Page 7 of Property of Doc

Leaning down, I push her hair back from her forehead and softly call out, “Gretchen? Baby, come on, we’re gonna go now, okay?”

“Sixteen years,” she whispers, her eyes still closed. “Lost it all.”

I know she’s a recovering addict but had no idea she had sixteen years under her belt since she’s so young. Granted, she’s younger than me, but still, she’s in her early thirties at least. “You have something you can rebuild on, Gretchen,” I reply as I carefully gather her in my arms, being sure not to pull her IV out. “And I’ll be right there beside you every step of the way.”

CHAPTER

FOUR

Gretchen

You have something you can rebuild on, Gretchen.

Shame.

Humiliation.

Degradation.

As I lie here on the bed in a room at Dr. Brooks’s clubhouse, all three emotions course through me, like a never-ending loop. Shame that I lost sixteen years of being clean. Logically, I know it wasn’t my fault, but that doesn’t change the fact that I’m back at square one, only this time, I’m not addicted to pain medication. No, it’s some fucked-up cocktail that my abductors concocted to keep me compliant and malleable.

Humiliation because I was so unaware of what was happening around me and wasn’t paying attention to my surroundings, I was abducted. While I don’t know everyone else’s story as far as how they were captured, I feel like I should have sensed that I wasn’t alone in that parking lot. My survival instincts should’vekicked in but for some reason, they were dormant. How can I be trusted to help others in their own recovery journey when I messed up so spectacularly?

Degradation is the worst emotion coursing through me, though. Knowing that the man I’ve been attracted to ever since I walked through the doors of the clinic saw me lying in my own waste and filth, stinking to high heaven? It’s mortifying and horrifying at the same time. He picked me up, for heaven’s sake, and I was sweat soaked, covered in my own piss and shit and vomit, and I’m sure my breath was beyond foul, since we weren’t exactly given bathroom privileges in order to clean ourselves up.

Yet he tucked me in his arms, carried me through that warehouse and out to a waiting SUV as if I was made of porcelain. Something precious to be treasured and protected.

I can’t wrap my mind around that fact, because once we got back to the clubhouse, which shocked me senseless, several of the women helped me shower since I was so weak and unsteady from the poison running through my veins and lack of nutrients. My stamina was non-existent. Constance held me up while I scrubbed myself raw until she and Maria deemed that I was sufficiently clean. They then dried me, brushed out my matted hair, and braided it, reminding me of my mom and the bedtime routine we had when I was a small child. By the time Dr. Brooks came back to the room to get me hooked up to another IV to start me on fluids, I was nearly asleep.

But I was awake enough to feel his lips lightly caress my forehead, like a light stroke of a feather, before he left.

“I’m sorry, Gretchen,” he whispers, pushing the tendrils of hair that have come loose and escaped from the braids away from my sweat soaked skin. “I know this is gotta suck for you.”

I moan, my whole body in agony as tremors course through me thanks to the withdrawal I’m now embroiled in. While he does have me on a low dose of medication to help with the symptoms, we made the decision together for me not to fully rely on the meds, since the cocktail I was given was so potent.

“I… I’ll… I’ll be okay,” I stammer, my teeth now chattering from the withdrawal as the chills now take over. When I feel that sensation in my mouth that I think everyone in the world knows by heart, I reach out blindly for the emesis bag on the bed. “Gonna be sick,” I warn as bile flies out of my mouth into the bag.

“Let me get some anti-nausea meds for you,” he says.

“If me puking it up means it gets it out of me faster, please don’t,” I manage to say through clenched teeth. “I don’t like throwing up, I don’t think anyone does, but I don’t want that poison in me any longer than it has to be.”

“The first two weeks are the roughest,” he advises, his tone full of warning. “The meds won’t hurt anything.”

“I know, Dr. Brooks,” I reply as I take the bottle of water he hands me. Popping the top, I take a few cautious sips, swishing it around in my mouth as if it was Listerine and spitting it out into my nausea bag, grateful to lose the nasty taste I had in my mouth.

“Call me Doc or Hanson, sweetheart. We’re not at work and I’m known as Doc to my brothers.”

“Is Hanson your real name or something?” I ask, eager to learn something about him that I didn’t already know. It also helps me focus on something else besides my continuous misery.

“Yeah, but only when I’m filling out forms that require my legal name. At work, it’s Dr. Brooks for obvious reasons, but around the club, it’s Doc.”

“So, what do I call you?” I question.

“Yours.”

After he makesthatannouncement, he gets up and finds some anti-nausea medication, adds it to my IV, then he leaves while I’m lying there with a ton of questions. What did he mean that he was mine? Mine what? We’ve obviously built a professional relationship because of our work, but it wasn’t what I would call romantic by any stretch of the imagination.

In fact, up until I was rescued, I had never had the slightest hint that he was interested in me at all. Is my picker broken too? Flopping back on the bed, I sigh, no closer to getting any answers, and I doubt that he’s going to fill me in any time soon based on how quickly he left the room.