Chapter 7
Frank
“I’m so stupid,” I whisper to myself. Anyone on the west side of Haunted Health can see my foolery.
All they have to do is look out their window at the pink sunset and gaze down at the butterfly garden’s flowers to find me.
How did I allow that moth lady to talk me into meeting Alette where anyone could see us?
What if she doesn’t show? What if she’s so offended that I get slapped in front of anyone looking out their window?
Gossip spreads through this hospital like wildfire.
It will be on every floor by morning. I can just hear the whispers.
Dr. Stein shot his shot with Alette and got slapped back into his office. I’m a fool for sitting out here…
“Dr. Stein? You wanted to see me?” Her sweet voice carries on the breeze behind me.
I close my eyes and try to breathe in courage from the twilight air before I rise from the bench.
She has no idea how I feel about her. We’ve barely spoken.
Maybe she assumes this is about her care…
but knowing the meddling Mrs. M, Alette probably suspects I have more to say than just how I want to save her life.
I nearly drop my gift for her when I face her.
How can someone radiate such beauty in a hospital gown and grippy socks?
The waning sunlight sparkles on her pale skin.
Tiny strands of her long hair dance around her shoulders.
Those large eyes bounce around the garden, though I silently beg them to land on me.
I want her to see me—not Dr. Stein, the miracle worker.
Is it too much for me to ask that she share her sweetness with Frank the man?
My friends warned me there would be a woman to make me regret losing my hands, but I didn’t believe them until now.
I’m frozen with my stupidity. What wouldn’t I give to greet her with a hug?
The memory of our last one is burned on my body.
I became addicted to having support…contact…
the tenderness she brings to everyone. Who am I to want it all for myself?
“Dr. Stein? Are you alright?” She rushes forward to close the distance between us as I stare at her like an idiot. When her cold hands wrap around my forearm, the need to embrace her and shield her from the cool evening breeze overwhelms me.
“Mrs. M was right,” flies out of my mouth.
Oh, for fuck’s sake. The old matchmaker said I would see Alette as more than a patient out here, hinting at the beauty I’d find.
How can I tell Alette that? How unprofessional to let one of my patients see into my private life when I should have been focused on fixing the lady’s broken wing!
“Mrs. M donated this beautiful place in honor of her late husband—”
“Her Horus,” Alette says with a coy smile that suggests she’s heard all about the aged couple’s love story. I’d guess the entire hospital has heard about Dr. Mills. “I’ve been meaning to visit this magical place, but I—"
“—have spent your time hiding from me,” I finish for her.
“Not you specifically,” she says, shaking her hair with vigorous denial.
“Then hiding from Liam when he manages your chart for me.”
She blushes prettily but doesn’t deny it.
“Please sit with me,” I say as I lead her toward the bench.
I slide onto the far edge in hopes that my spot in the middle, where she now sits, is still warm.
I can’t hold her against the chill around us, but hopefully I can offer a warm place to sit at my side.
Her thigh is icy as it nestles next to mine, and for once, I’m glad I burn like a furnace.
The large white box on my lap is awkward between us, but I don’t know how to present her with my gift.
Maybe Mrs. M was right, and I should have brought flowers…
“I know nothing about butterflies, but the green ones are quite pretty,” she says, pointing to the small, fluttering bugs.
“Once the sun sets, the larger, purple ones will come out. They are quite stunning.”
“Do you spend a lot of time out here, Dr. Stein?”
“Frank, please,” I correct her quickly. She nods and wraps her arms tighter around mine.
I know she’s hiding from the chill, but a part of me wishes she were cuddling closer to me.
“When I’m stuck with a patient’s care, I often come out here to think.
I don’t leave the hospital…I can’t separate my thoughts from my patients… so this is as far as I get.”
“With such a pretty, peaceful place, I doubt I would wander far either.”
“Yet you want to travel realms.”
“I want to belong,” she says with a sigh. “I want to be surrounded by the loving acceptance weres experience from birth. I want that place in this world that can only be filled by me…because it’s mine.”
“I understand, but I didn’t find my place in the human realm. It wasn’t until Haunted Health became my home that I felt like I belonged. Do you feel it too?”
“Here? At Haunted Health? You probably feel it because you are Dr. Stein. The hospital would collapse without you in the OR. You save lives and fix broken monsters every day. Your purpose is clear as glass. When patients see you, they relax. Don’t give me that look.
I’ve watched it happen through the vents.
Just your presence calms them because they know you won’t rest until they are healed.
It’s not just your gifts…I see how you take their problems on as your own. ”
“I just do what I can to deserve my second chance at life—to deserve my hands—but I’ve learned from you, Alette. I’ve learned that sometimes they need more than Dr. Stein’s hands. They need Frank. I don’t know how to give them that part of me…but you do.”
“What? Me? I’m just nice—”
“Do you know the magic you’ve spread through this hospital? The lives you’ve changed?”
“Me? You have me mixed up with someone else. I’m the crazy lady who climbs through the vents to hide from the professionals trying to save her life.”
“Ruslan called you an angel last night,” I say, as an invisible hand squeezes my heart.
The pain in that little boy’s face as he described what went on during his parents’ surgeries will haunt me forever.
“That little boy’s future rested in your hands as you held him.
He would have fallen apart without you. Who knows what would have happened—”
“I don’t understand,” she says, gazing up at me with teary eyes. “He’s a little boy who was alone in the dark while his parents fought for their lives. I did what any other woman would do—”
“He’s Ruslan Von Popescu, heir to the vampire throne.
Lucien, his father, is King of the Vampires.
I’ve transplanted bone marrow from his human mother to his vampire father many times—too many times.
Lucien’s next infection will make Ruslan the vampire king.
You see, vampires die young. They have a genetic disease that Lucien and I have fought with stem cells, medications, and now transplants. ”
“I had no idea,” she says with a shiver. “I saw a lonely boy, crying for his mother.”
“Even the fiercest monsters on my staff were too scared to comfort him,” I say with a shiver of my own. If my surgery hadn’t been a success, Ruslan would have lost himself to grief and bloodlust. What would I have done if I found her shredded by a vampire child?
“I didn’t think about him being a monster. You must think I’m stupid.”
“Brave, compassionate to a fault, more loving than any human I’ve met, maybe a little impulsive…but not stupid.”
“Well, thanks for that.”
“I admire your bravery, Alette,” I confess.
When she shivers again, I raise my arm between us to rest it on the back of the bench.
“In that moment, when I found out it was you who comforted Ruslan, I felt a bone-chilling fear I had never felt before. It would hurt me deeply to lose you before I got the chance to… I want your light to shine on me the way it shines on the patients you visit, Alette. Everyone is happier after spending time with you. I want to give you something back. Ruslan could have taken the chance from me.”
“If this is a ploy to get me onto your operating table—”
“It’s a ploy to get you to spend more time with me—Frank—the human man who’s tired of being alone but doesn’t know how to connect with people the way you do. With you, I want to be more than The Cold Dr. Stein.”
She gasps and searches my face for sincerity.
I hold my breath. I’ve never laid my feelings bare like this. Waiting for her to accept or reject me is torture, but I don’t know what else to do. What else can I say? I want to save her life—not to add her miracle to my list of accomplishments—but because I want the chance to love her.
“Scoot closer to me, so I can keep you warm,” I say brusquely, when the silence stretches to an uncomfortable stickiness between us. “I didn’t think it would get this cold so quickly...and your gift is in the way.”
“My gift?”
“I should have brought flowers,” I snap, then feel my face heat as I realize what just flew out of my mouth.
“No, anyone can bring flowers,” she says, as she takes the box onto her lap.
My heart gallops triple-time when she presses against my side and lowers my arm from the back of the bench of rest beside her.
“I want the strange and wonderful gift in this box. Anyone can guess a woman would want a delicate, perfumed gift. What is in this box is heavy and smells terrible, so it must be thoughtful.”
“I made it for you. Well, I made several, but this is a prototype for this conversation,” I blubber, feeling ten inches tall.
Of course Alette would want something delicate and pretty like her.
Her jaw drops as she opens the box, and I shrink into my skin, wishing I had a snail’s shell to hide my face.
“You said something that struck me. When talking about the J-pouch, you said you didn’t want to be incomplete…
that you would feel something was missing.
I mean, I’d be removing most of your intestines, so you’re right, a bunch of you would be missing.
You said you didn’t want plastic, metal, or a—”
“Poo bag,” she says with a giggle. “I don’t want to carry around bags of poo.”
“It wouldn’t be as bad as you think, but I’m going to let that argument die.
I want to give you the life you deserve, in the body you want.
So I did some research of my own…in the monster realm.
I found a species of gremlin that coughs up its intestines, which I could recode as your tissue with your stem cells.
I got the idea from this old book from the 1920s that I found in the basement.
It’s called the “Enhancement of Modern Man” by Dr. Leopold Guett. ”
“They knew about stem cells in the 1920s?”
“No, but he was crazy enough to surgically enhance people and animals, guessing that they were there to help. He probably thought they were mini-angels,” I say with all the excitement and enthusiasm I had when I found the book.
“Alette, your gift is a box of new intestines. Organic. Living. Part of you. I can’t give you the human realm’s medicines with the sensitivity of a human man, but I can give you a new digestive system built from monsters… as I rebuilt myself into a monster.”
“You aren’t a monster, Frank,” she says with a sob. She slides the box to the side to twine her arms around my neck. “A monster wouldn’t have dedicated his brilliance to the whining of a brat.”
“Wanting agency over your body doesn’t make you a brat.”
“Liam would disagree with you.”
“Liam wants you to live. That’s all. He puts too much faith in a cold man like me.”
“We all do,” she whispers. Her large eyes see deep into my soul and sear away my doubts. I can be her hero. I can do this for her. “Can you really give this to me? Make me whole? Take away the pain, the flares, the nights crying on the bathroom floor?”
“I want to try,” I whisper, leaning closer to her lips with the sudden urge to kiss her. “I want to give you the happiness you give everyone else. Please let me try. There’s nobody I would work harder to save, Alette. Please let me give you the life you’ve never had.”
Sparks fly behind my eyelids when our lips meet.
A simple press against her softness, and I’m lost. She will live, eat, and digest without pain, if it takes everything I am.
This hospital is better for her being a patient, so it’s only fair that it helps her, too.
We owe her for the privilege of her light, her compassion, and her sweetness.
I can only hope my meager gifts can repay her, for I’m a greedy man, and I want more than just a taste of her affection.
Her kiss unfurls an innocent blossom in my heart that I thought long dead.
Do I care if she loves me for the life I can give her, if this is the love she gives?
It’s dumb to believe the romance blooming under the stars, in an enchanted butterfly garden, will last. Once I heal her, she will find her place in the human realm.
She will make their world a better place just by existing in it…
like she has Haunted Health. My wrists cross behind her to cage her in my embrace as if I can hold onto the peace she offers.
I can only hope she’s changed me to share warmth as readily as she does.
Cherishing every moment she gives me, I promise to give her the parts of me I’ve kept from the rest of the world.
“Kiss me again,” she whispers when we part.
“You make me feel alive, Frank. For the first time in my life, I feel truly alive. You call yourself a cold man, but I feel more warmth from you than I’ve ever felt.
Whether your idea works, I pursue the human medications, or my disease takes me, please know that right now, you gave me the belonging I’ve been seeking. ”