“Nah. Just geeky,” he responded. It was hard to find a subject on which they disagreed more on than the simple question of which was better: cats or dogs.
“Dogs,” Bridget argued.
“Cats.” Theo was adamant. It was a cute little banter, nothing more than a conversation roller. And with every topic they breached, Bridget found herself falling a little more for the man.
*****
They had kept the first meeting relatively short, like something of a teaser, or an appetizer. But the meetings grew, both in frequency and in length, expanding from sweet little nothings to more lengthy, more cozy meetings.
As the meetings grew, so did their feelings for each other. But Bridget was less than enthusiastic about revealing them, too often prone to her habit of panicking and overthinking things.
What if he doesn’t reciprocate them? What if I’m too forward? What if – why all these “what if”s, Marnie had scolded her. Just tell him. If only telling him could be summed up with a “just.” Bridget shook her head. She would wait, wait for the right moment and the right opportunity to tell him. And perhaps, she wouldn’t have to be the one to initiate it at all – perhaps Theo would tell her first.
But Theo, for all his cockiness and quiet self-assuredness, was just as, if not more, nervous about telling her than she was. At stake was also his pride, should she choose to reject him.
Though both clasped their hands in prayer, seeking God for answers on what to do, it was difficult to keep trusting God for the right opportunity to confess. So both held onto their confessions, both held onto their feelings, hardly daring to call their meetings anything more than just dalliances though both wished for them to be more.
Bridget held her breath, hardly daring to call them dates. But Theo did. He didn’t do it on purpose – it simply slipped out one day, when they were saying their goodbyes.
*****
“I’ve got work,” Bridget said regretfully, a small apologetic smile on her face.
“You’ve always got work,” Theo grumbled, “and I can never properly take you out on a nice date.” He gave her a smile regardless though she hardly noticed. Date. He had said date.
“Says the doctor-in-training,” she pointed out instead. “You’ve got a busier schedule than I,” she accused teasingly.
“Fair enough,” he agreed. “It’s a shame that our breaks don’t coincide,” he let out a sigh, slinging an arm over her shoulder. She huddled in closer; the restaurant patio hadn’t been too cold earlier, but as night descended, the winds started getting chilly.
She shrugged, not knowing what else to say. “What were you planning anyways? A romantic dinner by candlelight?” She laughed, knowing full well that they both hated the idea of anything overly sappy or fancy.
“Ew.” Theo wrinkled his nose, as expected. “How about at the park? Saturday? You can’t possibly have work then.”
“And if I did?”
“I wouldn’t even be asking you out on a date – I would be asking what kind of debt you owed to warrant working on a Saturday,” Theo answered.
Bridget laughed, the sound muffled by his coat as she burrowed closer in for warmth. “Saturday works. Afternoon?”
“Afternoon’s good,” Theo affirmed.
*****
It’s a relatively sunny day at the park –fall has come, and the red and gold leaves swirl down in pretty patterns, casting their shadows on the dusty sand.
Theo had found for them a little wrought-iron bench in the shade of a large maple tree, and they had contented themselves with a little picnic basket he’d prepared.
“Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches?” She raised a questioning brow, pointing at the tiny triangle.
Theo shrugged. “I would’ve burned down the house had I tried to cook anything,” he said unapologetically. “I can buy you something,” he offered.
“No, it’s fine,” she said, biting into the sandwich with a smile. “You never told me you couldn’t cook. I could’ve made something.”
“When you’re courting, you can’t exactly afford to bring out all the bad traits,” he joked.
“Leading the girl on, I see,” she tsked, playing along.
“Wait till you get married,” Theo nodded sagely. “Then let them figure it out.” Bridget smacked him in the arm, eliciting a wounded look from him.
“That hurt” he said sullenly.
“Poor Theo.” She mussed up his hair, laughing when he let out an indignant yelp.
“I don’t know why I put up with you,” he shook his head with a smile.
“I could say the same.” Bridget pretended to be disinterested and disappointed in the cuisine. “I can’t believe after all this time, you tell me now of all times that you can’t cook. If I had known earlier, we wouldn’t have been together for so long.”
“Ah, see,” Theo nodded sagely, taking another bite of his sandwich. “That is why I couldn’t say anything earlier. Now you’re stuck.” He stuck his tongue out at her.
“Ew, that’s gross – keep your food in your mouth,” Bridget laughed, poking him. They ate their sandwiches together in companionable silence for some time before Bridget spoke again.
“Can you at least brew coffee?”
He looked at her, a completely offended look on his face. “Of course I can. How else would I have been able to survive medical school?”
“Good, because God says men should know how to make coffee.”
“Where?” He looked at her dubiously, not so inclined to trust her again.
“Hebrews.” Bridget couldn’t help it. She cracked up, not just at the lame joke, but at Theo’s completely disbelieving face.
“That was not so funny.” He had to work extremely hard to keep the smile from coming to his face. She poked his cheek.
“I see the corner of your lip twitching. Just give up,” she told him smugly. Naturally, he refused, setting his jaw even more determinedly. But she knew exactly how to break him.
Bridget poked his side, giving him an innocent look as he jumped, laughing with a startled yelp.
“You cheated!”
“Didn’t.”
“God saw that. Don’t lie.”
“I was encouraging it. I didn’t cheat at all.”
Bridget couldn’t remember how she had kept herself so entertained or so happy before Theo. He seemed to fill her days with endless laughter and gave her the strength not to stray from her walk with God. He just made everything seem so right. And for that, she was eternally grateful to God.
She rested her head against Theo, closing her eyes as her lips curled upward in a quiet, contented smile. He was telling her a story, or something of that sort, and as she listened, she could picture everything he said in vivid, colorful images.
But then he shifted. She sat up, turning to look at him, concerned.
“It’s nothing,” he assured her.
“Is my head too pointy?” She quirked him a smile.
“Yes,” he deadpanned, and she gave him a shocked look. “But that’s not it,” he laughed, pulling her close once more. Bridget huffed, but thought nothing more of the matter.
It wasn’t until a short while later that she realized he had been lying.
*****
“Theo! Theo!”
The wail of sirens and flash of red and white and the clanging of metal couldn’t drown out her cries, and the presence of people in white couldn’t reassure her, and even her faith in God couldn’t keep her from crumbling. Everything around her seemed to blur in both fast forward and slow motion at the same time. She couldn’t comprehend everything; it was happening too fast for her to react.
There were too many people, but not enough people, and it was all terribly confusing, and all she remembered was lots of concrete and stretchers and medications that she couldn’t remember the name of. There were too many questions, questions she found she couldn’t answer, and questions she realized she didn’t know existed.
Throughout everything, the
only thing that remained clear in her head was the echoing, ominous, frightening thought: Theo is not okay.
And she’s screaming and she’s crying, but she didn’t remember why. All she knew was that something was wrong, so terribly wrong, and he had to be okay, he just had to, just so she would be okay too.
*****
She prayed. She prayed because it was all she could afford to do, and it was all she could do.
Please. Please let him be okay. Please. Tears prickled at the corner of her eyes, threatening to spill out and run tracks down her face. Let me be okay.
Bridget couldn’t think of a time where she had prayed more. But it was all she had now. All she had was God and all she had was prayer, and all she could do was pray for a miracle.
She was angry, too. Angry to begin with, and angry at God. Why? What had Theo done, to provoke this sudden heart attack? How? What had he done to displease God? She couldn’t find answers. She didn’t have the strength to find answers. And while she held onto her burning anger and hot tears, she soon found she no longer had the energy to be angry either.
There was just a feeling of empty fear inside of her. She couldn’t describe it. It was cold and hot at the same time, frantic, but calm, painful, yet numbing. It had gripped after it had become clear that Theo wasn’t going to respond to her. She had shaken him so much she was certain his brain was going to completely fall apart when he came to.
She had thought it originally a practical joke on his part, albeit an extraordinarily unfunny one. Medical students, she had assumed, had an odd sense of humor. He had stopped talking to her mid-sentence, breaking off into a gasping like noise while clutching his chest. She had assumed he was choking – they had been laughing hard only seconds before – and so thought nothing of it, until he started shifting in actual discomfort.
Then she’d started getting worried, but he waved her off, instead putting it off to laughing too hard, or perhaps eating too much. It wasn’t until he started being unresponsive to her prods and pokes and instead staring off glassily into the distance that she decided to call the ambulance.
Myocardial infarction. She didn’t need to be a doctor to know what that meant. Heart attack. It instantly terrified her. There was something immediately offsetting about having an ambulance there, with their team of medics in blinding white and their stretcher laid out in front of her, remnants of a supposedly innocent date behind her in the form of scraped napkins and abandoned sandwiches.
Perhaps it was just the inherent fear that came with the blaring of ambulances and the sight of spectators and the quiet, authoritative direction of the medics that spiked the sense of fear in her. But even more than that, even louder than that was the screaming fear within her that Theo might not be okay. She had heard too many stories of people dying of heart attacks, and while Bridget would be the first to admit she wasn’t one to jump to the worst possible consequence, she couldn’t get the images of a dying Theo out of her head fast enough.
She had been driven over in a police car, and the ride to the hospital had been uncomfortably tense and fearful. The policewoman had tactfully decided against saying anything, instead opting to let Bridget stare out the window in silence, lost in the swirl of thoughts in her head.
The sky had been cheerfully blue, accusingly so, and Bridget couldn’t help but wonder exactly how something so right had ended up taking such a turn for the worse. When she had first stepped into the white-washed building of their local hospital, she was greeted with only the sad-eyed, lackluster gaze of the patients sitting in the waiting room, and the mumbled chatter of the people was only broken by the occasional cheerful voice of a nurse, or the squeak of a wheelchair against the clean tile.
And here she was now, curled up on an uncomfortable plastic chair, watching the love of her life sleep away with quiet, steady breathing in the sad, cold hospital bed only several feet in front of her. She breathed in time with him, to the steady, syncopated tempo of his heart monitor, hoping, praying, wishing.
She watched him, eyes soft with love and worry as she brushed them over his mussed up hair. His jaw, which had only hours before been clenched tightly shut during their banter together, was now gently slack, reflecting a peace in his face that had not been there at the initial beginning of the attack.
The doctors had said he would be fine, but would need monitoring for the next few days for signs of relapse or what had caused the collapse. The doctors and their fancy words meant nothing to Bridget. All that mattered was Theo getting out safely. All that mattered was that Theo would be okay. She burrowed her nose into the crook of her arm, shutting her eyes as she did so. Maybe it was all a bad dream. Maybe, when she finally woke up, everything would be okay. Everything would be normal, and they would be fine, laughing about finishing each other’s sandwiches and the colorful little guppies in Dr. Winters’s office and the impossibility of having a Netflix marathon anytime in the somewhat near future.
So she slept, worried wrinkles on her forehead smoothing out into an unconcerned mask as she dreamed of a world in which everything was right.
*****
Theo awoke to the sound of quiet beeping, and white, scratchy sheets that clearly weren’t his. The room was blurry – his eyes, it seemed, hadn’t awakened yet. But when they did focus, he found a clock on the wall in front of him. Four o’clock, it read. He couldn’t tell if it was morning or night – the shutters had been drawn completely shut and the room rendered dark so that he could better sleep.
To the right, there was a small table, with a jug of sad looking flowers, a napkin, and a plastic cup of water. The constant beeping was coming from his left, and so he looked up. It was a monitor, and the constant beeping was his heartbeat. Theo blinked a few times. He didn’t remember much, just a sharp pain and then blackness. There was shouting, lots of it, and it all was much too disorienting, coming back to him in a too-sudden rush of memories.
Theo shook his head. What was he doing prior to blacking out? Leaves. He remembered leaves, so he must have been outdoors somewhere. Concrete, and a bench. The park? Bit by bit, he started piecing together the image in his mind. And when he put the last piece back in, he panicked, bolting upright as his heart rate suddenly spiked. Bridget. He’d been on a date with Bridget.
He’d been eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with her in the park and they had been laughing about making coffee and everything else silly in between and then – he couldn’t remember much afterwards. He remembered hearing his name, and he remembered the stale whiteness of the ambulance and the concerned, wide eyes of the medics caring for him. He remembered the nitroglycerin. How ironic, he had thought, to be in the position of patient rather than caretaker for once. He didn’t remember Bridget coming with him in the ambulance.
“Bridget?” He called out into the darkness softly, then laughed at himself. Of course, she wouldn’t be here. It was the hospital, and he had been sleeping for so long. Of course, she wouldn’t be here.
But a movement caught his attention from the corner of his eye. He had missed it before. She was here.
She was here, and his heart swelling, with an abundance of love as much as there was an overwhelming sense of apologetic pity. But she had come. She had come, and that was all that really mattered.
“Bridget,” he called again softly.
She was sleeping but shifted slightly in her sleep.
“Bridget.” She blinked lazily, just as disoriented as he had been, but when her eyes focused, she could only focus on him. And her eyes widened, shocked, he was sure, but also filled with an inexplicably excited sort of happiness. But then she was crying, weeping, and no longer happy. And Theo was completely alarmed. She stumbled over, barely able to see through the curtain of water in her eyes.
“I was so afraid,” she said, sitting down on the edge of his bed as she grasped his hand. She was babbling now, she was sure of it. “I was so scared you might die,” she said brokenly, no longer bothering to hold the tears back.
She was almost afraid to think it, almost afraid to hope for it, because all good things, she had thought, slipped away like fairy dust in her fingers whenever she so much as looked at it. But she dared to hope.
God, she thought, will we be okay?
And almost as if an answer, the sun slipped a shy finger in through the closed curtain, a tiny ray of hope.
THE END
Bonus Story 3 of 10
Betsy
It was 11:25 and Casey Larson had just over a half an hour to finish writing the news for the noon broadcast.
It had been a crazy day, with a car crash on Route 6 that had killed a mother and her infant son and, earlier in the day, one of the state’s senators had held a press conference at the Hyannis Resort Hotel to announce the passage of a new land bank bill that would help to preserve Cape Cod’s wilderness—or what was left of it.
Casey had been working at WCCB for the past two years, and although she loved her job, it was hard to be a single mother and a career woman who devoted her working life to breaking news. Since the major television networks and other big news outlets were located sixty miles away in Boston, WCCB was the only source of local news for Cape Cod. She and Mark Lawson were it. The two of them kept churning out the news, six days a week on the radio.
At two minutes to twelve, Casey ran into the sound booth and turned on the mike, waiting for the news jingle to finish so she could begin her newscast.
“Good Afternoon,” she announced into the mike in the soundproof room. “The time is twelve o’clock noon. I’m Casey Larson. Today in the news…”
When she was finished, she walked back into the newsroom and collapsed into her chair. She put her head down on her desk, her long brown hair falling in tangles.
“Crazy, crazy day,” Mark, her news director, said from his desk across the room. “I hate to leave you with so much going on, but I’m going to stop by the police station in Yarmouth to interview the chief about all of the break-ins there. Then I’m going home, Case. I’ve been here since 5:00 this morning.”
Clean Inspirational Romance: Escape to Paradise (Inspirational Happy Sweet First Love Second Chance Romance) (Contemporary New Adult Love Inspired Holiday Short Stories) Page 9
