~
“Dr. Barton.” One of the medical students who was supposed to observe me waved his hand in front of my face. “Dr. Barton? Are you okay?”
“Huh?” I asked. “Of course.”
I’d just finished putting on a gown, gloves, and mask, and I was scheduled for surgery imminently. But my hands would not stop shaking. My heart raced, and I could feel tiny droplets of sweat collecting on my forehead, running down my temples to my cheeks.
“You don’t look so good, Dr. Barton,” he said. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
I was having a hard time breathing. It felt like something was constricting my chest, and I wanted to rip my gown off so I could just breathe. “Is it really hot in here, or is it just me?”
“It feels all right to me, Dr. Barton,” he said. “Do you want me to see if the temperature can be adjusted?”
“Please,” I said.
Please let this stop, I prayed. Not here. Not now. This can’t be happening.
I couldn’t breathe. The room was spinning, and I felt so light-headed. Then everything went dark.
When I came to, Ben Jackson, my boss, was standing over me, and I was on a hospital bed in an empty room. “June,” he said.
“What happened?” I knew full and well what had happened, but I couldn’t admit it to myself. I had failed, and not just today.
“You fainted. How are you feeling?”
“Oh, I’m fine,” I said, forcing a brightness into my tone that I didn’t feel. “I was just dizzy. I forgot to eat breakfast this morning.”
“Yes,” he said. He sat down in a chair beside my bed, silent, his eyes on me. I knew what he was thinking. He’d been my supervisor years ago when I was in residency. He knew me fairly well, and he knew what happened during deployment-not the specifics exactly, but there weren’t too many surgeons who had wound up involved in a blast on a humanitarian mission outside the base.
As big as it was, the Navy really was small. And the physicians' community, even smaller. Word got around.
“I did,” I said. “Really.” I don’t know if I was trying to convince him or convince myself.
“June,” he said. “This isn’t the first time.”
“No.”
“I’ve witnessed it personally.” He was reminding me of the time I scrubbed in to assist him, during my first month at the hospital. I’d had the same symptoms as I’d had today, but not on this scale. He was perceptive, though, and noticed my hands shaking immediately, pulling me off the surgery and relegating me to the role of observer. It was embarrassing then, but not nearly as humiliating as this was today.
That time, I’d chalked it up to nerves related to the new job, and he had seemed to take that explanation. It wasn’t much of one, I knew that. And I’d gotten myself into therapy immediately, worried this would derail my career. But as it turned out, therapy hadn’t been the quick fix I was hoping for. In fact, I was beginning to think it was making things worse.
“I know, sir.”
“Is there anything you’d like to tell me?”
“Nothing.”
He was silent. “Fine. But I can’t have you operating when this is happening. I have to pull you off surgery.”
~
He'd pulled me from surgeries, and things got better. Temporarily. Then I was reinstated, and it was fine for a while. No panic attacks, at least. By the time things got worse, we were sleeping together and the lines were blurred. He should have pulled me from operating, should have noticed when I was going off the deep end.
I'd played God on the operating table, decided that a man should die - a bad man, but still.
When I turned in my resignation, Ben begged me to stay, said he was in love with me.
I didn't feel the same way.
I just wanted to get away from everything. Get back to my roots. Start a new life, a peaceful one. A life where I didn't get involved with the wrong guy. One that didn't involve hard choices.
And then Cade walked up the driveway.
Cade, the boy I'd loved once upon a time. Those early years stood out in my mind, the technicolor memories of my first love.
Before everything in my life went grey.
Cade certainly wasn't a boy anymore, though.
No, now he was a man. A biker, at that.
Axe.
Just thinking about him now sent heat rushing through my body. Standing there by his father's porch, his hair falling in pieces around his face, looking at me with his big blue eyes the same way he had looked at me in high school. Facing me, in that leather vest, the one with the emblem on the back, the sleeves of his shirt pushed up over his forearms. Forearms that were now covered in tattoos.
I wondered where else he had tattoos.
And felt my body respond to the thought, a visceral immediate reaction, the heat of arousal in my belly, spreading through me. Even though no one was outside with me, I could feel myself flush with embarrassment.