Hell Bent (19 page)

I
twist anxiously
in the Starbucks line, impatient for my coffee but nervous at the prospect of seeing Cameron again. I’d basically written him off by the time he finally got around to texting me. He probably had a thousand reasons for not reaching out to me—or at least that’s what I chose to think. So I was shocked when I saw the text on my lunch break and spent five minutes staring at it before composing a reply. While I briefly contemplated how to react—whether to be cross at him or not for this radio silence—I forgave him almost immediately. Who was I kidding? I was ready to jump up and down that he texted. And it was clear that he wanted to see me, so whatever the reasons were for his silence up till now—I couldn’t care less. We’d texted all through my break as if it were the most natural thing in the world. I decided not to ask what took him so long. I honestly didn’t care, as long as he was here now, back in my life.

In my nervousness, I may have overdone it while getting ready this morning. Despite knowing that I have to be at work in a few hours, my hair is curled perfectly, and I’m wearing a little sundress and wedge sandals. My scrubs and comfortable shoes are sitting in my car. Because of my hospital’s health codes, I couldn’t paint my nails, but I did make sure my makeup was perfect.

It has been over a week since I last saw Cameron, and he’s never seen me in anything but bulky scrubs, my hair in a ponytail. I can’t help it. I want to impress him a little. After all, he was impressive even in a coma.

As it turns out, I’m the one impressed again when I enter his room on the third floor of the rehab center. My breath is caught up in my throat as I see him for the first time since his transfer out of my ICU. My heart is pounding so loud, I’m sure everyone on the entire floor can hear it.

The hair over his surgical scar has been growing back, and the rest of his hair has been cut short to match it. He’s clean-shaven for the first time since he was admitted to the National Military Medical Center, revealing large dimples as he smiles brightly at me.

He even stands as I approach and gives me a tight hug. He smells amazing—clean and fresh—and I can’t help but breathe the scent of his soap in as I pull his body as close to mine as possible while still carrying two coffees. His rippled muscles press against my shaking form, and I feel like I’m about to pass out. I’m way more nervous than I thought I would be.

All too soon, he is pulling away and taking his coffee out of my hand.

“You look great!” I say, and this doesn’t even come close to describing my true reaction at seeing him for the first time since his transfer from the ICU. He looks healthy and more lucid than I’ve ever seen him. He’s regaining muscle mass—not that he’d lost a ton—and is obviously up and moving around on his own. Rehab is doing him good. Seeing him like this is doing me bad. Very very bad. I’m choked up and starting to sweat.
Calm down, Milly, for chrissakes.

“So do you,
hot stuff
,” he replies, running his eyes up and down my body.

Oh my God
. I can’t help but blush. “Thanks!”

He sits back down on the bed, and I sit next to him in the chair. It’s almost like we’re back in the ICU. Except it’s nothing like that. I’m no longer his nurse, and he’s no longer my patient. Things between us have obviously shifted into something far less professional. I can see his eyes drifting up my legs or across the bodice of my dress every now and then and I can’t be bothered to care. I wonder if he can also see my heart fluttering inside my chest.

We chat for a while, but I have no idea what we actually talk about. It’s all a blur—of me, almost suffocating on my nerves, and of him, nervously yet hungrily checking me out the whole time. Am I imagining this?

His physical therapist comes in to take him away, finally interrupting the most awkward visit ever, and I have to go get ready for work. I promise to text on my break, making him flash me one last dimpled smile before I go.

To my utter delight, the texting isn’t kept just to my break. In fact, he texts me less than an hour later, and we continue this texting dalliance so much over the next few days that I find it hard to believe he’d waited a week to contact me. On my day off, the texts turn into an hours-long phone call, in which we both bitch about our parents and he reveals the grueling details of his physical therapy.

I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop—for something about Cameron’s personality to be less than perfect. But the more I get to know him, the more flawless he seems. I tell myself not to get ahead of things—not to put more into the relationship than what’s already there. The only thing Cameron refuses to talk about is his actual progress. Any time I ask about when the doctors think he may be released, he changes the subject. I begin to think he’s hiding something. Maybe he isn’t healing the way he should be and he doesn’t want to admit it.

I’m ruminating on this as I take down the vitals for my new patient when Linda puts her head into the room.

“Milly, honey, someone is here to see you.”

I frown. The last person to visit me at work was my mother, and that didn’t turned out all that well. We still haven’t rescheduled our dinner—she is always busy lately. Madi—my sister—is too busy to drop by as well. It could be Susie, she hasn’t returned any of my calls in the last week.

I nod and turn back to my patient. Finishing up, I enter the last of her information and head towards the nurses’ station. About half way there, I look up and freeze.

There, in front of the nurses’ station, is Cameron. He’s in actual clothes—tight jeans and a dark grey polo shirt that clings to his muscled chest—the definition of his knotted pectorals not diminished even after weeks of being in the hospital. I shudder to think about how big his chest must have been prior to his accident. Before I can stop myself from thinking it, I realize I’m hoping that I get a chance to see him once he’s back to his regular state of fitness. He looks damn fine now. I can’t even imagine what he’ll look like in a few weeks.

Too caught up staring at his chiseled muscles, it takes me a moment to realize that there is a bouquet of pink roses in his hands.

“Hi,” he says as he shyly pushes the flowers towards me when I approach, a broad smile plastered across his face.

“Thank you,” I say with a smile of my own, taking the roses and allowing my hand to brush gently against his. Oh my God, what is happening here?
Get a hold of your senses, Milly. Act normal.
“What—… How—… When did you get discharged?” Okay, I sound like a moron.

“Today. Just a little while ago, actually.” He looks sheepish and blushes as he speaks. Just when I think he can’t get any sexier, he goes and proves me wrong. “This is the best bouquet they had at the gift shop.”

“The flowers are gorgeous, thank you.” I go mute for a second, unable to come up with anything intelligible. “You’re not driving home, are you?” That was probably the dumbest question I could ask. Of course, he’s not driving.

“No,” he assures me. “My father sent a car. He couldn’t make it himself.”

I can’t help but grow angry at Cameron’s father on his behalf. It’s one thing to be preoccupied, but he could have at least picked his son up from the hospital.

“I actually can’t stay,” he continues. “Like I said, the car is waiting. I just wanted to tell you thanks—for everything. And I wanted to ask if, maybe, you’d like to go out to dinner with me, sometime?” He looks more nervous than I am at this moment.

I can feel the smile on my face spreading even wider. I know I must look like an idiot, but I can’t help myself.

“I would love to,” I reply, a bit too eagerly.

“Good,” he breathes out, obviously relieved. Like he had any doubt that I would say anything else. “When are you off?”

“Um… Tuesday and Wednesday next week,” I tell him.

“Does Tuesday work?” he asks.

“Totally,” I say, hiding my grin in the roses.

Cameron shifts awkwardly from side to side for a moment, as if debating something, before finally leaning forward and kissing me on the cheek.

“I’ll call you then,” he says in my ear before abruptly turning and walking away. I can’t help but admire his butt as he strides out. He’s definitely been doing some squats in physical therapy.

“About damn time,” Linda says, interrupting my thoughts.

I jump, having forgotten she was there, realizing that she had witnessed the entire conversation between us. My cheeks are on fire.

“What do you mean, “about time”?” I demand.

“I was half expecting to find the two of you curled in bed together while he was still in the ICU,” she snaps back.

I try to look offended, but I can’t wipe the idiotic grin off my face. It stays there through the rest of my shift.

Can it be Tuesday tomorrow?

T
he days seems
to creep along, and Monday feels like the longest day ever, but Tuesday does finally arrive. I spend half the day obsessing over what to wear and the other half obsessing over my hair and makeup. By the time I leave the house, I’m a ball of nerves, despite having texted with Cameron back and forth for most of the afternoon.

I insist on driving us, since Cameron still hasn’t been cleared by his doctor to “operate heavy machinery,” and I pick him up outside of a posh apartment building downtown where he told me he’s staying with his dad while he recovers. He is standing on the curb in a pair of dress slacks and a deep purple button down shirt. The sight of him makes my mouth water, and with horror, I can feel myself growing damp in other regions of my body as well. I begin an internal debate as to whether or not I should invite him back to my place at the end of the evening. It’s our first official date, but we’ve known each other for over three weeks—and more like a month if you count the time he spent in a coma.

“Hi,” he says as he slips into the passenger’s seat.

“Hi,” I reply, deciding to table my internal debate until I see how the night goes.

We’re both giddy with excitement and nervousness, as if we are some teenagers. I force myself to stop grinning from ear to ear. Cameron directs me to an upscale restaurant only a few blocks away, where he tells me we have a reservation. It turns out to be a seafood restaurant overlooking the water. We’ve been chatting over texts and have had a few phone conversations, but here, in person, I can feel butterflies swirling in my stomach, and I can tell he’s just as thrilled and giddy as I am.

“So, I know your dad is a General. What exactly does he do?” I ask at one point. I know his father works in the government but I’ve refused to actually know anything about politics ever since my mother had chosen that route for her career.

“Oh, I haven’t told you?” he asks, frowning a little. Am I imagining it, or did he blush? I shake my head, and he continues. “He’s the member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—Commandant of the Marine Corps, specifically.”

“Wow. No wonder you became a Marine yourself!”

“It was never really an option for me to do anything else,” he explains.

“So what are you going to do now?” I ask. I immediately regret it, as a weird look comes over Cameron’s face and his eyes wander to the window.

“I’m technically still a Marine,” he says after a while. “If I recover fast and thoroughly enough, I can be redeployed.”

“What?” I ask, my voice a little shaken. I try to school my face into a casual expression, but I can’t help but feel a little agitated. The man has suffered a severe brain injury. He’s been hospitalized for almost seven weeks, including the time he spent in Iraq and Turkey.

There is no way he would have a “fast” recovery. It would be years until he is back to one hundred percent—if ever. As a nurse in the Neuro Intensive Care Unit at the nation’s leading Military hospital, I’d seen my fair share of head wounds, even in the short time I’d worked there. I knew that the healing process would be long and slow.

“My dad is pushing for that,” he replies, still gazing out the window.

“But what do
you
want?” I ask, reaching across the table to take his hand.

“I don’t know,” he says, his expression pained. “I can’t imagine my life if I’m not a Marine. I don’t really know if I can do anything else. It’s what I’ve been training for since I was nine years old.”

“Well,” I smile, desperately wanting to shift the conversation away from a topic that is obviously upsetting him. “You don’t have to make any decisions right away, right? For now, you just need to focus on getting better.”

For the rest of the meal, we talk about his progress in physical therapy—how he’d ran his first mile without feeling sick, how weird it feels to be out of the hospital and back in civilian life.

“When was your last leave?” I ask.

“About two and a half yeas ago,” he says.

“Wow. That’s a long time.”

“Yeah,” he says. “My unit does… did special assignments. We didn’t always get much time off.”

His face has morphed into a grimace. I can’t help but notice the change in tense and wonder if the rest of his unit has suffered as badly as he has.

“So, it’s weird being a civilian?” I ask, trying to change the subject once again.