I forced my eyelids open, blinking at the halogen lights above me. “How did you know I play hockey?” As if that’s even important anymore.
“I’ve seen you play.”
He didn’t have to finish the sentence. I already knew what he was going to say. It was the same conversation I’d had with him four years ago. I forced my head to turn and saw him sitting in the chair next to my bed, leaned back with his hands folded in his lap. His scrub cap sat over a pair of piercing blue eyes I knew well, and his mouth held a kind smile.
This wasn’t real. I was still asleep, no doubt drugged from the surgery they’d wheeled me into.
For just this moment, I was okay with that.
“Where?” I asked him, knowing that was the line of the script I was reading.
“My daughter went to high school with you. She was quite the fan. Took me with her to see you play.”
“Your daughter?” I asked, my heart burning with the love I hadn’t known then.
“December Howard. You probably don’t know her. She was a few years your junior.”
“I know December,” I whispered. “I love her. I’m marrying her. You raised such a flawless woman.” But he didn’t hear the last lines, because they hadn’t been spoken four years ago.
“You do? She’s a senior this year, hoping to go to Vanderbilt in the fall, but she has an asshat boyfriend who’s pushing her toward CU.”
“She’ll break up with him,” I promised. “He’ll hurt her, but she’ll heal. She’ll go to Vanderbilt, and she’ll graduate. She’s happy.”
“You know how those high school boys are.” He laughed, having heard none of what I’d just said, then stood to take my vitals. He looked off in the distance as he listened to my lungs.
“She misses you every day. She doesn’t say it—keeps everything pretty close to the vest—but I see it in her eyes,” I said as he moved his stethoscope. “I love her with every cell in my body. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for her, sir.”
“I hope she makes the right decision for her,” he said. “She’s too good of a girl to get trapped beneath a man’s dreams. She deserves her own. He won’t give her that, and she’s too young to see it.”
“I see it,” I whispered. “God, I see it.” I forced my fifty-pound eyelids open again, but I was losing the battle.
“Don’t you worry, PFC, you’ll play hockey again. I took really good care of you.”
“Thank you, sir.” My world faded, leaving only the sensation of his hand on my forehead.
“You’re going to be okay, Josh. I swear it. You both will.”
“Lieutenant Walker?” A woman called to me from the black. “Can you hear me? Can you open your eyes for me?”
A blood pressure cuff went off on my left arm, squeezing to an unpleasant pressure. It was nothing compared to the overall ache coursing through my body. The left side of my chest felt like I’d been beaten in a bar brawl by at least six professional wrestlers. “Yes,” I croaked.
“Here,” she said and lifted a straw to my lips. I took in giant sips of cool, crisp water, washing away the taste of dead skunk in my mouth. I blinked, looking up to see a nurse hovering over me.
“Thank you,” I said, my voice closer to normal.
She smiled. “Can you tell me your name and birthday?”
I turned my head to the chair next to me, half expecting to see Doc Howard sitting there, but it was empty, of course. I was drugged, not insane.
“Lieutenant?” she prompted.
I took a deep breath and focused on the nurse. “Joshua Walker, September twenty-third.”
“Good.”
December. Her name rushed through me, soothed me, and then instantly my stomach dropped. God, she had to be losing her mind. Had they told her? They usually waited until we could call, but with helicopter crashes, those were too televised to delay notification until a soldier could call home.
God, had they gone to the house? She must have relived her worst nightmare.
“Ma’am? Can I call my fiancée? She’s got to be scared. My mom, too.”
“I understand. The transport airplane is here to take you to Landstuhl, so let’s get you ready, and see if there’s time for those phone calls before we move you.” She picked up my chart and gave me a rundown on everything I’d fucked up in the last twenty-four hours.
Dislocated shoulder. Radius and ulna buckle fractured.
I looked down to see the splint covering the lower portion of my right arm, cradled against my chest in a blue sling. That’s not so bad. But she kept going.
Six-inch gash on my thigh, and I hadn’t done them any favors by ripping the metal out in the field and then walking on it. Yeah, but I lived. I’d had exploratory surgery on that, with both internal stitches and over thirty external ones. It took all my willpower not to rip back the blanket to see if I’d at least had the luck to bisect the gunshot scar that was already there.
“But the shocker was your spleen. It ruptured, which we didn’t catch until you were here.”
“I don’t remember that.”
Her smile was apologetic. “You were pretty heavily drugged. But we took it out, and you’re going to be okay. You’ll need a couple months to recover, but you will.”
“Jagger? I mean, Lieutenant Bateman? Specialist Rizzo?”