by Holly Rayner
“Sorry, what is?” he asked mildly, looking back over one broad shoulder as he rummaged for his small pile of ingredients in the lone cupboard. I noticed a lot of spice containers and squashed a surge of jealousy.
“That net over your bed. It stands out from everything else.” I forced myself to be a little bold. “It looks like you picked it off the beach after the fishing fleet came back. What’s the story behind it?”
“Oh, that?” He chuckled a little self-consciously, intriguing me further. “That’s from home. It’s a little island off the coast of Italy. The fishing net used to belong to my mother’s great-uncle—the first one to own his own fleet in our area.” His gaze tracked around a little bit, not as firm as usual. It gave me the impression that he wasn’t telling me the whole story. “It was passed down to me when I was ten.”
“Your relatives are fishermen?” It seemed a little simple and homey for the man before me, who was pulling me out a seat at his small, heavily carved wooden table. I sat obediently, and he moved to the small sink and plugged in his hot plate to heat.
“On the one side, yes. That net is a traditional design; I used to use it while out on my uncle’s boat.” The wistful look on his face fascinated me. “My mother’s family has always made their living on the sea. I have a little of that in me as well.” He smiled slightly, his eyes bright and calm instead of sarcastic as he started thinly slicing a precious section of onion.
“I apologize for having no meat for you,” he said as he set water to boil for the lentils. “It seemed too much of a luxury when we’re running out of medical supplies at the end of each week.”
“I understand your priorities,” I soothed, honestly enough. In the middle of a war zone, meat was a delicacy, more used for flavoring food than anything else. Beans and rice, lentils and barley, the odd bits of military rations or survival foods—that was the bulk of our diet now. The meal he was making, if anything, was better than usual, and he seemed to know his way around a cook-pot.
He nodded and kept working while we talked, his fingers expertly added pinches of herbs and spices to the oil and onions in his pan. “The Mediterranean is a kind sea, compared to so many others. It isn’t as if we don’t have storms, or the long dry season. But there’s no better way to wake up than to those soft breezes.”
“It sounds…idyllic,” I said wistfully. I had never been out of the United States before coming here. I had never had the wealth to do a lot of traveling. “Do you miss it?” I asked—and felt a shock of embarrassment when his face darkened.
“No. I only miss life at the seaside. That island, my home itself…it holds little in the way of fond memories.” His gaze was cold and distant, looking past my shoulder at something from his memories. From his expression, it was nothing pleasant.
For a moment, I got caught up in wondering about him: his history, his plans, whatever kind of darkness caused him to not only flee from that small Mediterranean island he spoke of, but to hate the very memories that had made him leave. Why would a likely well-off man from the kind of place that people dreamed of fleeing to walk away from it all? There was more than idealism at work here.
“I’m sorry,” I mumbled, feeling that terrible fear of putting him off gnaw at me again. I hated that his opinions already mattered to me this much, especially since he was unpredictable.
“It’s fine. You didn’t know.” He smiled softly, but his eyes still gazed at the past. “My home to me is as Miami to you, but the estrangement is more…permanent. I will only return home when I am obliged to, which I hope won’t be for many years. You probably wish to return home eventually, once the bad memories have faded enough.”
“Maybe,” I admitted. I had started thinking about it a lot lately, but had dismissed the thoughts as burnout over all the death and chaos around me. My place was in Safirah, at least until things had settled down enough that the team here didn’t need me so badly. “Anyway, I didn’t mean to make things awkward.”
He paused in his work to look back at me. “Well, for most people it is normal to miss home. I’m not offended by an assumption that is so excusable. My life…simply hasn’t been very normal.”
He gave no further explanation, leaving me wondering even more. What island was he from? Did my mystery man still have family somewhere, or was he alone? He acted like someone who had no living family back home; no friends, nobody to miss.
But that could simply point to a tragedy as bad as mine—or worse. Not good dinner conversation. So I decided to change the subject. Food. Food is safe.
“So where did you learn to cook?” I asked as I watched him brown the precious herbs and slivers of onion with an expert hand.
“My mother taught me.” A touch of the same, defensive flatness crept into his voice, leaving me tempted to give up. But then he chuckled at my expression and went right back to work, adding a bit more of the spices and some bouillon to the pot of water he had sitting by. “Don’t men cook where you’re from?”
I thought of your typical Miami guy scoffing at the prospect of owning a spice rack in the first place, and smiled lopsidedly. “You must have never been to Florida. Some of them barbecue, but that’s about it.”
“I was warned away from Florida by all the memes,” he joked.
I sporfled and covered my mouth with my hand. “I worked in a Miami emergency room.”
“How bad was it?” Amusement had crept back into his voice. I was finally on safer ground.
Phew. “I have stories. Oh…boy, do I have stories.” Most of which were again, not good dinner conversation. “On a typical shift we would see what you would probably expect: knife wounds, gunshots. Aftermaths of drunken fights and drunken dares. Also iguana bites.”
He finished browning herbs and set the pan aside, putting the lentils and rice on to boil. “I’m not certain I heard that correctly. Iguana bites?”
I burst out laughing at the confusion in his voice. “Most cities have a pigeon problem. Miami has an iguana problem.” And a snake problem, and a tegu lizard problem, and an invasive tropical fish problem.
“The meter-plus lizards with the wattles? Green and brown? Look like small dinosaurs?” He gave me an arched eyebrow over his shoulder. “Those iguanas?”
“The very same.” My lips twitched as I remembered the first time I had come out onto my apartment’s tiny balcony and seen three of the giant suckers sunning themselves on my railing. They had then proceeded to hiss and lash tails at me as if I was the intruder. “People abandon them as pets when they get big and sassy, and since it’s a tropical climate, they have thrived and bred. Now they’re everywhere. Along with feral pythons, tegus, and the native alligators.”
“Do people try to keep them as pets?” From the tone in his voice, his impression of Florida was getting even weirder.
“The ferals or the alligators?” Then I thought about it. “Yes. Or they take them in by mistake, thinking they’re lost pets or need help. Especially a few years ago.”
“What happened?” He set the lentils to simmer and came to sit across from me, keeping half an eye on his cooking the whole time.
“We had a cold snap. It was bad enough that it got below freezing in places, and almost everywhere, it got cold enough to send reptiles into torpor.” At his confused look I simply said, “A bit like hibernation crossed with a sudden fainting spell. So suddenly all these seemingly dead iguanas were falling out of the trees.” I smirked as his eyebrows went up. “I’m not actually kidding you.”
“I believe you. I’m just trying to imagine it.” The corner of his mouth tucked up. “Miami natives walking around having to avoid the trees in case they get smacked in the head by a large lizard.”
“It happened to several people. But they didn’t end up in my emergency room.” I rolled my eyes. “The ones that did were the ones who kept messing with the torpid lizards until they warmed up and woke up, or worse, took them inside to ‘save’ them. And an hour later had a wild lizard the size of a small dog runni
ng around their house or apartment with no idea how to catch them.”
He burst out into light laughter. “Ah. Iguana bites. It makes more sense now.”
“Any weird wildlife dangers for you back home?”
He paused for a moment, then shrugged. “Just the people.”
“Are you sure you’re not from Miami?”
He snorted. “No, no, all the biting reptiles back home have two legs and speak Italian.”
“Ah. Okay. I think I get it.”
Just don’t mention where he’s from, I guess, and he’ll be more comfortable. That would make it difficult to find out anything about his past, but I would rather have missed something than send him on an uncomfortable walk through bad memories.
“Do you?” he asked, then smiled wryly. “Most people do not. Instead, they tend to always assume there’s something back home that I miss. But those I would miss are gone from that place, and those whom I do not are the only ones left.” The sad wistfulness in his voice caught me off guard. He sounded…lonely.
My heart melted at the thought.
“I don’t know if there’s anything back in Miami that I miss anymore, besides, of course, not having rockets fired at my home and workplace on a regular basis.” I took an appreciative sniff of the savory smells that were now filling the room. “Though this is Miami, so for all I know by the time I get back, that will be a new fad.”
He laughed at that. “Well, there are other places to go that may be better for you. If there is one thing I have come to understand in my travels, it is that there is always another place to try.”
“This is actually my first time out of Florida,” I admitted in a small voice.
He blinked in surprise. “Oh. I am sorry. Have I offended you?”
“No, not at all, just feeling wistful. It feels weird that my first big trip out of town turned out to be to a war zone.”
“You could always travel elsewhere afterward,” he suggested.
I smiled and shook my head. “Money’s too tight between leaving my job and coming here. I have to build up something resembling savings first, and that could take me a few years.”
“Oh.” He again looked dumbfounded. “Are you certain I am not offending you?”
“Not intentionally,” I conceded to reassure him, though I was a little annoyed. Doctors, like a lot of wealthier-than-average people, tended to be a bit out of touch. But still, what kind of man couldn’t conceive of the fact that someone working as a nurse in the States wouldn’t have the cash to be a world traveler? “It’s just kind of clear that lack of funds isn’t a problem you usually face. Probably just means you were luckier than a lot of the rest of us, and don’t always realize that.”
His smile went lopsided again, and he looked almost sarcastic. “I suppose that depends on your definition of ‘luck.’”
“Financially.” I took a deep breath, trying to be patient. I liked him, I was attracted to him, but sometimes his unconscious arrogance and moodiness drove me crazy. Especially since something in me still wanted desperately to impress him. “Most nurses can’t actually afford to travel the world, and I’m one of them.”
He went quiet as he got up to stir the lentils. His expression was thoughtful, not angry or defensive. But when he spoke up, it was to change the subject entirely. “So you said that you could not perform as a nurse after your friend’s death?”
“No, I couldn’t.” I squashed another surge of irritation. “When Karla died, I quickly found I just couldn’t do the job. I would freeze. I thought we talked about this.”
“We did, but I need people with your talent and training over in the clinic, and I want to make certain you feel that you can continue to do the work without another incident before I put any more pressure on you about it.” He added a few more pinches from his spice rack, and some salt, stirred, then tasted the results. “I would kill for a tube of tomato concentrate about now,” he muttered.
“I would kill for a damn tomato,” I snarked, and he chuckled. But then, despite his dodging the issue of his privilege, I addressed his question. “I admit…my ability to do this came back so fast that I’m a little worried I’ll wake up tomorrow and it will have gone away again. But I think that’s mostly just because of how it shocked me when the skills I went into debt to acquire suddenly started failing me. One day I had them, and the next, it was like I hadn’t even gone to nursing school. Except for the piles of debt, of course.”
“Hmmm. Well, that would explain your reluctance. It would be disastrous if you froze in the middle of a procedure. However, you’re forgetting a few things.” He gave another stir and turned to face me, bemused.
I tensed just slightly. “Like what?”
He smiled faintly. “First off, you’re competent and good in a crisis. You had reasons to freeze when we were saving Yvonne, but you didn’t. I was there. I saw what you did, and I saw that even though the situation was very stressful, you pulled through admirably.”
I hadn’t been expecting that. “Okay, I’m waiting on the sarcasm, or on the ‘but.’”
“No ‘but,’ and I’m not being sarcastic.” He leaned against the counter near the hot plate, occasionally reaching over and giving it a stir. “I would also like to point out that if you’re working under me and start to have problems, you can always tell me. Do you think I’m going to come after Yvonne because she’s in bed with a gashed leg?”
“Of…course not.” I bit my lip. “But I’m not hospitalized.”
“No, but you are traumatized. So my second reassurance is that yes, if you have trouble, you can bring it to me without judgment. And the third, well, it’s a question. Do you think that attempting to use your nursing skills and potentially failing will actually save fewer lives than abstaining out of fear?”
I blushed. Hard. Had he read my mind? Or…
“I suspect that you’re no stranger to getting past traumatic crap,” I said.
“Heh.” His smile went a little stiff and he turned back to the lentils. “You are correct.”
Oh, boy. There I go chewing off my own foot again.
But he didn’t seem that troubled this time. “When a man talks about his accomplishments, he cannot talk about the fear he felt while working on them. That outbreak of hemorrhagic fever that I mentioned was an example of that. People die of it in the worst way possible. As if their immune systems never existed at all. I used to need a stiff drink after every shift.”
I nodded, glad he had confided in me about that at least. “I’m familiar with the symptoms. It sounds like something out of a horror movie.”
“Indeed.” He gave the lentils another stir. “If you’re not terrified of Ebola and its kin, you’re not educated on what it can do.”
I switched back to talking about the clinic, the local gossip, anything I could think of that would help him settle in—and keep from setting his darker moods off. I was less worried now that I would make a bad impression as I was worried about what memories my innocent questions would dig up. He seemed haunted.
He answered mildly, showing interest in the small interpersonal dramas that still managed to go on in the middle of a mass survival situation. I launched into one of my better stories, hoping it would amuse and distract him.
“We don’t get too many tourist types in a situation like this. It’s too dangerous, and the office back in the US vets too carefully. But now and again, we do get someone who just doesn’t fit in. Not just in an endangering way, but in a really ridiculous one. Since high conflict areas get a high turnover in volunteers, now and again someone like that slips through.”
His lips quirked in amusement as he ladled the lentil stew into two earthenware bowls. “Given how deadly serious you are about this place running smoothly, I’m shocked you can find the humor in any failed volunteer.”
The corner of my eye twitched. There was his sarcasm again. I had almost started to miss it. But that probably meant he was in a better mood.
I went on. “Well,
the thing about this guy was, he was barely a resident, had apparently been a hotshot in med school, and was much more interested in chasing women than in doing his job.” I took up my fork eagerly as Vincenzo set the simple meal in front of me. It smelled delicious, but I waited to dig in until he sat and took up his own fork.
“Now, nobody’s got time for this because it was during the last siege. And he just doesn’t get it. We had this adorable Filipino nurse here, and he was determined to get her in the sack, wedding ring or not.”
Vincenzo chuckled and fluffed his lentils with his fork, then added a precious pinch of parmesan from the tiny bowl on the table. “Did he confide this in you?”
“For some reason he decided that making friends with me would help get into her pants because I would vouch for him. What he didn’t understand was that everything I heard about his plans went straight to her. I hate manipulative people.”
I took an experimental bite…and went quiet as I ate several more. The stew was perfect. Like him, it almost seemed too good for what it was: lentils, spices, some bouillon, and a sprinkle of Parmesan, somehow tasting like a feast in the middle of a war zone.
“This is amazing,” I said between bites.
“My mother taught me a few tricks,” he said with a mild shrug. “I’ve got a bit of a treat to follow it up.”
“Really?” I wondered what kind of goodies he had managed to smuggle in here along with all this stuff. “If it’s as good as this, you might have trouble getting me to leave.”
He laughed softly and tucked into his meal. After a few bites, he lifted an eyebrow. “You never finished your story.”
“My story?” I looked down at my partially eaten stew and shrugged a shoulder. “Never mind, I’ve got better uses for my mouth right now.” How had he managed to make everything taste so good?
Maybe it’s the company, I thought and found myself blushing furiously for a moment. I covered it with a mild coughing fit.
“My, you were hungry after the day’s ordeal. Remember to breathe between bites, not during.” He smiled lopsidedly and took another bite of his stew.