Total pages in book: 106
Estimated words: 99949 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 500(@200wpm)___ 400(@250wpm)___ 333(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 99949 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 500(@200wpm)___ 400(@250wpm)___ 333(@300wpm)
I forced my eyes up. “You’re not very good at it,” I said softly.
“At what?” Lincoln asked, clearly confused.
Go, Theo. Walk away right fucking now.
I ignored my inner voice and whispered, “Lying.” I dropped my eyes again because I was afraid of what I’d see in his. “It’s not you,” I added.
Lincoln sighed. “Yeah, I guess it’s not,” he said softly. “But I guess we all need to wear masks sometimes.”
His comment made my heart hurt. My chest felt constricted, and it was all I could do to keep my breathing steady. I didn’t know which Theo to be in that moment. Not with this man, anyway.
But that wasn’t what made my body feel like it was spiraling downward with no ending in sight.
I didn’t want to wear a mask.
Not with Lincoln.
Not in this moment.
And I had no clue why.
So I did the only other thing I knew I could do.
Escape.
“I’m sorry I intruded on…” I didn’t know how to finish the statement, so I lamely continued with, “I’ll just go.”
I was in the process of climbing to my feet when Lincoln’s strong fingers closed around my wrist. I felt frozen in time because he didn’t say or do anything, and I didn’t dare continue to get up.
Lincoln was staring at the ground between his legs. His breathing became heavier and although his grip wasn’t hurting me, I could feel his fingers tighten more and more with each breath he took.
I immediately dropped all my weight back onto the ground. Lincoln released me and it was all I could do to not grab his hand so that I’d have some kind of contact with him.
I couldn’t say how long we sat there for in complete silence, but I managed to steal a few glances at Lincoln and was glad to see that his breathing had slowed. But I also recognized a lot of myself in him. Something had a grip on his insides. The kind of grip that you couldn’t shake. It would only go away when it was ready to. Maybe it never would. I’d had a lot of those… still did.
“What made you decide to become a nurse?” I asked. My voice sounded loud in the quiet of the forest. It was like all the birds and little critters that normally scurried around in the fallen leaves had gone silent.
“I was a combat medic in the army. I seemed to have a knack for staying cool under pressure, especially when bullets were whizzing past my head.”
I could hear the small smile in his voice as he said that last part. It made it easier for me to breathe.
“I used my GI bill to become a nurse,” Lincoln added. “I went on to become a nurse practitioner.”
“That’s where you can prescribe drugs and stuff, right?” I asked.
He nodded. “My original plan was to work in a hospital, but…”
Lincoln paused for what seemed like forever before finally finishing with, “But things have a way of changing when you least expect it.”
I was desperate to ask him what had changed but knew it was an off-limits question. Not to mention I was already starting to learn things about the man I shouldn’t want to know.
“How did you end up here?” I asked. “I mean, Pelican Bay, it’s so…”
Lincoln chuckled despite the fact that I hadn’t been able to figure out how to finish my observation about the small town.
“I was doing a lot of work with hospice patients. It’s called palliative care.”
“That’s when your goal is to keep a terminal patient comfortable until the end, right?”
“Right,” he responded. “I was able to save a lot of guys on the front lines when I was in the army, but I lost a lot too.”
Lincoln was quiet for a moment before whispering, “The ones I knew I couldn’t save… they were so fucking brave. But they were scared too because they knew what was happening. I might have been able to ease some of their pain with drugs but otherwise I was completely helpless. I couldn’t do anything but hold their hand and listen. And when they couldn’t talk, then I did the talking. Most of the time I just tried to help them imagine they were somewhere else. I’d describe that place… the colors, the sounds, the smells… anything that might help them forget that they were bleeding out in the fucking sand and dirt for a cause most of them didn’t even really understand.”
He fell silent and began twisting his hands together. “Never understood it myself,” he murmured.
His pain was etched into every part of his body. The way he was hunched in on himself, the way he rocked back and forth, the way his hands were nearly bloodless from how hard he was pressing them together…
I knew I couldn’t just sit there pretending he wasn’t hurting. But I didn’t know what the fuck to do. I was completely unequipped to deal with someone else’s pain. I’d spent my entire adult life avoiding building relationships, including just friendships, because I had a role to play and that was hard to do when you were around people.