Page 10 of Cole (Dirty Misfits MC 4)
Five
Cole
“Come on, Stokes. Come on!”
He gurgled blood as his hand reached up for my cheek. “Doctor. I can’t—”
I grabbed his face and glared into his eyes. “You don’t stop ‘til I stop, you got that, Sergeant? You got that!?”
His eyes rolled into the back of his head and he started convulsing. In the middle of a fucking battlefield, with bullets flying everywhere, and I had a man convulsing on the ground in front of me. I needed my go-bag. I needed my medication. But instead, I had been sent on a “do-or-die” mission that I wasn’t nearly prepared to handle by myself.
Why the fuck did the Army do this to us?
“Doc—mmph—tor.”
I gripped his hand as the convulsing stopped. “You have to keep your eyes on me. I’m going to get you out of here. I need a van! Now!”
He shook his head side-to-side, as if to tell me no. But his lips ceased to move. His eyes grew big, as if he were seeing something above my head. And with a breath that was both laborious and tainted with blood he couldn’t swallow down, a smile crept across his face.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Stokes?” I asked.
Tears crested his eyes. “Mom. I haven’t seen you in—”
“Stokes! Don’t! The van’s right here!”
The medical Humvee pulled up behind us as his eyes went blank. People scurried around me as some random medical trainee started chest compressions. I watched as the life faded from his eyes. I listened as bullets whizzed by our heads like little points of passion threatening to breach the entire Geneva Convention just to take me out.
And as I watched them roll his dead body onto a gurney, bile rose up the back of my throat.
“Oh, fuck,” I choked out.
“No!” I exclaimed.
I sat bolt upright in bed, as if someone had shocked me back from a dead existence. A cold sweat dribbled down the nape of my neck, causing me to twitch as I swung my legs over the side of my bed. I raced for my bathroom, feeling that same haunting bile make its way to the back of my tongue.
And after throwing up my dinner into the sink, I splashed some water in my face.
“Jesus,” I whispered.
I heard Opie’s bell on his collar jingling as he raced up the steps. He blasted into my room and met me at the bathroom door just as I had gotten done cleaning myself up. He kept nudging the insides of my legs with his nose as I made my way toward my bed, and the second I collapsed onto the other side of it to avoid the sweaty outline of my body, he climbed between my legs.
Before curling up next to me with his soft, warm fur.
“Come here, boy. There’s a good boy,” I whispered.
His head nestled beneath my chin and I breathed in his scent. Nothing smelled or felt like home some days except the scent and smell of Opie. I wrapped my arms around him, and he nestled closer, licking softly at my jawline.
As if to give me kisses.
“I know, boy. You can start sleeping with me again,” I whispered.
He whimpered before he barked, and the sound made me smile. “None of that sarcastic shit now. Yes, you were right. You can sleep with me from now on, okay?”
He grumbled to himself before his eyes fell closed, and soon his chest rose and fell with his deep, even breaths. I drew in his scent one last time before I closed my own eyes, and soon I fell into a deep, dreamless slumber.
And when I awoke a few hours later, Opie was the first thing I saw.
“Hey there, buddy,” I said groggily.
He nuzzled my cheek with his cold, wet nose, and it made me smile as I rolled over onto my back.
“Come here,” I whispered as I patted my chest.
His head fell against my beating heart and I scratched behind his ear. As I stared up at the ceiling, I found myself thinking about Stokes. About his family, and how they were doing. I insisted on being with the team that went to inform his family about his death. He had been my first soldier that had ever died on the battlefield before I could get them on my operating table, and he still haunted me. Even now, eight years after I chose not to reenlist. I remembered dressing in clothes Stokes would never wear again. I remembered standing there while someone from the “Doom Squad”—as we so lovingly called them in my group of friends at the time—knocked on their door.
And when a beautiful woman with two children and one on the way answered, I almost screamed out to the heavens.
“She was days from delivery, Opie,” I murmured.
He nodded against my chest before his tongue darted out to lick my chin.
“Three babies, all under the age of four, and I was with her when they told her that her husband was never coming home.”
