral artery in the leg was pretty much a death sentence.

  “I hope he’s alive,” I heard myself saying. “I don’t like it when guys like this end up dying. He should have to live with what he’s done.”

  Brandon frowned. “Maybe you’re right. I don’t know.”

  We sat in silence for a while, watching the drama unfold on the screen. It was hard to watch but it felt necessary. Eventually, however, it was time to return to reality. To our lives. Our problems.

  “Brandon,” I said eventually. “It’s okay that you’re leaving.”

  He froze. “Aimee, I need to tell you something.” He took a deep breath. “My dad knows about us.”

  I felt a chill pass over me. “What?”

  “I guess he figured it out yesterday when General Sharp was at the hospital,” he said.

  I blinked. That felt like forever ago. The second half of yesterday had been so incredibly endless that meeting Brandon’s superior officer felt like it happened weeks ago. Still, this was not good news.

  Martin knew?

  “How?” I stuttered. “How could he have figured it out?”

  Brandon shrugged. “He says he could see it on your face when Sharp told me I was leaving by the end of the month. He, um, also fired me. Effective immediately.”

  I bit my lip. “Oh.”

  “He told me to leave you. He told me I wasn’t good enough for you,” Brandon continued. “We kind of had it out in the elevator to be honest. It wasn’t great. I’m still really angry with him.”

  “You talked about me?” I asked, suddenly uncomfortable.

  Brandon nodded. “Yeah. My dad was really angry with me for getting involved with you. He was pretty clear that I didn’t deserve you. In fact, he said exactly that.” His mouth was set in a thin, angry line.

  I reached out to touch him and he softened. “Brandon, I’m so sorry.” I knew how Martin could be when he wanted to protect me. Apparently even Brandon wasn’t safe from it.

  He shook his head. “Don’t be. He’s right. I probably don’t deserve you.”

  “That’s nonsense,” I told him. “Martin was probably just trying to look out for me, but obviously attacking you wasn’t the right thing to do. When he loses his temper, we both know how nasty he can be.”

  “I don’t want to leave,” I told Aimee. “I want to stay here, with you.”

  I paused. My mouth worked up and down like a guppy for a moment “You…. What?”

  “I’m going to resign my commission, Aimee. I want to be here, in Austin, with you. I’m ready for something completely different in my life. I’ve thought a lot about it and after last night—”

  I shook my head back and forth in horror. “And after last night you aren’t thinking clearly, Brandon.” I wanted to believe him. I wanted to believe him badly. So damn badly. But I couldn’t.

  I knew that what happened to us last night was incredibly traumatic. Maybe Brandon was better at handling it than most, but he was definitely not unaffected. Trauma makes people do stupid shit. It makes them say things that aren’t necessarily true when the haze lifts. I understand the effects of cortisol on the brain just a bit too well at the moment. Medically, Brandon could not be trusted. I couldn’t let my heart believe Brandon in this moment. “Please don’t say this right now when we’re both still so wound up. Let’s talk about this later.”

  He paused. “I won’t change my mind.” His voice was stubborn.

  “Please,” I begged him. “Don’t do this right now. Wait. Think about it. Because I won’t be able to take it if you’re just saying this because of what happened last night.”

  Brandon’s eyes searched mine but eventually he nodded. “Can we talk about it tonight?”

  I swallowed and nodded cautiously at him. “Okay. Tonight.”

  He smiled but I didn’t return it.

  I knew that by tonight Brandon would have thought it over. He would have come to realize that he couldn’t put our fledgling romance ahead of his career. He’d spent the last decade of his life going down one path. I couldn’t expect him to decide that the last few weeks of sleeping with me would make him change it. I wasn’t even sure if I was ready for that.

  If Brandon did choose me over his military career, he might come to regret it. He might eventually resent me for it, even though it might’ve been his decision. One day, he might come to hate me for it, seeing me as the thing that pulled him away from the excitement and promise of an exotic military dream. It had been hard enough for Brandon to stop hating me the first time. I didn’t want him to ever hate me again, even if it meant that he wouldn’t love me anymore.

  57

  Brandon

  Unfortunately, even though Aimee had rejected my attempt to confess myself to her and I was still exhausted, I had a short shift this afternoon. I was supposed to be fired, but an urgent text from the schedulers had me coming in anyway. Apparently in all the activity yesterday, my firing had not been processed yet. Go figure.

  I dragged my sorry self into the hospital and made myself start working, only to realize that the hospital was looking creepily deserted today. There were plenty of patients, but the staff were just… missing.

  “Where is everybody?” I asked the staff nurse.

  She shrugged. “A lot of people called out today because they’re just exhausted. Actually, most of them called out. I think some people are scared to come to work with the killer still on the loose.”

  “Couldn’t we get some people to come from other hospitals?” I asked. The ER was usually full of people in scrubs and white coats, but it was basically a ghost town today.

  The nurse looked at me like I was a moron. “The other hospitals are even worse off than we are,” she explained. “There was a total of thirty-three shooting victims and another fifty that were injured in the stampede. We got only a fraction of them.”

  I tried to imagine it and couldn’t. So many people shot, all innocent.

  “Can we call people down from the other floors? Residents?” It just seemed unsafe to me how empty the hospital was today.

  The nurse seemed to agree. She shook her head and looked around us in apparent disbelief. “I’ve already called down a bunch of doctors from the other floors to work the ER and they’re all here. This is all we’ve got today.”

  It was going to be another
long day.

  “How much clinical staff do we have?” I asked, wondering if I’d get to eat today.

  “Twelve doctors, twenty-three nurses. I’ve been making calls to the local medical school, but we’re still dangerously short staffed. Even your dad is down here treating patients.”

  I frowned. Twelve doctors for the entire hospital? My dad was down in the ER treating random walk-ins? That was different. I made a mental note to be sure to give him a wide berth if I saw him. Technically I was still fired.

  But far more than worrying about being thrown out, I was still really, really angry with my dad. Furious even. It might have seemed like the horrors of last night would have dulled the feeling. But it hadn’t. I still felt just as angry as I had when I stormed out of the elevator the day before.

  The fact that he told me off for being in love with Aimee pissed me off immensely. Although he didn’t know that I was I love with her because he wouldn’t even give me a chance to explain that I was in love with her. He just assumed that I was sleeping with her and didn’t care. He just couldn’t give me the damn benefit of the doubt.

  He barely knew me, and it was starting to become clear to me that he didn’t really know Aimee, either. If he really knew her, knew her like I knew her, he’d know that she was able to make her own choices. And what she’d really hate far more than anything else was someone second guessing or patronizing her. Which was exactly what my dad was doing to her. It made me frustrated on her behalf.

  I threw myself into my work to banish the resentment. It sort of worked. At least it gave me something else to focus on that didn’t make me see red.

  It wasn’t ten minutes into my shift that I heard the commotion and frantic screaming down the hall. Then I heard the gunshot.

  58

  Aimee