Heartsick

by Tracey Richardson

  “You okay?” Angie said, concern in her eyes.

  Maybe she should sleep with Angie. She wanted to, she was wet even now, and maybe doing so would banish Karen, or Karen’s ghost, from her life once and for all. “Yes. I’m good.” She threaded her fingers into Angie’s, guided her hand down to the hem of her own skirt, then to the inside of her bare thigh.

  “Oh, Jesus.” Angie’s voice cracked.

  Vic’s skin felt hot to the touch; it was burning up. Her head was thrown back, her throat exposed, and Angie nibbled it gently, eliciting a low moan that sent a pleasurable shiver up her spine. She was inches away from touching the most intimate part of Vic, of cupping her, slipping inside her underwear. Angie wanted to. Her racing heart urged her on and so did the hardening of her clit.

  “Oh God,” Vic moaned, slowly yet urgently tugging Angie’s hand higher until her fingertips made contact with moist cotton. Then Vic was mashing Angie’s hand against her, back and forth, hard, and God, she was so wet and soft and…

  A few more seconds, Angie realized, and there’d be no stopping. They’d end up on a pile of coats, muffling their cries, rubbing and grinding and thrusting until they both came.

  She stilled her hand against Vic’s heat, kissed her hard on the mouth and, against her better judgment, said, “We can’t, Vic. Not here. Not like this.” She collected her breath, waited for the rushing in her ears to subside. “When I make love to you, I want it to be in a bed. And I want it to be all night long because I want to take my time with you and I want you to come about fourteen times.”

  Vic slammed her eyes shut, sighed roughly as she gathered herself. Then she chuckled quietly. “God, Angie. You’re right. This isn’t exactly romantic, is it?”

  “Well, now that you mention it…”

  “I got carried away. I’m sorry.”

  “I like when you get carried away, sweetheart. Just not here.”

  They kissed again and then Vic rearranged herself, smoothed out her skirt and blouse to remove all evidence of their make-out session.

  “Do you think anyone noticed we’ve been gone?”

  “Do we care?” Angie led the way back to the ballroom and plucked two glasses of champagne from a passing server’s tray. Vic had cabbed it, and Angie had caught a ride with Liv and Beth. She was staying overnight at the couple’s to keep the pressure off Vic from inviting her home for the night.

  “Nope. But I’m not walking funny, am I?”

  Angie squeezed her hand. “No, but you were pretty, um, excited.”

  “I was—am still. And yes, it’s all your fault, you.”

  “Well, so you know, I was pretty we—”

  “Oh, you two!” Liv slung an arm around each of their shoulders. “Don’t you look so cute together. It looks good on you both.”

  A man walking past them stopped, quirked his head in their direction. He looked vaguely familiar, and Angie ran a list of names and faces through her mind. He was giving her and Vic the once-over before settling a sloppy, champagne saturated smile on them. “Sorry for interjecting, but Olivia’s right, it does suit you both.”

  Aw shit. Michael something. One of the junior lawyers at Brooke’s firm. Coolly, Angie said, “Excuse me?”

  He continued smiling, but not with his eyes. “I should almost take a picture. For Brooke.”

  “Look, Michael, I—”

  “Don’t worry. She’s not exactly my pal. In fact, I’d kind of enjoy seeing the look on her face. Especially now that she and Karen have broken up.”

  With force, Liv steered them away from him, but something was happening with Vic. She stumbled once. Her shoulders drooped. When Angie cupped her elbow, she flinched.

  “Darling,” Angie said as her chest tightened. “Are you all right? Vic?”

  “I…Yes, I’m fine. I just…didn’t expect to hear that. I mean, I didn’t know.”

  “I didn’t either.”

  Liv smiled nervously at them. “Look, the countdown’s only a couple of minutes away. Come on, I’ll grab you each a noisemaker. How are your drinks?”

  Vic was staring at the floor and Angie was staring at Vic.

  “Um, fine,” Angie said. “We’re fine.”

  Liv disappeared and Vic continued to visibly retreat into herself. Great!

  “Vic,” Angie said, converting her personal desperation into anger. “Brooke and Karen have nothing to do with us. This—whatever they’re doing or not doing—has no effect on—”

  “It’s okay.” Vic slowly raised her eyes to Angie’s face. Cool, guarded eyes that gave Angie a sinking, wretched feeling. “Whatever. It’s totally fine.”

  It absolutely wasn’t. Vic was somewhere else, and when midnight arrived and the crowd erupted around them, they kissed quickly, perfunctorily, and it pierced Angie’s suddenly broken heart. It came as no surprise moments later when Vic announced that she had a headache and was going to catch a cab.

  “Fuck,” Angie said under her breath. Fucking Karen and Brooke.

  Chapter Twenty

  Vic hadn’t meant to freak out the way she had on New Year’s Eve after hearing about Karen and Brooke breaking up. Things had clicked into place, that’s all. Like Karen’s desperate texts, for one. Her own increasing feelings of anxiety, for another. As her relationship with Angie continued to deepen, a tiny kernel of panic paralyzed her, kept her from taking the next step. Now she understood that kernel was Karen. Karen who was now single, it seemed. Karen who desperately wanted to talk to her. Karen who couldn’t quite get the hell out of her life.

  Karen was seated at a booth in the restaurant when Vic arrived. Finally answering her latest text, Vic agreed to meet with her. Neutral territory seemed best, because she didn’t want a scene and she wanted to be able to get up and leave whenever she felt like it.

  “Don’t get up,” she said to Karen, who’d begun to rise. She looked tired, thinner, as though worry had taken a carving chisel to her.

  “Will you be ordering lunch?” the server asked.

  Vic noticed the mug of coffee Karen clutched like a lifeline. “I’ll just have what she’s having.” Coffee was a good sign; it might mean this wouldn’t be a long meeting. She shook off her coat and stuffed it beside her.

  “You don’t look well,” Vic said carefully.

  “I guess you heard about Brooke and me.”

  “I did. Is that why you wanted to see me?”

  Karen’s eyebrow twitched. “You’re imagining that I can’t be single for five minutes and that I’m dying to get back together?”

  Vic shrugged. She didn’t have time for games. “Why did you want to see me?”

  Karen hedged, stirred her coffee for an interminable amount of time. “We were married, Vic. We were together a long time. I…I miss that.”

  The server deposited Vic’s coffee in front of her, and she was glad for the momentary interruption. The timeout did nothing, however, to hold back Vic’s catty retort once they were alone again. “You didn’t seem to miss it when you took up with Brooke. Forgive me, but the timing of your missing me seems rather suspect.”

  “Vic…”

  “So who ended it, you or Brooke?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Yes.”

  “I did.”

  Vic wasn’t sure if she should believe her. In any case, it wasn’t her business and she didn’t really care why they were over or how it had transpired.

  “Anyway,” Karen continued, “it was a mistake. Brooke. And I want to come back home.”

  Vic silently sipped her coffee, trying to remain calm.

  “I’m sorry, Vic. I’m so, so sorry for all the stuff that happened.” A tear, perfectly timed, spilled down Karen’s cheek.

  Stuff? Ripping my heart out, refusing to talk to me, leaving our home, our marriage? That stuff? “There is no home to come back to,” she ground out. “There is only my home now. And you have your settlement from me.”

  “Please don’t keep punishing me,” Karen whispered urgentl
y. She had the look perfected, the one that was supposed to hit all Vic’s emotional buttons. Or rather, Vic’s forgiveness buttons. The quiet tears, the slight frown between her eyes, the downturned mouth, the defeated shoulders. “I love you, Vic. I always have.”

  “No, you didn’t always love me. You told me that night in the hospital you weren’t in love with me anymore. That you were in love with Brooke.”

  “I never stopped loving you. And I never meant to hurt you. I just…went a little crazy. Maybe it was a midlife crisis, I don’t know. But you have to—”

  “I don’t have to do anything, Karen. I don’t have to forgive you, and I certainly don’t have to take you back.” Jesus! Did she really think it was that simple? Karen had never been a stupid person, and yet here she was, acting like absolution came in the form of a nod or a kiss or a few simple words.

  “You’re right. You don’t. I’m sorry.”

  Vic swallowed a large gulp of coffee and set her mug down. Funny thing was, when Karen left her she was hurt, completely demolished, but not especially angry. Not, certainly, the way Angie had been angry. But now, finally, she was damned pissed off. From her wallet she fished out a five-dollar bill and tossed it on the table. “I can’t talk to you about this right now.” She rose and squeezed out of the booth. Karen did the same.

  “Please don’t shut the door on this,” Karen said, desperate now. “Let’s talk again. Please?”

  Vic slammed her eyes shut, remembering the house search they’d made in Traverse City almost a year ago and settling on the grand old Victorian home. There was that winter vacation to Hawaii as a belated honeymoon a couple of years back, where they scooped up black sand to bring home and drank Mai Tais late into the nights. The ski trip to Vermont early in their relationship, when Vic had twisted her ankle so badly she thought she’d broken it and Karen had nursed her back to health. At lightning speed, so many memories, too many, kaleidoscoped through her mind. When she looked at Karen again, she saw the same thing in her eyes—their shared past. And it wasn’t something that could be wiped away with a few words and certainly not over a cup of coffee.

  “All right,” she relented, not at all convinced it was the right thing to do. “We’ll talk again. But not about getting back together.” Now that she’d established that rule, maybe she could stop hating Karen.

  * * *

  It was a drug deal gone bad that had landed a nineteen-year-old college student in the back of Angie’s rig with a stab wound to his chest. Not that he and his buddy admitted as much to her and Shatter and the two cops who pulled up to the scene a couple of minutes later, tires screeching and hands on their holsters, but it seemed like a good bet.

  Ethan was the kid’s name. He was still conscious, but his breathing was slowly growing shallow. “Hurts to take a deep breath,” he mumbled to her as she put a line into him, thankful there were no potholes in the road at the point of insertion as the ambulance sped to the hospital. At the ER, she handed the kid off to Vic, who was all business. They had traded only a few texts, a rushed phone call in the week since their New Year’s Eve date. Just busy, Vic had claimed. Distracted beyond reason, gone cold on her, was how Angie saw it. Something was clearly up with her, and it didn’t take a genius to link it back to the news that Karen and Brooke were no longer a couple.

  As far as Angie was concerned, Karen and Brooke’s breakup was karma biting them in the ass. It served them right, and to her, the news changed nothing. But Vic possessed a different emotional makeup. She was sensitive, a thinker, a muller of things, maybe even a bit of a martyr. She was probably thinking this thing to death, because she certainly wasn’t talking it to death. Angie had tried on the phone to bring it up, but Vic had quickly changed the subject. Case closed.

  To Angie, one of the cops said, “Make sure you stick around so we can talk to you.” She was bigger than Angie, an inch or two taller and brawnier by probably a dozen pounds, with skin the color of bronze. “We’ll need a statement from you and your partner.”

  Angie stuck out her hand. “Angie Cullen. You new on the force?”

  A nod, then a polite smile accompanied by a firm handshake. “Transferred up here from Grand Rapids. Shawna Malik. Since you guys got to the scene before us, we’d like to know what you saw, heard…you know.”

  “Absolutely. Kid’s buddy called us before you guys got the call, sounds like.”

  “Yup. Thought they could get away with just calling the EMTs.” She lowered her voice. “Random attack, my ass.”

  Vic was calling out orders, her voice tight, urgent, which told Angie the kid’s injury—a small, single stab wound to the lower left part of his chest near his sternum—might be more serious than it looked. A small spray of blood squirted out of the pencil-sized hole with each heartbeat.

  “Blood pressure’s normal,” Liv called out. “One-thirty systolic, one-ten heart rate.”

  “Call cardiothoracic surgery,” Vic replied. “And give him two liters of saline, wide open. I want his blood typed and matched too.” A quick glance from her confirmed that she feared the knife might have nicked or penetrated the kid’s heart, that he could flatline or bleed out without much warning. Angie had begun to be able to read Vic’s body language.

  “Am I doing to die, Doc?” Ethan’s eyes were stark and wide with the terrifying realization that things might not be going in his favor. “The guy just stabbed me for no reason. It missed my heart, right?”

  He began to thrash a little. Shawna took a step closer, ready to intervene. “I can’t believe it,” he continued. “I got a hockey game next week. I…” His voice trailed off and his eyes fluttered shut.

  Liv announced the obvious. “He’s crashing.”

  Vic glanced at the clock. “Bring the ultrasound. Set up a thoracotomy. We need to crack his chest!”

  Angie had witnessed the radical procedure four or five times before, all of them in the theater of war and never at this hospital’s ER. But under Vic’s command, it had the hallmarks of a routine procedure. With every barked order, every proficient move of her hands, she exuded the kind of confidence that steered all eyes onto her.

  Quickly, she squirted ultrasound gel on Ethan’s chest, moved the probe around while keeping her eyes on the portable machine’s monitor. “Pericardium’s been penetrated. Where the hell is cardiothoracic?”

  Liv gave a helpless shrug. “They said they’re on their way.”

  Vic nodded at Julie Whitaker, who stood across the treatment bed from her. “Intubate him while I gown up.”

  A nurse helped Vic into a full-length protective gown, tied it at the back for her. Next, she slid on a plastic face protector. Liv handed her a scalpel.

  “Jesus,” Shawna whispered roughly to Angie. “I’m outta here.” She backed out and disappeared, but Angie wouldn’t be pried from her spot. She wanted to see this.

  Someone splashed disinfectant on the patient’s chest, and Vic sliced between the two ribs over the heart. Rib spreaders were handed to her and she spread the boy’s ribs until she could see his heart in its bloody sac. She sliced into the pericardium with scissors, watched as clots of blood popped out. She lengthened the incision and more clots came out, freeing the pressure from his heart, which suddenly began beating normally again. Over the bodies clustered around the table, Angie heard Julie’s voice call for sedation so the kid didn’t wake up. “Suction?” she said to Vic.

  “Suction,” Vic repeated. Through the glut of bodies, Angie could no longer see what was going on anymore, but she could picture it. “Nylon stitch on a needle driver, please.”

  The surgeon walked in, a petite woman with a deep voice and a head full of wavy gray hair. She nudged people aside. “Nice job, Dr. Turner. Everyone. I’ll take him up for final repairs.”

  “All yours,” Vic replied with a tight smile. Angie followed her out, striding to catch up as she discarded her mask and gown in a bin down the hall.

  “With moves like that, the army would take you in a flash.”

/>   “No thanks. Civilian medicine has all the excitement I can handle.”

  “Vic? Can we talk? When you get off work?”

  She pursed her lips, shook her head. “I don’t know when I’ll be off. Have you seen the waiting room?”

  Angie hadn’t. “What about tomorrow? It’s your day off, right?”

  “Sorry, can’t. I’ve got a lot of things I need to do.”

  Angie’s scalp prickled with heat. “I’m not someone you need to book an appointment with.”

  Vic’s expression softened. “I know. I’m sorry. I’ll call you.”

  She was off with long purposeful strides, leaving Angie wondering, again, what the hell she’d done wrong. And what she could possibly do to fix it.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Vic sat at one of the nursing station computers and signed off on another patient from the night. The day shift folks had come in almost an hour ago, and she was trying to leave them with an empty dry erase board. So far so good, except for a drunk sleeping it off and a mental patient currently being assessed by psychiatry.

  Adrenaline from the stabbing case hours earlier had finally burned off, leaving an empty shell of exhaustion in its place.

  “Breakfast?” Liv asked.

  Vic shook her head. “Too tired. I’m going home straight to bed.”

  “I’m still keyed up from the stabbing. That was a nice save. And cracking his chest—that was some slick Chicago move, Dr. Turner!”