Controlled Burn (Scarred Hearts)

by Nikki Duncan

  “Yeah?”

  “Who else comes to see him? You said as far as he knows it’s just been staff.” She’d avoided the question before, but now that he was awake she felt a more urgent need to know.

  “His sister’s fiancé stopped by once.” Sadness swept through the air answering before Lexi confirmed what Delancey suspected. “He never made it through the door and I haven’t seen him again.”

  No visitors was as much a curse as too many visitors. At least that’s what Chad had said on every occasion that he’d begged the hospital staff to run his very extended family off. They’d even wanted to accompany him to his physical therapy sessions. Knowing he had people to care was great. Yet, too many people were suffocating and could get in the way.

  Either problem was better than being alone to face trauma’s hardships.

  The thought of Chad, of the man she’d planned forever with, tightened the skin on her right side. Memories exploded in her mind and had her hand shaking on the handle of Logan’s door.

  Logan Mathis had a hellish time ahead of him and it sounded like he had only himself to hide from. Her heart ached and she suddenly understood more clearly why she couldn’t stay away. She’d been him, and she wanted nothing more than to see him avoid some of the emotional anxiety she had battled.

  Nervousness moved nearer and nearer until Delancey was trembling with it as she pushed open the door and stepped into his room. For a moment it wasn’t Logan Mathis lying in the bed. It was Chad before he’d become her fiancé. Badly injured in a motorcycle accident, he’d required therapy. She’d been assigned as his therapist.

  Chad Banks had looked her down then up when she walked into his room. The glare hardening his stare assured her he was ready for a fight, but what he didn’t know was that she liked when her patients fought. It meant they had spirit and something to live for. Once she tapped into that, therapy was more productive.

  What she hadn’t realized was the only fight he’d had in mind involved him getting her between the sheets. He’d made that confession only after claiming himself victorious.

  “This place has the sexiest nurses,” Chad had said with a cocky smile.

  She ignored his pass and got straight to business. “I’m Delancey.” She set the brake on the wheelchair she pushed and met his gaze with an unspoken challenge. “I’ll be overseeing your physical therapy.”

  He grinned and pointed at the bed. “I have just the thing you can help with.”

  “I’m here about your legs.”

  “Let’s start on the third one.”

  “I can make all three hurt with equal complaints from you later.”

  “Sounds kinky.” He winked. “I like kinky.”

  “You’re going to make this a challenge, but I like a good challenge.”

  Accepting a new challenge, a personal one, she blinked away the memory of Chad and moved toward Logan’s bed. His eyes were closed, but he didn’t look like he was resting peacefully.

  Sinking into the chair beside the bed, Delancey rubbed her middle three fingers up and down her forehead.

  “Ashley?”

  The woman’s name, spoken softly and gravelly, had Delancey dropping her hand and lifting her head to meet Logan’s pained gaze. Ashley had been the woman he asked about at the fire, the woman she’d learned was his sister.

  “Sorry, no.” Delancey hated herself for not being who he wanted, who he clearly needed her to be. Setting her regrets aside as much as she could, she choked down the sorrow filling her throat. “I’m Delancey.”

  “Delancey.” He turned his head with a wince of pain, likely from the change in pressure against the burns on his head and side of his face. Sadness darkened his eyes and that sadness made the distance she needed to maintain even more unattainable. “I know you. You’ve read to me. You smell like grapefruit.”

  Her chest constricted. He’d come to recognize her voice and her scent. It didn’t mean he wanted her there. Delancey pulled the chair closer to his bed. “I figured if you were aware of things you might prefer a distraction.”

  “I’d prefer a lot of things.” He stayed silent a long while. His eyes drifted closed and his breaths grew slow, as if he’d drifted back to sleep. Then a tear leaked free. Wincing, he raised his non-bandaged hand and wiped it away.

  When he began talking again it was in a sandpaper-coarse whisper. Every syllable of every word had to be a misery, but he barely hesitated. “You carried me out. Said you’d check on Ashley.”

  “Yes.”

  “She didn’t make it.”

  “No.”

  “She was my best friend, and I’ll never love anyone like I loved her.”

  Delancey swallowed her impulse to cry. “She must have been very special for you to have risked your life for her.”

  “There was no one like her.” The rasp in his voice worsened, but he didn’t seem to notice or care. “She didn’t deserve to die.”

  “No one deserves what happened to you two.”

  “She’d sent me on yet another coffee run. Then I found her.” The raspiness, possibly from the difficulty speaking or possibly from emotion, overtook Logan. He coughed lightly. The cough quickly grew in intensity and stole his ability to speak.

  “Shh. Relax.” Delancey filled the bedside cup with water and slipped the nearby straw into it. Careful not to jostle him, she helped him take a few sips until his coughing eased off.

  When he stopped coughing and his face no longer showed pinch lines of pain she set the cup back on the table. “You should rest.”

  “I’ve done nothing but rest,” he whispered without moving his mouth.

  “It’s how you heal. You’ve suffered too much.” But will suffer more.

  “I suffer in sleep too. Dreams hurt.”

  “Dreams and memories. They can be worse than breathing,” she admitted. “But we can’t hide from them.”

  He looked at her with those eyes that had arrested her from the beginning. Despite the pain he had to be feeling, his gaze reflected an acceptance she wouldn’t have expected so soon after he awoke. “What do you dream of?”

  “Fire.” She almost held the admission back, but lies slowed recovery and hindered emotional connections that could motivate a patient. With Logan, not lying extended to a need to admit what she shared with no one else. “I dream of flames robbing me of the man I’d planned to marry. I dream of days when loss didn’t motivate my every move.”

  “Hope your intent isn’t to cheer me up, ’cause you suck at it.”

  She smiled, almost on the verge of laughter. Burned, covered in bandages and grief, Logan managed to make jokes. It was a rare quality.

  “Guess that’s why I’m not a motivational speaker.”

  “Or a suicide hotline volunteer.” His mouth curved the slightest bit, inviting her own smile to widen.

  “I’m definitely more of a shit-or-get-off-the-pot kind of girl.”

  “Ashley was too.”

  As quickly as humor had entered the conversation it left. Logan’s eyes closed, pinching visibly with his efforts to breathe. Long minutes passed before he opened his eyes again and looked directly at her. “Delancey?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I know you saved my life and you’ve visited me.”

  She nodded.

  “I don’t understand why you come here.”

  That made two of them, and now that he was awake she was more curious than ever.

  “Would you mind not coming back? You remind me too much of that day.”

  His request robbed her of breath and had tears welling up until holding them back became the focus of her being. She mechanically nodded and stood.

  Lexi had warned her not to be hurt if he didn’t share the same need to see her. Warnings and preparations truly did nothing to brace her for the shaft of rejection.

  Chapter Four

  Months had passed and they still didn’t have answers on how the fire had started or what exactly had happened to Ashley that she’d bee
n dead when the fire started. What could she have hit her head on? Or had she been murdered?

  Logan’s gaze haunted the empty doorway as he fought the draw of the pain meds that kept him in a daze. He wasn’t dazed enough to not realize the mistake he’d made with Delancey.

  He’d taken to reading the books she’d left behind, but the stories lacked a spark without her voice to add depth to the characters and different inflections to the dialogue. Without her visits the stories failed to successfully distract him from the screams beyond his door and in his mind.

  And without her visits, Ashley, or rather Ashley’s ghost, visited more often.

  As if a thought was enough to conjure her, Ashley appeared at the foot of his bed. “You miss her.”

  He’d never believed in ghosts, let alone the idea of having a conversation with one, but he wouldn’t dismiss the prolonged time with Ashley, so he answered. Besides, her visits offered a distraction from the torment of healing grafts and slowly regenerating nerves. “I don’t know her.”

  “You know you miss her.”

  “Not like I miss you.”

  Ashley kicked her legs up on the bed, crossing her ankles and smiling. “How can you miss me when I’m right here?”

  “Because you’re not really here.”

  “Maybe, but I still know you. And I know you rejected a nice woman out of fear.”

  Fear? “I ran into a burning building for you. Why would I be afraid of her?”

  “She reminds you why you’re alive and that magnifies your feelings of guilt.”

  Half his life had been spent with guilt in the driver’s seat. Ashley was right that it controlled him more now than ever before.

  As a kid he’d had no chance of changing the outcome of events. But in the fire… If he’d refused to go on the coffee run he’d have been there when the fire started. If he’d been there he could have gotten her out. Or if he’d ridden his bike instead of walking he would have gotten back faster, which would have given him a better chance of getting her out.

  “See? You’re thinking about it now and blaming yourself.”

  “I should’ve been there.”

  “You can’t control life any more than you can travel through time to rewrite history.”

  “A month ago I would’ve said talking to ghosts was impossible.”

  Ashley grinned the way she always did when she was humoring him for being stubborn. “It must be driving you crazy that you can’t fit this into a tidy category.”

  “You’ve never fit into a clear category, Ash. It never kept me from adoring you.”

  “And that’s the real reason you’re still alive. You loved me enough to do my bidding.”

  “You were trying to get me out of the way?”

  “How could I have a wicked rendezvous with you there?”

  “You sent me for coffee so you could have a quickie with Cameron?”

  She faded before he could chastise her. Whatever she’d planned wasn’t what had happened. So what could have happened? What had he missed?

  No sooner did the question spring to life than the memory swooped in with a fresh wave of heart-stinging loss.

  Ashley knocked on the glass wall separating their offices a second before she leaned around the open door. “I need caffeine.”

  Logan checked his watch and heaved a sigh.

  Ashley walked to him, each step strong and commanding, with the slightest bounce. Her heels added the necessary inches to close the distance between their heights, making it easy for her to kiss him, like she often did, at the edge of his mouth where it became cheek. “Scowl all you want, baby brother, and we know you do it so well. We also know you’ll give in.” She pulled back and patted his shoulder. “It’s been an hour.”

  Never sure how they could be related, with her always bubbly and bright-side view and his not-so-optimistic outlook, Logan stared. “A whole hour that could’ve been filled with caffeine if we had a coffee maker.”

  “If you’re trying to make a point, I’d catch it easier with coffee.”

  “I’ll spell it out for you. A coffee pot would mean endless caffeine, productive work time for me and, apparently, a functioning brain for you.”

  “Other than you being a grump, I’m still missing your point.”

  “I could buy a coffee pot. It would also save us money, which would increase our profits.” He leaned closer and narrowed his gaze. “And I could get some work done.”

  “The landlord is supposed to provide the coffee pot, not us. We should hold him to his obligations.”

  The trouble with being the first tenants in a new office building seemed to be that everything wasn’t quite ready. Or the problem could just be a slow-to-respond landlord. Resistance would be a futile waste of hope, because Ashley had never been swayed down a new path of thought once her mind was set. And she called him inflexible. “Consider something for me.”

  “What?”

  “If you had your own pot you’d never have to worry that someone didn’t make it your way.”

  “That’s a good point. But until we’re set up…” She twirled her long brown hair around her index finger and smiled the way she always did to charm him and her fiancé into giving her whatever she wanted. “I would really appreciate some coffee.”

  Rolling his eyes as much at her as himself and his willingness to do whatever she asked, Logan backed up the file he was working on to their sky drive and closed the lid of his laptop. “I’ll be right back.”

  She kissed his cheek and grinned her most victorious grin. “I love you.”

  “Love me all you want. This is the last run I’m making today.”

  “Take your time.”

  He regretted that he’d been annoyed with her. Annoyed and more concerned with the work he wasn’t getting done than telling her he loved her.

  The clock’s hands moved too slowly around its world. Nurses and doctors came and went, changing his bandages, the most painful part of being burned as it turned out. Therapists, physical and psychological, stopped in to check on him and talk about what he’d need to do for a full recovery.

  Sometimes he pretended to be asleep. It never worked, because no one in the hospital had an issue waking him up.

  Days became nights and nights became days. The cycle seemed endless, with no discharge in sight. Through it all, he wanted the door to open for two reasons. First, to hear the news he was going home. Second, to reveal that Delancey had ignored his wish for her to stay away.

  After several weeks of loneliness, despite the revolving door of staff entering and exiting his room, he received one of his two wishes. Sort of.

  The door opened and Dr. Hyatt entered. “Mr. Mathis. How are you today?”

  “Same as yesterday and the day before.”

  Nurse Lexi walked in behind Dr. Hyatt. She carried a tray with all the things they used in the torture sessions they called bandage changes.

  Logan scowled. “Ready to go home. Ready to be finished with all of this.”

  “Then good news,” Dr. Hyatt said. “After Nurse Lexi removes your bandages today we’ll be leaving them off.”

  “So when do I get to go home?”

  “When you can dress yourself and walk to the nurse’s station without assistance.”

  Sitting up in bed and turning so his feet dangled over the edge, his muscles and skin grafts pulled against each other, resisting the move. The effort sapped him of energy, but Logan cared more about the glimpse of hope Dr. Hyatt’s words awakened.

  Nurse Lexi set the tray on the bed table and smiled, waiting for the signal to begin.

  “Sounds simple enough,” he said in hopes of believing himself. Except he hadn’t managed to walk across his own room without help, let alone to the nurse’s station. Hope deflated, because he didn’t know how he would do it without help.

  “Sounds simple, yes.” Dr. Hyatt nodded at Nurse Lexi. “It’ll be tougher than you anticipate.”

  Logan accepted the challenge and met the doct
or’s steady stare. “Easier without the restriction of these bandages.”

  “Ready?” Nurse Lexi pointed at his bandaged arm.

  The unwrapping of the outer layer of gauze wasn’t the painful part. The lower layers where the bandages stuck to the blood or still-raw sections of skin were a different story. When those layers were changed, with each inch of gauze that Nurse Lexi lifted, his skin pulled as if she’d tugged at a Band-Aid superglued to a festering wound.

  And then there was the final step they called debridement. It was a simple word to describe the popping of large blisters and the removal of damaged skin that hadn’t been replaced by grafts.

  The pain was indescribable and though it had lessened considerably over the last week its memory was a vital sensation that sprang to life at the thought of a dressing change.

  With his muscles trembling and his nerves tingling, he raised his arm in front of her and closed his eyes. He could handle the pain, but he couldn’t make himself look at his burned flesh. Not after the one time he’d looked.

  The areas where they’d given him donor skin were smooth while the outer edges and other nearby areas surrounding the graft sites were hideous. He would have to live with the scars, forever hideous. He didn’t have to share his hideousness with the world. It was one good thing about having sent Delancey away before he got more attached to her.

  Absence failed to diminish her impact, because she entered his thoughts every day. And every day he was more curious about her. About why she’d become a firefighter. Why she’d come to visit him. Why he couldn’t stop thinking about her.

  “Can you stand?” Nurse Lexi broke the spell of his somber thoughts.

  He wasn’t sure how long it had taken her, but she’d unwrapped his arm, all the layers, and he hadn’t even felt it.

  “My favorite part of the day,” he said, barely looking at his favorite nurse, “stripping for women who couldn’t care less. Except when you deliver those home-cooked lunches or dinners.”

  She would say nothing about the food. She never did, which kept him wondering who was cooking for him when no one tried to visit. All he knew was that the food was amazing and it comforted him more than he’d have imagined.