Chapter 6 Lizzie
LIZZIE
As I hovered at the top of the steps, listening to the men talking in the kitchen, I rolled my eyes. Great. Ranger was staying the night. That meant I didn’t have a chance in hell of seeing Marla for the rest of the day.
Figures.
After hearing parts of the conversation at the top of the steps, I lost my want for a snack. I turned and lumbered my way back to the bedroom. I flopped down face first, then groaned and regretted the decision the moment a flash of pain worked its way through my skull.
“Fuck all of this,” I grumbled as I rolled over.
With the pain medication in my system, I was pretty much useless. Walking was a chore and a half whenever it rushed through my veins, which meant the only thing I had to do was dwell. I supposed I could have played video games, but those weren’t fun when alone.
Nothing was fun when alone.
I thought about my lieutenant. Did they declare me dead? Were they searching for me? Were they trying to figure out what happened? I was supposed to report back three weeks ago. We got home from a deployment, we had three weeks off, and we were supposed to report back.
That felt like it was ages ago.
Pictures. You have to take pictures.
That was something I could do.
Well, something Doc could do.
Man, that meant I had to go find him and talk to him.
“Better than laying here and dwelling on shit,” I mumbled as I shoved myself back up on wobbly arms.
I could still be proactive with things. If I had to continue to be off the grid from my life, then the least I could do was roll up with proof of everything that happened to me.
And that required pictures. Was Doc taking meticulous notes on my condition?
Hell, I hadn’t even seen a real doctor’s office.
What if he was just writing this shit down on toilet paper he used to wipe his ass or some shit?
“Ugh,” I grumbled when I realized my brain wouldn’t let me rest.
I slipped back off the bed and stood, feeling the twinge in my hip. It made me grimace, and as I slowly turned toward the door, my eye caught the gray cane in the corner that I was supposed to use on my walks with Marla.
Or on my walks anywhere.
“Fine, but just this once,” I said as I lumbered over and grabbed it.
The can clicked with every slow movement I made. I rubbed my hand down my face at one point to try to clear my mind, and ended up groaning at the pain that shot through my faceplate.
Was there a part of me that didn’t hurt?
“Come on, we can do this,” I whispered.
The cane made me feel as if I was incapable of shit, and I couldn’t stand that. I worked so hard to become the strong, independent woman that I grew into. It took surviving my childhood. It took surviving school. It took surviving basic.
So much fucking survival.
“Oh my God!”
I flinched at the shrieking voice before peels of laughter poured from one of the rooms upstairs. I hadn’t traveled down that particular hallway yet, and the commotion made me curious.
“You’re fucking joking,” Brutus’s deep voice wafted down the hallway.
“I shit you fucking not,” Doc said through his chuckling, “that’s exactly how it went down.”
“You lie,” Anna said. “You’re lying through your teeth, Dee! There’s no way!”
I paused just beyond the frame of the cracked door when I heard Anna’s voice.
Of course, Brutus and Doc would be with her.
All the fucking time.
Like they always fucking were.
Since when did you become such a jealous bitch?
“I’m being serious, though!” Doc said through the laughter coming from the crack in the door.
“Statistically speaking, there are more people on this planet with mental illness than there are people with physical illnesses. When you build up a society like ours, which is an unchecked capitalistic society, and you have generations of people who are raised in survival mode, the nervous system activates in ways we have yet to test. One of those ways, we have found, is that the nervous system has a tendency to rewrite—”
Anna interjected, still giggling up a storm.
“You really mean to tell me that there are bitches out here walking around with fucked up heads and they don’t even realize it?
Hell, that describes half the fucking prissy-ass fucks I went to school with!
Why the hell didn’t I have that information at my disposal before?
Doc, you need to figure out how to clone yourself.
I’ve got some sick fucking burn material because of your ramblings. ”
Brutus snickered. “Gonna tell the next person that, statistically speaking, they’re hardwired to be an asshole.”
“Actually,” Doc said as a shadow moved beyond the door, “it would be more like, ‘statistically speaking, your nervous system has never known stability once in its life. No wonder you can’t think straight. I’m surprised you can walk straight.”
Anna and Brutus fell apart in laughter, and I had to admit, what he said tugged a barely-there smile across his face.
I found that I liked his ramblings when he got to going about statistics and studies.
Intelligent men always drew me in. They never ran out of things to talk about, and I loved hearing how passionate they were about things they enjoyed.
Why did I have to eavesdrop to experience that side of Doc?
Every time we were together, it was always ‘Miss Elizabeth’ this, ‘Miss Elizabeth’ that.
You have to take your meds. Make sure you eat this food.
You need to do better by your body. No, you can’t leave yet.
Always a studious and stoic gaze, and never the small smile I saw him crack sometimes with Anna. Or Brutus. Or even Cap.
Why didn’t I get to be graced with his smile?
Why couldn’t I just have some of the fun conversations with him?
I wanted my life to be fun again.
He smiled during video games.
“Sure, until Anna barged in,” I grumbled to myself.
Everything paused. Things went eerily silent, and I wondered if I spoke to myself a bit too loudly. It was a bad habit of mine. Talking to myself was always how I decompressed, especially in showers.
I won so many fucking fights in the shower when it was just me and my brain.
“Is someone there?” Brutus called out.
Fuck.
I was had.
I sighed heavily as I reached out and eased the door open, revealing the three stooges behind it. Brutus looked at me with a heavily-furrowed brow. Anna smiled and waved her hand. But it was Doc who immediately stood and rushed toward me.
He looked up and down the hallway before he stepped out of the room, causing me to step backward in order to make room for him.
His voice lowered. “What in the world are you doing out of bed, Miss Elizabeth?”
“Lizzie’s fine,” I said simply, “and I need a favor.”
“Is something wrong? Is something bleeding? Have you popped a stitch anywhere?”
I shook my head. “Uh, no. But I want to take pictures.”
He paused. “Pictures?”
I nodded. “Of my injuries.”
He looked at me for a long time with a look that I couldn’t decipher. “Pictures of your injuries.”
“Mhm. For the file that I assume you’re keeping, even though I haven’t ever seen it. You are keeping a file, right? You’re not just some fake doctor that makes ends meet by playing Frankenstein or something.”
I expected that to get a rise out of him, but instead, all he did was continue to stare down at me. “You want pictures cataloguing your injuries for your medical file.”
God, it was like pulling teeth with this man. “Look, my commanding officer is a bitch and a half. For good reasons, but still. He’ll need proof of everything that I’ll have to tell him that has kept me AWOL, otherwise I’ll be court-martialed.”
“You know Cap is going to take care of that, right?” Brutus piped up from behind Doc, still inside of the room.
I just shrugged and continued staring up at Doc. “They’re still going to need proof of what’s happened. I’d like to make sure we stay up to date on that proof.”
Doc’s brow furrowed and he studied me, and for a moment, I was worried that I forgot something. There was an intense curiosity behind his gaze before he turned his eyes over his shoulder.
“I’ll be back, guys,” he said before he reached for the door and closed it.
“Don’t leave me with pickle breath, come on,” Brutus grumbled.
Anna just giggled and clapped as Doc closed the bedroom door.
“All right,” I said breathlessly, happy to finally have something to do, “lead the way, Doc.”
He just nodded his head before he moved in front of me, and I clicked behind him with my cane.
Of course, he didn’t speak. There were no ramblings.
No quips about studies. No words in general.
Never words with me. Always silence and manners and the kind of stoicism that made me want to choke on a noose.
We made our way deeper into the second story of the home, only for him to grab a stainless-steel doorknob.
He tossed the door open, and I vaguely remembered him mentioning something about a surgical room in the house somewhere.
This was definitely that room.
Wait, how did I know about a surgical room in his house?
Everything was a blur these days.
My brain was mush with these pain meds.
“Your place is massive,” I said as I clicked into the room. “I didn’t even realize this was up here, and I thought Marla and I walked pretty much this whole upper area.”
All he did was usher his hand out to an O.R. table. “Have a seat if you’d like, Miss Elizabeth.”
“Seriously,” I said as I went and struggled myself up onto the crisp, pristine table. “You can just call me ‘Lizzie.’ You don’t use formalities with anyone else. Don’t know why you’re using them with me.”
He didn’t skip a beat. “Your file.”
I wasn’t sure why I was disappointed in his reaction, but when I saw that file folder with my name on it, my mind clicked into another sort of gear. Perfect. I saw with my own two eyes the kind of notes he takes.
“Thanks,” I said as I took it from him.
I flipped it open and, sure enough, there were pages and scribblings and notations of things like medications and verbal documentation of injuries.
There were pictures with the outline of a female form, and inside of the form were also meticulous drawings of the bruises and scrapes and cuts I originally came in with.
I had to admit, I was impressed with the notes.
Until I flipped through the pages and got to the—
“Pictures,” I whispered softly.
Holy fucking hell, I completely forgot that we took pictures.
It was a punch to the gut realizing that.
How in the world did I forget that we took those pictures?
My fingertips ran along the bruises that were documented.
I tilted my head as I studied the small patches of stitches I had scattered throughout my body.
Seeing it all at once snapped part of my mind into place.
I was in rough shape.
“Miss Elizabeth?” Doc said softly.
I snapped the file folder closed and handed it back to him. “I’ll need a copy of that when this is all said and done.”
“This is your copy,” he said simply as he slid it back into a roll-out drawer.
“What?”
He turned and faced me, nudging the drawer closed with his hip.
“Downstairs is my normal medical exam room. I keep the original copies there. Up here in the surgical room, I keep copies of those same files that are downstairs. I come up here and update them whenever they need to be updated. This will be the file I hand off to you, whenever you’re ready for it. ”
“Oh.”
I hung my head before I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes. I groaned softly with the pain, but it helped to ground me.
That was until I felt a pair of warm hands wrap around my wrists.
My hands were pulled away from my pulsing eyes.
“You don’t like it here,” he said.
I snickered and sighed as he settled my hands into my lap. “No, I’ve never been good at being a sitting duck.”
He shook his head as he stood there, gazing down at me. “You’re not a sitting duck. You’re safe here, Miss Elizabeth.”
I just looked over to the side, studying the room. “No one is safe anywhere.”
When he didn’t say anything, I went to slip off the exam table, only for him to grab my upper arms.
“Easy,” he muttered as he helped me down.
“Thanks,” I said breathlessly.
“No thanks needed.”
He steadied me on my feet before I reached for my cane. “Seriously, make sure you keep that file updated. My commanding officer will most likely want to see pictures to back up what we’re talking about.”
“You have my word, Miss Elizabeth.”
With my back turned to him, I rolled my eyes as I clicked toward the exit. My body was ready for more sleep. Walking around was still exhausting, and I—
“Whoo,” I exclaimed as my ankle buckled beneath me.
There was a rush of wind behind me so quick that it fluttered my hair before there was a pressure at my back. I was hoisted against something solid and warm, then realized that Doc had his arm banded around my back.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“Fucking hell, my ankle,” I said.
“Do I need to take a look at it?”
I just shook my head as I tried moving away from him. “Just need some more rest. I am tired all of a sudden.”
“Because you’re doing too much. Here, let me help.”
He tried scooping me up, but I stepped away from him. “I’m fine. It’s good for me to walk.”
His gaze hardened on me. “Get back over here, Elizabeth.”
My back straightened. My eyebrows slowly hiked up my forehead.
I narrowed my eyes for a moment, wondering if I could get away with smacking him with my cane for daring to speak to me that way.
But a warm tingling sensation bled its way through my veins, and it distracted me enough that I stayed silent.
Which apparently communicated a different kind of message to Doc.
“Now,” he said as he walked up to me and slid his arm around my waist, tugging me against his side, “we’ll take this one step at a time. No getting ahead of me, Miss Elizabeth.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said as I tried not to focus on the splay of his long, dexterous fingers against the dip in my waist, “Sure. I hear you.”
And then he walked with me.
Step for step.
Allowing me to set the pace.
While the protection of his arm sent butterflies racing through my chest.