Susan Mallery - Only Yours

“After sex or in general?”

“When my time is up, I’ll be leaving Fool’s Gold.”

Oh, that. “Yes, Peru. I know. Not the most romantic postcoital declaration I’ve ever heard.”

“Montana, I’m not playing a game. You need to understand….”

“That you’ll leave.” She rolled onto her back. “It would be good for you to stay.”

“I can’t.”

“You won’t.”

“I won’t.”

She turned her head to look at him. “Because there are people who need you?”

“Yes.”

“They could come to you here.”

“Not all of them.”

“You can’t heal all of them.”

“I can try.”

“That’s a lot of pressure.”

“Yes, but that doesn’t matter. You don’t know what it’s like. There are places where people die because they don’t have access to clean water. I do what I can. It’s my job.”

It was more than his job, but he already knew that. Telling him that saving the world wouldn’t save him was dramatic, and true, but also wouldn’t help. He used his job as a way to heal, not just others, but himself as well.

“It’s not a gift if you have to keep paying for it,” she whispered.

“I know.”

He kissed her then, probably because he wanted to shut her up. She didn’t complain. Whatever the outcome, being in Simon’s arms right now was the best place in the world.

SIMON MADE HIS WAY BACK to the hotel late Saturday morning. He needed to go into the hospital to check on a few patients and clear his head. Then he would return to Montana’s house.

He reluctantly went to shower. The scent of her lingered on his skin. As the hot water hit his muscles, he told himself he would see her later. He would lose himself in her again and for those few hours he could forget about everything.

After he’d dried off, he dressed and was about to leave when someone knocked on his door. He opened it and found Montana’s mother standing in the hotel hallway.

“Bobby down at the front desk said you’d come up a little while ago,” she said with a smile.

“Ah, yes. I was out this morning.”

He rarely felt guilty about the women in his life, but staring at Denise Hendrix, he felt as small as a sixteen-year-old caught making out in the backseat of the family car.

Remembering his manners, he stepped back. “Please, come in.”

She stepped inside the hotel room and raised the cloth bag she carried. “Montana mentioned your suite came with a refrigerator and a microwave. I thought you might be getting tired of eating out all the time, so I made you a couple of casseroles. It’s sort of a Fool’s Gold thing.”

He’d slept with her daughter and she’d brought him food? He would guess she didn’t know about last night, but still. He could feel himself flushing.

“Thank you,” he said, taking the bag from her. “That was very nice of you.”

“One is a Mexican dish. It’s a little spicy. The other is Italian—plenty of meat and pasta. It was my late husband’s favorite.”

Simon told himself that the fact that he was slime was something he would deal with later. Right now he only had to get through the next five or ten minutes.

She gave him the heating instructions, then waited until he’d loaded the dishes into his small refrigerator and took back her cloth bag.

“Are you enjoying yourself while you’re here?” she asked.

He nearly choked. “Yes. The people around here are friendly. My patients are always a pleasure. Even the difficult ones.”

“What you do is amazing.”

“Sometimes. Not often enough.” He thought of Kalinda and the years of surgery ahead of her. He wanted to make her journey easier, but didn’t know another way.

He waited to see if Denise would ask him about Montana or perhaps warn him away. Instead she talked about the festival, the weather and suggested a few places for him to visit. Then she excused herself and left.

Simon stood in the center of the room, confused by her visit. The food was the obvious reason, but why had she done that? And then he remembered. There were people who were simply nice. The majority of children grew up in stable homes, feeling loved and cared for. What he knew, what he and the Freddies of the world had experienced, was the exception.

“IT’S OPEN,” Montana called when he knocked on her door, later that afternoon.

He walked in to find her carrying a tray with a bottle of wine and cut up sandwiches.

“If I’m going to have my way with you again later, you’ll need to keep your strength up.”

She was smiling as she spoke. Her face was bare of makeup, her hair long and loose. She’d dressed in jeans and a blue T-shirt and her feet were bare.

He stopped where he was just to look at her, to take in her radiance, to feel the life pulsing through her. Then he crossed the room, took the tray from her, put it on the coffee table and pulled her into his arms.

When they surfaced from the kiss, she continued to hang on to him. “You do have a way with greeting people. Not that I would encourage you to do that with the other women in the hospital. They would be throwing themselves at you constantly and that would make it hard to work.”

“Yes, it would.”

She laughed.

His cell phone rang.

He didn’t want to answer it. For once, he didn’t want to be called to the hospital for an emergency, didn’t want to help or heal or… He swore and pushed the talk button.

“Bradley.”

“You sound grumpy,” a cheerful Alistair said.

Simon relaxed. “I’m busy. Go away.”

Alistair chuckled. “Ah, yes, the ever present American overexuberance. Who is she?”

He glanced at Montana, who wasn’t bothering to pretend she wasn’t listening. “Someone special.”

“A girl?”

“A woman.”

“Better and better,” Alistair told him. “Would I like her?”

“Yes, but you can’t have her. I’m hanging up now.”

“Give her a kiss for me.”

“Not a chance.”

“A friend of yours?” Montana asked when he’d hung up.

“Yes. Alistair. I’ve known him for years. He’s a surgeon, as well. We’ll be in Peru together.”

He drew her close and kissed her. “He’s handsome, witty and British. You’d like him.”

“I like you better.”

He kissed her again, released her and reached for the wine. “Your mother came to see me earlier.”

Montana froze, her eyes wide. “Why?”

“She brought me food.”

“Oh. Good. She’s like that. You didn’t tell her, did you?”

“No.”

“Not that I mind her knowing. Sort of. I don’t know. The whole sex-parent-child situation confuses me. I don’t want to know if she’s doing it, and I suspect she feels the same way about me.”

“I didn’t tell your mother what we’d done.” He poured red wine into two glasses, then handed her one.

“I don’t usually drink wine at three in the afternoon.”

“I wish I could say the same,” he joked.

“Ha. I knew you were the bad boy type.”

“Not until I met you. I was pretty boring and studious as a kid.”

She sank onto the sofa. “I guess I need to tell you something.”

She sounded worried. That should have concerned him, but this was Montana. Nothing she could say would shock him.

He sat across from her and leaned forward. “Go ahead.”

“I know what happened to you. The scars, I mean. Someone told me.”

He’d been expecting some sort of confession, not this. His first reaction was embarrassment. No one liked admitting they had been so unlovable as a child that their own mother had set them on fire. Only there wasn’t a “them.” There was him.

“I was a smart kid. Scary smart. I never fit in. Skipping a lot of grades meant I was always the youngest in the class. That didn’t help either.”

He leaned back on the sofa. “My mother wasn’t one who enjoyed working for a living. She preferred to find a man to support her. Something that wasn’t so easy with a freaky kid around. When I was eleven, her boyfriend was kind of a weasel. I don’t know exactly what he did for a living, but I’m sure it was illegal.”

He took a sip of the wine, more as something to do than because he wanted to taste it. “He complained that I was always staring at him, which wasn’t true. When I was home I knew to keep my head down. One day they had a big fight and he walked out. On the way he said I was the main reason he was leaving. My mother was already drunk and she started screaming at me. Crying and screaming.”

He kept telling the story as if it belonged to someone else, as if relating a movie premise. He didn’t want to remember that this had happened to him.

“She threw a couple of things across the room. My schoolbooks, I think. I went to leave but she grabbed me by the front of my shirt and shoved me hard. She told the police that she didn’t mean for me to fall in the fire, but she did. There was no screen, nothing but burning logs.”

Despite his best intentions, the memories returned. The split second of disbelief followed by searing pain. Pain that exploded, pain that was unendurable. He remembered screaming and scrambling, trying to get away, begging her to make it stop. And when he managed to crawl out, she pushed him in again.

The rest of it was a blur. It was a cold day and when he managed to get outside, still screaming, he threw himself into a snowbank. But the cold didn’t help. Nothing helped. He screamed and screamed until the sirens came. He remembered men surrounding him, telling him he would be all right. Even then, he’d known they were lying.

“I was in the hospital for a long time,” he continued, sparing her the worst of the details.

“Did you ever see her again?”

“No, she went to prison. She died there.” He shrugged. “By then it didn’t matter. I lived at the hospital. The doctors and nurses were my family. I had a lot of surgeries. For reasons I can’t explain, my hands were untouched. Within the first year I realized I wanted to be a doctor. A surgeon. I wanted to help kids like me.”

Montana set down her wine and crossed to him. She knelt on the floor in front of him and put her hands on his thighs. “Didn’t the doctors and nurses always leave?”

“Don’t make it more than it was.”

He knew where she was going. That because the people he cared about left, he left as well.

She stared into his eyes, as if searching for answers. He thought about telling her he wasn’t as deep as she imagined, but he doubted she would believe him. There had been plenty of people looking into his head while he’d been in the hospital. Therapists and psychiatrists. He knew the jargon, understood the theories.

“So somehow that all got twisted into the idea that if you sacrifice your personal needs, you can heal everyone?” she asked.

“You don’t understand. I love what I do. This is all I want to do.”

“What about belonging? What about loving and being loved?”

He put down his wine and stood. He should’ve seen this coming, he told himself. Montana was that kind of girl.

“Love doesn’t matter. I won’t say it doesn’t exist, because I’ve seen it on occasion.”

She rose to her feet and faced him. “Love is the only thing that matters.”

He knew that wasn’t true. He’d gone his whole life without feeling love and he was fine. It was easier to stay distant, to be an observer. Cleaner.

“Everyone wants to belong,” she insisted.

“No. You want to belong. I have to leave and take care of other people.”

“Want to or have to?”

“Does it matter?” he asked.

He saw the sadness in her eyes and knew she understood now. He hadn’t been kidding when he’d said he was leaving. In some ways he’d never really been here at all.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he said.

“Too late.”

VISITING THE FOOL’S GOLD nursing home was usually the highlight of Montana’s day. She loved bringing a vanload of happy dogs to the residents, enjoyed taking them around, watching them work their magic. By now she knew nearly every person at the facility by name, remembered who preferred a small dog to cuddle and who wanted to throw a ball for a bigger dog. She’d seen those who barely responded to their environment at all smile when nudged by a grinning service dog.

But today, as she parked and got out of Max’s van, she felt as if she were moving through water. She hurt all over, but not in a physical way. She hurt on the inside.

Simon wasn’t staying. Yes, he’d always said that and, yes, she’d understood the words, but this was different. This was her realizing that she was falling for a man who had no intention of sticking around even if he’d found something here he’d never find anywhere else. Whatever she felt for him, they would have no future. Even if he was willing to travel back and forth to Fool’s Gold, or if she was willing to travel to visit him every now and then, that wouldn’t be much of a relationship.