CHAPTER 17
HE NEEDED NO FURTHER INVITATION. With fevered need, Michael lunged for her wet throat. Nicole need, Michael lunged for her wet throat. Nicole cried out at the first sharp prick of his teeth piercing her flesh, but just as quickly the pain dissipated, replaced by the warm, arousing, suckling sensation of his lips against her skin.
What she felt next filled her with surprise. It was as if she could feel her own blood slowly emanating from her body and mingling at the point of contact with some delectable essence of his. A molten shiver ran through her as the exquisitely erotic exchange continued. As he drank, he moved inside her. Nicole gasped with pleasure as the twin forces simultaneously spread shock waves of intense, rising sensation within her body. She had never imagined a bliss so delirious as this.
His mouth at her throat and his every thrust within brought her ever closer to the point of rapture. As she hovered on the brink of her sexual peak, Michael’s mouth moved up to cover hers once more. His lips and tongue tasted warm, tangy, and coppery. Moving together, they breached the pinnacle of ecstasy, gasping with pleasure as their two souls became one.
“I SHOULDN’T HAVE BITTEN YOU,” Michael said, regret in his voice.
They were sitting on the carpet in the great room before the hearth. Nicole wore Michael’s soft, luxurious bathrobe with the cuffs rolled up several times, and he had thrown on a pair of sweat pants and a T-shirt. As Nicole ran his brush through her damp hair to dry it by the roaring fire, Michael’s eyes fell on the bite marks imprinted on her exposed throat, and she saw him wince.
“I’m glad you did it,” she told him. She wondered now why the thought of him drinking her blood had seemed so frightening before. “I liked it. Very much, in fact.”
“You’re supposed to like it,” Michael said grimly. “Here, let me mend the wound.”
Gently, he pulled her backward in his arms until she was sitting in the V of his legs. Tilting her head to one side, he slowly, tenderly ran his moist tongue over the tiny wounds on her neck. Even under his light touch, Nicole’s pierced flesh smarted slightly, as if that spot were under the siege of a hundred needle points, just as it had when he’d cured the cut on her forehead the night before. Knowing what was coming, she relaxed in his embrace, holding the hairbrush in her lap.
“It’s part of the higher plan, I think,” Michael went on, his tongue lapping against her sensitive flesh. Soon the barbed, stinging sensation waned and altered into something sweet and ticklish, as if he were stroking her with the tip of a feather. A giggle bubbled up from her chest, followed by a calm, lethargic warmth and a sense of well-being as the tickling finally eased.
Nicole felt her neck; the marks were gone. She gazed up at him with a smile. “Thank you. What higher plan?”
“The blood exchange, I believe, is designed so that people will enjoy it. It’s just like sex. Why do you think lovemaking is so pleasurable? It’s to ensure the continuation of the species.”
“The continuation of the species?” Nicole’s pulse skittered as she sat up and turned to face him on the carpet. “What are you saying? I know you were worried that you’d take too much blood. You didn’t. You stopped. But if you had kept drinking—?”
He reached out to gently stroke her cheek. “Don’t worry, my darling. I shouldn’t have taken your blood; I vowed that I wouldn’t, and I promise I won’t do it again. But if I drink from you—that, on its own, wouldn’t make you a vampire.”
“That’s right,” she nodded. “To become like you, I’d have to be near death and then drink your blood, wouldn’t I? The way you drank from . . . ?”
“Yes.”
“How much blood would I have to drink to . . . ?”
He pulled his hand away, frowning. “Don’t ask. Don’t even think about it.”
Michael took the hairbrush from Nicole’s hand and asked her to turn around again. She settled on the floor cross-legged as he brushed the long, damp hair, which flowed down her back like a mantle. For a while neither of them spoke, as the bristles tingled intermittently against her scalp, followed by a gentle tug as the brush pulled through her locks.
Michael said, “May I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“I’ve told you my history. But when it comes to talking about yourself, you’ve been very reticent.”
“Have I?” she asked, knowing full well that it was true.
“Forgive me if I’m wrong, but I got the distinct impression that you don’t find your current line of work very fulfilling. Not to mention that it seems a bit beneath your abilities and talents.”
Nicole’s cheeks grew warm but she didn’t reply.
“When I asked what you did before that job, you didn’t answer, and you seem to have been avoiding the topic ever since.”
“A lady doesn’t like to talk about herself,” Nicole said lightly, hoping he would change the subject. But he didn’t.
“The first night we spoke, you told me how much you loved children and that you dreamed of working with them one day. Yesterday, you said you once thought about becoming a doctor. What happened to that dream?”
Nicole didn’t respond immediately. The fire crackled. The clock ticked. The brush tugged and glided through her hair. Michael remained silent, waiting. Unable to think of a way to gracefully avoid his question, Nicole sighed and said, “Actually I did pursue it for a while. I went to college fully expecting that I’d become a pediatrician.”
“You did?”
She nodded. “I graduated from high school at seventeen, got a scholarship to a great university, and began my undergrad studies with a premed focus. I took all the difficult prerequisite classes that are supposed to weed out people. I did very well academically, but . . .”
“But?”
“I really didn’t enjoy the people I was with. There was this hypercompetitive component. People actually celebrated when someone else flunked a test or dropped out—and I’m not that way.”
“You wanted everyone to do well.”
“Yes. In that cutthroat environment, I was miserable. In my second year of college I went to the health center with strep throat and was seen by a nurse practitioner. She was fantastic and had about a hundred letters embroidered on her lab coat after her name. I asked what the letters meant, and she was really kind, told me all about it—that RN was registered nurse, BSN meant she had a bachelor’s degree in science and nursing, MSN was her master’s, and ARNP was for advanced registered nurse practitioner. At the end of my visit, she said, ‘You’re premed, aren’t you?’ And I said yes. ‘You hate it, huh?’ she asked. I admitted I did. She said: ‘You know, there are about a zillion other ways to go into health care without being a physician.’ A huge lightbulb came on for me. I realized that I could have a fulfilling career in the medical profession and still work with kids by becoming a pediatric nurse.”
Michael’s brush strokes continued to pull pleasingly through her hair. “A pediatric nurse? That sounds like the ideal profession for you.”
“I thought so too, at the time. Due to the shift work that’s common in the nursing profession, it seemed like it would work with my other hope, to become a mother and raise a family of my own. Within a month I’d looked into nursing programs all over the country and applied for a transfer. At the end of my second year I moved up to Seattle to go to nursing school. Even though I’d taken all those premed courses, I had to make up a whole bunch of nursing prerequisites. I took an extra heavy course load every semester and attended summer school so that I could still get my undergrad degree in four years.”
“So you did graduate? You became a nurse?” he asked, surprised.
“Yes.” She ran her fingers through her hair, which was now almost completely dry, and turned around to face him where they sat. “I took a job at Puget Sound Children’s Hospital in the pediatric oncology unit—”
“Oncology?” His eyebrows lifted and she thought she detected admiration in his gaze.
“I worked on a hematology, oncology, and bone marrow transplant floor, responsible for between three and six patients per shift.”
“Did you enjoy it?”
“I loved it. The kids would check in and stay for weeks or months at a time. We really got to know people, so when we experienced a loss, it was a huge loss, and it was stressful. But the kids were such fighters. It meant so much to me to be a part of returning children to health, young people who still had their whole lives ahead of them—or in the terminal cases, helping them through a difficult illness with affection and respect. There’s a layer in pediatrics that’s not present in adult nursing or adult medicine. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that no one tells kids how they’re supposed to be sick. They don’t really know about the social construction of illness. So when they’re sick—and for five years I dealt with some very sick kids—I was amazed that they never wallowed in self-pity. Ever. They just went about their day. It was very compelling to me that in the midst of their chemotherapy and throwing up from the side effects they’d be saying ‘Are we almost done yet? I really want to go to the playroom.’”
“What about the parents?”
“They were the ones you had to peel off the ceiling. And that’s one of the things I loved about pediatric nursing: that the kid is the centerpiece but you’re really taking care of the whole family. You have to tailor your caring and the way you’re delivering your nursing to many different family members with many different needs. It was a wonderful balance for me, where I could act like a kid and do goofy knock-knock jokes all day, and then go become an adult when I talked with their mom and dad.”
“When I was a physician,” Michael said, “cancer was an even bigger mystery than it is today. There was no real way to treat it. The survival rate was negligible. There’s still so much about that terrible disease that we don’t understand, but at least there have been some breakthroughs. It must be thrilling to know that you have the power now to cure certain cases.”
“Yes! So many times, at a party someone would ask, ‘what do you do?’ When I said ‘I’m a pediatric oncology nurse,’ they’d just want to walk away. I spent a lot of time telling people, ‘it’s actually a lot more hopeful than you think.’ Granted, bone tumors and brain tumors don’t do so well. But a good number of leukemia cases are actually cured, and that’s a lot of what we saw in oncology.”
Michael hesitated, as if weighing his next words carefully. “I would imagine that, even loving nursing as much as you did, a specialty like oncology must have been . . . very difficult at times.”
“It was. I worked at a very renowned center. Kids who couldn’t be cured with traditional chemo came from all over the country and the world to have last-chance treatments, and they were expecting miracles from us. That didn’t happen very often. That was really hard. And it’s never easy when you—” She broke off suddenly, her stomach seizing as the memory came crashing back, and with it all the horror and stress of everything that followed.
She felt him studying her as she picked at the carpet, struggling desperately to reassemble her thoughts. At length, he said, “I’ve heard a saying: ‘Nurses eat their young.’ That older nurses make it difficult for younger ones, who really have to earn their stripes. Is that true?”
“There is that perception,” she agreed. “I don’t know why. I never once encountered that issue, nor have any of the people I know. There was no hazing when I first started. I was never bullied. I was surrounded by extremely supportive and professional people. I had a network of four nurses I had graduated with, and we became very close friends. We all worked weird swing shifts, so we’d get together at bizarre hours, meet for drinks at midnight or for dinner at 9:30 PM before someone started the night shift at 11:00. We helped each other cope. And we loved to ski.”
“To ski?”
“We used to make our schedules fit with each other’s and get season passes to a mountain resort close to us in Seattle. We spent a lot of our days off skiing.”
“That sounds like a great outlet.”
“It was—a place I could go to get away from the stress and tension and just let loose, so that I was clear-headed and raring to go when I got back to work.”
He smiled. “I’ll bet you were a wonderful nurse.”
“Well, I don’t know how wonderful I was, but I always tried to do whatever I could to make the children’s experience in the hospital a little more pleasant, to help them understand and be okay with their diagnosis, tolerant of their treatment, and actually come up smiling. I used to ask what their favorite color was and buy them a bright knit cap or new do-rag in that color to cover their bald heads—that often cheered them up. But some of the children were very introverted and had a lot of trouble opening up and responding.”
“Such as?”
“I remember one patient—a darling five-year-old girl with leukemia. She was a Native American from Alaska who spoke very little English. She was shy, in pain, and traumatized, and for weeks she would hardly look at me. I tried to explain to her about the Make-A-Wish Foundation—they grant wishes for kids who’ve been diagnosed with a life-threatening illness, whether their prognosis is hopeful or terminal—but she didn’t understand. I brought in a translator, I bought her toys and a hat and a doll, but she still wouldn’t come out of her shell and she wasn’t responding to treatment; she was going downhill. I couldn’t think of what else to do.
“Then I thought: maybe she could draw what she’s thinking. So I brought in a pad of paper and some crayons and left them with her. When I came back, she’d drawn a picture of a dog. I called back the interpreter and discovered that the family had a dog back home that she missed terribly. So I pulled some strings and talked to the right people, and by the end of the week, the Make-A-Wish Foundation delivered her dog to the hospital. When we wheeled the little girl outside and she saw that animal, her face lit up with such a big, toothy grin—I’ll never forget it. Every afternoon for a week, she got to spend some time outside with her dog. She rallied after that, and she beat the leukemia.”
“What a wonderful story,” Michael said. “That hospital—and those children—were very lucky to have you as their nurse.” He took one of her hands in his and kissed it. “How long did you work there?”
“Five years.” Tension filled her. Nicole knew what he’d ask next; waited for it; it was inevitable.
“And after that? You said you live in California.”
“Yes. I left Seattle when . . . I left nursing.”
“Why did you leave?”
Nicole felt the pressure building up in her chest; her throat felt as if it were closing, and perspiration broke out with sudden force on her brow. She couldn’t go there, couldn’t bear dredging all that up again. Leaping to her feet, she walked away, stopping by the grand piano several yards across the room. She felt Michael’s eyes on her from behind. When he spoke, there was compassion in his voice.
“I realize this is something you don’t like to talk about. If anyone can understand what that’s like, I do, believe me. But whatever is bothering you, Nicole . . . whatever happened to you, I should think it’d be therapeutic to get it out in the open. And after everything I told you about my life, you must realize that absolutely nothing you say would shock me or cause me to judge you.”
Nicole nodded slowly, swallowing hard as she drummed up the courage to tell him. With her back still to him, she began.
“There was a little boy, two years old. His name was Ethan. He had leukemia but a good chance for survival. He was anemic after chemotherapy and required a transfusion to bring his hematocrit levels back up. He was under the care of a nurse I didn’t know well, a woman who’d just started at the hospital a month before. She was going off on her lunch break and said, ‘I just hung a bag of blood on Ethan. Would you check on him and move the rate up for me?’”
Nicole paused, turning around to glance back at Michael. “I know it’s been a long time since you practiced medicine, but when you hang a bag of blood you start it at a low rate, and if the patient is doing well, you increase it every fifteen minutes until you reach a particular prescribed rate.”
Michael nodded.
“We nurses helped each other out all the time, were required to double-check each other’s work, actually. But I wasn’t at my best that day. My father had died the week before. He’d been sick for a while, I’d known it was coming and—”
“I’m sorry.”
She felt tears threaten and had to clear her throat before she could continue. “I thought I had dealt with it. I guess I wasn’t ready to come back to work yet. But I did. I checked on that patient at the first interval, did a full set of vitals, and he seemed fine. So I advanced him to the next level. When I came back fifteen minutes later, I noticed that the boy wasn’t looking great, but not terrible either.”
Nicole took a shuddering breath, on the verge of tears. “Michael, he was only two years old. He couldn’t say, ‘I’m having this really tight feeling in my throat, I can’t breathe very well.’ Still, I had that hair on the back of my neck feeling—you know, when you sense that something is wrong, even without evidence to support it?”
“Yes.”
“So I checked his chart. To my horror I discovered that the nurse had hung the wrong blood! The child was A positive and she’d hung a bag of AB positive blood.”
“Oh my God.”
“I stopped the transfusion immediately and called the doctor, but it was too late. The little boy coded; he had an acute hemolytic reaction that progressed very quickly to DIC.”
“DIC? I’m not familiar with that term.”
“It stands for disseminated intravascular coagulation. His blood lost the ability to coagulate. The team tried to save him, but right there in front of us, he, he—” Nicole’s voice broke and tears rolled down her cheeks. “That little boy didn’t have an incision or an open wound, but still he bled out. He bled out from the vein where the needle had been inserted, he vomited blood, and he bled out of his nose and eyes. Blood poured from his body until the bed and the floor were covered in it. And then he died.”
“Jesus,” Michael said. “That must have been horrible.”
“I’d never seen anyone bleed to death before. It was . . .”
“I know. I know.” He leaped to his feet and in one fluid motion he was across the room, holding her in his arms, stroking her hair. “I’m so sorry—for you, for the child, and for his family. But Nicole: it wasn’t your fault. You didn’t hang that bag of blood.”
“It was my fault, just as much as the other nurse’s. I should have caught the mistake when I checked her work the first time, before she hung that bag. I should have checked the blood type again when I first looked in on him, before I bumped it up. But I wasn’t concentrating that day. I wasn’t thinking straight.”
“That’s understandable,” Michael said softly. “You were grieving. Your father had died.”
“That’s no excuse. I was a professional. I had a responsibility to that patient and his family. When I tried to express my sorrow to the boy’s parents—the hatred I saw in their eyes—it will live with me for the rest of my life. It rocked me to my core. They sued the hospital and everyone who’d touched their child—including me.”
“And?”
“It was a long and traumatic legal process. For the first two months after the child’s death, I went to work like a dead thing myself, questioning my judgment, doubting every decision, checking and rechecking everything I did like someone with OCD. I was terrified that I’d make that kind of mistake again. Lawyers were breathing down my neck, questioning me, threatening to have my license revoked. Finally I couldn’t take it anymore. I quit my job. I left nursing for good. It was too painful to be around all my friends who were nurses, so I moved back to San Jose. I took the first job I could find, in medical claims, and I’ve been there ever since.”
“Was there a trial?”
“Yes. Six months ago. The nurse who hung the bag of blood did lose her license. The hospital paid out a huge settlement. In the end I was acquitted of any wrongdoing, but for two and a half long years I was under constant stress and worry. And now that it’s over . . .”
“Now that it’s over?”
Nicole heaved a sigh. “I thought I would feel relieved. I thought it would finally allow me to concentrate on my new life and move on. But so far I haven’t been able to do that.”
Michael hugged her tightly, then took her hands in his and urged her to sit down on the piano bench beside him. Quietly, he said, “We have a lot in common, you and I.”
“That’s true,” she said, although she wasn’t sure what, specifically, he was referring to.
Looking at her, he added, “We’ve both run away from our problems.”
“I didn’t run away,” she insisted. “I wasn’t functioning as a nurse anymore. I wasn’t doing my patients any good. It was time for me to start over in a different place and a new profession.”
He just looked at her, disagreement written all over his face.
“Okay, so maybe I did run away,” Nicole admitted with a sigh. “But I felt I had no choice.”
“I felt the same when I left England and when I came to Colorado. In my case I didn’t have a choice. But you did. You still do.” He paused, then quoted softly: “‘Your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart to give yourself to it.’ Buddha.”
“I can’t go back to nursing, Michael.”
“Are you happy with the work you’re doing now?”
“No,” Nicole said, “but—”
“That story you told me, about the Native Alaskan girl and her dog—I think that’s far more emblematic of who you are than the boy you couldn’t save. When you talked about nursing just now and what you loved about it, there was an excitement in your voice and eyes that came from the depths of your soul. Nursing is what you are meant to do. Go back to it. You are so compassionate and giving. You have skills that can help so many people and make a difference in so many lives. You have to forgive yourself, Nicole. Don’t let one mistake alter the entire direction of your life.”
Nicole mulled over his words, knowing deep down that he was right. “I could say the same thing to you.”
“You could, and you’d be right—except for two tiny details. One: the things I did are so much worse than what you did, they’re not even in the same hemisphere. And two: you’re a human being. You can learn from your mistakes, and change. You can go back to nursing and be more aware and vigilant. I can never go back. I can’t trust myself to always do the right thing. I am what I am, and always will be.”
“You’re a human being to me, Michael, in all the ways that matter.”
“Oh my love,” he said, kissing her, “how I wish that were true.”
