Finding Serenity (12 page)

“Hasn’t played much, has he?” Layla’s head moves up and down the pitch as the match powers on.

“No idea, but I don’t think so.” She frowns when Vaughn and the Collins guy run into each other as they both make a play for the ball. “This is actually kind of pathetic.”

Then, she echoes Layla’s quick hiss of disapproval as Vaughn and Collins collide on the field yet again. When Vaughn continues to lay on the ground, the girls stand, both moving their head to see if he manages to get up.

The thing about league tournaments, especially in Cavanagh, is that there isn’t an overabundance of caution taken in the organization of the matches. Most residents are happy to watch the matches simply because they miss the university’s season. But these tournaments don’t have the funding that the Cavanagh squad does. They are essentially just pick-up matches to fill the time between seasons. The refs tend to be coaches from the high school leagues. The pitch is rarely maintained in the off season and there are never any EMTs or even trainers there to treat any injuries a player may sustain during a match.

That’s probably not something Vaughn realized when he agreed to this tournament and Mollie is sure that’s something he probably wouldn’t want to hear right now as he is still on the ground.

“Shit,” she says when Declan looks her way and shakes his head. Mollie has zero formal training in medicine, but she has had to learn a thing or two over the years at the Compound. You can’t be a kid living the life she did without some “on the job” training.

When she and Layla jog out to the pitch, Vaughn isn’t moving. He’s awake, staring out above the other players surrounding him, begging off their calls of concern.

“I’m fine.” He waves off Collins and Declan as he slowly moves to his feet.

“You sure, mate?” Declan asks only to have Vaughn frown at him.

“Happens a lot, actually.”

Vaughn moves his completely motionless shoulder in an odd wiggle and at the gesture, Mollie hears Layla next to her, covering her mouth as though she may vomit. The joint of his shoulder is lowered and protrudes against the skin. Dislocated. Mollie would know what that looked like anywhere. How many times had a fight or drunken horseplay at the Compound resulted in this exact injury?

Despite her awkwardness with Vaughn the last time she saw him, Mollie knows how painful this injury is. She also knows that if it isn’t taken care of immediately, the treatment will be worse than the injury itself.

“You’ve done this before?” she asks Vaughn.

Despite his coolness to her earlier, Vaughn manages to look her in the eyes. “Yeah. I probably need surgery, but haven’t gotten around to it. I can pop it back.” But Mollie notices how hard Vaughn winces, how his bottom lip is trembling from sheer pain.

“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.