9
9
BITCH-SLAPPED BY THE OTHER DR. D
T he romance was a whirlwind. Like the New Year’s Eve kiss, it was a shock to me, a shock to everyone. Ranger had managed to turn our relationship as deftly as the luxury box around a hairpin turn. Seemingly overnight we were a couple. And, again, I appeared to have no say in the matter. Ranger was openly affectionate with me, holding hands as we strolled down the sidewalk, leaning over to kiss me before we parted ways on the forked paths. One time, we even simultaneously kissed our brother, one on each cheek, in a Mikey sandwich. This one in private, with dead video cameras staring at the ground. Everyone eventually simmered down at The Academy, whispers stopped, and gunning for invites commenced
Weston had agreed to our nuptials. Even paying for the elaborate wedding on The Academy dime. This came with two caveats: that I would finish The CAP and remain dedicated to the GAP program. Agreed and agreed. And we were to use it as a spring expedition, inviting all the Academy brass and local VIPs. Whatever. I had more fingers than friends here.
So I was to wed Officer Ranger James Nealson the II, in a traditional ceremony at St. Mark’s Catholic Church in Belvedere. My father was called, not to ask for permission, but to march me down the aisle. Mikey was to be ring bearer. Andrew was to be in attendance, and Jess my maiden of honor. The only fly in the anointment (other than the brutal fact that I would not become Mrs. Peter Davenport) was Slater was to be Ranger’s best man.
Oh well. After all Ranger was doing for me, I couldn’t begrudge him that, so I smiled sweetly at his dark handsome mug and tried to forgive and forget for the sake of peace and new beginnings. Despite the upset to my personal life, life at The Academy went on in typical fashion. I woke up as usual, I breakfasted as usual, I went to training as usual, and I hung around The Academy on the weekends, while everyone else went out. That’s okay, I spent Friday nights watching movies with Mikey and Saturday nights Googling wedding ideas.
My fiancé was gone. A lot. A long mission in South Africa kept him away the better part of February. Some operation having to do with blood diamonds that would severely cut into the largest diamond retailer’s margins, if not stopped. I didn’t really ask for details on his affairs. I was fully occupied with finishing another six-week course on international ones and planning a wedding.
Upon my fiancé’s return, he put the kibosh on some of my grandest ideas for our wedding: no ice cream bar for the kids. No kids, with the exception of our ring bearer and his brother. No dee-jay spinning hip-hop. The Academy social committee preferring a string quartet for the wedding, a brass band for the reception, and a more “sophisticated palette” than the upscale BBQ I’d had in mind. (Didn’t go with hotel they’d picked out, don’tja know.) This was to be another Asian-fusion affair.
Fine. I smiled up at him. No problem. He smiled down at me. We were getting along great.
“Oh. And one more thing . . .” he said before heading off to the Ops Building and another meeting. “I made an appointment for you in La-La Land at L’ezu.” He emphasized the French name with a very believable accent.
“Tres magnifique,” I said, less believably. Forget about the last two weeks thumbing through pages of glossy bridal magazines. Ranger was a man who always had a plan and who kept you on your toes. However, I wasn’t a ballerina so I soon grew weary of all the unnatural posing.
At night, he’d sometimes send a golf cart for me. Sometimes he wouldn’t. No rhyme. No reason. When he did, we’d sit on his low couch, watching his flat screen TV—sports. I’d rub his shoulders if he had a hard day or his temples if he had one of his headaches. Eventually, he’d pull me into his lap, where I eventually let him round second base, under my Academy T-shirt, with that dang roaring lion’s head watching everything. This brought a gasp of shocked surprise to my mouth and a grin to his.
I’d learned something during these little sofa romps: once you’d crossed a line, you could never go back. And the line kept creeping further and further south. Now, he was trying to steel third. But when I called him out, the night would end with him sending me away and a “cold shower.” Ranger was slowly breaking down my barriers and rebuilding a foundation of trust.
He blew off again in windy March, with a memorable kiss, and a new six-weeks course for me. He was headed to tropical Miami—a drug cartel recon with Reese (who refused to partake in wedding talk), Laticia, the brown-haired, brown-skinned beauty who’d intimidated me during seduction training, and his best man as back-up. Something about that pairing bothered me, but I didn’t have time to dwell on it.
I was heading for a crash course in Russian, Digital Forensics, something called Locks, Stocks, one I ignored.
My head shot up. “Why? Is anything wrong?”
She took in a measured breath, plucked her gloves off finger by finger. “I believe it’s time to strip the bark from the Horse Chestnut tree.” She whirred toward the tree blooming snow in the yellow sunshine. My heart lifted with the cool spring breeze, my footsteps skipping as I followed her tracks in the spongy earth.
Dr. D demonstrated the correct procedure for stripping the bark and laying it out in long strips on metal racks to bake in the sun. After it had properly dried, she explained how she would use them to make a tonic used for ulcers, narcotic properties, and febrifuge properties. (Which I now knew was just a fancy way of saying fever reducers.) She was preparing a trial for injecting the concentrated tonic into mice with cancerous tumors.
This was the exact type of thing I was interested in, but I could barely follow the simple instructions. She made to leave, but I stopped her with a plaintive, “Aren’t we gonna talk about . . . how your physical therapy’s goin’?”
Dr. D let out a long, deep sigh. She whirred back around. “Katie, talking about my son is not something an engaged girl should be engaged in.” Her words were sharp, but her eyes were kind.
I’m ashamed to say I wasn’t even ashamed, although I hung my head as though I were. “I’m sorry. I just can’t help it. I want to at least know how he is. That’s not so bad, right?”
“I’m going to tell you something for your own good. It’s the same conversation I had with my son the last time he inquired after you.” She pinned me with a look.
A smile, the likes of which I could not commandeer, sprang to my face.
She drew another exasperated breath before hitting me between the eyes with it: “This fated romance notion you two have going on is a figment of your imaginations, not to mention illogical and immature. It most likely would not exist for a moon cycle in the real world.”
My smile withered.
“You two barely know one another,” she stated flatly. “ I know you better than my son does. These feelings that you’re harboring aren’t real. Romantic feelings die after a season, just like these annuals we just planted. You are both just too young to realize this. How many times do couples get together then break up? Time and time again. This is because the love feeling wears off like a temporary tattoo.”
My chest felt like something hard and sharp had just crashed into it. I would not believe it was bald truth.
“Marriage based on love doesn’t work,” she continued, after I’d taken a breath. “I know this from first-hand experience. And from national statistics. Do you know the average rate of divorce is above fifty percent?” She penetrated me with her deep brown eyes, and I shook my head dumbly. “And those that stick it out are usually more miserable than the ones who decide to end it. People grow up. They grow apart. That’s reality.
“That’s one reason Pete’s father . . . lost it that day. It’s wisdom you gain from life experience, which you two foolish youngsters do not have. He saw it as his son throwing a lifetime’s worth of work and achievement down the toilet for a vacation fling.”
I audibly gasped, the forgotten spade in my hands dropping to the earth, along with my hopes.
Dr. D stopped her lecture short to eye ball my face. “I’m sorry to bust your bubble, Katie, but that’s exactly what that was. You just both don’t know it. Furthermore, you most likely were doubly besotted because he was your first paramour, and a handsome and exciting novelty to your sheltered world. And . . .” She bored her brown eyes, so much like her son’s, into mine. “I don’t know if you’ve been apprised of this yet, but elite cadets are usually shot up with an extra dose of testosterone right before a mission like yours. This creates an immediate calming and bonding feeling on the part of the females.”
I felt my face crumple, but Dr. D took no pity on me, continuing resolutely on. “They do this, my dear, to simply make themselves irresistible to their marks. In this case, you.” She finished with a pointed finger and look.
My face blanched when this little scientific doozy discharged from her mouth. Like a missile, it hit me right in the heart. I’d already heard this from Ranger, but hearing it from the horse’s mother’s mouth, made it ten times more unbearable . The crazy strong feelings I felt for Pete were not mixed in a lab. Right? Did they create his intoxicating scent too? They had orchestrated a romance for me based on snippets they’d garnered from my life—books I’d read, perfumes I’d torn from magazines, then chemically created it in that cold lab with that ginormous monster computer?
Tears sparkled my eyes. But I wasn’t sad; I was mad. “I don’t believe you,” I choked out, even though I was speaking to a scientist who relied on facts not feelings. But wasn’t I taught to trust my feelings?
“Ask your fiancé,” she advised. I didn’t have to—he’d already imparted the knowledge.
“And from my understanding, from my son, you weren’t exactly the easiest mark to deal with—being both gifted and poisoned against The Academy from your mother. They most likely did this to calm your fears about relinquishing your brother and to get you to bond more quickly with Peter.”
I yanked a piece of bark off with unnecessary force. “Then how do you explain him comin’ for me in L.A? I was just as bonded with him then. I felt exactly the same way.”
She shook her head. “No, you didn’t,” she argued. “If you would have felt that strongly for him, then you would have left with him that night. But you didn’t. You chose to remain with your brother. You ended up going home with Ranger, instead—your future husband.”
I opened my mouth to protest this, but only a croak came out.
“And as far as Peter coming back for you . . . well, psychologically it makes sense. He couldn’t save his brother, a gifted too, so he was trying to make up for that by trying to save you. Classic reliving the same themes from your childhood until you get it right.”
I was still continuing with my guppy impersonation. Could she be right? I thought back to my encounters with Pete. I did feel very safe and calm with him. I did have an almost overwhelming desire to jump his bones, when I didn’t even know him. But I felt like that feeling was pretty consistent throughout, from the first encounter to the last. A promise to my dying mother to take care of my little brother, whom I loved and had raised since he was two, was what stopped me from going with Pete. And it almost wasn’t enough. Ranger had nothing to do with it. Right?
“I don’t believe you,” I repeated myself.
“The unflappable opinion of youth,” she asserted.
I set my hands on my hips and dared a glare.
“I’m sorry, Katie. I know I’ve been harsh, but I feel it’s in yours and my son’s best interests to let this go. And I want you to know he has moved on. Created a life for himself. He’s content. And seeing other girls . . . like a young man his age should .”
Another piercing zinger straight to my heart. I actually staggered back.
“Whatever striations of love you two once shared didn’t grow roots deep enough to weather a lifetime. And you know what happens to plants with weak roots?” she challenged. I didn’t answer the rhetorical question. “They whither up and die from lack of nutrients.”
The tears I’d been holding back began to disperse. I dashed them away, along with the last of my hopes.
Her face softened a little. “You have a chance to take the time to dig deep roots with Ranger, an important man at The Academy. One who can help you weather the storm of problems you’ll face here. A smart young lady such as yourself would do well to do everything in her power to maintain it. Because your reality is your life at The Academy. Your fantasy is a life with my son. And that life would never have worked anyway.”
I glanced away from her wise face, staring at my future without her son.
“If you two insist on another rendezvous, it would result in disastrous consequences, especially for Peter. Think what your husband would do, if he found out you were even having this conversation.”
I shuttered just thinking about it.
“Do you understand this, Katie dear?”
I nodded miserably.
“Much like you are looking out for Mikey’s best interests, I too, am doing the same for my son. It is not in his best interests for you to try to escape with him. You are a gifted Weston has been searching high and low for. If you shacked up with my son, they would scour the earth like our military did Bin Laden. They would find you two. You would come out unharmed, a prized gifted. But I can’t say the same for my son, who is now a fugitive and enemy of one of the most powerful organizations in the world. Because of you . . . as unwitting on your part as it may be. These are the hard facts.”
She paused for a moment to let this all sink in. It felt like I was standing in quicksand. The defeat I was feeling weighing heavily on my heart.
She slowly whirred forward to take my cold hand. She waited until I found her earnest eyes before resuming. “I’d like to leave today, imparting words of wisdom: Make Ranger happy for as long as you can. Make your marriage work, for as long as you can. Forget about my son, if you really do love him. If not for your sake . . . then for his.” After that long, painful speech, she one-eightied and whirred away.
It was a long time before I spoke to Elena Davenport. And I never called her by her first name again.