by Lilian Darcy
‘Next week…’
‘I’m still worried it’s going to be too much for you.’
‘It’s not forever. Just until he settles down. When he starts school, I hope. And I’m worried it’s going to be too much for you!’
‘Nonsense!’ Brave words, fragile tone. Then Mum coughed and struggled for breath, needed her oxygen, but was determined to give Annabelle the credit-card statement to look at first.
‘Are the bills filed away, Mum?’ she asked, when things had settled down a little.
A little. Duncan was still jumping on the couch. Annabelle decided to let him do it, this once. Some kids, apparently, never even thought of jumping on couches. What would that be like? she wondered.
‘No, I got them out again,’ Mum said.
‘It does seem as if the payments should have appeared on this statement. Let me get their transaction numbers and phone the enquiry lines, see if there’s been some kind of a glitch.’
A couple of frustrating phone calls reassured both of them that no phone line or electricity service was about to be disconnected. Everything was in order. The bills had apparently been paid by magic.
No, Annabelle understood finally. It had taken her way longer than it should have done.
Not by magic. By Dylan.
It didn’t click until she and Duncan arrived at Dylan’s garage to pick up the car.
‘So how much will it be?’ she made herself ask brightly, dreading the answer.
‘Four hundred and ninety-five dollars,’ the head mechanic said, then gave her a leering stare. ‘Isn’t your doctor boyfriend going to pick up the tab for you this time?’
‘What did you expect me to say?’ Annabelle asked Dylan angrily, an hour later.
‘Not much. A small thank-you, maybe.’ He looked wary, a little distant, and he was watching her carefully.
He had only arrived at her place a minute ago—with another huge assortment of take-away containers, even though she had already told him she would cook—and she’d launched into her angry interrogation straight away, while Duncan was still safely running around in the back garden.
Had Dylan put those bills of Mum’s on his own card?
Yes.
And was he intending to pick up all or part of the tab at her garage, as he’d apparently done before?
Yes to that, too.
Why?
That was obvious, wasn’t it?
She paced the kitchen, got distracted for a moment by the sight of him unpacking the twelve…no, fourteen…plastic containers, all of them steaming with hot food, and demanded, ‘What am I supposed to do with all that?’
‘Eat the dishes we fancy tonight, and freeze the rest.’
‘No. You can take it home. I hate this. Why have you started doing this?’
‘What’s “this”?’
‘You know!’
‘Helping—’
‘No! You were the one who made me see what a horrible, mercenary kind of transaction was going on between Alex and me, and now you’re doing the same thing.’
‘Annabelle—’
‘I’m not your mistress, Dylan. The garage man made it quite clear he thought you were paying for favours received. And I’m not your charity case. I don’t want to need you. I just want…’
To want you. She didn’t quite dare to say it, since the wanting was so strong.
‘You don’t have to pay for me, or find ways to elevate my lifestyle to your level,’ she went on. ‘If my lifestyle isn’t good enough for you, then I’m not good enough for you. And if any part of what’s going on here is because you feel sorry for me, you can get out of my house right now.’
‘Since none of that applies, I’ll stay put,’ he answered lightly.
The lightness angered her further. He wasn’t taking this seriously. He wasn’t taking her seriously! Maybe the wanting was only this strong on her side.
‘Don’t belittle my feelings,’ she said. ‘This is important.’
‘I’m not belittling your feelings. I’m belittling what I did. I paid a few bills for your mother, and set up an arrangement at my garage.’
‘Yes, Alex was very willing to take on my family and financial obligations, too. I was happy about that until I realised—until you made me see—what he expected in return—a porcelain wife with a saintly aura so extreme it could be permanently damaged, in his eyes, by your outrageous behaviour at our wedding.’
‘Hey!’ Dylan growled. ‘You know I never meant that comment of mine to carry the way it did! Haven’t we dealt with that? It’s behind us. And as for comparing me with Alex, saintliness is the last thing on my mind when I think of you, Annabelle.’
She ignored the suggestive, caressing lilt in his voice and stood her ground. ‘I’m not going to be kept. Or helped. I don’t want to be dependent on the man I’m…’ She hesitated, and searched for the right word. ‘The man I’m sleeping with.’
‘What if I’m not prepared to build a relationship on those terms?’ he shot back at her immediately. ‘What if I believe that there’s always give and take? That you can’t even have a casual fling without need and support going both ways? And anyway, as far as I’m concerned, this isn’t—’
She ploughed over him. ‘It’s not going both ways, the way you’ve engineered it. It can’t go both ways. I’ve got nothing to give.’
He ignored her.
‘I’m not backing down on this, Annabelle. What you’re saying is impractical and artificial. You’re the one dealing in transactions.’
‘Am I? If that’s true, then I guess it’s over. It is over, Dylan. It has to be.’
She could hardly believe she’d said it. The words had flashed out of her mouth like a knife blade flashing out of its sheath. As soon as they’d been spoken, they settled into place as if they were puzzle pieces. They fitted. She didn’t particularly want them to, but they did.
‘It has to be,’ she repeated tightly.
She had started this too soon. She had too many issues trailing in her wake. Feelings, obligations, questions. It was very nice to have a man like Dylan in her life—a man who set her on fire, and bossed her around a little bit, with a wicked gleam in his eyes. But she wasn’t ready, and she desperately didn’t want to fall into the same pattern she’d had with Alex. She didn’t trust Dylan’s confidence on the issue, didn’t trust his belief that he was too different from the senior surgeon to let it happen.
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’ Dylan crossed the kitchen in three strides, and pulled her into his arms. His confidence didn’t appear to flag.
And maybe he was right to be confident, because she didn’t fight him off, just looked helplessly up into his face, melting at his touch the way she always did.
‘You don’t mean this,’ he said.
‘I—I do, actually.’
‘What, you’re turning it off, just like that? One minute we’re on fire for each other…’ He gave her a graphic verbal sketch about exactly what this had meant to them over the past ten days. Secret heat in the way they looked at each other. An almost painful anticipation about being together. Feverish couplings in her bedroom…and other places. ‘The next minute,’ he went on, ‘you’re telling me you’ve switched off the current. I don’t believe it. You still feel it. You do!’
The way he was touching her, and the way she responded, proved his point, but she at last managed to flatten her hand against his chest and push him away. At the same time, Annabelle had to bite on her lower lip to stop herself from letting her mouth drift open to receive his kiss.
‘That’s not the thing that counts for me,’ she said. ‘I just don’t like…the other places where this is going. You shouldn’t have paid those bills, or made the arrangement with your mechanic. Not without asking.’
‘If I’d asked, would you have let me?’
‘No.’
‘There you are!’
‘No! Tricking me into accepting help is worse. I can’t explain why this is so important. I’m obvi
ously not explaining. Not well enough. But it is.’
He tried to argue some more, but she resisted. It was painful. Almost impossible. But she managed it, and finally she saw an angry acceptance cloud his eyes.
‘You’re almost as stubborn as Alex, do you know that?’ he muttered.
‘Good! It’s right to be stubborn sometimes.’
He controlled a sigh. ‘I’d better go, then, hadn’t I?’
‘Yes, I—I think so. Please, take…’ Her gesture towards the hot containers on the counter-top died in the face of his laughter.
‘Some of the food?’ he finished for her. ‘Hell, don’t be so petty, Annabelle! There’s a big picture out there, you know. You’re not seeing it, and I can’t force you to. So let’s leave it at that. I’ll see you, OK? Sorry we didn’t get a little further than this.’
She mumbled some inept agreement and followed him to her front door. Then Duncan called out for her and she hurried out to the garden, wondering if there was any way she and Dylan could have handled this without making such a mess of it.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE pain was back.
It came on so gradually that Dylan thought his mind was playing tricks at first. This new hot spot low in his spine wasn’t related in any way to the pain he’d had before. Thinking about that first night at Annabelle’s, he concluded that making love on a towel on the grass hadn’t been such an erotic and inspired idea after all. He’d got a bruise on his spine, or something, from the hard ground beneath them.
Smashing her bottle of cough syrup seemed like proof that he shouldn’t be seeking to mask the issue with medication. He left the painkillers alone for the next week or more, and listened helplessly to his nerve-endings telling him, It’s getting worse. It’s more than a bruise.
Still, he made excuses. A lot of doctors were good at that when it came to their own bodies. Too much swimming, he decided. And the seat-back in his car wasn’t positioned correctly. He’d had a couple of difficult operations. He was stressed. All sorts of plausible things.
He definitely felt stressed after Annabelle’s meltdown on Tuesday night. He understood what she was saying, but felt that she was coming at the whole thing from the wrong angle. Would have tried to talk to her about it some more, only he didn’t know how to say it. There were some missing links in his own understanding as well.
He was sure, though, that her comparing him to Alex was hugely and almost sinfully unfair. So perhaps he’d had a fortunate escape from more tangled perceptions further down the line. Perhaps his experience with Sarah wasn’t far enough in the past, after all. At least Sarah had had a single, specific complaint. ‘You’re never here.’
Some people, on the other hand, had a knack for creating problems in a relationship where none truly existed. If Annabelle was one of them…
And meanwhile, there was the pain in his back.
It started waking him in the night, and he skulked off to a physiotherapist who had a practice at the shopping centre near where he lived. He’d never heard of her. She wasn’t on the list of people to whom he or Alex referred their own patients when necessary.
This, of course, was the whole point of seeing her. He didn’t want this getting back to anyone else in the profession.
She seemed perfectly competent and pleasant, and had all the right qualifications. He sketched out the problem. She said it was very common, and gave him some ultrasound massage and some exercises. One of the mentholated heat ointments might help, too, she said. He picked some up at the chemist immediately, and slathered it on as soon as he got home.
If it helped, it didn’t help much.
He started to notice the pain in surgery again, worse than that first bout after the sailing trip, and thought rebelliously, Why? There’s no family history. His parents, in the United States, still maintained an active lifestyle, and his older sister, who also lived there, had never had any back problems that he knew about, even during her two pregnancies.
In addition, his posture was good. He did do a certain amount of lifting and pulling in his profession, but not enough to generate a chronic problem, or so he would have thought.
It had to be the sailing. He’d pulled a muscle or bruised a vertebra without realising it, and he kept unconsciously aggravating the injury before it had fully healed. He just needed to take things easy, do the exercises, get some more massage and be careful.
All this good sense…and none of it worked.
Duncan left Gumnut Playcare for the last time without a backward glance. Each of the staff gave him a hug, raised their voices a little too high to be natural and said they hoped he’d come back for lots of visits. Duncan scowled, turned and ran for the car.
I’m going to make the night shifts work! Annabelle vowed.
The first of these was the following night, and she was keyed up for it, aware of the difference. She drove over to pick Mum up straight after dinner, and had her settled in front of television with her oxygen, and Duncan settled in bed with his night-light, by eight. She then dutifully went to bed herself, with the alarm set for twenty past ten. Tonight, she probably wouldn’t get any sleep this early, but tomorrow would be a different story.
Sure enough, she spent most of the two hours just lying there, watching the numbers change on the digital clock and thinking circular thoughts about Dylan Calford. She got out of bed before the alarm went off.
The hospital felt different at night, and the theatre suite even more so. Surgery was limited to emergencies, including Caesarean deliveries, and she arrived in time to hear a newborn crying in its clear plastic cot on its way up in the lift to the maternity ward, one level above.
Occasionally, she might be rostered in Theatre Four for obstetrics, but mostly she’d be across the corridor in Theatre Two or Three, assisting with complicated fractures and closed head injuries, coronary artery bypass grafts and emergency appendicectomies, and putting people back together after accidents. Sometimes she’d see Dylan.
Not tonight, she hoped.
Tonight, she wanted a nice easy start, with some quiet periods in which to grab some sleep.
Occasionally, it seemed, wishes of this selfish kind did come true. They handled emergency surgery on a fifty-seven-year-old man’s bowel obstruction, and sewed up a shallow knife wound in another man’s chest. The alleged assailant was in police custody. After this, she slept from three until six, then assisted in another stitching up—glass in a woman’s foot this time.
The patient had delayed coming in for some hours, the glass was dirty and she wasn’t up to date on her tetanus, so it might not be as simple a recovery as it could have been. At least the surgery itself went smoothly.
‘Always makes me think of that prissy little proverb about a stitch in time,’ commented fellow nurse, Sue Thorpe, stifling a yawn.
Annabelle pulled off her gloves and threw them in the bin, then helped Sue push the patient, on her wheeled bed, out to Recovery. She yawned as well. ‘You don’t think it’s true?’ she asked Sue.
‘Oh, I’m sure it’s true! But it’s not always helpful. Sometimes you don’t get the chance to put in that first stitch. The whole seam is ripped before you notice a problem.’
‘Are we talking about needlework here?’
‘Life, darling,’ Sue drawled.
Perhaps I needed to hear that, Annabelle thought as they tidied up.
She had been wondering what she could have done to stop herself from feeling the way she did about Dylan—full of regret, still wanting him, still angry with him, wondering what her own problem was and if she was just being irrational—but perhaps there was nothing to learn from going over it all. Somehow, it was inevitable that she should have ended up in a mess. Sometimes, as Sue had said, you didn’t notice anything was wrong until the whole seam was ripped.
She heard Dylan’s voice just then, penetrating through the theatre’s swing doors as they opened again. The anaesthetist, Andrew Brockway, had started to leave, but had turned in the doorway
. He held the door open with his shoulder as he mumbled a question to Sue. Beyond him, Dylan’s words were clearer.
‘What’s happening?’ He sounded alert, and full of authority. ‘Is he ready for us?’
Apparently, he was about to operate in this theatre as soon as the place was cleaned and prepared by the incoming staff.
‘Not yet,’ said a woman’s voice. ‘He’s still in A and E, getting stabilised. And we’ve got day shift nursing staff coming on.’
‘Who else is operating?’
‘Kevin Neeley, since the guy has facial injuries,’ said someone else. ‘Cam Brewer, too, I think.’
Dylan whistled, then said, ‘OK, I’ll go and—’
The swing doors closed again as Andrew Brockway left, and Annabelle couldn’t hear any more. She assumed they had an accident victim with multiple injuries. Dylan and the rest of his surgical team could be here for hours. She finished up some ten minutes later, and didn’t see him on her way out.
That night, after a satisfying snooze on the couch while Duncan watched a video, and a two-hour nap in bed between eight and ten, it was a different story. They had a patient flown in by helicopter, having suffered a serious fall while rock-climbing. His injuries were severe and extensive, and it was obvious at once that it would take all night to patch him up. Dylan would be heavily involved, as the twenty-four-year-old had sustained two complicated spiral fractures of each femur—fractures where the broken bone was protruding through the skin, creating a serious risk of infection—and three more simple breaks.
Meanwhile, a gastric lavage had shown a bleeding spleen. The patient’s blood pressure was still dropping slowly, despite the replacement blood going into him, and gastro-intestinal surgeon Cam Brewer had been called in to do a life-saving repair before the less critical orthopaedic procedures could take place.
Dylan, already on hand, looked tired in contrast to the way he’d sounded this morning, Annabelle noted, and she wondered how many hours he’d already spent in surgery today. The large team grouped themselves around the patient, and he seemed unusually terse as he outlined what he needed to do and when he needed to do it.