Hell Bent (3 page)

S
o this is Susie
? This is the pastel cream-puff I envisioned? I definitely got this one wrong. She’s like a pixie on steroids, with a hangover. There’s something she’s hiding, but it’s probably not a career as social hostess or international ambassador.

It’s those eyes…huge and brown, and there is a glint there that says she is no fool. I want to suck on that bottom lip.
Jesus
, when she realized she almost knocked that old lady on her ass, that lip pouted out, and I’m getting hard just thinking about it. What the hell? I’ve never met a female who could get to me this way. What’s going on? I want to fuck her and spank her at the same time. Shit, if my buddies spot this, I’ll never hear the end of it.

I decide to avoid the cream-puff for the rest of the evening. She seems like she hates all men anyway, if her reaction to my lending hand is any an indication. That temper! This has danger written all over it, and I’ve lost enough toes to learn. I spot the dessert carts being wheeled in. Good time to make my exit.

Standing, I step over and whisper to Cam. “Hey, buddy, great party, but I have to be on my way. Work in the morning, you know.”

Cam wipes his mouth on the linen square from his lap and nods, swallowing. “Yeah, sure man, I get it. Hey, thanks for coming. Talk soon, okay?”

Milly looks up with that sweet smile that hooked Cam, and I can see sadness in her eyes. Probably because her father isn’t here.

“You’ve been wonderful, Bryce, thank you for being Cam’s best man,” she says with just the right blend of proper and perky.

Oh, so proper.
Jesus,
I would go fuckin’ crazy if that’s what the future was going to be. I’d take the cream-puff over this one. Odd. What made me think that? The cream-puff is nothing but trouble; I can sense it in my bones.

I feel myself shudder as I head for the door, but I can’t resist. I look back and see the cream-puff watching me. She is looking sort of rejected. Ah crap, there, now she sees me looking at her.

Sweet Jesus,
she is sticking her tongue out, slow, curling it around the spoon of ice cream. I’m getting hard again. I close my jacket to hide my erection but she is looking straight at my crotch. Now she’s smiling, like she just made some kind of discovery. Damn! The cream-puff knew what she was doing! She did it on purpose. What do you know about that? Huh! I head for the entrance, feeling a little violated.

When I hit the sidewalk, I realize what just happened. She knows I’m on medical discharge and was pushing my buttons to see if I could still fuck her. Damn right, I can. You just wait, Miss Cream-puff.

W
ell
, this isn’t so hard, I’m thinking. But he sure is—hard, that is. He knows too…I can tell by the look on his face. I snicker and take another spoonful. I watch a lot of Maureen, but I’m a fan of Marilyn, as well. After all, Maureen has limits, and I don’t. That was a ballsy move on my part, for sure, licking that spoon like that. I find myself more daring with this Bryce guy, and I have no idea where my normal self has disappeared.

I see Milly waving at me to come over, interrupting my musings on the loss of my shame.

“What’s up?” I ask.

“Would you walk outside with me a minute?” she asks, a funny look on her face.

I nod and she stands, a bit wobbly, and taps Cam on the shoulder before whispering something into his ear. She takes my hand and loops it over her arm like I’m some kind of escort and slowly picks her way toward the entrance, stopping every so often to accept well wishes.

“What’s going on?” I ask when we finally reach the sidewalk.

“I…I…have to get some air.”

I look at her hard and see that her pale eyes are bubbling with tears. “What’s wrong?” I ask.

Even Milly can keep her composure when it’s socially correct. This puzzles me.

“Walk with me,” she whispers, and we start down the sidewalk, toward the park. She finds a bench next to the fountain and sits down, pulling me to sit beside her.

“What the hell, Milly? What’s going on? Is Cam backing out?”

“No, no, nothing like that…at least not yet,” she sniffs thoughtfully, leaning her head on its side in doubt.

“Not yet?”

She pats my hand and sits for long moments in silence. I can see neon lights flashing down the street in sync, and there’s the sound of laughter as people enter and leave the various nightclubs and hotels that abound in this part of the city. There are no parking meters here, not even parking places. This is where you have drivers, or at the very least, a valet to park your vehicle and then hoof it back three or four blocks. It’s a warm night and the fountain next to us feels kind of good, actually. I wait patiently for her to speak.

“He doesn’t know,” she says simply.

I wait for more, but she is crying softly now, dabbing her eyes with a lace-edged handkerchief.

I finally decide enough is enough. “Who doesn’t know what?”

A fresh sob, and then she slowly calms down.

“Cameron.” She dabs her eyes again, careful to only catch the tears and not smear her mascara. “He doesn’t know about…lymphoma.”

“What? Why not? Are you crazy, Milly? That’s not the kind of thing you don’t tell the man you’re going to marry!”

“I know…” she sobs louder now; her shoulders quake, and I can’t help but put my arm around her.

“Okay, okay, calm down. Get it together, Milly. Cam’s a good egg. He loves you…yeah, he loves you, that’s for sure…although I don’t know why.”

This brings her head to snap upward, glaring at me in disapproval.

I laugh. “Got you to stop crying, didn’t I?”

She relaxes a bit and looks back at her lap. “That was a nasty thing to say, Susie, even for you.”

“Awwww…I’m just kidding. You know me, ninny.” I pat her shoulder again, and this is about as close as I’m going to come to an apology. “So, why didn’t you tell him?”

“Mother said I should wait…we don’t know for sure if it’s going to come back.”

I can’t believe my ears. The good ol’ senator. Her daughter snags a blue-blood, and she’s going to make the most of it. Wants to make sure she’s safely out of her hands so she won’t feel any disgrace, as if there is any to feel. I pat her shoulder one time in sympathy.
That bitch.

“So, when were you planning to tell Cam?” I ask, more out of curiosity than therapeutic urging.

“I don’t know. I want to tell him now but Mother says there’s no point in sounding an alarm that may never go off. She says General Watson will never let me marry his son if he knows, Cam being his heir and all. She knows the general well, obviously.”

I nod, realizing that everything I suspect is true. I hate Sabrina all over again. Actually, I think I’ve hated her since I first heard her name.

Milly is still talking. “Mother says that even though I had it as a teenager, it doesn’t mean it’ll recur. She says the general has more money than God, and the family can afford the medication should I get sick again. Cam’s VA benefits wouldn’t do that. Plus, he’s just recovering from that brain surgery—Mother and the general said he doesn’t need to know, not yet. She says…”

“She says, she says… dammit, Milly, what do
you
say?”

“I don’t know…” she begins to cry again.

“Okay, I’ve had enough of this. Listen to me, Millie,” I grab the handkerchief away from her grasp and hold it to her nose. “Blow!” I order.

She complies, and I wipe her nose and hand the soiled linen back to her.

“Cam is a decent sort, but that’s no reason to put something on him that he—just maybe—can’t handle.” She looks up at that, panicking again. “Hush,” I go on. “You know your diagnosis is not a light thing, Milly. You can’t escape that,” I say firmly. “And you’ve had so much chemo that you may not be able to have children.”

She nods, but her head slumps low with the memory.

“Have you been tested for infertility?” I ask in a low voice. I am utterly amazed that her mother, or at least Milly, did not address this long ago.

“No. Mother says to wait. She says until I actually try to get pregnant, there is no reason to look for ghosts in the corners, but it seems like it’s not very proper. I think I have the right to know, and so does Cam.”

“Yes, Milly, because you
do
have the right to know. This is your life, not your mother’s. You need to know, and now. You’re about to get married.”

I slowly rise, the resolve strengthening in my gut to get this out in the open here and now. Milly met Cam when she was his nurse in the neuro ICU, where he was flown from Iraq, right after his injury. I can understand delaying telling him about her past when he was still in the hospital, but not anymore.

Milly yanks at my sleeve. “No, Susie, no! Not now. Not here!”

“Why not?” I demand, angry.

“I might be starting something we can’t finish,” she mimics the wise and oh-so-cautious Senator Hamilton.

“Milly, honey,” I sit back down and look her straight in the teary eyes. “You’re a nurse, and you know there is a high chance that you may not be able to have children, and there is also a probability that your lymphoma might come back. It isn’t fair to Cam to not let him know about this.”

“What do you mean? Do you think Cam will not marry me if he knows?” Milly’s eyes are wide with terror.

I look at her. “Don’t you think that Cam has the right to answer that, and not me?”

She nods her head slowly, her eyes welling up with tears as the impact of what I am saying is beginning to sink in.

I am seething inside. Milly may be sitting next to me with a death sentence looming over her blonde head. Her husband-to-be does not know it. She isn’t preparing for what could lie ahead: the possibility of chemotherapy again, maybe radiation, the chance that she’s infertile already. She could possibly never be the Milly she envisions in her future.

This is why I became a nurse. Since Milly’s diagnosis when we were teens, I am doing the research. I know what potentially lies ahead for Milly, and here she is, completely in the dark and believing in some fairy-tale that her mighty mother has convinced her will be her life. My poor ninny friend has her head buried in the sand.

Even worse, I am the only one who can protect her. I am planning on this; at least the care-taking part. I have no respect for Sabrina, and I know she will not look after Milly. She didn’t back when we were kids, passing the responsibility on to her staff. She doesn’t have the wealth that her new husband has, so she will not have the resources for private care. But General Watson—and by extension, Cameron—will.

Milly is my responsibility, as surely as if she is my ninny sister. I am willing to bet money that Sabrina Hamilton had her daughter tested back when she was initially sick, and she knows about her chances of having kids, maybe even knows how high the probability is of her cancer coming back. This is why she is going to such lengths to get her settled, to absolve herself of responsibility and let someone else shoulder it. This is why she pretended to concede to the idea of Milly marrying her step-brother, even though she was so dead-set against it at the beginning. She is an ass of asses!

“Hey, c’mon…cheer up.” I hold out a hand to help Milly stand from the bench. “Let’s you and I go back to the party, and you have a dance with that handsome fiancé of yours. You let me worry about this, okay? After all, I’m the mean nurse, and you…why, you’re just the ninny nurse, right?”

She smiles at this, and my blackened heart is being set aside to keep her cheerful. If Milly loses her cheer, we may as well pack it in and know the world is coming to an end. There will be no saving it.

We stroll toward the Grand Hyatt when Milly suddenly stops and looks up at me. “Susie, it
will
be okay, won’t it?” she asks in a pitiful voice.

“Of course, Milly. I have it all under control.”

“Thank you, Susie. You always do.”

I
am fairly thrown
with the events of the day. This isn’t anything like I am expecting, and it’s not over yet. Cam’s best man is supposed to be a hideous gargoyle, the fat kid nobody wants to be friends with or a bastard who fucks and moves on like a rooster in his world of a hen house. Instead, he looks like a movie star and has the personality of…well…I can’t really compare it because I have never known anyone like him. Not male, anyway.

T
here was
a scratching at the back door, and I could hear my name in a whispered shout, a noise that had become the soundtrack of my nightmares.

“Su-zaah-nna!”

It was my father’s voice, and he wasn’t going to stop bugging me. I had no choice but to climb out of my warm bed and pad through the hallway and dim kitchen to the door and open it. Sure enough, he was outside on the stoop, weaving from side to side, his chin dirty with a two-day beard and waves of stale liquor and cigarettes wafting through the door screen and into my face. I wanted to puke, but knew there was no relief in that; he would affect my senses until he was no longer under the same roof.

I said nothing—there was nothing to say. It was a repeat performance, and we both knew the drill. He pushed past me, steadying himself with counters and door frames as he spasmodically moved toward my bedroom, my bed, my clean sheets and sweet-smelling air. I stood by helplessly watching, knowing there was no way to stop him unless my mother awakened, and then a battle of a different sort would begin.

He stopped abruptly in my doorway, looking into the room’s darkness, and then his hand fumbled along the wall, feeling for the light switch. The room flooded with bright, blue, flickering light from the fluorescent fixture mounted over my bed, the second-hand cast-off from the liquor store on the corner. Dad hated to sleep in the dark when he was drunk; the demons would come from the corners and windows, grabbing at him and saturating him with vile odors and vomit. He needed to see them to make them go away, and this didn’t always work, but still he tried.

I heard his body assault my clean blankets, and I numbly turned and headed down the rough, wooden stairs leading to the basement. There awaited the punctured, stained, blue-ticking covered mattress from an old roll-away bed, huddled in a corner next to the hot water tank. I pulled a ratty thermal blanket from its hiding place between two cardboard cartons of Christmas decorations, wrapped myself in it, and lay on the mattress. Everything was pre-arranged to look un-arranged.

Mother could not know that I would spend the rest of the night here, only to sneak out the kitchen door early to school without her waking. She had to believe that Father had just come in from working all night and fallen asleep on my empty bed to avoid disturbing her. She would only see his horizontal form, quietly flip off the light, and go about getting ready to go to work. She would sigh, her thoughts consumed with the nobility of the man to whom she was married. He worked non-ending hours to support her and me, earning a fraction of what he was worth, only enough to maintain the most meager rental house in town. If she knew where he had truly been, she may not have been able to survive it. I knew this—she was not strong. She didn’t have the instincts I had developed.

It was not my job to hide my father’s faults, but to protect my mother’s desired reality. She had to feel safe; I had to see to it.