Chapter 6 First Steps #2
She hadn’t seen him fully undressed, but the man did not need to worry about calories or carbs or dieting in general. What she had seen of him was chiseled from granite.
Lynnette set her cargo in the passenger seat of her truck and shook her head. That was the sort of thought that would get her in trouble. I’m just doing something nice for someone who’s alone in an unfamiliar place.
She didn’t bother with the radio on her return trip.
Most of the morning chatter had been more about that missing college girl and the ongoing search efforts—a mix of police, college associates, and assorted volunteers—and the utter lack of clues.
The radio host remained convinced the girl’s boyfriend was to blame for whatever atrocity had happened.
Supposedly her family was flying in from England to join the search.
The whole story was heartbreaking, except for the part where a public figure threw accusations without a shred of proof, based purely on general statistics.
There would be a new host on at this time of day, but Lynnette didn’t have the emotional energy to risk that they were any better.
Her spot was still open, so she reclaimed it, snatched the deli bag and her purse, and hopped out. She walked in through her usual entrance, smiled but didn’t linger at the first familiar face she saw, and took the elevator to her floor.
Nerves mounted in her gut. She’d never done anything like this before.
Not that there was anything wrong with a platonic lunch during open visiting hours.
There were other nurses who donated free time to patient’s needs in various ways—though those were often part-time nurses, or they worked in one place and donated in another.
Still, the hospital had no rules against what she was doing. So long as she kept it platonic.
Which won’t be a problem. It’s not a date.
Why in the hell would she even consider that it was a date?
The elevator released her, Lynnette drew an unsteady breath, and stepped into the newly familiar hall.
Amy looked around her monitor, a bright red straw slipping from between her lips. “Lynnette?”
“Don’t mind me,” Lynnette said, raising her free hand in a dismissive wave. She slowed her pace but angled so as not to stop at Amy’s desk. “I’m still very much off. Not really here.”
Amy squinted. “Are you?”
Lynnette pinched at her shirt to draw attention to normal-person attire. “Yep. See you later.” She gave Amy a finger wave and continued on, praying her face hadn’t been five shades redder than normal.
It’s definitely, totally, not a date.
She pushed into Lance’s room after sneaking a glance through the slanted blinds that peeked inside, making sure no one was with him.
Because that embarrassment might have been too much for her already elevated heartrate.
But he was alone, so it was fine. As long as she didn’t think about how relieved she felt over that fact.
Lance’s eyes widened when he saw her, his gaze rolling over her form. “Lynn?” His stare snagged on the branded bag, then jumped back to her face as a smile tugged at his lips. “Did you dress up for me?”
More heat rushed to her face that she could only stubbornly ignore. Lynnette walked around and held out the bag. “Since you’re so capable, I’m sure you can hold onto this for a minute.”
He took the bag easily.
She turned, grabbed the permanent guest chair, and hauled it closer.
Because that would be more comfortable and less awkward.
For no other reason. Then she lowered her purse to the floor between the chair and the cabinet she’d previously hidden against—an embarrassment she already didn’t want to think about—and took the bag from him.
“While I imagine you’ve had worse, we both know hospital cafeteria food isn’t all that craveable.
And there’s no reason you can’t have better, so, I brought lunch. ”
Lance beamed, his pale green eyes sparkling under the glare of the fluorescent lights. “Not how I pictured our first date, but I won’t complain.”
She nearly crushed his bag of chips. “I never said anything about a date. You’re my patient, that would be highly inappropriate.” Enough to get her fired.
“I dunno, Lynn,” he teased, “you don’t look very nurse-like right now. Maybe there’s more to you than ‘Nurse Garver’.” He made it sound downright indecent and she was questioning her sanity for not bolting from the building.
Instead, she set his wrapped sandwich and the small bag of Doritos—cheesy, because he was cheesy and the thought had made her laugh—in his lap and said, “Since you insisted you could eat just about anything, I ordered what reminded me of you.” She lifted both sodas from the bag and held them up. “Which of these would you like?”
He already had a hand on his sandwich, but he looked over at the sodas and blinked in a brief silence. Then he shrugged. “Whichever one you don’t want as much.”
Lynnette frowned. “I’m fine with either.”
His lips twitched. “Are you being stubborn?”
“Are you?” She was. He kept giving her noncommittal answers and she wanted him to make a choice, to have an opinion. It was possible he genuinely didn’t care what he ate, but even then, that wasn’t all that healthy.
He studied her for several more seconds, amusement showing on his face, before tilting his head marginally to the right without ever breaking eye-contact and saying, “Root beer’s good.”
He’d left the diet soda for her. Was that the reason he’d done it? Or did he prefer root beer? Or did he just not like diet soda?
Why am I overanalyzing every single thing?
Lynnette set his choice on the cabinet top within his reach, then finally lowered to her seat with the remainder of the contents in the bag—her own lunch. She twisted off the cap of the soda and gulped down a swallow, then set the bottle on the same cabinet top so she could unwrap her sandwich.
“So,” Lance said as he lifted the first half of his already unwrapped sub toward his mouth, “since you’re off the clock, can we talk about non-medical shit? I’d like to know Lynnette beneath the scrubs.”
She watched him bite into the sandwich as her brow arched. “You mean beyond?”
He grinned, cheeks slightly puffed with food. He chewed and swallowed with alarming speed and replied, “That, too.”
Her face flared and Lynnette distracted herself by diving into her own food. She let her eyes close in appreciation of the first bite, let herself take the time to chew it properly, and didn’t look up again until she’d swallowed.
Lance had nearly devoured the first half of his sandwich in that short time.
“You should eat slower,” Lynnette said. “You could hurt yourself eating like that.”
He paused with the next bite nearly at his mouth, and an almost sheepish grin lifted his lips. It was stupidly endearing. “Force of habit, I guess. Chow time’s been a limited thing for a while.”
She let herself smile. “Well, at least try to work on it. For your own sake.”
He seemed to watch her take a second bite, motionless and unblinking until she swallowed again. “Sure. Now you. Give me something. All I know about you is that your dad was Navy and you’re good at what you do, and obviously that you’re damn beautiful.”
She couldn’t have stopped the wide-eyed stare or the rush of heat to her face if she’d tried.
She’d received her share of nonsensical, over the top compliments—it was par for the course in her work.
Patients on medication said bizarre things, and that wasn’t even accounting for the personalities of the patients themselves.
But the vast majority of those compliments were disingenuous, or, at best, inspired by fleeting feelings in the moment.
Lance’s simple, straightforward words hit harder than any of those. She knew he was sober. Painfully so. And he’d been very insistent in his interest in her.
Lynnette blew out a breath and ripped her gaze away as she attempted to sort out her thoughts.
She hadn’t consciously realized that her plan to keep him company for a bit, to bring him lunch and not leave him quite so alone, would mean talking.
And she felt like an idiot. So, she shrugged and said, “I guess I consider myself kind of boring. I always knew I wanted to help people, and I wasn’t really interested in doing what my dad did.
” Her chest tightened as she reflected on where her story was leading, but she didn’t fight it.
“My mom got sick shortly after he retired, the kind of sick that sent her bouncing from one doctor to another for a lot of years. Too many chronic illnesses still aren’t well understood, and it was hard for her to find treatment, even enough to be comfortable at home. ”
Lance lowered his food, expression somber. “I’m sorry. Is she doing any better?”
Lynnette’s throat swelled and she had to swallow it down. “She passed about eight years ago.”
“Shit. Lynn, I’m sorry.”
She shook her head and picked at the crust on her sandwich.
“It’s nothing for you to apologize for. We loved her as best we could, did everything for her that we could, and in the end her illness won.
” She missed her mother, but her mother’s passing hadn’t been sudden or surprising.
So, she pushed the tears that always threatened when she reflected on that time back and managed a smile.
“Mom was my inspiration to go into the medical field. I wanted to help as many suffering people as I could.”
Lance matched her smile. “Then I owe Mrs. Garver a debt of gratitude.”
Lynnette scoffed and rolled her eyes. “Don’t make this all about me, Marine,” she returned before taking another bite of her lunch.
He grinned, shoved another bite into his own mouth, and had his swallowed down while she was still chewing.
As he reached for his drink, he said, “My family story doesn’t have that heartwarming flare to it.
” He gulped down a third of his root beer and screwed the cap back on.
“You’ve heard the term ‘sovereign citizen’? ”
“Of course.” She had about as much respect for those who claimed the title as they did for the law she lived under, but she also knew how to shut down her personal feelings. At the end of the day, people were people.
Lance dipped his chin. “My folks never used that term when I was a kid, but that was definitely them. We lived on a small farm, at the edge of the county, and the only law that mattered was my dad’s word and the weight of his fist.”
“Yet you enlisted?”
Lance chuckled. “Yep. They were too busy micromanaging the farm to homeschool me, so I went to public school—‘might as well use the system where it’s convenient’ was their logic—and I started seeing other perspectives.
Made friends whose families had different viewpoints.
I was a teenage boy, I didn’t always go to class, I didn’t always go where I said I had, and so I saw stuff my parents wouldn’t have approved of.
But it caught my attention. I still remember that damn commercial that snagged me when I was skipping class and watching some European soccer game on my friend’s TV.
You remember the old slogan? ‘The few, the proud’? ”
Lynnette grinned. “I watched a lot of TV as a kid. I can still hear that commercial in my head.”
Lance laughed. “Well, it was that, and the image. I wanted to stand tall like the men on the screen. To be able to, to have that confidence and power and whatever came with it. And even then, I knew my dad’s way would never get me there.”
“So, you enlisted in order to find your strength?”
He shrugged. “Something like that, I think. I wanted to do good, be good, but also be strong. And the more I learned, the more I realized how messed up my family’s teachings were.
The more ashamed I was of where I came from.
It made me wanna contribute to the country they were trying to take from like leeches.
I thought if I worked my ass off, bled until I broke, maybe it’d make up for them. ”
Lynnette frowned, hearing the frustration that had seeped into his voice and seeing the way it tightened his jaw.
She shifted aside her food items and reached out, curling her fingers around his nearest hand and squeezing.
“You’re not responsible for their actions, Lance.
You didn’t make their choices. And as far as I can see, you’ve done a damn good job of accomplishing all of those goals.
But maybe back off the ‘bleeding ‘til you break’ part, okay?”
His expression softened, his eyes crinkling. “I’ll work on that, since you asked.”
She smiled.
He smiled.
Her heart beat a little too fast.
Lynnette eased back and reached for her food again.
They switched topics, touching on easier things.
They shared random funny memories. He told her how one of his old buddies—now deceased—had challenged him to get one of the more classic Marine tattoos, they’d gotten drunk, and ended up with matching tats on their chests.
She told him about the white dove memorial tattoo she’d gotten in honor of her mother.
How her father had pushed her to learn self-defense and it turned out she had a knack for Krav Maga.
Lance seemed especially impressed with that. She wrote it off as typical macho-meatheadedness.
Their food was long consumed, trash deposited, and conversation flowing much easier when Lynnette’s phone intruded on the moment.
She quickly dug into her purse, seeking to silence the call, but guilt bit into her when she saw Jenna’s number and laughing smile on the screen.
If she were a better friend, she would have followed up with her morning text that had gone unanswered all day.
“Go ahead and take it,” Lance said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
She flashed him an appreciative smile and swiped to catch the call, putting the phone to her ear. “Hey, Jen,” she greeted, doing her best to keep her tone calm and normal. “Busy morning?”