HE WANTED HER BACK.
Before West had revealed how he felt and didn’t feel about her, Lia had harbored quiet fantasies of getting back together. But since then, even knowing that she’d only days ago questioned why he hadn’t wanted to keep seeing her and see if love developed, standing on the other side of it felt different. Scary.
Saying yes would mean entering an unequal relationship, where she loved him, but he didn’t, and may never love her back. How long was she supposed to even give that kind of a trial?
She didn’t want to be that stupid again, and had already proven she couldn’t even correctly identify love. She confused it with general happiness, and probably lust. Would she ever be able to believe him if he said the words to her again?
“I don’t want to sound cruel, and I don’t want to have a fight in the clinic, but I won’t lead you on, either. I don’t know why you want me back when you’ve been very clear that you never loved me. I didn’t realize it before, I didn’t think anyone would propose without love, so I believed it. But the truth is I don’t have any idea what that feels like.”
“What what feels like?”
“Being loved. You say you want me, and I believe you do because want doesn’t require more than physical connection—something we’re very good at.” Or had been before. They’d been too wounded and cagey since she’d returned to do more than feel things, and then stuff them away. “But you don’t love me, so I don’t know. I need to think about it, about whether we can have something healthy and happy.” She licked her lips and shook her head. “I’m glad you’re here. I don’t really believe that you came back for me, but I am glad you’re here.”
“When I said—”
“No,” she cut him off. “I don’t want to talk about this more right now. You need to eat and get a walk in before I’m willing to discharge you.” She opened her mouth to say more, but a loud, frantic cry for help from the lobby took precedence, and sent her sluggish heart back into instant overdrive.
Without another word, she turned and ran toward the voice.
“What happened?” West heard Lia say through the opened door.
“He’s not breathing. I found him like this...” a man said.
West took two big bites of the noodles she’d brought him, then shoved the table aside and got up to fetch a second gown from the cabinet to use as a robe and conceal his backside. He hadn’t gotten around to asking where his clothes were, and he was going to go help, with or without them.
“Air was really thin in there,” the man said as West made it out, breathing labored, and had obviously carried the patient in. He stood to the side, hands gripped together, worriedly watching.
“Where was it?” West asked. They’d gotten the man on the table and Lia was climbing up to straddle him, fingers linked to begin chest compressions.
“Mechanical room.”
Another injury from Mechanical?
“Thin air,” she puffed between compressions, but he heard her flinging open drawers to get a mouth guard out to breathe for him when she stopped.
He took and delivered two quick breaths before she resumed. “I know.”
Suffocation could do that, if the room was pressure sealed, but why would Mechanical be pressure sealed?
“Oxygen?” he prompted, and she nodded, but didn’t speak again, focused on applying the proper amount of pressure, and keeping count. Chest compressions were a workout and carried on for a long time. It was common to need to switch out with someone fresh, so the cadence wouldn’t be affected. Exhaustion could set in quickly when someone was fully rested, let alone whatever state Lia was in.
He kept an eye on her, and breathed for the man when he was supposed to, mentally ticking through what else it could be. Carbon monoxide was a silent killer, odorless, and breathing didn’t feel affected up until it was too late. So it was unlikely to be noticed as thin air, but did sound like something that could actually happen in Mechanical with the machines and exhaust.
Regardless, the treatment was the same. Pure oxygen would help, if anything was going to.
He dug out a laryngoscope, bag valve ventilator, and connected it straight into the oxygen in seconds, readying himself to dive in and intubate the man the next time she stopped.
“He’s still warm,” she said, which was something at least. And as soon as she counted her last compression, she helped tilt his head back to lengthen the throat, and West slid in the blade and tubing, then began pumping straight oxygen into the man’s lungs.
Three puffs, an extra to help, and she resumed.
After the fourth set of full oxygen breaths, the mechanical aeration of the man’s blood worked. His head jerked once, and she stopped to feel the pulse in his throat, her hands shaking, and following up, he could see her arms shaking, too. Not nerves, but weakness that came from overexertion, because if anyone was going to have one of those TV doctor moments of having to be dragged away from a patient who was too far gone, it would be Lia. She’d keep going until he made her stop. Or until they got lucky.
She didn’t climb down yet, instead grabbing the man’s wrists to pin beneath her knees, in case he should wake and do what most people did when they woke up intubated—try to pull it out. He needed the oxygen. If this was carbon monoxide poisoning, he’d need hours of pure, undiluted oxygen.
They waited and watched for a full minute, but when he didn’t fully rouse, she climbed down and they got his manual pump respirator switched to the machine and began attaching leads to monitor his heart.
“Thinking someone needs to get a detector down there.” She breathed hard. “And we need to get him stable and out of here. His sternum cracked, and he’ll need a lot of care for a while.”
“If he wakes,” West said softly. They both knew his chances weren’t great.
“While the weather allows travel, we need to relocate him. Is there anywhere in South America with a hyperbaric chamber? Or maybe a navy boat?”
“I don’t know.” He didn’t, but he would find out. “I’ve read that they help filter the blood, but there’s no evidence that it helps.”
“There’s no evidence that it doesn’t,” she grumbled, breathing starting to even out, but she still shook as if by an internal earthquake.
The man they’d been ignoring made himself known again. “Does it always make you die? If you’ve got carbon monoxide poisoning?”
West glanced sideways at Lia, and despite still being in a hospital gown, he said to the man, “You went in after him?”
A nod was his answer, and he shared a look with Lia to let her know he was handling it.
“Let’s check you out. You might benefit from some oxygen, too.”
Still focused on their main patient, she didn’t interfere, but did call after him, “Get blood.”
“Get my clothes when you’re done,” he called back, ushering the man into an exam room. “How are you feeling? Anything off? And what’s your name? I can’t pull up your file—I don’t have a device—but I can check this right now.”
“Mario Correa,” he answered first. “I haven’t been feeling right since the day I moved into Pod A.”
“Not about Mechanical?” West asked, and when the man shrugged, he continued. “Symptoms?”
“I don’t know. Tired and off,” Mario said, then looked at West seriously. “Doctor, are you sure you’re well enough for this? Maybe the lady doctor should see me.”
“I’m okay,” West assured him. “I’ve been discharged, just haven’t gotten changed yet. So, after sleeping in Pod A you felt poorly?”
“It was before bed,” he said. “I worked in the shop all day that day. Actually, it was the day after we’d shut down Pod B, where I had been, and some other parts of the station. I went to Mechanical to make a part for the ventilation system so we could change it.”
“Repair?”
“Not broken, but the engineers came up with some way to save energy, and that meant closing down different parts than they’d originally planned. So we’re reworking ventilation and electrical, those kinds of things.”
Right. None of that meant much to him.
“We’ll get some blood. That’ll tell us if you’ve got a carbon monoxide concentration. But I’m going to get you on oxygen now, just in case.”
“How does that help?”
“Pushes the carbon monoxide out of the blood. It takes a few hours to clean it out, but we can do that. You just have to wear a mask and breathe only the oxygen that comes through it,” he explained, getting the man set up and turning the oxygen flow on. “It smells kind of weird, but it’ll help. If you can, lie down on the table and nap after I get your blood. If it’s clear, I’ll let you go. If it’s not, you stay until it is.”
“I need to call my boss...”
“I’ll get it,” West said, getting that information from the man to make the call. It sounded to him like something weird was going on with ventilation, but it was a new station and this was the first time being overwintered. It was bound to have kinks that needed working out as things were used and bugs discovered.
He’d find Lia after. Get some clothes. Finish their conversation before sending her to bed. He’d slept twenty-one hours; he could stay awake for another eight so she could sleep.
It was fine. They had time. They weren’t done. Even if he’d made this exponentially harder with his lie about having never loved her. A lie he still couldn’t believe she’d bought, no more than he could believe her assertion that she’d never been loved, that she didn’t know what it felt like.
Jordan loved her. Her friends. Certainly her family and the people in her village. Unless that was the big mess she’d wanted to keep him away from.
It was funny the things that occurred to Lia in the middle of an emergency. How it was possible to save a life with CPR eleven percent of the time if you performed the right steps, the right way, in the right amount of time after the last natural respiration.
Maybe in eleven percent of alternate universes, he said those words to her and it saved their relationship. And maybe the reason she’d been gritting her teeth all afternoon was how badly she wanted to take him back, and how bad an idea she knew that to be. But it would feel good in the moment.
All is forgiven.
Pretend nothing happened.
Pretend she didn’t remember the other words he’d said.
What she couldn’t work out was why he’d said them. And why hadn’t she?
She could’ve lied, or just told him she didn’t want to translate the words she’d said outside the bus, when she hadn’t expected to ever have to own up to them. And couldn’t bring herself to lie about them. Which could be something she did need to learn.
Instead, she’d spent hours trying to convince herself that this new pragmatism was a sign of growth. That she was just uncovering the real Lia.
She’d kept busy after resuscitation, arranging transport to get her resus patient back to civilization and the care he’d need. And where his family could go to him, where they wouldn’t have to worry if he was all right.
West had gotten changed and dumped his belongings off at his new cabin in Pod A, no longer next door for her to worry about, then returned after dinner.
“I’m going to take the night shift so you can get some sleep,” he said from the door to the office. She’d expected to have the rest of the evening to herself, to gather her wits, but there he was.
She fisted her hands in her lap, trying to hide her white-knuckling it through the conversation, a twisting grip on her jacket better than the grip she had on her willpower. Shoving him out of the office and yelling at him would probably be a bad thing, especially as he was now there to work. And she didn’t even know if Kasey was running the transport bus now to escape.
“You don’t have to. I’ll set alarms, keep a radio with me and go check on him every hour...”
“Why?”
“It’s my job. I don’t want you thinking you have to take care of me. Or that it will change things. We both probably need to stay in our lanes for a few days.”
He made some sound of understanding, then moseyed in to lean against her desk. “So, by our lanes, you mean no hugging, no relationship talk, no random love declarations or trying to give you the ring back?”
“For instance,” she said, but felt herself bristling when he said “love declarations.” Her nails digging into her palms made her pull them from her lap and reach for an ink pen on her desk instead. Something to fidget with that wouldn’t hurt.
He played it too cool, but when she looked up at him, she saw worry in his brow. Another thing she couldn’t count on reading correctly. Instinct wanted to believe that you couldn’t worry about someone you didn’t love, but that wasn’t true. She was worried about her resus patient, someone she’d just met while unconscious.
“For instance?”
“It would be counterproductive to comment further, and definitely strays outside of what my lane should be right now when I’m trying to picture what this is going to be like, working together in close quarters for eight months,” she grumbled, giving voice to what was in her head, because why not? “Besides, it would be a lie, wouldn’t it?”
“What would be a lie?”
“Love declarations,” she repeated, then looked up at him, not ready to back down on that one. “It feels manipulative when you say things like that, given what I know. You never loved me. So, if you didn’t love me before, when I was actively trying to be what you wanted, you certainly don’t love me now.”
“I did love you,” he argued, then, “You were trying to be what I wanted?”
“I always try to be what I think people I love want me to be. Everyone does it. Some better than others.” Her energy flagged, because it had been an exhausting couple of days, and that was before the morning CPR. “And you didn’t. You told me you didn’t. You practically said it again when you told me to not cry because you dislike me having red eyes.”
“That’s not why I said that.” He looked kind of bewildered, and that just made her want to cry again. “I lied. I lied about Charlie, I lied about loving you. And you know what? There’s more. I don’t... There’s...”
He stopped and pinched the bridge of his nose, eyes closing. “It seemed like the kindest thing to do at the time. I did love you. I do love you, as well as I’m able.”
“Even if I wanted to believe that, I know it’s not true. How can you really love me when you don’t even know me?”
“Of course I know you.”
“You don’t know me. I don’t even know me.” She threw her hands up, her voice rising with them, but through her evident exhaustion, she remembered where they were and lowered her voice again. “We went over this. It’s just rehashing at this point. If you loved anything, it was on the surface, or what you thought we would become sometime in the future. When plans worked out. Living the dream. But I can’t do that anymore. I’m making changes, which no one seems to notice, anyway, so why are we even having this discussion?”
“By changes, you mean being grumpy?”
“Growing my hair out. Wearing pink things. Not forcing myself to project optimism that I don’t feel, though I guess that’s the same as grumpy.” She stood up to mostly close the door, leaving it open enough to hear if anyone called for help.
“Of course I noticed the changes, but what does a haircut or pink pajamas have to do with who you are as a person?”
“We all have reasons for the things we do. Even if they’re stupid reasons, we all have reasons. My father is on the run because he doesn’t want to deal with the vineyard anymore, or the mess. And maybe so he doesn’t have to see me succeed with it, because I will. Reasons are important for the things we do.”
“There’s a deeper reason behind growing your hair out than you simply want to change your hair?”
“Yes,” she said, then went to check the radios on their charging stations, to see if they were getting a full charge. “And the reason I’m calling this conversation to a close right now is that I’m tired. And disillusioned. And wishing I had a superpower right now.”
He chuckled. “What superpower would that be?”
She nodded toward the door. “Heal him.”
“Ah, see, that’s why you’re a better doctor than I am,” he said, and when she turned to look at him, he reached out to take her hand. “Do you want to know what superpower I want to have?”
“No,” she said instantly, the way he looked into her eyes and stroked her hand giving her a silly little turn in the conversation gravity. “What?”
“Time-travel,” he said softly. “But I can’t fix the past. All I can try to do is do better. We have eight months to work this out, don’t we? I’m not a patient man, so don’t expect me to just give up and wait, but I can do something for you tonight, and take the night shift, keep an eye on our patient so you can get eight hours. I think after twenty-one hours of straight sleep I can manage that.”
She opened her mouth to argue, but suddenly couldn’t think of why. Instead, she nodded her agreement, and when he tugged her over to wrap his arms around her, she leaned in. But she couldn’t bring herself to put her arms around him in return. Her hands and cheek rested against his chest, and he propped his bearded chin atop her pink knitted hat, and there they stood, swaying together for far too long.
Up close, she could see the shape of her ring under the thermal shirt he wore, and felt that pit open back up in her stomach.
Hugging was definitely to be avoided. And she’d tell him that, too. Tomorrow.