Romantic Interludes

by TWCS Authors

  “You seemed a little upset this morning.”

  Damn it! Did anyone miss my dramatics this morning?

  “Got some, uh . . . bad news.”

  “Does that news have anything to do with someone tall, dark, and sexy?” Carrie asked, leaning on the countertop and nearly spilling her ample cleavage out of her tight-as-hell scrub top. “And currently staring longingly at you from across the unit?”

  Staring . . . what?

  Following Carrie’s gaze, I saw Mitch glaring at me from the other side of the room. His arms were folded defensively across his chest, and he had that hot-as-hell eff-you look on his face. Lovingly? If looks could kill, I’d be dead on this nasty hospital floor.

  Suddenly I felt a bit slighted. I should be the one giving him looks of death. After all, wasn’t I the one who’d caught his ass in a lie?

  “I can’t deal with this right now.” I gave Mitch my back, massaging my temples with my fingertips to ward off the oncoming headache. At almost noon, I had yet to have my first cup of coffee. The ER buzzed with its common fast-paced commotion, and the stress of my love life didn’t help any.

  “This time last month you two were sneaking off the floor every chance you could get. What happened between you two?” Carrie asked low enough to keep the conversation between the two of us.

  “Oh my God, you knew about that?”

  Images of heated moments in the darkened janitor’s closet and whispered words of passion with the brush of warm lips flooded through my mind. My heart quickened from just remembering how he’d felt. The rustle of our clothes as we stripped each other bare, the sighs of serenity when he entered me, the barest touch of fingertips on my breasts that kept me crazed in that unending demand. Things between us had been so raw back in the beginning, as if we were almost desperate for each other. The excitement of new feelings drew me in, but the discovery of how his body fed the most basic needs of mine fueled us into a fevered hunger neither one of us could ignore. Sometimes we couldn’t even make it through a shift without succumbing.

  Perhaps I’d been foolish to think we’d had something special based on how attuned we were to one another sexually. To him, maybe that’s all it turned out to be—just good times in bed. In the end, it didn’t appear to be hard for him to start something new. It didn’t seem difficult for him to lie to me after our last amazing night together.

  Still, to know that our actions hadn’t gone unnoticed by at least one of our coworkers was embarrassing, especially now that things were over between us.

  “It wasn’t hard to put the pieces together.” Carrie smiled at me in the way of a woman who wants the details of her friend’s hot night with the equally hot boy toy. I opted to ignore her outright and stick with the important points.

  “Does anyone else know about it?”

  “I don’t know.” Carrie shrugged. Suddenly, she let out a gasp, catching the attention of a couple people standing nearby. “He’s not married, is he?”

  “No!” I grabbed her arm to pull her away from the main traffic by the nurses’ station.

  “Well then, why does it matter that I know or if anyone else does?” She pulled her arm away from me, causing me to stop mid-step.

  “Because it’s over. It never should’ve started to begin with,” I said, feeling the sting of tears forming in my eyes.

  “Oh, honey . . . I’m sorry.” Carrie went to hug me, but I took a step back.

  “It’s okay,” I told her as I fiddled with the pens in my pocket. “I really don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

  “Sure, I understand, sweetie,” she said with another effing pitiful expression.

  Before she could say anything else, I jetted into the nearby staff bathroom. By that time, my tears were in a full on torrential downpour, and I hurriedly swiped my finger underneath my eyes to save at least some of my mascara from clumping into sodden tangles. Bad enough that I’d apparently made a scene this morning, but to actually appear to be upset for the rest of my shift day would just add more to the gossip mill.

  Lady Luck didn’t seem to favor me very much this morning because as soon as I poked my head outside the bathroom door, I saw Grace waiting for me with a sympathetic, concerned expression.

  “Are you okay, sweet pea?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” I said with a sigh. “Just received some tough news this morning.”

  “You’re not pregnant, are you?”

  “No, nothing like that.” I may have sounded a bit harsh, but I needed to stop that thought process dead in its tracks. Besides being too young to contemplate that scenario, I didn’t want that kind of rumor floating around the halls. My attempts at steering the masses away from speculation had left me batting for zero.

  “Good. I don’t think you and Mitch are ready for a step that big just yet.”

  Great.

  Instead of commenting, I decided to refocus. I did happen to be at work, after all.

  “Anything coming in?”

  “Just got off the radio. That’s why I was looking for you, but Carrie said you were a little upset. Do you need to go home for the day?” Grace paused to assess my response.

  “No, I’m good.”

  “Okay.” She handed me a short report from the arriving ambulance. “EMS is bringing in a sixty-four-year-old male experiencing dizziness and epigastric pain. The bus reported he’d taken aspirin at the onset of symptoms. Guess he was a medic in the war or something.”

  “Smart man.” I nodded, glancing over the basic information.

  “ETA ten minutes.”

  I sensed someone else approach and I looked up. Mitch stood next to our charge nurse, looking like he needed to speak with me.

  Grace tactfully decided to make herself scarce. “I’ll go set up the room for you, Chris.”

  “Thanks,” I said, but she’d already made it halfway down the hall before the words came out of my mouth.

  “Can I talk to you for a minute?” The way Mitch stood in front of me, blocking my escape, didn’t brook any argument.

  “Do you really think this is the place for this?” I asked him, despising the way I felt trapped into speaking with him.

  “I just want to know what happened.” He placed both hands on my shoulders and ran his palms up and down my arms. I hated the way my body reacted to his touch. “I thought we were having fun.”

  “Fun?” I felt the proverbial flames shooting from the sides of my face. “We were having fun?”

  “Well, yeah.” He seemed surprised by my reaction.

  I ran a hand through my hair. “Jeez, Mitch. Well, I guess I’m done having ‘fun’ with you.” I stormed off, feeling the rage boiling in my blood. We were having fun? Like it had all been a game, and his plaything had been put back on the do-not-touch shelf?

  “I didn’t mean it like that.”

  It seemed he’d finally understood what he’d said, but I didn’t care. I’d had enough, and no amount of pleading on his part would ever get me to let my guard down around him again.

  “The bus is pulling up,” Carried said as I approached the nurses’ station with Mitch hot on my heels.

  “Thanks, Carrie.” My tone sounded brisk and harsh.

  “Yeah, no problem,” she said, glancing between me and the man standing not two feet behind me. I had to put an end to this.

  “Chris, you know I didn’t mean it like that. I thought we had something special. I really like you a lot,” Mitch said when I faced him.

  The pain and desperation in his eyes made me pause for just a moment. “I like you, too, Mitch.”

  “Then why the evasion?”

  The thing was, Mitch didn’t know why I’d stopped taking his calls. I just stopped, and for three weeks he’d been trying to contact me with no success. It probably wasn’t fair for me to avoid the confrontation that was likely to occur, but I didn’t want to be drawn back into a situation like the one I’d been in before. Once a liar, always a liar, and if I allowed him to convince me otherwise, I’d
be the fool again.

  No, it was better to let him believe I just didn’t want him anymore.

  “It just didn’t work out, okay?” I turned to the intake room with an air of finality, despite my heart screaming at me to stop it.

  “No,” I heard Mitch say behind me, “talk to me. Tell me what’s going on. Why wouldn’t you return my calls? What happened, Christine?”

  The wavering of his voice made my heart lurch in my chest, and I glanced at his face. Tears shimmered in his eyes, and a tiny voice in my head began to second-guess the logical side of my brain. Before I could begin to ponder anything further, the large sliding doors to the ambulance bay rattled open. Two paramedics wheeled in a gurney with a frowning, middle-aged man strapped securely to it.

  “We’ll talk later, okay?” I told Mitch, and he nodded quickly.

  “Sixty-four-year-old male—”

  “That’s Mr. Carson to you, sergeant know-it-all,” the patient grumbled and glared at the paramedic.

  “Fine. Mr. Carson is a sixty-four-year-old pain in the a—”

  “Hello, Mr. Carson.” I sent the medic a warning look. “My name is Christine and I’ll be your nurse.”

  “Well, aren’t you beautiful? You can call me Ike,” he said with a handsome smile.

  “Okay, Ike. Can you tell me what happened today?”

  “Not really sure,” he said pensively, rubbing his upper abdomen. “I was working out in the garden with the ol’ lady next to me. She was tending to her rose garden. She hates it when the weeds choke her bushes.” He smiled fondly. “Anyway, I turn to ask her something and I see her bent over with her nose in the dirt. Well, I’m a man and all my parts are still working, if you know what I mean.”

  Carrie stifled a laugh.

  “I went to stand up but this sudden pain in my stomach knocks me on my ass.”

  “Ike Carson! Watch your language,” a voice snapped.

  “There she is. You know this is all your fault, wife.” Ike smiled as a beautiful woman in her early fifties walked into the room.

  “Oh, stop it.” She playfully batted away her husband’s arm while he began to rub her lower back.

  “Hello, Mrs. Carson. My name is Christine. I’ll be your husband’s nurse.”

  “Phyllis, please. And don’t let this guy charm you. He loves to flirt.”

  “Only to keep up my wooing skills, my love,” Mr. Carson said with a solicitous grin.

  “You’ve got plenty of woo, babe.”

  “And skills.” Ike winked at his wife.

  Rob and Carrie stood behind the couple and tried not to laugh out loud. Rob looked at me and mouthed the word “vomit,” but Carrie nudged him, looking like she thought the elderly couple was too cute for words.

  I refocused on my patient and ran through a quick assessment.

  “We’re going to run an EKG to check your heart rhythm and draw some blood.”

  “Damn vampires,” Ike grumbled.

  “Oh, shush. You let them do what they have to do and no fuss,” Phyllis reprimanded with a loving pat.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Now, be good, Ike Carson. I’m going to call the kids and tell them you’re okay.”

  “I’ll be back in a bit with the doc once the preliminary tests are done,” I told him.

  “I’ll count the minutes.”

  “You save those lines for you wife, mister.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Ike said with a wink.

  I smiled and followed Carrie to the nurses’ station.

  “He’s a cutie. I bet he was a looker in his day,” Carrie said.

  “His wife, too.”

  “They’re so cute together.”

  “Mmhm,” I said, feeling melancholy for some reason.

  “I hope I’m that happy at that age. Retired, in love, with all my parts still working.”

  The rest of my afternoon came and went. I had the rest of my patients treated and streeted by lunchtime. At two o’clock, I sat down in the break room with a cup of coffee—my first of the day—and to say I had a bit of a withdrawal headache was putting it mildly. With elbows resting on the table, I pressed my fingertips to both my temples, hoping to relieve some pressure in my throbbing noggin. My appetite had gone bye-bye, and in its place sat a gnawing ball of nerves and what-ifs. I hoped once the coffee zinged through my system and killed the monster of a migraine, I’d be able to eat something. Maybe then I could think straight and get this situation with Mitch worked out through my warring thoughts and emotions. Wishful thinking.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “What?” I glanced up from the spot on the table I’d been zoned out on. Mitch stood beside me. We were alone in the break room, everyone having cleared out long ago.

  “I’m sorry if I said or did something to hurt you.”

  “Mitch—”

  “No, Christine.” He pulled out the chair beside me and sat down.

  The screeching of the legs against the hard floor set off a round of pulsating pain through my head, but Mitch didn’t seem to notice. I felt like I was going to be sick.

  “Whatever it is, I’m sorry. I’ve been thinking about the last time we were together, but I can’t come up with anything I did. You seemed happy when I left . . . but you didn’t return my phone calls the next day, so something must have happened, and I just want you to know that I’m sorry.”

  “You didn’t do anything, Mitch.”

  “Then what is it?” he asked, almost begging. “Come on, Christie. I don’t want to lose you. We can fix whatever happened, I know it. We’re worth it.”

  My stomach lurched. He didn’t know it, but those were the exact words I’d heard a very long time ago from a man who told me he loved me more than anything. A man who I’d given my heart to completely. A man who I thought I was going to marry some day. A man who turned out to be a lying, cheating bastard—who’d destroyed my heart implicitly.

  Jonathan Meeks and I had started dating my first year in college. He was two years older than I was and well into the party scene. He didn’t drink to the point of oblivion like other people we hung out with. Actually, I’d initially been attracted to him because I’d never seen him lose control of his inhibitions. I respected the fact that he could stay so focused on his studies as a business major and yet be a part of the college scene. He excelled in school, came from a wonderful upper middle-class family from Orange County, and had a great sense of humor. To me, he seemed to have it all, and the fact that he looked like a young Brad Pitt only added to everything he had to offer.

  When he asked me out one night after a football game, I was over the moon. I thought I’d lucked out that he’d chosen me out of all the co-eds vying for his attention. For our first date he took me to a concert at the California Mid-State Fair. I felt like a kid again, as we rode carnival rides and stuffed our faces with tons of junk food. When the lights went down, he took me on the Ferris wheel, and that’s when he kissed me for the first time. To say I saw fireworks . . . Well, I hadn’t had much experience with boys, but that kiss made me feel things I’d never felt before.

  Need, desire, desperation.

  We quickly lost control with the passion of first love, or so I’d thought.

  Six months into our love affair I’d found him sleeping with my best friend on the bed I’d lost my virginity in. The soft click of the door behind me caught their attention, but the sob that tore out of my throat brought me to the brink of destruction. I ran out of that room as fast as I could and never set foot in his apartment again.

  My heart had been shattered into a million pieces. Every waking minute I thought about the two of them together. Images of their naked bodies defiling the bed I’d given myself to him on tormented me during the day and woke me in tears every night. I’d hated both of them for a long time, but I despised myself even more for being so damn naïve. I became an introvert, throwing myself into my studies and keeping my weekends reserved for visits back home.

  Eventually, I got better. I
found a few friends that had similar interests to mine and kept far away from the party scene. Instead of the Friday night keggers, we’d go to a classic movie marathon at a local outdoor theater or an open mic night hosted by the student center. Gradually I found myself smiling and even accepted a date with a philosophy student.

  A couple months later I came home from the library to find John standing outside my door with a bouquet of flowers and a tormented expression. It looked like he hadn’t changed or shaved in a few days. It shocked me, really. He’d always been so put together.

  “Can I talk to you, please?” he asked me, holding out the flowers like some kind of sign of peace.

  “What are you doing here, John?”

  “I had to see you.”

  “Why?”

  “We never talked.”

  “We didn’t need to.”

  “Yeah, we do. It didn’t mean anything to me, Chris.”

  “Well, it meant plenty to me.”

  “Come on, Chris. I don’t love her.”

  “But you love me?”

  “Yes, baby.” He’d reached for me, but I stepped away. “I know we can fix this. We are worth it!”

  We are worth it.

  Turns out we weren’t. I’d been dumb enough to give him a second chance, and the second time I’d caught him cheating nearly broke me for good. As a result, I grew a thick skin. I vowed to be strong and to never let a man defile me like that again.

  Yet, here I was, staring another cheater dead in the face.

  “Just stop, please . . . I can’t do this here.”

  “Later, then. After work. I’ll take you to dinner.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “Take out, then.”

  The door to the break room slammed open before I could reject him again.

  “Christine, Dr. Peterson is ready for you in bed B.”

  Thank God for small favors.

  “Thanks, Carrie.”

  I stood and poured the remainder of my lukewarm coffee down the drain and rinsed out my mug.

  “Chris.” Mitch stood behind me, blocking any attempt at a quick exit.

  “Mitch, I know it may seem to you like I’m blowing you off,” I said, keeping my back to him. I felt the sting of tears prick my eyes, the pain of losing him hitting me harder than I wanted it to. “I’m not trying to. And I like you a lot. Probably too much.”