1
Karly
“You okay?” Jamie asks. She’s looking at me with a worried look on her face, and it’s then I realize that I’ve been staring at the white wall of the nurses’ station for who knows how long.
Obviously too long since Jamie, my coworker, is looking at me as if I’m about to sprout another head.
I’m working an extra shift at the hospital in the physical therapy department trying hard to catch up on late payments for my student loans and car. I’m a very responsible sort of person, and having received letters threatening to take back the car and others threatening to ruin my credit, I’ve taken on every extra shift I can get.
“I’m fine. Just trying to figure things out,” I tell her. Like how I’m going to eat, I think to myself. It looks like I’ll be eating ramen for the rest of the month.
“Well, I don’t know why you would be staring off into the wall when you can be looking at Jason Keller,” Jamie says with a nod to the other side of the room, where the popular patient is doing his physical therapy. She puts extra emphasis on saying his name with a wiggle of her eyebrows. It seems everyone has fallen under the handsome veteran’s spell. Jamie gives me a little hip check before she tells me bye and walks out of the open PT area.
The cute young army veteran I’ve seen and heard the other nurses gushing over is receiving physical therapy from Marven. I just shake my head at the grumpy older guy who has lost his spark for the profession and isn’t pushing Mr. Keller in his therapy exercises. He’s not challenging him at all. He just accepts whatever Jason agrees to do, even if it’s nothing.
I’ve watched Jason the other times he’s been in here. It’s sort of hard not to. He really is handsome. But this time seems different. Usually, he’s got a scowl on his face like he hates the world and everyone in it. Today, he’s looking at me with curiosity. I ignore the way my heartbeat picks up when I catch him looking my way.
The patient I’m helping with has almost completed PT and is working on the stationary bike which just so happens to be next to the station where Jason is working.
Marven steps away to get a drink and probably put another mark on his countdown to retirement calendar.
I walk across the room and I tell myself I should mind my own business, but of course I never listen to myself. I stop next to Jason. “Why have you stopped doing the exercise?”
He shrugs, blinking his long lashes at me, and then acts as if I’ve asked a stupid question or something. “It’s because I’ve completed the number of reps Marven gave me.”
I barely resist rolling my eyes. They should just let Marven get a jump start on his retirement already. He’s not doing anyone any good here. I try to mask my frustration, but I still voice my opinion. “Marven is taking it way too easy on you. If I were your PT instructor, I’d make you do two more sets of ten.”
He looks taken aback. “I had a compound fracture.” And the way he’s looking at me, he truly believes that is a perfect excuse to half-ass his therapy. It was a bad break for sure and the pins in his knee weren’t sitting right and they had to go back in to perform another surgery. He lost some bone mass because of the complication, and it is possible he might not be able to rebuild enough strength in his right leg to be able to walk without a cane.
At least that’s what his file said… Not that I’d snooped and read it.
“Doctors make guesses about what you’ll be capable of, but you’re the one who really decides what you can and can’t do. You may be sore doing the extra sets, but you don’t know you can’t do them unless you try.”
Jason
The other patients and doctors call her Nurse Berry. I didn’t expect for her to talk to me especially since I wasn’t trying to catch her attention. After my injury and the multiple surgeries, I came out feeling like I’d come out of it as less than half the man I’d gone under the knife as.
Rebuilding my strength in my entire body seemed to be too hard a challenge—and then to be told I may not ever be able to rebuild enough strength in my leg to be mobile without a walker or cane? It was devastating, and I know I’m not handling it well. I keep thinking about how much hard work my two brothers put into our family ranch. After the military I’d planned to work in the family business.