“Well, it would be nice if your team is that good,” she said, “but I wouldn’t count on it.”
“I can definitely count on it,” he said. “They are that good, without a doubt.”
She stared at him. “Then they are better than everybody else I know.”
“They are,” he said, “and I won’t hide that fact. Because part of the reason they are so good is because they are my team. Chosen, trained, and looked after by me.”
She studied him for the longest time, seeing the pride, the joy on his face and realizing just how far removed his world was from hers. She looked around at the island, sensing change, much like the tsunami that she’d already felt coming toward her, but she wasn’t ready for it now any more than she had been prepared back then. “I get it,” she said and then motioned at the fresh buns in front of him. “You better eat.”
“And if I don’t?” he asked, sitting down and looking up at her. “Oh, is there any more coffee, by chance?”
She smiled and said, “If you don’t eat the bun, I’ll eat it for you. And, yes, there’s plenty of coffee.” She walked over and poured him a cup, before sitting down across from him. She picked out one of the four rolls and gently buttered it, before taking a small bite herself.
“You don’t eat much, do you?” he asked.
“I don’t need to eat much,” she said. “I spend my days here in peaceful contemplation.”
“You were doing some writing as well, I noticed.”
“I was,” she said. “It’s a way to keep my sanity sometimes.”
“You never told me what you did in the big bad world before you wound up here.”
She smiled. “I was a heart surgeon.”
He stopped and stared. “Seriously?”
She gave him a sideways look. “Why? Can’t women be surgeons in your world?”
He continued to stare at her, looking even more shocked at that. “Of course they can. Some of the best surgeons I know are women,” he said, “but what on earth would take you from there to here?”
“Sometimes life doesn’t go the way we thought it would go,” she said, clearly uncomfortable with the attention.
“If you tell me that you threw it all away for some asshole of a man, I’ll get really angry.”
She laughed at that. “Well, let’s just say an asshole of a man was part of the reason, but it certainly wasn’t a love affair gone wrong.”
“Okay, now I want the details,” he snapped.
“You can want all you like,” she said. “That doesn’t mean I’m giving them to you.”
He glared at her in frustration, while she remained serene. “I can’t understand how you can live here so calm and peaceful if something bad happened to you.”
“But that’s exactly why I am here,” she said. “Not all injustices get resolved the way we want them to.”
“That doesn’t mean we have to let it all go either,” he growled, clearly upset.
“You’re really pretty much black-and-white, aren’t you?”
“I don’t like to see the people I care about getting hurt.”
“Neither do I,” she said. “Sometimes we make the wrong decisions, and sometimes people go against us regardless.”
“Could I please have an explanation?”
“Not really anything to say.” But she considered it, and, just as she would open up and share something with him, a noise came from around the corner of her cabin. She got up and walked over there, ever mindful of his comment about somebody watching them. As she got to the corner, Paolo emerged, smiling broadly with the typical island friendliness.
“I brought you fish,” he said, holding out his hand. She accepted them. “It looks lovely, thank you,” she said warmly.
“Your patient, how is he doing?” Paolo asked.
“Much better,” she said, and, at that, she turned to see Bullard stepping away from her cabin.
Paolo’s gaze widened at the size of him. “Wow, he’s doing much better.”
Bullard smiled and said, “I’m almost healed. Did you bring a cell phone?”
He frowned and looked at him. “I forgot.” He turned to look behind him. “My brother went though. Let me see if I can get one from him.” With that, he turned and disappeared.
“He forgot?” Bullard said, his voice a low growl.
“He doesn’t lie,” she said, turning back to him. She thought she heard another sound around the corner. She stepped around the side of the cabin and stared into the trees.
Bullard reached out and put a hand on her shoulder and said, “Remember. We’re being watched.”
She tensed immediately. “I wasn’t expecting to find danger when you got back on your feet,” she muttered. “It’s a foreign feeling for me.”
“No,” he said, “you were dealing with the same type of attack. It’s just that yours was verbal, whereas mine will be physical.”
“Interesting observation,” she said. “How did you know?”
“Because if somebody didn’t physically beat you, they beat you in other ways.”
“Oh, I was definitely hurting,” she said. “And I’ve had no contact from the outer world ever since.”
“You just up and left?”
“I did,” she said, and, thinking back, she realized how much she had needed that to happen. “When you’re hurt, sometimes it’s all you can do.”
“Absolutely, but, at the same time, you’re hiding,” he said, “and you have to be prepared to reenter the world at some point. I can’t imagine anybody driven enough to become a heart surgeon could be happy here indefinitely.”
“Well, I was,” she said. “Until a stranger washed up on my boat.”
“Is that why you haven’t been fishing lately?”
“I’ve been looking after you,” she said, “and Paolo, well, he likes me, so he tends to bring me fish.”
Bullard growled behind her back. “That’s nice,” he said. “As long as he doesn’t have any expectations.”
“He’s male,” she said. “Don’t you all have expectations?”
He frowned at that and then nodded. “You’re right. I guess I have expectations too.”
She spun and looked up at him. “And just what are those?”
*
Bullard glared at Leia. “Obviously not what you’re thinking,” he said, “but I would like to not lose you right now.”
“Once you go back to your real world,” she said, “I’ll be a blip on your radar. Just something that happened, and, sure, you’ll remember, but soon it’ll be a distant memory.”
“I don’t want you to be a distant memory,” he said roughly.
“That’s what you say right now,” she said, “but, once you get back to that world, it will be completely different.”
“Maybe,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for you in it.”
“I’m not sure there is though,” she said, “because I don’t know that I could handle it.”