Seven Nights with Her Ex

by Louisa Heaton

  But what? She was a nice person. Clever. Kind. Friendly. Loving. She’d never been shy in showing him her affection. Their sex life had been great! Hadn’t it? Of course it had been. No man could make a woman feel like that and then say things were lacking in that department.

  He hadn’t said much in the days leading up to the wedding, she supposed. He hadn’t said much in regard to their marriage, or his hopes and dreams, so she’d talked about hers, hoping to draw him out. But he’d never said anything. Just smiled and looked…nervous.

  Beau poked at the campfire with a long stick and watched as the embers collapsed and spat heat upwards and outwards, tiny flecks of flame bursting forth and disappearing into the night sky above. The dark blue of the night revealed the sparkle of stars that she could never have hoped to see from her home town of Oxford. Even from the hospital roof you couldn’t see a sky such as this.

  The vast openness of Yellowstone made her realise that there was so much she wasn’t used to seeing. Or noticing. It made her aware that she wouldn’t know if something else was out there until she made the time to look for it.

  Was there something about Gray that she’d not known about?

  She glanced up at him once more and caught his gaze upon her through the heat of the orange flames. He looked pensive, and he rubbed at his jaw before he turned to answer Rick, who’d asked him a question.

  He looks weary.

  She wasn’t used to seeing him look worn down. He’d always looked sprightly. Ready for anything. Raring to go.

  Had today done that to him? Had she? She didn’t like how that made her feel, how uncomfortable she suddenly was, and her stomach squirmed at the notion.

  Perhaps there was more to this situation between them? Something she’d not been aware of because she’d never thought to look for it. Was it something obvious? Was it staring her in the face? Like the stars—always there, but not always seen?

  Was I so wrapped up in the wedding that I forgot to focus on us?

  Beau threw her stick into the fire and watched as it got swallowed up by the flames. She knew with certainty now that this week was going to be one hell of a learning experience.

  And not the kind that she’d been expecting.

  *

  Beau had spent an uncomfortable night in her tent. Before the trip she’d bought a decent one, and a groundsheet, a sleeping mat and a sleeping bag, and had thought that would be enough for her to get a decent night’s sleep. But the ground had been hard and unforgiving and she’d tossed and turned, worrying about being away from her patients, being here with Gray—not to mention the possibilities of insect invasion—before she’d finally fallen into a broken sleep at about five o’clock in the morning.

  Unfortunately Mack had woken them all up around seven by banging a tin bowl with a rock right by the entrance to her shelter, and she’d woken blearily, feeling as if her body was bruised all over.

  ‘Okay, okay…I’m awake,’ she’d moaned, rubbing her eyes and blinking thoroughly until they seemed to operate correctly.

  Now she sat up, stretching out her back muscles and rolling her stiff shoulders and noting, with some small satisfaction, that her tent had not filled with ants overnight. Perhaps it’s safe to sleep on the ground after all? Then she pulled herself from her sleeping bag, put on a fresh set of underwear, the clothes she’d worn yesterday, and put her hair up into a ponytail and unzipped her tent.

  ‘Morning, Beau.’

  Gray was already up, looking freshly groomed, his eyes bright and sparkly.

  She groaned. Used to her normal schedule, Beau was not a morning person. She needed a good-sized mug of coffee, a Danish pastry and a blast of loud music in her car to wake her properly before she got to the hospital, and she guessed she wouldn’t get that here.

  She peered gloomily at the pot that Barb was in charge of. ‘What’s for breakfast?’

  ‘Oatmeal.’

  ‘Porridge? Great,’ she replied without enthusiasm.

  It wasn’t exactly a buttery, flaky pastry delight, but never mind. It would have to do. She warmed her hands over the fire and then ducked back into her tent to grab her toothbrush and toothpaste. She stood and cleaned her teeth and rinsed her toothbrush with the last of her bottled water.

  ‘I’ve got a pot of boiled water cooling down already,’ Barb said when she returned. ‘Have you got your purifying tablets?’

  ‘I’ve got a filter.’

  ‘Brilliant.’

  Beau was quite pleased with her state-of-the-art filter. It meant that she could collect water from any source, pour it through, and all protozoa and bacteria would be removed, including giardia and cryptosporidium, the two biggest causes of infection in water. It saved having to boil water and wait for it to cool before it could be put into containers. It had been one of her new purchases, thoroughly researched and tested, and she’d even looked up reviews from previous customers to make sure it was the best for the job.

  After she’d put her toiletries away, she stretched her back once again and took in the view. Now that she was more awake, she could appreciate where they were. High up on a mountainside, on a grassy plateau, surrounded by nature, with not a building, a towering spire nor a frantic cyclist in sight. Just clear blue skies, promising the heat of another day, the sun, a gentle warm breeze and the bright, cheery sounds of birdsong lighting up the morning.

  ‘It’s gorgeous, isn’t it?’

  ‘It certainly is.’

  Gray smiled down at her, making her jump. She sat up.

  ‘What are we doing today?’

  ‘Mack said we need to cover CPR, as we missed it last night, and then we’re heading higher up to cover altitude sickness.’

  She nodded. ‘Right. How far up do you think we already are?’

  ‘Four or five thousand feet?’

  ‘And altitude sickness sets in at…what? Eight thousand or more?’

  ‘Depends on the climber. Could be now.’

  ‘Mack won’t want to take us up that far, will he?’ she asked, feeling the pain in her calf muscles from yesterday’s climb.

  ‘No, I won’t,’ Mack answered as he came out of his tent. ‘It’s a survival course, not a medical experiment.’

  She smiled at him. ‘Glad to hear it.’

  Barb gave the oatmeal a stir. ‘This is done. Everyone hungry?’

  Everyone nodded and grabbed their metal dishes to receive a small helping of breakfast before sitting down around the fire to eat quietly.

  Porridge wasn’t her thing, but Beau ate it anyway, and Justin and Claire offered to get everything washed up before they packed up camp.

  They soon covered the CPR training—how to do it effectively without defibrillators. Two breaths to thirty compressions in two rounds, before checking for signs of life—breathing, pulse rate, chest rise and fall. Mack showed them all how to find the right spot on the chest for compressions. How to place their hands. What sort of rhythm they needed and how fast. Showed them that even if they did it properly they might hear ribs break—which made everyone cringe at the thought!

  Then there was a short break before Mack showed them how to put out the fire safely, and once they’d packed up their tents and equipment, they all set off once again on the next hike.

  Gray fell into step beside Beau and she noticed that he was limping.

  ‘Blisters?’

  He didn’t quite meet her gaze. ‘Er…no. Not really.’

  ‘How did you sleep?’

  ‘Well, thanks. The hammock was great.’

  ‘Lucky you. I barely got forty winks before Mack’s alarm. The ground mat I bought felt as thin as tissue paper.’

  He smiled. ‘That’s why I brought a hammock. Off the ground is better. Even the most comfortable bed is on legs.’

  ‘The voice of experience?’

  ‘Most definitely.’

  Mack led them up a stony trail. Like a line of ants they began their ascent, and in the early-morning warmth they were all soon puffin
g and panting, stripping off layers as they got higher and higher. Beau focused on one point—the shirt of the person in front. Her mind was blank of everything as she simply concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other. Plodding on, climbing bit by bit, until they reached a lookout high on the side of the mountain.

  Mack indicated a rest stop by dropping his backpack to the floor. ‘Let’s take an hour here. Get fluids on board, and then we’ll start our next lesson from this beautiful viewpoint.’

  Beau slipped off her backpack and used it as a seat as she took a drink of water from her bottle. She was hot and sweaty, totally out of breath, and the muscles in her legs burned. She stretched her legs out in front of her and counted her blessings.

  This was what she had come here for. To find nature. To escape the confines of the hospital. When had she last climbed anything? She didn’t even climb stairs any more—she changed floors at the hospital by using the lift, and the same at home. Her flat was on the sixth floor and the lift worked perfectly every time she needed it. She needed this sort of workout. Blowing away the cobwebs on muscle groups that she ought to have been using. Using her body and not just her brain. Breathing in this fresh, crisp mountain air and feeling alive!

  She watched a large bird, far out above the canyon, circle effortlessly in the air. ‘Now, that’s the way to climb to new heights.’

  Gray squinted up at the sky. ‘I wonder if birds get altitude sickness.’

  ‘Or have a fear of heights. Can you imagine?’

  ‘We humans think too much. We worry and fret, build our anxieties on imagined threats. If you think about it, animals have it easier.’

  She took another drink of water. ‘What worries you, Gray? You never struck me as a worrier.’

  He stretched out his legs. ‘I worry about lots of things. I just choose not to show it.’

  Leo came over and rested against the rocks next to them. ‘You’re a surgeon, though, aren’t you? You can’t show your patients that you’re worried. They’d have no confidence in your abilities if you did.’

  Gray nodded. ‘That’s right. It’s a strength not to wear your heart on your sleeve. Patients need to see that you’re confident and sure.’

  But Beau was thinking about their past. ‘And what if you’re not sure about something?’ she asked, her face curious. ‘Do you talk to them about your concerns? Do you ever share your doubts so they know the full picture?’

  It was obvious he knew she wasn’t just referring to his work. ‘I always let my patients know the full picture. They always understand the risks. Letting them know about dangers and possibilities doesn’t stop you from being confident.’

  ‘But what if you’re not confident in an outcome? What then?’

  He stared at her, long and hard. ‘Then I don’t proceed.’

  She nodded, her face stony. ‘You don’t move forward?’

  ‘No.’

  Leo looked between the two of them, clearly puzzled at the tone of the conversation and at the way they were looking at each other. He took a bite from his trail bar. ‘Looks like Mack’s about to start the next lesson.’

  He was right.

  Mack gathered them all round. ‘Okay, I’m sure that as we made the climb up here we all noticed we were getting a little out of breath. Now, imagine being like that all the time…not being able to breathe, feeling like there isn’t enough air, struggling to take in enough oxygen. How do you think that’s going to affect you on a day-to-day basis?’

  Rick put up his hand. ‘You’d struggle.’

  Mack nodded. ‘Too long in too high an altitude, without a period of adjustment, can affect thinking skills and judgement calls, and it leads to hikers and climbers taking risks. Luckily here in Yellowstone we don’t have the extreme elevations that provoke serious cases of altitude sickness, but we do have heights over eight thousand feet, and as soon as you go beyond this number, you’ll start to see symptoms. Now, can anyone tell me what those symptoms are?’

  Beau was itching to answer, but she thrust her hands in her pockets and bit her lip to stop herself from speaking.

  Conrad suggested an answer. ‘Dizziness?’

  ‘That’s one. Can you give me another?’

  ‘Nausea?’

  Mack nodded. ‘Most people complain of a headache first. They get nauseous, feel exhausted. Then they might be short of breath, might get nosebleeds, muscle weakness. So what do we do to alleviate the condition?’

  Beau gritted her teeth, let Mack continue.

  ‘We descend. Height creates the problem, so going back down to where it’s easier to breathe solves it. People can adjust, though. This is why on mountain climbs—and specifically when tackling Everest and those sorts of places—climbers ascend and then come down for a bit. Then they go up again—then down. It’s a back and forth dance. Two steps forward, one step back. It acclimatises them to the new altitude. It allows their bodies to get used to the thinner air.’

  Everyone nodded.

  ‘The air itself still has oxygen at about twenty-one per cent. That doesn’t change as you go higher. What does change is the air pressure, and that’s what causes altitude sickness. Unfortunately we can’t tell who will succumb. Some of you may even be feeling it now.’

  He looked around at them and Claire raised her hand and mentioned that she had a headache.

  He nodded once. ‘So we start to head down. Let’s go!’

  They all got to their feet and slung on their backpacks wearily. The air did seem thinner. Everything seemed so much sharper up high. But the trail Mack led them down quickly led them into a beautiful green valley where they had to wait for a herd of moose to pass by.

  Beau got out her camera. They were magnificent animals! As tall as she was, heavyset, with brown-black coats and long, horse-like faces. There was one with huge cupped antlers, and he stood there proudly as his herd passed the hikers, heading for a crop of willow trees, where they stopped to graze.

  She took shot after shot, excited by getting her first close-up with an animal she hadn’t a chance of seeing in the wild in the UK, and when she finally put her camera away, Gray smiled at her.

  ‘What?’

  He laughed. ‘You’re still the same.’

  She shook her head, disagreeing with him. ‘I’m older. Wiser, I hope.’

  ‘I grant you that…but you still have that joy in you that I saw all those years ago. You always saw the joy and goodness in everything.’

  ‘That’s my problem. I thought I saw it in you once, but…I was wrong.’

  He stopped walking and sighed. ‘You weren’t wrong.’

  ‘Then why did you hurt me so badly?’ She stopped to look at him directly. The others were ahead. They couldn’t hear.

  Gray looked down at the ground. ‘That wasn’t my intention. I was trying to stop you from being hurt further down the line.’

  He passed her and began to walk to catch up with the rest of the group.

  Beau watched his retreating form and felt the old hurt and anger begin to rise. She pushed it down, refusing to show him that he could still press her buttons.

  She hurried to catch up, too, and as she passed him, she muttered, ‘Just for your information…it didn’t work.’

  Gray stopped and stared after her.

  *

  They walked for a few more hours. They passed through rocky canyons, small copses and grassy open plains. They followed the Gallatin River, passing a few men who stood in it in waders, fly-fishing, and giving them a wave.

  Gray could feel the weariness in his legs—particularly his left leg—and ached to stop and stretch out, but he said nothing, preferring to soldier on.

  They were all alert and on the lookout for bears, knowing that these mammals were keen on fishing themselves, but they saw none, and Mack soon led them off the popular trail and deeper into wilder country.

  Just as Gray was feeling the familiar pinching pain in his left calf that told him a cramp was about to set in, he heard crying and
groaning. His ears pricked up at the sound and his doctor radar kicked in. Someone was afraid and in pain. And then suddenly, there before them, in a clearing, were three people lying on the ground with blood everywhere.

  Adrenaline shot through his system. The cramp was forgotten as he raced past the others in his group with Beau to attend the casualties before them.

  There were two men and a woman. First he needed to assess them all, find out who was in the most medical danger, and he knelt by the first patient—the woman—who lay on her back, clutching at a bleed in her thigh, hopefully not her femoral artery. Out here, a bleed like that could be fatal.

  ‘Lie back! Can you tell me what happened?’

  He went to check the leg, already pulling off his belt so that he could create a tourniquet, and then he noticed that there was no wound. No tear in the fabric. And the blood was fake. He looked up at the others, to see Beau looking confused, too.

  Mack knelt down beside him, grinning. ‘Pretend patients! The wounds aren’t real, but you might come across people on your travels with serious injuries. I want you to work in groups of four. Each group take a patient. Assess the injury, ascertain what happened, and then I want you to tend to that patient. We’ll feed back to the group what we did and why. Gray, you work with Beau, Conrad and Barb. Jack and Leo—you’re with Dean and Rick. The rest of you, tend the third patient.’

  Gray had already got fake blood all over his hands and he let out a huge breath. Thank goodness it’s not real! It had really got his own blood pumping, though.

  Beau knelt beside him and Conrad and Barb gathered round.

  ‘Barb and I will let you two take the lead, Doc,’ said Conrad. ‘We’re sure you know more than us.’

  ‘Maybe, but you need to learn. Let’s see what our “patient” can tell us.’ He looked down at the woman on the ground. ‘Can you tell me what happened to you today?’

  ‘We were camping when we were attacked.’

  ‘By animals?’

  ‘No, some lads came into our camp. They were drunk and waving knives around.’

  Gray nodded. He’d actually been in a similar situation once before, hiking in the Peak District. A group of rowdy teenagers had wandered into his campsite, drunk and disorderly, and had become very threatening. Luckily he’d managed to talk them down and send them on their way—but not before one of them had tripped over his guy rope and broken his nose.