Page 43 of Finally Mine
Aldo felt a hand groping for his. Oluo. He squeezed it tight.
“How’s my girl here, doc?” Aldo asked. She was awake and alive, but the fact that Steph “Balls of Steel” Oluo was clinging to his hand meant that one of them was probably on death’s doorstep.
“Two GSWs. One to the shoulder, one in the gut. And a dump truck of desert grit in both,” Doctor Dreamy said conversationally in that faraway voice. “She’s gonna be fine.”
He blew out a breath, and the doctor looked down at him.
“Me?”
“Not great,” the doctor said, still seeming largely unconcerned. She hung a bag of plasma over him and leaned in. Aldo looked into eyes so green they made him think of spring. She had a deep scar that curved under her left eye. It only added to the mystery of her appeal.
“You can tell me straight if I’m gonna die.”
Her face softened, and she patted him on the chest. “I promise you’re going to come through this. Might not be pretty, but you give off a tough guy vibe, so I believe in you.”
“My leg…” He couldn’t get more words out. But he could tell by the set of her jaw that it was bad.
“I’m being straight with you. There’s a good chance we can’t save it,” she told him without looking down the stretcher. “But before you go all ‘I’m a cripple,’ ‘I’m half a man’ on me, I’ll remind you that prosthetics have never been better, and if you’re not a dumbass about it, you’ll probably be able to do everything you did before.”
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
“Chicks dig amputees, right, Oluo?” he asked weakly.
She choked out a laugh. “Fuck yeah, they do.” She squeezed his hand until it was the only thing he could feel.
Doctor Dreamy moved between her patients, stepping over their joined hands like a ballerina on stage instead of a combat surgeon mid-flight. “I predict you both will be having ice cream for dinner together in forty-eight hours,” she told them, earning a snort from the lactose-intolerant Oluo.
“How’d it go down?” he asked, his brain scrambling over the events.
“IED, I think. Took out our truck. We started taking fire from both sides,” Oluo told him.
“How’d you get out?”
“Did a damn belly flop into the dirt and crawled into a goat shit-splattered alley. O’Connell found me and carried me like a goddamn baby.” Aldo wanted to laugh but didn’t think he’d survive it. The carrying would bother her more than the gunshot wounds.
“How did I get out?”
“Captain Garrison,” she said simply.
So he and Luke had traded another round of lifesaving. Aldo closed his eyes and sent out a silent thank you to his friend. This had better be the last fucking time unless one of them needed a kidney someday. They fell into a silence under the thrum of the copter blades.
“Anyone else hurt?”
“I don’t know man. It was chaos, and there was dust and blood freaking everywhere.” Her voice cracked, and he gripped her hand hard.
Aldo tried to turn his head in the cradle it was strapped into. “Oluo?”
“Yeah, man?” she said through gritted teeth as Doctor Dreamy cut the shoulder of her uniform open.
“Chicks dig bullet scars, too.”
She laughed, her teeth chattering now, and Aldo felt a tear leak from the corner of his eye. He was so damn tired. He hurt so damn much. And this was only the beginning.
They clung together like that as the doctor, speaking quietly into her headset, danced over and around them, poking, prodding, taping, until landing. Aldo weakly tried to reach for Doctor Dreamy as the ground team swarmed his stretcher. “Will you call my mom, doc? Tell her what you told me. No bullshit. Give it to her straight.”
Doctor Dreamy pulled her headset off. “Yeah. I can do that.”
“She’ll probably cuss you out,” Aldo warned her. “Don’t take it personally.”
