Finding Serenity

by Eden Butler

“Yeah, that’s not gonna happen.”

  “It’s fine.” He takes a step back as she walks in front of him. “Besides, there isn’t any medical personnel here to take care of it.”

  “Let me take you to the ER.” Collins nods toward the parking lot.

  “Hell, no. It’s fine. I don’t need a doctor.”

  “You can’t stay like that,” Collins tells him, but Vaughn isn’t watching him. Instead, Mollie notices that his eyes are focused on the large oak tree she and Layla had used for shade.

  Mollie follows his gaze and then quickly looks back at him, understanding that he thinks slamming his body against the old tree would be an easy way to get his shoulder back into socket. “Don’t be stupid.”

  “Nobody here can treat it,” he says, looking down at her. She walks up to him and tries to disregard how his eyes have lowered, how despite the pain, he’s looking at her like he’d very much like to devour her. Though, she thinks, that could just be the mind numbing pain.

  “I can.” She doesn’t return his smile when he laughs. “Something funny?”

  “What do you weigh, one-ten? No thanks, little one, I can do it myself.”

  Mollie doesn’t think it would be wise to punch an already injured man, but it’s difficult to remember that when he’s looking at her like she’s an eight year old asking a classmate if he wants to play doctor.

  “Right. Enough of the G.I. Joe bullshit.” She looks at Declan, then to Donovan. “Take him down, boys.” And in an instant, both men have wrestled Vaughn to the ground flat on his back. He begins to fight them, to get their hands and arms away from him, but the pain must strike him fast; his winces and low curses tell Mollie that the pain is cresting.

  When she straddles his waist, Vaughn’s protests slow to mild complaints. Around them, the players back off, giving Mollie room to work.

  “Fine.” His voice is nothing more than a growl, “but if you’re going to do this be sure you get your knee in…”

  “Hey, Semper Fi, shut it.” Mollie’s bare legs move along his ribs, dragging his shirt with them so that her smooth skin slides against his body. She rests her hands on the ground around his head, hovering just above him. There’s a small blink of time where she catches Vaughn’s eyes and they stare at each other, their breaths heating between their open mouths. “I know what I’m doing so can the instructions.” Vaughn wets his lips, eyes drifting down to her chest which is only millimeters from his mouth before he focuses back at her face. “This isn’t my first time.”

  Despite the pain and the awkward tension building in front of their small audience, Vaughn manages a smile. “Well, will you be gentle?”

  “No.” Mollie climbs onto Vaughn’s chest, lifting her knee just below the dislocated shoulder. Before she pushes her leg up, she leans down, catching a whiff of his sweat-slick skin to whisper just above his mouth. “Baby, I’m always good, but I ain’t never gentle.”

  Vaughn hates hospitals. They always remind him of the desert, of the men and women in his unit that went in with missing limbs or gaping wounds and never came out. Hospitals in the States are nothing like hospitals in the desert. Logically, he knows that. But they all smell the same. There is always that sterile, putrid scent that burns the nostrils.

  This ER waiting room smells like shitty diapers and stale Fritos. There are two families waiting their turn as he sits next to Mollie. His arm in a sling, Mollie had insisted on the ER visit, wanting to score Vaughn some anti-inflammatories, maybe some pain meds. He just didn’t have it in him to argue. It seems when Mollie makes up her mind about something, there is no changing it and so he answered the young doctor’s questions, listened as the man berated him about a possible rotator cuff surgery and then he sent Vaughn and Mollie out into the lobby to wait on the prescriptions.

  The orange, plastic chairs squeak every time Vaughn moves. He watches Mollie’s foot shake, her spine straight as she avoids him, as a little kid sitting across the lobby from him smears chocolate across his dirty face. At least, Vaughn hopes it’s chocolate.

  The woman calling back to the kid, voice droning, whiny, holds an infant; the baby is swaddled in a thin, pink blanket and the woman pats its bottom, cooing to it in between fusses at the chocolate-faced boy. When the blanket falls from the infant’s head and Vaughn spots the billowing tufts of white blonde hair, he closes his eyes, heart clenched, air constricting him at a flash of memory, of potential, that left him a year before. His past, his wife, what she did, what was lost, all coalesces in that moment and it’s only when Vaughn shuts his eyes and focuses on the movement of Mollie’s jiggling foot and the smell of her skin—intoxicating vanilla—that the quick flash of pain eases from his heart.

  Mollie’s foot moves faster, shakes the ends of her sandals against her heel and Vaughn rests his hand on her knee to stop the movement. Her skin is soft, smooth but when she freezes, eyes downcast at his fingers covering her knee, he jerks his hand back.

  “You don’t have to wait with me.” He wonders why she won’t meet his eyes. “I can catch a cab after they bring me my prescriptions.”

  “It’s fine.” She exhales, rubs the back of her neck before she looks at him. “I don’t mind.”

  He should thank her. He knows that, but something stops him, clots the words in the back of his throat. She’d been so raw, so demanding out on that pitch, her body deceptive. She should not have been able to exert that much force. She is thin, muscular, true, but slender and her over him, breasts just inches from his mouth, words whipping out like a promise, like a threat, had Vaughn’s head spinning so much that the pain of his misplaced joint was momentarily forgotten.

  “How did you do it?” He stares at her profile and the delicate features of her nose, her cheekbones silhouetted against the fluorescent light.

  “What?” She finally looks at him, her left cheek up, giving her eyes a confused, curious expression.

  “My shoulder. How did you do it? You said you’d done it before, but you made it look like nothing.” Vaughn absently touches the tender joint. “I barely felt anything.”

  Mollie shrugs, passes off his compliments by looping the ends of her hair around her pinky. “I had to learn.” No further explanation; just like always, she is vague.

  Vaughn knows the cryptic nature comes from the secrets she likely had to keep for her father. He knows that the non-answers and tight-lipped way in which she generally speaks is all conditioned. He appreciates that, sees much of the same in himself. He wants to know. Part of him feels, he has to know.

  “How many times have you done it?”

  When her shoulders lower and her breath releases quick like she’s finally decided to exorcise some of the past, Vaughn leans back, stretches his good arm behind her on the plastic chair.

  “I couldn’t say.” Mollie chews her lip, squints her eyes as though trying to tick off a number in her head. “At least ten times?”

  This revelation has Vaughn’s eyes rounding. “At least ten times?” She nods. “Jesus.” Viv told him about the MC. She told him that Mollie had been taken from her father after his arrest. He couldn’t imagine what she’d seen in those short thirteen years, but if, during that time, she’d popped in dislocated shoulders at least ten times, then he wondered what else she had to learn. “Is that the only thing you learned how to treat?”

  He can’t read her expression and he thinks, perhaps, the non-disclosing will return. The closed off way in which she curls her arms around her waist and scoots away from him makes him think that’s exactly her intention, but when Vaughn brushes back a loose strand of hair from her forehead, tucks it behind her ear, that on-guard set of her body loosens, relaxes.

  “It wasn’t the only thing I treated, just the simplest.”

  “There was something worse than dislocated shoulders?”

  A nod again and she waves her hand like the idea is nothing. “Outlaw bikers.” Her voice is low and her eyes dart around the lobby. “There were plenty of stab wounds, a few busted lips that
needed stitches—that took some practice and the theory was easier than the practical, I promise.” She sinks down in her seat, eyes away from him, staring at nothing. “Gunshots are the hardest, though.”

  “My God, Mollie, how old were you?”

  She is cool, unaffected by his shock, as though the implications of his questions were nothing new; as though she’d heard them many times before. “I didn’t grow up in a picket fence kind of house, Semper Fi.” Her voice is flat, even, like she’s practiced this speech, but then she looks at him, eyes haunted. “My childhood wasn’t normal, probably nothing like yours.” Mollie watches the chocolate-faced kid run around the row of plastic seats. “A lot of folks don’t understand the world we live in and I’m sure there are hundreds, maybe thousands of kids who are more like me than you.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  Again she looks at him, a small wrinkle between her eyebrows. “We live in a violent world; kids grow up in that violent world. Kids have become desensitized to that violence. There are plenty of kids with no parents at all, who don’t flinch at gunshots ringing out in the dead of night; kids who go to more funerals than they do playgrounds.” She shrugs again, as though that reality should be obvious. “The first thirteen years of my life were like that. It was normal for me.” When he doesn’t speak, doesn’t do much else but stare at her, astounded, Mollie seems to sense his gawking and moves her head slow, gaze jumping up to his. “What?”

  “Mollie Malone, you are a bad ass woman.”

  He likes that the smile has returned, finally, and though he knows he shouldn’t, Vaughn inches closer, moves his hand onto her shoulder, sliding his thumb across that soft, soft skin.

  They sit close, the side of his chest just inches from her, the smell of her hair filtering into his nose and he likes it. He likes her. He shouldn’t; he knows this is a very, very bad idea, but he can’t seem to help himself.

  She is a girl, all smooth skin, priorities fluxed into selfish thoughts like most her age, but she is loyal, he’s seen that in her, in her friends. Her age makes him think that she is inexperienced, that her years do not equal much pain, much loss, but the reality of it is that she has been in her own battles, just like him. Mollie’s scars don’t cover her body like his; they have not left visible evidence of the loss she has known, but they are there just the same; hidden beneath a laugh that is deep, real. He knows he shouldn’t feel certain things where Mollie is concerned, but right now, sitting next to her, her head inching toward his shoulder, her scent doing things to his body, to his heart that he should ignore, Vaughn quickly understands that what he shouldn’t do, shouldn’t feel, is pointless to what he must.

  “Mollie,” he says, ready to forget for a moment that she is just a job. Ready to convince her that he doesn’t see a girl anymore when looks at her. She meets his gaze, big dark eyes that widen, that blink twice the closer he leans in. It is not an ideal setting—sterile peroxide making the air bitter, a loud kid with something questionable on his face, but as Mollie returns his stare and her eyes darken, lids lower, Vaughn blocks all sensation but the moisture on her lips and the small breath she releases when he kisses her. It is slight, barely passable as a kiss at all, but Vaughn still craves it, wants it to linger, to expand until he doesn’t feel anything but Mollie.

  She releases another exhale, this one moving up his cheek and as he reaches for her face to deepen the kiss, she pulls back, expression surprised, eyes a bit stunned. Then, those eyes shift, move toward the opening emergency room door, to the friend with the bloodied forehead and the old man that fusses over her and Mollie suddenly pulls away.

  “Autumn?” Mollie jumps from her chair and darts toward a redhead he assumes is yet another of the tight-knit circle that Viv told him means so much to her. Vaughn remembers this woman. She won the Dash; she fearlessly beat back a former boyfriend intent on sabotaging her victory. The old man, he assumes, is the redhead’s father.

  “Oh, hey, sweetie,” the redhead, this Autumn begins, taking the handkerchief the old man pushes against the gash on her forehead when he turns toward the nurse’s station.

  “What happened?”

  “I’m okay.” She turns, watches her father speak to a frazzled looking nurse. “Joe, you got everything? Do they need my card?” Autumn returns her attention to Mollie when her father takes the wallet she offers him. “Sweetie, I’m scared for you.” Autumn reaches for Mollie to steady her shaking hands. “We stopped by your place. I made you a cherry pie,” she waves her hand down the front of her light green tank top and Vaughn notices small sprinkles of blood on the collar. “I wanted to surprise you since I know you were going back there tonight. Joe was waiting in the parking lot and I ran up to get the key from Mrs. Varela to leave the pie in your kitchen.” Vaughn watches the redhead’s expression, the way her eyes blink, how she begins to sway. Mollie’s grip on her friend tightens. “Anyway, some asshole was there trying to break in.”

  “What?” Vaughn moves in closer. When he does, the old man steps to his daughter’s side.

  “Who are you then?” The accent is thick, Irish, and though he’s likely pushing sixty, Vaughn quickly gets that this isn’t some cantankerous push over. He’s seen enough rough necks and tough bastards to know a man who has done a lot of fighting, a lot of surviving in his life.

  Mollie answers for him. “Joe, this is Vaughn. He’s a—” she glances at Vaughn and seems to redirect her line of thinking. “From the Dash, remember? He’s my, um, friend.”

  A quick nod, and again Joe returns to the desk. Autumn shakes her head, dismissing her father’s rudeness. “Of course I don’t know if it was the same guy, but I think I shocked him. It was like he didn’t think anyone would be around.” She dabs a fresh drip of blood as it slides down her temples. “Anyway, he got antsy, pushed me out of his way and I fell. Hit my head on that ugly marble table by the mailboxes.”

  “Sweetie.” Mollie grabs hold of Autumn’s hand.

  “I’ll survive, really. Just need to have myself checked out.” She winces when she touches her forehead. “Maybe some stitches.” The nurse at the desk calls Autumn’s name and she and Joe are hustled toward the back. “Oh,” Autumn stops to turn back to Mollie, “I texted Declan. Can you let him know we’re back here if you see him?”

  “Of course,” Mollie says, then, a little louder, “I’m sorry, honey. Really I—”

  Autumn stops before the door and the nurse holding it open, trying to argue with the woman that she doesn’t need a wheelchair. “Mollie, none of this…” another sway, a small stagger and Autumn sits, holds the nurse’s hand when she asks Autumn if she is okay. She gives her nod, quick and then works a forced smile on her face. “None of this is on you, Mollie.” Autumn motions Mollie forward, takes her hand. “Don’t you dare think that any of us blame you for anything. We love you.”

  Vaughn watches her gaze follow Autumn as she disappears in the back, watches how those chocolate eyes take on a distinct, glassy shine and he grabs her hand, gives it a squeeze.

  “I’m fine,” she says before he can offer her any comfort.

  “This isn’t good, Mollie.”

  When she looks at him, there is no shock, no surprise contorting her features. “I know that.” She leans against the wall next to the water fountain, head tilted up, eyes toward the ceiling. “These things aren’t coincidental.”

  “Someone is targeting you.” She nods, the understanding clear in her expression and Vaughn decides he has to tell her the truth. Too many people are getting caught up in this attack on the witness’ family. Viv won’t like it, but he has to come clean. “Listen, Mollie, there’s something you should know.” She stands away from the wall, breath held, but before he can confess anything, the doors to the front entrance slams open, bounces against the wall and Declan Fraser thunders in.

  “Autumn McShane,” he asks the triage nurse, voice panicked. “She’s my girlfriend. She was brought in. She’s hurt.” When the nurse doesn’t move fast enough f
or his liking, Fraser stuffs his hands in his hair, eyes searching as though he’d like to scream. But then his gaze moves up, meets Mollie’s and he steps toward them.

  “Just tell me,” he says, taking her hand. “Is it bad?”

  “No, sweetie, no. But she’s woozy. She interrupted another break in.”

  Slowly, Declan moves his hands out of Mollie’s grip, rests them on his hips. “Did anyone get a good look at him?” When Mollie doesn’t answer quick enough, Declan’s worry peaks and he grips Mollie’s arm.

  “I don’t know.” The Irishman turns away, hand on the back of his neck. “I’m sorry, Declan.” She tries touching him, Vaughn thinks she means to calm him, but Fraser doesn’t respond, barely flinches.

  “We have to figure this out, but first I need to see her,” the last he directs toward the triage nurse who waves him off as she speaks into the telephone receiver.

  “I know. This is my fault,” she says.

  When Mollie’s voice barely moves above a whisper, Declan turns toward her and Vaughn recognizes his expression. He is overcome by fear, by the unknown. Vaughn had seen that look a hundred times in combat. “Or your fecking father’s,” he says, his tone biting, sharp.

  Mollie steps back, wounded, won’t meet the Irishman’s eyes and Vaughn intercedes, can’t take how her chin quivers, how she’s curled into herself.

  “That’s enough.” Vaughn pulls Mollie by her arm and settles her behind him. “I know you’re upset but that’s no reason to take it out on her.”

  There is a tense moment and again those warring emotions flit across Fraser’s face. Vaughn squares his shoulders, blocking Mollie from Declan’s sight telling him with a slight squint that he needs to walk away, but before anyone’s tempers can be ignited, Autumn’s father steps through the doors, catching the quiet awkwardness in the lobby.

  “Deco?” he says, calling the Irishman toward him.

  “Joe, how is she? Is she awake? Was she badly hurt? Where is she?” His questions release like a barrage from a machine gun. He begins to walk past the old man, but Joe holds him back.