by Jane Keeler
Lucky escape, she told herself, trying to straighten herself out. It’s a good job you didn’t get involved with that.
It was halfway through the lecture – sitting on the other side of the hall to Alison – that she got his text.
Sorry, my phone died last night. I’m fine. Have been thinking about you.
She felt her cheeks flush bright red with anger. How dare he carry on like that? With a brave determination that was carried by rage, she made up her mind to call him out.
That’s funny… I thought you would have had someone else on your mind.
Who do you mean?
I saw you kissing Alison.
A few minutes after her message went through, her phone started to ring. It was his number. She had set the ringer to silent, so she ignored it. He left a voicemail, but she ignored that too. It could wait until after the lecture.
She left the hall quickly, rushing away so that Alison couldn’t catch her, and went straight up to the dorm. It was late afternoon, and Jena wasn’t back yet. Finding a moment of privacy, she opened up her phone and played the voicemail, fully expecting some kind of ridiculous excuse.
“Hey, it’s Ethan,” his voice came through on the message, sounding far away. “I don’t know what you saw, but I’m not interested in Alison. She tried to kiss me and I pushed her off. Truth is I’m interested in you. If you want to see me, I’ll wait in the courtyard to the left of your hall when your lecture finishes. I hope you come.”
Eve’s heart sank.
She dialled his number furiously, pacing the room with her head in her hands. Like before, it rang and rang and rang. If he wasn’t screening her calls before, he probably was now.
---
“I think this is just what you need,” Jena said, handing her another of those infamous red cups.
“Maybe,” Eve sighed, looking around a little dubiously. “I guess it’s good to let my hair down once in a while.”
Jena had come home full of excitement about another party she had heard about, only to find Eve distraught over the whole Ethan situation. She had spilled all of the details there and then, admitting – to herself as much as to Jena – that she really was attracted to him. Jena consoled her, and with her wonderful way of talking, somehow convinced her that going to the party was the best possible solution. Borrowing another dress – a tight red number this time – she therefore found herself in another party, drinking another beer from a red cup.
Jena had already got talking to a pair of cute sophomores, and insisted that Eve stay in the conversation. One of them was actually not so bad – he was tall, built like a quarterback, and had unruly blond curls that just begged for hands to be run through them. His name was Dylan. After a couple of drinks, she started to feel more at ease. He was funny, honestly, and Jena seemed quite taken with his friend. It seemed as though she had met him before.
“You want another drink?” Dylan asked, and she nodded yes. When he brought it back she started to drink it immediately, feeling nervous all of a sudden.
“Thanks. So are you in a frat?” she asked.
“Oh, yeah, sure. Wow, you were thirsty, huh?” he laughed.
She grinned and shook her head, finishing off another mouthful. She realised she had managed to drink down half the cup already. “I guess. What frat is it, then?”
“Sigma Chi,” he said, pulling out a necklace from under his shirt to show her.
Something about that seemed off. At the back of her mind, she knew there was something important about Sigma Chi. It just seemed a little far away right now. Too far away to reach.
“I think I need to get some air,” she said, feeling a little woozy.
“You want me to come with you?” Jena asked quickly, though it was clear she was having a good time with her new friend.
“I’ll go,” Dylan volunteered, helping her to her feet and outside of the building.
The outside air was refreshing, but she still felt weirdly groggy. She just wanted to sit down. “’m tired…” she muttered.
“I’ll take you back to my dorm, you can rest there,” Dylan said, starting to lead her off down the pathway.
Dimly, in front of her, she saw a familiar shape approaching. “… Ethan?” she murmured, just as she felt herself starting to sink into sleep.
Chapter Six
When Eve opened her eyes, she could not at first work out where she was. The room was dark, and there were unfamiliar posters on the walls. She was in a bed, but the covers were not her own. Then she noticed Ethan sitting in a chair a foot or so away, and shot upright.
“You’re awake,” he said, quietly.
Eve looked around rapidly, trying to work out what had happened. “I was… I was at a party…”
“Yeah, talking to the same guy that spiked Jena’s drink at the last party you went to. You two have great taste,” Ethan said, rubbing his forehead and sounding tired.
“… Dylan? But…”
“It’s alright, she didn’t know. Apparently he spiked it on behalf of someone else last time. I got her out of there safely too. My dorm’s just closer for carrying you.” He got up and started to move closer to her, leaning over the bed. “Are you feeling alright?”
Eve was mentally checking her body, finding to her surprise that she was still fully dressed and in no way injured. “Yes, I guess I’m fine.”
“Headache?” he asked, laying a hand on her forehead to check her temperature.
“No – well, a little – what happened this time?” she asked, noticing a fresh cut on his lip that had started to swell.
“Dylan,” he said, drawing back slightly. “Should have known better than to take him on twice. Two fights I’ve lost thanks to you.”
Eve was at first thankful, then suddenly taken aback. Ethan really knew how to turn on the charm. “I’m sorry to have been such a burden,” she muttered. “I’ll get out of your way if you like.”
He sighed. “I’m sorry. I guess I’m a little too spiky for my own good. I’m just mad about the fact that he almost got away with hurting you.”
There was a pause; Eve sat up a little straighter, and reached up to touch his chin, pulling his face back round so that she could see it better in the light from the moon. “Does that hurt?”
“Only a little,” he said, almost brusquely. Trying to be the tough guy.
Almost without thinking, Eve reached up further, pulling him towards her at the same time. Gently, trying not to hurt him, she planted the smallest of kisses on his lips. “Thank you.”
Ethan winced. “You picked a fine time to decide you want to kiss me,” he said.
“I always wanted to kiss you,” she replied, and it was true.
Ethan sat down on the edge of the bed, bringing his hands up to the sides of her face, and in spite of the pain it must have caused him, he kissed her back. Before she knew it – almost before she could control herself – she put her hands on his chest.
At that moment, something stirred inside her. She thought of the love poems of Rossetti, the passions and desires she had written about. She thought about her own life, denying everything for the sake of academic progression. She thought about how the written word could only convey the strongest of feelings if the writer actually knew how they felt. There and then, immediately, she wanted to feel. To feel everything. To feel everything with him.
She started to tug at the bottom of his shirt, and he pulled back for a moment. “Are you sure about this?” he asked, hesitating just at the point of no return.
“Yes,” she said, simply, and that was enough.
His hands were hot, but light, smoothing over her skin and setting her on fire. He reached behind to unzip her dress and then tug it off over her head, her hair falling untamed over her bare shoulders. His shirt and jeans fell away to reveal a toned body, the muscles she had fantasized about, so much more enticing in the flesh.
They burned together, and when he entered her it was the most right thing she had ever felt – d
espite the pinch of pain that came with the newness of it all, it was everything she could have imagined. At some point their kisses broke the fresh wound on his lip and he grunted in pain, but despite their fevered passion he managed to be slow and gentle until she could handle more. This was everything.
Lying in his arms, tangled in the sweat-drenched sheets of his bed, Eve caught her breath. It was clear that he was going to have to learn to open up and improve his attitude if they weren’t going to have a whole series of misunderstandings. It was also clear that she was going to have to work hard to fit her studies around whatever this would turn into. But sometimes, she reflected, life itself could be poetry.
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*** THE END ***
Book Seventeen
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TO HEAL A BROKEN SOLDIER
By Jane Keeler
For Emilia, her weekends were sporadic and all over the place. She never quite knew when she would get time off, but reveled in the ability to leave the hospital and have some time to herself to explore the city where she was stationed.
The town of Landstuhl was quaint and cute, busy with the natural movement within it as well as the tourists coming to visit. They came mostly for the thousand year old castle that loomed above her. She looked up longingly at the Burg Nanstein castle. She had a fascination with castles since she was a child in America, though, and loved the idea of living beneath it. She was heading up there today, for the first time, to check out the castle and have a cup of coffee in their cafe. It seemed like just what she needed to get out of the army housing and hospital and go explore something truly beautiful.
She got a page, though, and had to look away from Burg Nanstein to read it. She was stationed in Landstuhl at the military's Regional Medical Center there and there was going to be a bus-full of patients arriving within the day that she had to do pre-med analysis for.
She rushed back to the army housing, got dressed out of her casual clothes and into her scrubs and lab coat and jogged to the hospital gates. She looked up at the seal that bore the words "Selfless Service" on it. She certainly was selflessly serving, unable to get out of her 5-year long commitment. She had signed up before med school, enticed by the way the military took care of all of her tuition, but now she realized that she would much rather be in a civilian hospital than a military one. She had about a year left and was counting down the days.
She wasn't of the mind that being a soldier first and doctor second helped her practice medicine and was disheartened when she realized that that's what it took to be a military doctor. Despite that, she was a woman that was persevering and could get through hardship, but the longevity of the five years was looming over her ominously.
She got to the emergency room in time to look over the CAT-scans of the patients she would be treating that were taken in the combat zone that had been sent electronically to the hospital. She was most excited to be able to work on a man that had two shattered vertebrae in his neck. She had never seen something lie it and it seemed that he wouldn't make it unless she did something extraordinary.
The arrival of the blue bus filled with the latest casualties of the Iraq and Afghanistan war. She waited outside of the ER with the other doctors and volunteers and when it arrived she was the first to get her patient out of the bus and onto a gurney. She assessed his injuries and took his vitals while another set him up on an IV.
"Hey Doc," he said to her, opening his eyes.
"Hold on, sir," she replied, looking into his icy blue eyes.
"Doc, I just wanted to say how beautiful you are."
She was taken aback. She hadn't been complimented on her looks in a long time since she was in such a professional workplace and never really left it.
"Th-thank you," she told him with a stutter.
"Cute, too. I like you, Doc. Good luck," he said and his eyes closed again.
He went under the knife just under an hour later. She had to go through the front of his neck, pushing aside his voice box and trachea to remove the damaged fragments of the vertebrae. Then, she grafted in new bone and inserted a titanium plate.
She couldn't help but notice his strong jawline and handsome features. He had black hair shorn close to his scalp and temples, like any military man. His lips were full and kind, like he smiled a lot when he was awake.
After the surgery, she looked over his rank again. His name was Derek Lander and he was a staff sergeant machine-gunner, which meant he was pretty well-ranked in his company and led a squad. She was impressed, but caught herself. She reminded herself how little rank mattered, how the whole idea of it was inane, and that she shouldn't care at all. What was he to her but another patient? What was he but another jarhead? Nothing, she reminded herself. He was nothing to her but someone to save.
And she had, against the odds. Because she had gone in through the front of the neck to replace bone, she had saved his life. The operation was a huge success and she was congratulated by several of her colleagues. She replied with thanks and took off her gloves, then looked at the patient one more time, lingering on his face and how it looked like any other she had seen. There was something about it, she thought, something she couldn't quite place.
She went about the same duties that day and the next, until she was called in to the room where the staff sergeant was recovering.
"Sergeant," she said when she entered, as was protocol.
"Doctor," he said, "how can I ever thank you for what you've done?"
She looked away from him, then back, "I don't know, but when you figure it out, you know where I am."
"The ER?"
"Always," she replied.
Derek asked her, "Is it your life?"
"It has to be."
"Why?" he asked.
"The military needs me."
"It's not like you're a combat soldier."
She rolled her eyes and said, "I might as well be."
He seemed perturbed by that. His black brows furrowed over his cyan eyes.
"Not to demean your position."
"Go to a forward position and tell me then that your job is hard."
"My job's not hard, my position is. I'm sorry to say something like that, though."
He nodded, and then grew less perturbed as he said, "It's more than fine. I know how much duty can wear a person down."
"Not to say that you've been worn down, or anything," she said as she flicked the tube to his morphine to speed it up. She took the clipboard off of the end of the bed and looked over what the orderlies had written on it since the operation. "It all looks good on my end, but you're going to have to spend some time in the USO Warrior Center, that's for sure."
"What's that?"
"A part of the hospital for recovering patients. A place to stay other than the barracks. More homey."
"Oh," he said, looking away.
"It's nicer than any recovery center I've heard about."
"Have you worked at other hospitals?"
"No," she said. "Other than my residency."
"Really?"
"Yeah, I went to med school for three years and did my residency in two, so then I owed the army five years. I'm almost out."
"You owed them?"
She had never talked this much to a patient and looked away from him and back to her clipboard.
"What do you mean, 'owe them'?" he asked again.
"I need to work back my time I spent in med school and my residency. So I spent five years doing that, so I needed to work that time off."
"Oh, I see," he said, looking away. His face grew distant and she could tell he felt something she didn't understand.
"I'll check back on you in a couple of hours, how does that sound?" she asked.
He nodded and she left the room. In that time she thought deeply about her interaction with Derek. She had wanted to please him for some reason and hadn't done a very good job of it. She couldn't shake the feeling that she would rather make him happy then sad, which she cha
lked up to the patient-doctor relationship. She wanted him happy so that he would get better faster and he was always going to feel like his doctor could be doing more. But there was something else there that she couldn't put her finger on.
She went back to see him and was all smiles. She wanted to let him know that she was confident in him, in her position at the hospital, in herself-- whatever he needed to know.
He shocked her by saying, "You're stunningly gorgeous, you know."
"Oh," she said, faltering. She had always thought her auburn hair and lackluster hazel eyes weren't something to be coveted, but she doubted her opinion of herself, now.
"Really, really gorgeous. How do you not know that, already?"
"Me?" she asked.
He chuckled and said, "Yes, you."
"Derek, you seem to have some residual brain impairments."
He sat up a little straighter, "What do you mean?"
She laughed quickly and reassured him, "A joke. You're better than fine. You just seem to not know what you're talking about, is all."
"I don't know?" he said with a half grin. "I've seen my fair share of women. And none of them could hold a candle to you, doc."
She was flustered, but said, "The name's Emilia."
He repeated, "Emilia."
"Let's get to brass tacks. How do you feel, Derek?"
"I like the first-name basis."
"I'm sorry, Sergeant."
"Staff Sergeant, you know," he said and laughed and she did too, lightly. She was slightly uncomfortable with someone that respected his title so thoroughly.
"Staff Sergeant Derek Lander, how are you feeling?"
"Better than I've ever felt in my life," he told her. "I have a hole in my neck. A few plates of metal pressed against my spine and I'm laying in my own casket."
