ROMANCE: CLEAN ROMANCE: Summer Splash! (Sweet Inspirational Contemporary Romance) (New Adult Clean Fantasy Short Stories) (17 page)

              So they waited a few days and bought a test from the store. It was positive. After that things changed between them, but not drastically at first. It wasn't until the talk they had a few days after the test came back positive.

              “Jen, there are a few things I've kept from you,” Rick said as he sat on her couch with her, holding her hand. “First of all, I don't know how else to say this so I'm just going to go for it. I'm in the mafia. That means the whole waste management thing is more or less a cover for all of the other stuff that I have to do for the mob. It's a pretty good paying gig, but there is a bunch of unsavory practices that I didn't mind so much when I was younger, but as time goes on I hate it more and more.”

              Jen wanted to recoil but didn't. She didn't want to offend Rick. It was shitty that he'd lied to her, and it sucked that he was in the mob, but maybe they could get over it. Maybe there was a way for them to reconcile what was going on between them with what the world wanted them to do.

              “There is something else,” Rick said. “Besides that, I'm married.”
              Jen recoiled this time, and the wail of a banshee left her lips before she could even think of suppressing it. She got up and ran out the front door of the apartment, then down the hall, then down the steps, then out the door. She just kept running and running. She figured she'd know when she was supposed to stop, but she couldn't. Something about moving away from the entire situation made her feel like she was getting some kind of resolution to what was happening. Like if she put enough distance between her and Rick maybe she wouldn't have to face it. Maybe, just maybe, if she ran forever everything would go back to normal for a change instead of being so shitty. So she ran, without looking back. All the way to the end of town. Then she collapsed.

              Luckily Rick was just behind Jen when she went down, and he scooped her up and carried her back to her place. After that their relationship changed, but it didn't cool off. They were still hot for each other, but now they had to be careful, almost as if playing some kind of game. They couldn't go out in public together, and Rick couldn't get caught coming over to her place. This wasn't just because Rick was married, but because if the mob found out that she was pregnant something would have to happen. Either she would be drawn into the mob herself as an axillary person, or she would be killed. Of course neither of them wanted the former, but even the latter seemed to be a bad option in Rick's mind. He told her that even though it could appear to be glamorous at times it really wasn't. In the movies they never showed the hours of boredom, waiting for someone to show up at a money drop, or all the paranoia that eventually tore people apart.

              The more Jen listened the more she realized that being in the mob was nothing like the movies depicted. There was just so much more going on under the surface that she hadn't known about. People killed each other all the time with little or no reprisal. The only people that a mobster would get into trouble for touching was someone who was “made.” Rick was a made guy, like the rest of the made guys he hung out with. But some of the others were starting to bring around hanger-ons, as they were called. People that didn't really have any skin in the game but wanted badly to be a part of it. The way they did this was by doing things for made men in the hopes that at some point they would be rewarded by being vouched for when they were made themselves. It was all a pretty shadowy underworld of rules and regulations that were only adhered to when it was convenient, and completely disregarded at a moments notice.

              Jen thought long and hard about leaving Rick for awhile but it always seemed like the coward's way out. Not that Jen didn't realize that it was an actual, viable option. It was just that she was actually in love with Rick and didn't want to leave him. She wanted to spend the rest of her life with him. Jen didn't think about what was going to happen with his wife and kids, or what was going to happen if, or when, people found out. And when it dawned on her she had retreated into her own head a good deal, in order to justify staying with Rick and to minimize the very real danger to her and her unborn child, she knew that was why so many of the people that Rick hung out with had that weird, detached look on their faces. The kind that soldiers get after being deployed to long. The look that man adopts when the pressure is just too great and they have to be absent in order to be present.

              Jen thought about calling her mother and fleeing the state but that seemed like a terrible idea to her the more she considered it. She even thought about contacting the police and offering up her cooperation in exchange for some kind of protection, but then she heard Rick talking about how a made man had rolled on the mob years ago. The mob had been patient, dropping the entire matter for about a decade. Then they had carefully started to seek the person out. First it was just the internet and searches. Then it was weird phone calls in the middle of the night to people they thought might be the guy. Eventually they tracked him to a small town in the middle of nowhere. It didn't take long for the guy to disappear. The real kicker, Rick had told her, is that since the former made man had been in the witness protection program no one noticed when he wasn't around anymore. As far as anyone knew he'd died shortly after rolling over on the mob. So his family didn't raise a stink that would have forced people to do their jobs and track down the killers, or at least try. Instead the whole thing was swept under the rug, so to speak, because the witness protection program wasn't about to air their dirty laundry to their own bosses and tell them how badly they'd fucked everything up.

              So Jen felt trapped, but at the same time it was the kind of trapped that a dog feels while it wears an electric collar and stares longingly across the property line at the street. Jen knew that it was all on her, that her destiny was in her hands. Sure the mob would try to flex and make people think that they ran everything, but really, from the little she'd been able to see of Rick's friends—which wasn't very much since they couldn't know they were together as a couple—it had seemed that most of them were literally playing some kind of weird game where organized crime was the focal point. Sure they were dangerous, but mostly to each other. The mob even had loosely followed rules about only killing people that were soldiers in the mob as to avoid civilian death. Jen also noticed that when they did kill someone out side of the mob syndicate it was usually someone weak and alone, someone that wouldn't lose their minds and kill everyone in sight. The mob didn't pick on retired cops or soldiers, they didn't fuck with people they knew would go from zero to shooting up their houses at night in less time then it took to pee their pants. The mob always had an eye out for an easy mark, and sometimes they didn't want anything from a mark but their life.

              Things went on this way for some time. Then Jen really started to show and both of their attitudes changed. Rick started talking about how it might be possible to buy his way out of the mob. He could leave his wife in good financial standing so that she'd never have to work and he didn't even think she'd really mind anyway, if that were the case. Jen asked how much money he was talking about having to spend to buy his way out, but Rick wouldn't say. He just kept talking about how it was worth it, how he had to live a normal life at some point and all of the mob stuff was going to get him killed eventually anyway. It just wasn't enough that they were in love. The way things were at that time pretty much insured that Jen would end up raising the kids alone, and neither of them wanted that.

              When Jen first started considering taking off with Rick she knew that it would have to be quick, and that she wouldn't have time to commiserate with any of her friends about what was going on. She knew that Rick was giving up a lot for her, but at the same time she didn't feel at all badly about it because she knew as well as he did that what he was doing wasn't something that could be done forever. People got out of the mob for reasons that were usually pretty good. Rick's reasoning was sound, as far as Jen was concerned, but she also wondered if he was being completely honest with her. What if there was no way for him to buy out and he was just saying that so that she didn't worry all the time. She knew that she wasn't cut out for constantly looking over her shoulder.

              “Listen,” Rick said one day as they walked in the park. “I'm going to buy my way out and we're going to head west, all the way out to Colorado. The west side of the Rockies out there is sparsely populated. There are towns where people go to disappear. One place I've read about on the internet even has a sign up at the post office telling people that if they take pictures of the residents that they will be arrested and the film scrapped.”

              Jen's eyes grew wide.

              “What do you think is going on out there?” she asked.

              “I'm not sure, really. It could be that witness protection just loves the place. Or it could be the rich eccentric people move out there to be left alone. You'd be surprised how hard it is to be left alone in this country. But Colorado's Front Range does a good job of providing that place. You can go there and get lost in the mountains. And weed is legal. I've never smoked the stuff because the mob looks down on that sort of thing, and drugs in general. But maybe we could move out there and live like a couple of New Age hippies in the mountains. Of course we'd have running water and all of that jazz. You know what I mean. I'm not talking about living under a bridge or anything.”

              Jen had agreed and they'd set a date. As the date approached Jen wondered more and more whether or not she'd made the right decision. It was easy to just tell herself yes, but she knew that deep down there were other ways she could go about raising the child. She knew that she could pull off being a single mother, and that it didn't have to turn into something out of a thriller movie where she moved far away from her life in order to stay alive. The closer the day got the more antsy she felt about the entire thing. But she couldn't let Rick know. He wasn't joking around about buying out, and the amount of cash that he'd stored at her house for the drop off was huge. She'd never seen so much money in one place in her life. She wondered what it must feel like to be able to produce that amount of money on demand. Or maybe the feeling was more like the trapped feeling she'd had clinging to her for the past few months. Maybe Rick felt like his whole life had been kind of a waste since he'd only ended up making enough money to buy his was out of the mob.

              The day they left the sky was sunny and clear. They got on a train westward bound and settled in. Rick told her about all of the places they'd go and things they'd see once they made it out there. It was pretty great to listen to him talk, to know that he loved her so much that he was willing to do all of this. Because love was a word they hadn't thrown around yet, or even said once. But as the train chugged away from the station Jen realized that this was love, the amount of sacrifice for each other. This was the thing that so many people went their entire life without finding. And like with so many other people, love was the thing that might end up tearing them apart. Because who knew how each of them would adjust. Who knew what would happen. They could move out there and end up hating it, end up resenting each other and everything about the mountains and the hippies and the pot and the tourists. They might end up worse off.

              Jen rested her head against Rick's arm as the train slowly picked up speed. The rhythm of the engine was something she felt in her soul. She smiled as she thought about how their baby would enter the world in one of its most beautiful places. She just hoped that Rick and herself could do right by the child and each other. She hoped that end the end it would all be worth it, and neither of them would have any regrets. Jen fell asleep and didn't wake again until their next stop. It was dark out, but for the first time since they met they were alone together, without anything darkening the sky above them. Jen felt at peace for the first time. She felt homeward bound.

THE END

Falling Again

Oh God, my supervisor was going to kill me.  I could not remember a single thing that she had told me, and I had no idea how to assist the hand surgeon and my future career was going to be over before I had even started.

                        Yup, that’s it.  I couldn’t even survive two weeks as an intern.  Wait, let’s back up here for a second.  I tend to talk and think way too much when I’m freaking out.

                        I’m an occupational therapy student.  Nobody knows what occupational therapists do, and the field is so broad that I’d have to go into about a million different research articles to tell you exactly what it is, but I’ll be nice.  I’ll go the easy route.  We help people do their daily tasks, whatever they happen to be.  You need to shave your face but you had a stroke?  Occupational therapy.  You were in a car accident and now you freak out every time you have to go outside?  Occupational therapy.

                        So how the heck did I end up involved in hand surgery?  A most excellent question.

                        Basically, the way it goes in this profession is that one of the things occupational therapists do is become hand therapists.  So if you break your hand, they splint you.  If you rip a tendon, they help you with the aftermath so you can use the hand again. I think it goes without saying that hand therapists are the grand poo-bas of the occupational therapy scene.  You know how they say on every doctor show ever made that surgeons are like the jocks of the medical profession?  They’re hardcore, they’re gung-ho, they’re the popular kids, and they have the most money?

                        Hand therapy is like that.  Except for, you know, not being a doctor thing. Which suits me just fine.

                        At my school, we’re lucky enough to pick and choose which internships we can apply to.  Those poor sacks at other schools are so pit-scared of their administration that they cower down in fear and let their internship coordinators do all the talking.  Not me.  Even if my school was like that, I’m the kind of person who doesn’t just take a job sitting down.  So basically, I did some research in the New York area and found out that there are ten hand therapists in the whole damn state.

                        Ten.  As in IX.  As in a one with a zero at the end.

                        I was overjoyed.  That meant it would be super easy to narrow down the best one.  And I found her super quick.  Yes,
she
.  Occupational therapy is a female-dominated field, but hand therapy is the one place you can find boys.  Hand therapy is filed under the physical disabilities heading.  Boys go into the physical disabilities field, where there are lots of broken bones and heavy lifting.  And I am just fine with boys, being one of them and playing with them, let’s just put it like that.

                        On the phone, Elisa Ahmed was not what I expected.  She had this soft little baby voice and giggled at the end of every sentence as she told me the medical clearance I would have to get and the anatomy I would have to review before the hospital she worked at would let me in.  This was the woman who was at the top of her field in the most competitive state across the nation? Had she really passed the grueling, six-hour exam?  And been supervising for over fifteen years? She sounded about as soft and fluffy as a corgi puppy, and about as ridiculous.

                        Still, stats don’t lie.  Elisa Ahmed was the best, and if I wanted to go into hand therapy, I had to be among the best.  So when I was approved for a thirteen-week internship at Middleton Hospital’s Occupational Therapy Department, I was thrilled.  And nervous as fuck.  If I did well here, I could be offered a job after graduation.

                        As it turned out, my intuition was right.  I had been oh so very correct in being nervous.  Elisa Ahmed may have sounded like a sugar-covered marshmallow, but she was anything but.  I realized this the very first day I began working for her.

                        Rules and directions and all the possible consequences of breaking a patient’s confidentiality—or their bones—came tumbling out of her mouth a mile a minute in perfectly even, clipped sentences, which was confusing, because she was still speaking in that baby doll voice.  She gave me the world’s fastest introduction to the facility and told me that by the end of the second week, I’d be taking on ten patients a day, and that if I was truly interested in hand therapy, I’d have to do something to prove myself before my midterm at six weeks.

                        At lunch, someone whispered that she had fired the last three students who worked for her.

                        Physically, she was a pretty imposing-looking woman.  She had the kind of ethnic European beauty that comes with big hair, breasts, hips and blue eyes, but from the no-nonsense dark pants and pale button-downs she wore underneath her pristinely white lab coat, you could tell she was the kind of person who took herself very seriously.  And you knew that you better take her seriously, too.

                        I was still reeling from the sheer workload piled on to all the interns who make the decision to work in a hospital when Elisa sprang another firecracker onto my lap.

                        “Once a week, every week, we go over to the inpatient unit of the hospital to check out incoming cases with the hand surgeon.”

                        Hands.  Surgeons.  Inpatient unit.  I swallowed hard.  I tried to mask my confusion by nodding as if I were a perfectly competent student of occupational therapy rather than an intern about to wet her own pants.

                        “We leave in fifteen minutes.  We walk over together.  I’ll see you then.”

                        She was not kidding.  In fifteen minutes, I had to run for my jacket and bag because Elisa Ahmed was giving me a very displeased look from the door of the rehabilitation center, where she stood, fully dressed and ready to go.  The inpatient unit was four blocks away, and as we walked, she shot instructions at me rapid-fire.

                        “We go in, drop off our stuff, and head straight down to unit thirteen on the third floor.  Do not speak directly to the surgeon unless he speaks to you.  That being said, sometimes, he has medical students in his office, doing their rounds, so he may enjoy a question every now and then.  Do not look over his shoulder when he reads X-rays.  Step in, glance, then step back.  When he reaches out, give him the white paper every patient gets when they walk into the clinic.  When he gives it back to you, it means they need to be scheduled for an evaluation at our outpatient clinic, and that they are automatically one of our patients.  Take the paper, go to the phone, dial eighty four eighty four, and while you wait for one of the front office staff to pick it up, ask the patient what day and time works better for them, then schedule them for the best available time.  And then go back into the office.”

                        What?  WHAT?  Did this woman ever hear herself talk?

                        “And Mindy?”  It seemed like a good a time as any to pretend my stomach was not roiling inside of my body, so I looked over at her and tried to smile.   “This is a great opportunity to see our patients and find out what’s wrong with them before we even evaluate them.”

                        I nodded, trying hard not to betray the fact that my head was reeling from the sheer volume of information Elise Ahmed, certified hand therapist and hardcore chick with the voice of a sugar baby, had managed to stuff into just four short city blocks.

                        The first two patients went fine.  My manner seemed to have ingratiated me with Dr. Hahn, the short, round little hand surgeon, so I managed to stutter out a few questions which he graciously answered, but for the most part, I just stood next to Elise as the doctor removed stitches from his surgery patients and informed them that they’d be wearing their casts for at least six more weeks, which meant that they were not going to be our—meaning occupational therapist’s—problem for a little while yet.  I was afraid to breathe, let alone get close enough to the patients to examine their tendon repairs, and I was just sighing a sigh of relief when patient number three entered the room.

                        He was a youngish guy of about thirty, and he had broken his left middle finger seven weeks prior.  He had gone to a doctor when it happened, and the medical genius had told him that it would heal over just fine and that he didn’t need any surgery.  When Dr. Hahn unwrapped his hand, it was quite clear that this was very incorrect information.  The finger was healing over, all right, but it was lapping over his ring and pinky fingers, making his hand appear more like a Franken-limb than anything else.

                        “What do I do, doc?  Do I get surgery for it now?”

                        “I’d have to re-break the finger and you’d only get about 60% of function back” was Dr. Hahn’s curt reply as he sat, typing away at his doctor’s note.  Then, some measure of sympathy entered his face as the full extent of his words finally registered in his trained-to-be-cold surgeon’s brain.  “But if I don’t operate, it doesn’t grow straight, but you can use the hand.”

                        At that moment, Elisa stepped in, all blond hair and professional calm.  “If you come therapy, we can get the strength in your hand back.  The finger will be more crooked, but you’ll be able to use the hand for all your daily things—shaving, dressing, eating.  What do you do for a living?”

                        “I’m a driver,” said the patient, terrified at all this information.  “That other doctor, he mangled me?” For a split second, it was as if his anger had exploded and suffused the whole room, and the look on Elisa’s face told me she felt exactly as I did—trapped by this man’s misfortune.

                        “I’m sorry,” came that soft voice of hers, putting a balm on the situation.  “He did a bad thing.  But if you come to us, we’ll do the best we can to get your hand up and running again.”  And with that, the surgeon scribbled something on the patient’s white card and held it out.

                        Take the white card, I remembered.  Schedule the patient’s appointment.  I was so caught up in the enormity of this individual situation that my awareness of the space around me narrowed down to just my own. Elisa Ahmed was going to do great things for this guy, she was going to rehabilitate his life.  I had totally made the right decision, all the other fired interns be damned.   I remembered only the next step, to schedule this patient’s appointment with us, and that the phone I was supposed to use was just around the bend of the office.  As I rushed out of the office, leaving Elisa discussing the case with Dr. Hahn, I barely noticed bumping into a whole bunch of people who seemed to be lining up with military precision outside of the office.

                        And that’s when disaster struck.

                        The patient with the medically butchered hand standing right behind me, I grasped the phone with one hand and stared at the keypad in front of me.  I was drawing a total blank.  I could not remember for the life of me what number I had to call or any of the things I was supposed to do to arrange an appointment for this patient.  Five seconds ticked by, and ten, and I knew I had to do something unless I wanted Elisa Ahmed to come outside and find me staring like a slow-witted donkey at a bunch of numbers with a patient behind me.  I had to move as fast as she did, or I would get sacked just as fast as the other interns.

                        Basically, my whole future hung on my ability to complete this phone call.

                        God damn it.  Maybe I’d make a good burger-flipper instead?

                        “Eight four, eight four,” a male voice behind me said.  “It’s the number of the outpatient unit.”

                        I glance back.  
Well, hello ginger
, I think, and then my brain is overtaken by the immediacy of my potential workplace situation.  I dial the number and somehow, haltingly, and with a million mistakes, make the appointment.

                        And bless everything I hold sacred that the patient does not know why I’m slumped against the countertop in relief.

                        The seconds tick by as my heartbeat slows to an acceptable rhythm.  Medically stable, one might say.  My weak little joke cheers me up and the wobble disappears from my knees.  I can go back in and face Elisa.  I can do this.  But first, I need to thank that cute little ginger boy who saved me.  I look around, but there’s nothing but nurses’ assistance running around in blue and maroon scrubs.  I guess the ginger ran off before I could thank him.  Oh well.  There’ll be more good-looking guys around here, anyway.

                        When I get back into Dr. Hahn’s office, it’s as if the space has shrunk.  More accurately, it’s now populated by the surgeon, Elisa, me, and about four medical students.  One of them is a tall, skinny blond girl with equally skinny curls who I dismiss instantly—no competition here.  There is a short, round jocky girl there, kind of cute in a dirty sexy way, and there are two guys.  One is a tall, pot-bellied fellow I’d bet dollars to doughnuts is going to get diabetes any day now, and the other is my ginger savior.

                       
Hey there, hot stuff
.

                        He’s tall, skinny as a reed, and has these great sunken cheekbones that you could cut butter with.  His hair looks like he got out of the shower maybe half an hour ago, and the green scrubs he’s wearing set off his eyes.  There’s a splash of freckles on his upturned little nose that are just begging to be counted by someone’s tongue, and I don’t see any reason why it should be mine.