Page 93 of Better Late Than Never

“What?”

“I, uh… I don’t want to drag up more bad memories.”

“Eh, they’re already here.” I ran my hand up his chest. “What’s on your mind?”

“I just wondered, um…” He swallowed. “Did you ever find out what happened to the Marine?”

I exhaled, not at all surprised by the question but still hit in the gut by that particular memory. “He didn’t make it. He might’ve had a chance—I’ll never know for sure. What I do know is that the mortar finished him off.”

“Jesus,” Alex breathed. “Either way, though, it wasn’t your fault.”

“I know. It took a long time to reconcile with the guilt. I just… I don’t know. There was absolutely nothing I could’ve done to stop the mortar, and I could’ve died as easily as he did. I might not have been able to save him even if hadn’t been hit by that mortar. But I still felt guilty for a long, long time.” I paused. “Sometimes I still do.”

“I think that comes with the territory,” Alex said softly. “Not just of being in a combat situation, but the medical profession. We’ve all had our hands on patients when they died, and even when there was no earthly chance of them surviving, it’s hard not to wonder if we could’ve done something differently.”

I closed my eyes and released a long breath. There was something intensely comforting about hearing my own thoughts rolling off someone else’s tongue. Especially when that someone was Alex, even if I was afraid to look too closely at why his feelings mattered that much to me.

“That’s exactly it,” I said. “It’s the ‘what ifs’ that get to me.”

“Me too. I was so glad to come back from deployment and start working toward my radiology designation. I still see some awful shit, but I’m not up to my elbows in it, you know?”

“I get that. My emergency rotation was by far the hardest part of medical school.”

“Worse than combat?”

I thought about that. “Not necessarily worse? But it fucked with my head in some of the same ways. And some different ways. In combat, youkindof have an idea what you’re going to see most of the time. Like there’s definitely things you don’t expect, but the ways people get hurt in warzonesusuallyfall into the same general box, you know?”

Alex nodded.

“Right. But an emergency room in a major city?” I whistled and shook my head. “It’s… everything. And everyone. I wasn’t just treating soldiers anymore. It was kids and little old ladies, you know? And it’s everything from a new mom who’s freaking out because her baby’s spiking a fever to parents who are about to hear the worst news of their lives. It was… It was a lot.”

“That’s what I’ve heard,” he whispered. “I’ve never envied anyone who works in the ED. I mean, I have to come down sometimes for ultrasounds and X-rays and whatnot, and their patients come up to my department all the time. But it’s not the constant barrage.”

I nodded. “Seriously. I knew two shifts into that rotation that I would never be an emergency doctor.”

“But you’ve been to combat, haven’t you?”

“Only as a corpsman. As a physician, I’ve only ever been on shipboard deployments.”

“Was there ever a possibility? Of going boots-on-the-ground again, I mean?”

“There was,” I whispered, that old familiar prickle of fear creeping up my neck. “I got lucky, I guess.”

“You did. Me too—I did the three deployments into the desert, but thank God, the last sea duty rotation I did during active combat ops was on a boat. I’ll take that over going back to the Sandbox any day.”

“You and me both.”

“It’s funny,” Alex said. “My mom told me she was relieved I was going to be a corpsman. She thought that meant I’d be away from the fighting, you know?” He trailed his fingers up and down my arm. “I didn’t have the heart to tell her that being a corpsman means being a combat medic, and they’re not kidding about the combat part.” He paused. “I… really should’ve told her before I was deployed the first time. I just didn’t want her to worry more than she already would, you know?”

“I get that. My dad was in the Army, so my parents both knew exactly what it meant. The whole reason my dad encouraged me to join the Navy instead of the Army was that I’d probably be on a ship. Neither of us thought I’d end up boots on the ground.”

“I don’t think anyone expected that,” Alex said dryly.

Wasn’t that the truth.

I sighed. “Well, I made it through. So did you. Now we just have all these psychological souvenirs.”

He huffed a soft laugh. “Yeah. The gift that keeps on giving.”

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