“Something like that,” the man said.
“Oh, come on,” Anna said as she shoved him playfully. “It’s okay to brag about yourself a little bit, Doc-meister.”
“Doc… what now?” he asked as he turned and looked down at her.
Anna beamed up at him, and I watched that stoic face of his slowly crack under the pressure of a smile. It slid across his lips before he snickered and turned away, and for a moment, I caught the way his smile lit up his eyes. Those stormy gray eyes of his, flickering with lightning.
I lit up no one’s eyes. In all the time he’d spent checking on me, cataloguing my bruises and asking about my laps and myfood, I hadn’t seen that smile once. Maybe I was reading too much into it.
“All right, all right,” Anna said with a playful roll of her eyes, “I’ll stop getting Doc to brag on himself.”
“I do no such thing, you do it enough for me,” he said as he turned back to me. “Miss Elizabeth?”
I wanted to slug him for some reason. “You can just call me what everyone else does, Doc. No need for formalities.”
He stared at me for a while before he nodded his head. “Can I get you anything before Anna and I finish our rounds?”
I just shook my head. “No. Em and I are good.”
His eyes flickered to my best friend before coming back to me. “Are you sure?”
“Do I look like I’m not sure?”
As if I gave him an invitation, his gaze roamed down my body. I saw him bouncing his head every once in a while, like he used some sort of x-ray vision to count all the wounds and bruises and scrapes I still had healing all over my body. His gaze ran down the terrain of my body, and for a moment, I felt my cheeks blushing.
I’d never been looked at so hard by a man before.
Not even the men who captured me when I went looking for Em.
“If you ever need anything, Miss Elizabeth,” he said as his gaze finally traveled back up to my face, “you know where to find me.”
I just nodded. “Lizzie’s fine.”
His gaze traveled down my body one last time before he clasped his hands behind him. With a nod of his head, he turned toward Anna, and the two of them started out of the kitchen.
“Hey, since you’re a regular smarty pants,” Anna said as their walking faded away from the kitchen, “what do you think about PTSD? I think my brother’s got a bout of it going on, and I wantsome facts to throw into his face so that I can convince him to go see someone about it.”
“He could always just come see me,” Doc said.
Anna scoffed. “I can’t even get him to see the doctor we’ve got in our crew, much less someone else’s doctor, you know what I’m saying?”
“Well,” Doc said, and I hated how much I hung onto his fading words, “in psychology, there’s this phenomenon known as ‘latrophobia’, which is essentially the fear of medical professionals and medicine, in general. But sometimes when the mind comes into contact with things that it can’t make sense of, that latrophobia will morph itself into something a bit more compartmentalized. It’s a phenomenon that’s only just now being studied in military men as they’re discharged and willing to participate in studies, so it’s ongoing. But the premise of the study is that?—”
Their voices faded into nothing, and I didn’t even realize that I hung on bated breath to everything Doc said.
Marla placed her hand on my shoulder.
“Wanna sit down, and I’ll pour you a bowl of cereal?” she asked softly, her thumb rubbing soft circles against the fabric of my shirt. “They’ve got some cut up fruit in here as well. I could melt up some chocolate for you? Make it dippable?”
“Sure, yeah,” I said softly as I let her lead me to the kitchen table.
“You okay?” Em asked as she pulled out a chair for me.
I heard Anna’s laugh kick up from somewhere in the mansion, echoing down the hallway, and I winced.
“Yeah, they’re just loud,” I grumbled.
She scooted my chair back toward the table. “All right. Well one bowl of cereal and some chocolate-dipped fruit, coming up.”
