I couldn’t help but briefly run my hands over the bulge in Logan’s trunks. I inhaled deeply at his impressive length under the material, but when his hands slipped down to below my waist, I stopped him.
“I’m sorry … I can’t.”
“Why not? This feels so right to me … and I know you feel the same way.”
“I do … but … I just don’t feel ready.”
When I looked at him, flashes of annoyance flickered in his eyes, morphing quickly into disappointment.
“You don’t need to play games with me,” he said. “I’m a straightforward guy, and I’m not out to hurt or use you.”
I knew Logan was telling me the truth. He had all the reason in the world to be a typical bad boy with a trail of broken hearted girls behind him, yet he did seem genuinely sincere and honest about his feelings for me.
“I’m not playing games,” I said. “But I’ve just come out of a really bad breakup, and I need to take things slowly. Please tell me you understand.”
“Okay, I guess…” Logan said, but I could see he wasn’t sure.
Just do what comes naturally and don’t worry about it. When the right guy comes, you don’t have to concentrate on anything to make it work.
Stacy’s advice rang loudly in my mind, and I realized my approach was almost as bad as what I’d done with Tom. I was preventing the relationship between Logan and me from developing naturally, and also being more than a little hypocritical, seeing as I’d already frigged myself half-silly when I masturbated under Logan’s influence in the bathtub.
“I’m not a cock teaser,” I whispered. “Let me show you.”
I reached down to Logan’s swimming trunks. He inhaled deeply. I knelt, and beautiful look of lust entered his eyes. I slowly slid down his swimming trunks, and his cock jumped out like a soldier standing at attention.
I gazed at his manhood with open admiration. I almost said something silly like “wow,” but managed not to and took all nine inches in my right hand and ran the tip of my tongue over his shiny end.
Logan moaned out loud, and this spurred me on instantly.
I ran my lips over his wide, hard head and started sucking him … slowly at first, and then firmer, and deeper, one hand cupping his balls and stroking them in time with my mouth. His entire body shook, and I kept increasing my speed until I detected the telltale tremble meaning he was ready to explode. I pulled away slightly, just in time to take a warm jet of cum on my lips.
“You’re gonna kill me with that technique, Miss Brady,” Logan said breathlessly and stroked my hair with both hands.
I licked it off and caressed him some more with my tongue while he kept shooting more down my throat, groaning with each movement; it had clearly been a while for him too. He tasted salty and delicious, and I couldn’t get enough of him.
After, he fell down next to me on the soft grass, and we lay there, staring at the sky and not saying anything. No need for words. We had consummated our relationship to a certain degree, and I could tell Logan felt better. A whole lot better.
Maybe he’d been a little insecure before, like I wasn’t serious about him.
But now I’d uncorked my inhibitions, or at least cracked the lid, I couldn’t help comparing Logan’s splendid manhood to Tom Delaney’s incredibly average five-inch prick. And to think, I nearly allowed my father’s advice to drive me into a loveless marriage with the sad bastard.
If I needed Stacy’s advice and allowed the relationship between Logan and me to breathe freely, we would become full-blown lovers before the day ended. I still wasn’t sure if I was ready to allow that to happen, but at least now I knew Logan and I were a great physical match, and judging from what had taken place, there would be no awkwardness between us if we did finally go all the way.
We spent the rest of the day driving around, laughing and kissing like schoolchildren. As ever, Logan was the perfect gentleman, although he made no secret of his physical desire for me. We eventually made our way back to town at around six p.m., and after we’d parked the Land Rover and walked toward the hotel, I knew. I was ready to give myself to him, so we only needed to answer the age-old question, Your place or mine?
“Ah, there you are. I thought I’d never find you in this hellhole!”
I looked up and couldn’t believe my eyes. There he stood in the hotel entrance as if he had some God-given right to talk to me.
“Tom?” I said, unable to keep the shock from my voice or, presumably, my expression.
“Aren’t you gonna say hello?” he asked and smiled at me, and it was like no time had passed between us at all.
9
“Who’s this dude?” Logan asked, looking at me quizzically.
“Logan,” I said through gritted teeth, “please meet Doctor Tom Delaney, celebrated plastic surgeon and, umm, what was that other thing? Oh, yeah, cheating bastard extraordinaire.”
Logan looked at Tom as if contemplating whether he should smack him or not.
“No need to introduce me to your friend; I know a bit about Doctor Summers already,” Tom said, and for some reason, that seemed to stop Logan right in his tracks.
“I’m not a doctor,” he said.
“Right, right,” Tom replied. “Of course not. Jenny wouldn’t date another big, bad doc, now, would she?”
I was taken aback by Logan’s reaction, or—more to the point—his lack of reaction. He wasn’t foul-tempered or easy to anger, but he did get riled when people made fun of him being “just” a nurse. Male nurses are still a little unusual, especially in a field so heavily dominated by women, and as such are seen as a lesser role than that of a doctor or surgeon. Logan was always quick to defend his profession as being the glue that binds a hospital together, the doctors simply bells and whistles that add a touch of glamour.
But seeing Logan’s tension at Tom’s comment, then his passivity at the dig, I suddenly wondered if the whole thing with him had seemed too good to be true precisely because it was all some scam. Tom was a lying bastard, but why didn’t Logan punch him in the face, or at least tell the arrogant toad to get lost?
Instead, he just stood there, transfixed by Tom’s presence.
“You want some time to catch up with this charming gentleman?” Logan said. “Or would you rather spend the evening with me?”
I glared at Tom, thinking.
The temptation to go with Logan overwhelmed me. Pretend this asshole from my past had not arrived in paradise. But now a shard of doubt crept into my mind. Nevertheless, I didn’t want Tom to think his little stunt had gotten to me at all. His mind-games were so unbearably obvious that all I could do was take Logan by the hand and march away from the hotel as if Tom didn’t exist.
“You’ll be happy to know you’ve been a good influence on me, after all,” he called. “I’m going to be working at this hospital for the next two months.”
I wanted to cry out, No! But I kept on walking.
“I’ve already requested your expert assistance!” Tom shouted now we were further away.
My heart sank in my chest, and I swallowed back a sob, holding Logan’s hand tighter.
Tom was using all the resources at his disposal to force his way back into my life. The thought of having to work by his side made me nauseous. I had no idea how the hell Tom, a plastic surgeon, had maneuvered himself into a position at an emergency hospital, but he was the kind of man who knew how to weasel his way into places.
“I suppose that’s your ex?” Logan asked.
I looked at him again, hating myself for asking, but needing an answer all the same. “Are you hiding something from me, Logan? Because it would be better to tell me now before I find out about it later.”
I didn’t care if it sounded bitchy. I was too riled up by Tom’s appearance and not in the mood for getting into something I was going to regret later.
“I’m not hiding anything from you,” he answered. “Don’t allow your ex to mess up a perfect day. Put him out of your mind and let’s
go and watch the stars from my balcony.”
“I’m sorry, Logan, and I do believe you,” I said, and we embraced, “but I feel tired now, so I think I’m going to take a bath and go to bed.”
“Okay, but please don’t ever doubt me. Know I will never lie to you.” He briefly kissed me goodnight.
Later that evening, as I lay in bed, I thought how much I wanted to believe Logan, and I sent up a silent prayer that everything would work out between us, despite the dark specter of Tom Delaney now hovering over our little slice of heaven.
10
The next day was one that I will not soon forget, almost as if the gods conspired to give Tom the most heroic entrance they could manage.
A young girl was rushed to the hospital, and I swear, most of her face was gone. I mean gone. So you could barely tell she was human. She’d been injured in a mudslide and had been dragged under by the mass of rocks, tree branches, and filth. Her face must have been cut up against stone and wood.
“Jenny Brady, you are needed in ICU for an emergency operation,” a voice over the intercom announced, and I knew right away I would be working side-by-side with Tom to try and save the girl’s life.
I sometimes think God must have a strange way of deciding who to give the most important skills and talents to, as Tom received the gift of healing hands. What made this doubly paradoxical, apart from him being the greatest ass I’d ever met, was that those same hands that were so skilled in the operating theater were so utterly clumsy and useless with me.
Tom had requested I work directly alongside him for the duration of the six-hour operation, and at first, I thought the young woman could not possibly survive. He finally stabilized her vital signs and got her breathing normally, the highest level of success most of us could have hoped for her. But then he started doing the thing which had made him a super surgeon back in America.
He carefully washed away the blood and grime from the young patient’s face and then proceeded to fix the two deepest cuts which ran right across her face. He injected her skin with a drug that took the swelling down so he could see exactly where to attach the invisible stitching. Once he tended to the two worst cuts, she already looked a lot better.
But then he started the real magic. He sewed together the rest of her face by stitching below the skin, which would dissolve after a time and leave virtually no scars at all. The two large wounds would also be almost undetectable later, as Tom used a special technique to make sure the skin bonded in such a way that the stitches became unnoticeable.
It took a truly special talent to make such a complex operation look easy; the same kind of talent that makes a maestro playing the piano look simple or the effortless way in which Logan surfed the waves.
After the operation, the other nurses and the anesthetist couldn’t believe this was the same kid who had been brought in six hours earlier. She seemed peaceful, and although her face was bruised and swollen, pasted together while the stitches took hold, odds were she’d be just fine.
The true magic became more visible over the next week as the swelling on the young woman’s face subsided. We could all tell she would recover well from her ordeal, so you’d have to look closely to tell she’d ever had anything bad happen to her face, let alone that a mudslide maimed her.
To keep things in perspective and to remind me what an arrogant, insufferable prick he was, Tom made a remark after the operation which nearly made me slap him in the face. “Now go ask your surf-god boyfriend to do something as amazing as that.”
“You may be a talented surgeon, Tom, but your people skills are lower than lobster shit at the bottom of the ocean.” I managed a smile and walked away to go and spend some time with Logan.
Of course, he’d heard about Tom’s heroics, and I liked that he was able to give Tom credit for the operation. It wasn’t a question of me wanting him to get some credit; it was that I could see Logan had a big heart, secure enough to pay a compliment to a man who had obviously come to Arugam Bay to win back my affections.
“Tom is a great surgeon, but I never want you to feel you need to compete with him in any way,” I said.
Logan smiled. “I just hope we’ll get the opportunity to pick up where we left off.”
“Don’t worry, things will soon stabilize, and we will all find a ‘new normal.’ After that, I think Tom will see he’s wasting his time and he’ll be on a flight to the States before his first pack of Imodium runs out.”
In the days that followed, I saw how wrong I had been. Tom was not going anywhere, as he used his weaseling skills to burrow into every hole he could find. He made friends with all the staff by having those intimate little conversations with them that he was so good at. At first, I used to think Tom was a caring guy, especially after I’d seen him talking so intimately to the staff at the private hospital in the States, but one day I overheard a conversation between him and one of his colleagues which made me realize it was all fake. Tom laughed and explained how you had to “pretend to give a shit” if you wanted the “idiot nurses” to do some “honest work.” After that day, my eyes started to open up about who and what Tom Delaney was: a manipulator prepared to say and do anything to get what he wanted.
Tom kept trying to find a way back into my good graces after his initial arrogant remark about my “surf-god boyfriend,” and he came at me from every angle. But I’d seen and experienced it all, so I wasn’t about to fall prey to his machinations. I got the distinct impression that he knew more about my time in Arugam Bay than he let on. He never wanted to admit the reason he’d come here, although this was obvious. I could ever quite lay my finger on it, but I could tell from the way he spoke about some of the places in the area that he must have had some inside info on what I’d been doing.
“Why don’t we go for lunch at that beach bar where you enjoy hanging out with your friends?” he asked me one day, and I decided to confront him.
“Just how do you know where I go with my friends?”
“Calm down, Jenny, I’m sure one of the staff must have mentioned it to me.”
“Perhaps that’s how it happened and perhaps not. I just find it strange you arrive here out of nowhere and suddenly seem to know everything about my activities.”
“I told you before, I did not arrive out of nowhere. I was specifically asked to come and help because of the great need for a corrective surgeon in this area. When we get settled, and my equipment and drugs arrive, we can start inviting communities to send their worst cases. That tsunami wrecked more than buildings.”
“And how did you know my best friend’s name was Stacy? The other day, you started talking about her as if you’ve known her your entire life, despite her never speaking a single word to you. I know, because I asked her about it.”
“Once again, I talk to the staff on a daily basis, and I’m sure they must have mentioned her name and some things about her to me. I sometimes wonder why you don’t investigate that surfer boy’s past a little more carefully. You seem to trust him without knowing what the hell he’s doing here.” He made a calm, innocent face. Placid. Like what he was saying was completely natural. “It’s none of my business, and I will not interfere unless you ask me to, but have you never wondered why a guy like that would come to a secluded place like this?”
“You seem to be a real expert on other people’s motives. Why don’t you go home and study your motives for once, and then come back and tell me again that you’re here out of the goodness of your soul?” I walked away before he could sow more seeds of doubt in my mind.
I still felt disappointed that Logan had not answered more forcefully when Tom arrived and questioned his past. Tom was an expert in the art of holding his cards until the right time, and I had the terrible feeling he was waiting to lay out some dirty secret about Logan in front of me. Of course, it might be a carefully fabricated manipulation, designed to drive a wedge between us, but still, I wasn’t looking forward to it.
I was quite right about the notion of reac
hing a new equilibrium at the hospital, but wrong when I told Logan that Tom would soon realize he was wasting his time with me. He was relentless, and when he realized he wasn’t getting anywhere with questioning Logan’s motives, he started trying to sweet-talk me. Of course, I would have loved to tell him to take a hike and not speak to me at all, but he’d made sure we worked closely on a daily basis, and since he occupied a far more senior position to Logan, there was nowhere to run from his continuous assaults. The administrator who ran the place on behalf of Médicins Sans Frontières had more pressing matters than sexual harassment and a vague sense of workplace bullying, matters such as delayed TB inoculations and misdirected disinfectant, and I was loath to report Tom’s behavior. And Tom plainly knew it.
He started complimenting me on my medical skills; he would say how much I’d learned and how he could see me becoming a doctor one day, stuff like that. As if being a nurse was somehow a lesser calling. Whereas it would have been easy to dismiss that kind of approach if I’d only had to face it for a single day, it was quite a different story to face it day in and day out, and the pressure began to build. Tom became like the sea washing against a rock surface, eroding my defenses one tiny grain at a time.
Logan grew agitated, as our relationship stalled like an airplane in mid-air, and I could tell he would start seeing us crash real soon if we didn’t do something to move forward. I wanted to make it work, so planned another surfing lesson for that weekend. We were going to get up real early on Saturday and hit the beach while it was still reasonably cool.
When the day came, I was super amped when Logan knocked on my door to come and fetch me. He again carried two surfboards with him, just like my very first lesson.
“Let’s get going, surf’s up,” he said, and we were off.
As we were heading down the embankment in front of the hotel, my cell phone rang. I wished I’d left it in my room, but we were expected to have our phones on us all the time in case of an emergency call out. I would have gotten away by saying I’d forgotten it. But no, I had to be the good little nurse and answer.
My Doctor Without Borders Page 4