Chapter 2 Margot
MARGOT
Just as I went on break from the hospital and grabbed my coffee, my cell phone vibrated in my pocket.
I was done with my shift. I just needed enough caffeine in me to get home after coming in to assist in the triage coming from a massive car pile-up on the highway.
While most people didn’t need coffee at three in the afternoon, I did.
I preferred the night shifts at the hospitals I worked at because I’d always been a night owl.
I was more alert during those times. I was more focused in the wee hours of the morning.
And while Redding didn’t get much action like car pile-ups and shootouts, when we did, all hands had to be on deck.
So, after four hours of rudimentary stitches and trying to figure out whether or not people would live or die, I was ready for a nice hot cup of coffee. Especially when everything had pulled me out of bed at eleven in the morning with only three hours of sleep under my belt.
I was ready for another long nap.
I let my phone go to voicemail, but it promptly vibrated in my pocket again.
I sat my cup of coffee down on top of a table, claiming a corner booth for myself.
I slid my phone out and saw it was Piper.
I almost shot her to voicemail again, ready to enjoy my coffee so I could get my ass home.
But something in the pit of my gut told me to answer it.
So, I did.
“Piper, hey. Did you see on the news about the—”
“I need your help,” she said breathlessly.
Grunting and groaning sounded in the back before a door slammed open.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“I need your help and you can’t ask questions. Just please tell me you’ll help me,” she said.
“I can’t help you unless I kind of know what’s going on.”
“I’ve got a man in my care with four—possibly five—gunshot wounds and a knife in his arm. He needs blood, I need cauterizing equipment, and we need all the gauze, IV bags, and pain medication you can hustle out of there.”
I blinked. “You want me to steal all that shit from a hospital. Just like that. During my first year of my residency.”
“You know you have the capability with your expertise and your midwife practices to sign out those items, if needed. Plus, you have incredible pull with the hospital president. I think it’s because he has the hots for you.
Anyway, I’ll personally do the paperwork for you on my next shift at the beginning of the week.
Please, Margot. He’s dying. And he’s my husband’s best friend,” she said.
Ah. Someone with the crew. That’s why they couldn't come to the hospital.
“I’ll come help you under one condition,” I said as I stood up.
“Name it,” Piper said.
“You explain what the hell’s going on to me afterward.”
“Deal.”
“Send me the address of where you are. It’ll take me thirty or so minutes to procure everything,” I said.
“Can you make it twenty?”
“If I want to get caught, sure,” I said.
“I’ll try to keep him alive, but I make no promises,” she said.
I didn't know much about Rock. About this man Piper had gotten involved with.
Or had a family with. But what I did know was that he belonged to a crew that did both a lot of good for the community and indulged in shady practices whenever necessary.
Not really my kind of man, but to each their own.
I enjoyed mine clean-cut. Preferably rich.
Very unlike the young man I had dated in high school.
I changed my want of men, then and there.
After a massive blow-out fight my senior year, I went to Stanford to get my medical degree and never once looked back.
I turned my head toward sweater-vest-wearing-men with loafers and shorts that came above the knee.
Innocent men. Men who had a passion to take care of an intelligent woman like me someday.
Because deep down, I was tired.
I had no qualms in admitting I didn’t want to work someday.
Not because I hated my job, but because I’d been working every since I was fourteen years old.
Hell, I almost dropped out of high school in order to go full-time at the grocery store up the street from where I lived because my father drank too much of our money away and Mom couldn't bring in enough.
I was glad I didn’t drop out, though. Because I met him.
Yes, being a doctor was my dream. Had been ever since I hit high school.
But my senior year, I had a different dream posed to me.
One that had a big, tall, brute, strong man in it.
One that had my stomach round with children.
One that had my heart filled with love. One that had my body satiated with the tongue of the brute that opened up only for me.
I dreamt of having children. Of having a large family to love and raising them with the man of my dreams I’d met back in high school.
That was my newly-adopted dream. The one that helped me to ease myself into peaceful sleep at night despite my parents’ incessant fighting downstairs until two and three in the morning.
But fights happened. Things were said that could never be taken back. And even though I was willing to do the long-distance relationship while I was off to Stanford, he wasn’t.
He made that very clear the night he took my virginity.
“What a fucking night,” I murmured.
I slipped in and out of rooms I needed to be in.
I stuffed my massive hospital overnight bag with IV bags and sterile, covered needles.
I grabbed the three units of blood I could, then managed to reach for some glass-vialed pain medication.
Just in case we needed it. I rushed out of the hospital, clocking out with trembling fingertips before I made my way to my car.
And after punching in the address Piper sent me into my GPS on my phone, I raced off to my final destination.
The second I walked into that small building by the ocean, it was utter chaos.
There was an inconsolable woman with dark features in the corner.
I spotted Rock by the door, who waved me in the second I appeared at the doorway.
It was like everyone made a path for me from the front door to the bedroom.
And as I rushed down the hallway, Piper stuck her head out of the room.
“Please tell me you have blood,” she said breathlessly.
I reached into my purse and pulled out the three units.
“We need to use it wisely. This was all they had of the O-negative that I could spot,” I said.
“Not when I get back into work tomorrow. I’m O-negative,” Piper said.
Then, she ripped the bags from my palm.
I slinked into the room and saw a massive, hairy man lying there on the bed. And when my eyes fell to his pale face, panic rushed over me. My stomach dropped to my toes. My eyes flooded with tears as my purse fell from my shoulder down to the floor at my feet.
“Margot?” Piper asked.
Her voice sounded far away. Like it drifted off underneath a current of ocean water. My mind swirled with all sorts of memories the second I gazed into his face.
Bear.
My god, it had been so long.
“Margot!” Piper exclaimed.
She shook me, and it ripped me from my trance.
“I need you to set two IV’s. And we need to hurry. He’s got four gunshot wounds, a knife wound, and I’m pretty sure he has a collapsed lung as well. Along with an artery we have to cauterize,” she said.
I nodded quickly and drew in a deep breath, then got to work.
I set two IV’s in Bear’s hands. One for fluids, and one for giving him blood.
I waited until Piper finished stitching up the wounds in his abdomen, checking his eyes with my flashlight.
His pupils responded, but barely. Which wasn’t good.
“He needs a unit of blood now. We’re going to lose him if I don’t give it to him,” I said.
“Then, do it. But we have to hold off on the second one until we can get this damn thing—”
“Yeah, yeah. I know. I might be a resident, but I know,” I said.
Piper looked up at me and grinned before getting back to work.
I stitched up the wound in his arm as I watched the wound in his side slowly trickling blood. It was getting better, but it should have stopped. I felt around for Bear’s pulse, clocking how slow it was beating.
And his pulse ticked downward.
“I need to give him another unit,” I said.
“Not until I—”
“Then start cauterizing the damn wound! But his pulse is dropping dangerously low and if we lose him, we can’t shock him again. He’ll be too weak and we won’t get him back,” I said.
Piper locked her eyes with me before she nodded.
I hooked up the second bag of blood, and his body drew it in way too fast. I had the third one set up, ready to go. But we were running out of time.
“That’s all the blood we have left. We have to cauterize this, otherwise he has to go to the hospital,” I said.
Piper rustled around before she dropped to her knees at my side.
“Rip open the stitches and hold him down. I don’t have anything that isn’t going to make this hurt,” Piper said.
“Roger that,” I said.
And after her scalpel released the stitches, Bear finally moved underneath my hands.
“Keep him down!” Piper exclaimed.
I pressed all of my body weight into him, trying to keep him steady. He groaned as Piper shoved that implement into him, and his labored breathing worried me. He coughed into my face. One of his eyes opened up. And as I gazed into that warm, brown stare of his, my heart skipped a beat.
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered.
“I’ve got it! The bleeding’s stopping,” Piper said.
“Good. Because now I have to do this.”
I straddled Bear’s body and reached down into my purse.
I looked back at Piper and told her to hold Bear’s legs down as I grabbed the hollow tube needle from my purse.
I gripped it in my hands as I pulled the plastic casing of the needle off with my teeth.
And after I spat it back out onto the floor, I felt around on his bare skin with my fingertips.
Wow, Bear had put on some serious muscle since high school.
I brought the needle down into his chest, right in the pleural space. I pulled the top of the hollow tube off, listening as the trapped air escaped his chest. Bear drew in a large gasp, his eyes flying open before I quickly scrambled off his body.
The pneumothorax alone would take weeks to recover from. Let alone the rest of the issues he had going on.
What happened to you, Bear?
I slowly stood back as Piper rushed around him.
Pumping him full of pain medication and checking his vitals.
She took his blood pressure as my eyes gravitated over to the last bag of blood.
It wasn’t seeping into his body as quickly, which was a very good sign.
My eyes danced over his naked torso. Taking in the stitches and the wounds to make sure they weren’t bleeding.
“Margot,” Bear croaked out.
And as my eyes whipped up to his, he passed out again.
With everyone’s eyes slowly burning into me.
“Looks like you’re not the only one with questions that need to be answered,” Piper said.
Nope. She really wasn’t.