He waited until the others were gone before he spoke. "You've got my back, Mud," he said. "I'll see you put up for sergeant-at-arms.”
“That going to go over all right?” Mud asked. “I haven't been patched in as long as some of the other brothers.”
“They’ll have to fucking deal with it,” Mad Dog said. “I need someone I can trust. Someone who’s proved himself to me. The other brothers havent fucking proved shit to me. I need loyalty.”
"And fucking get Tink under control," he said. "If he isn't fucking tweaking right now, he's coming down off something. Get him clean or we take him out. He needs to be reliable."
“Roger, Boss,” Mud said. "We'll clean him up."
“There’s about to be some good changes happening here. Once we get out from under Benicio and get ourselves attached to the cartel, I’ve got a sweet side deal with them that you’re a part of now. There’s going to be plenty of money for us, more than we’re getting now.”
“You going to have a problem with the Veep, Boss?” Mud asked.
“Don’t worry about Blaze,” Mad Dog said. “He’s away right now, and I’ve got an idea for how to deal with him. He’ll be out of the picture soon enough.”
“Fuckin’ A, Prez,” Mud said.
“Fuckin’ A, right,” Mad Dog said. “This is going to be a new era for the MC.”
June
I sat on the front porch, shifting uncomfortably in the chair I'd pulled outside from the kitchen table, and made a mental note to get rocking chairs out here on the porch. I'd check in town tomorrow. I was on a loose timeline for starting the bed and breakfast, which really meant that when I decided I was done with my time off and finished with the repairs on the house, I'd hang out a shingle.
I needed time off anyhow. Going straight from the Navy into a civilian position in Chicago hadn't exactly left me any time to decompress. But it couldn't be helped; the offer was too good to pass up. The pay was insane, and it was a prestigious hospital. One of my former Navy supervisors, now a surgeon at the hospital in Chicago, had hand-picked me for the job - and would be my boss. We'd always gotten along well, so I figured having him in my corner would make the transition to civilian life a breeze.
Turns out, we'd gotten along too well.
Never get romantically involved with your boss.
It was a good life lesson.
It made things uncomfortable, when I ended it. But that's not why I left Chicago. And it didn't explain why I'd had the panic attacks there, a few months in. The job had started out great, what my therapist had referred to as a “honeymoon period". Then everything started spiraling out of control.
That was even before I started sleeping with my boss.
~
“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.”