“I’ll keep that in mind.”
Then she slipped past him and walked away.
Chapter 3
Two months later…
“Know how to save a life yet?” Mitch asked as Chase answered the video call from his buddy.
Chase laughed and tossed his duffle bag to the side as he flopped onto his couch.
“No, not yet. I can find your thigh bone, though—the femur, by the way. But only if I can cut everything else out of the way and really dig in. And have my book open while I do it. And the hot girl across the table from me helping. So… no. Don’t be doing anything that might kill you.”
Mitch laughed and Chase settled further into the sofa cushions, weary to his bones, his femur included. He took a deep breath. And grimaced. He smelled like formaldehyde and felt like he’d been doing manual labor all day.
Standing around dead bodies, leaning over with tiny scalpels, learning to discern a radial nerve from an ulnar artery wasn’t like digging ditches—or building a boat dock—but damn his back and neck and feet were aching like they had when he’d first showed up on the Louisiana bayou and started doing actual heavy-lifting work for the first time in his life.
He was going to lie here for a while before he headed for the shower. Again. He’d showered in the locker room but damn, the formaldehyde had soaked in deep. He didn’t know if he was going to get used to it or just give up eating for these first two semesters of medical school. The cutting on bodies didn’t bother him, but the smell zapped his appetite.
Thankfully, he’d already had a few care packages delivered from Louisiana. They came about every week or ten days and had since the end of August when he’d left the little bayou town of Autre. The gumbo last night had been spicy enough to be smelled and tasted over the formaldehyde. The pecan pie not as much. But he’d held his nose and ate it anyway. No way could he let Ellie Landry’s pie go to waste.
He loved hearing from the Landrys and he’d heard from them a lot since he’d started med school at Georgetown. Calls, texts, packages. It seemed he never went more than three days without some kind of contact from Autre. He wouldn’t be surprised if his sister, Juliet—who had now moved to Autre to be with Sawyer—had mapped out a schedule of who was calling or sending him something each day and had it tacked up on the wall in Ellie’s bar.
Chase had only spent two weeks with them this summer, but damn, they’d soaked in deep. In a good way.
“Shit man, even I could find the thigh bone,” Mitch said. “Hell, one of my buddies had a four-wheeler accident about three years ago and I saw his femur sticking out and knew immediately what it was.”
“You didn’t fucking know it was called the femur.”
“Yeah, well, no one’s paying me big bucks to know,” Mitch joked. “Holy shit that’s your thigh bone, dude was all I really needed to know.”
Chase chuckled. The Landrys were going to keep him grounded, that was for sure. They were all supportive and encouraging about medical school, but none of them were going to let him get a big head about any of it. They were, however, going to make him want to go back to the tiny town along the bayou and be the local doctor. He could already feel it.
The idea of taking care of a town full of people he’d know and see go through everything from tonsillitis to childbirth to Alzheimer’s was terrifying. And tempting. That was what medicine should be about—truly knowing people, taking care of them as if they were your friends, caring about everything including their mental and emotional health as much as their physical health. That was what all of the jobs in Autre were about. It had only taken him two weeks to learn that. If he knew the people there for much longer, he’d be building his own cabin, buying a fishing boat, and never leaving.
Of course, small town doctor in Louisiana was a far cry from what he’d envisioned as his future as a physician. He’d chosen a profession that was highly respected and made a decent income while also being able to feel like he was touching lives. But he’d always pictured himself in a big city hospital or clinic. Not a dinky little town down south where they ate strange food and drank moonshine that could also be used to strip paint if needed.
Of course, that “decent income” part might be a little different in Autre, Louisiana too. If he cut a stray bullet out a guy down there, he’d probably be paid with meat from the alligator the guy was hunting when he accidentally shot himself in the foot.
“Do not tell me the story about what you all did to that guy’s thigh after that,” Chase warned Mitch. “I’ve been cutting on dead bodies for weeks, but I still don’t know if I can handle some of the shit you all do.”
The folks of Autre were tough. Chase would give them that. They didn’t worry about leaving scars behind and pain killers were a luxury rather than a requirement. He had to admit that some of the homemade potions and creams he’d been introduced to were intriguing though. They worked. It might have all been in their heads, but, if so, Chase’s head was right there with them. The salve they’d put on his hand after Ellie had dug out the splinter had been a damn miracle. He’d awakened the next morning with no pain and the wound half-healed already.
Mitch just chuckled. “I’ve cut on tons of dead bodies.”
“Alligators and catfish don’t count.”
“Aw, come on.” Mitch was clearly entertained. The way he had been for most of Chase’s time in Louisiana.
Chase was a spoiled rich kid from Virginia who had gotten his only bloody nose from getting whacked with a racquetball and whose only grass stains had come from falling down after a third Bloody Mary on the golf course.
Cadavers were fine. Chase could handle human blood and sticking needles into people. But walking around barefoot in the bayou and sticking his hands into a bucket of live bait and putting animals that looked like giant bugs in his mouth? He’d been a little squeamish while in Autre, he could admit.
Even as a little boy he hadn’t walked around in muddy water or played with worms and bugs. And he hadn’t eaten a crawfish—nor would he have even given it a try—until he met the Landrys.
He’d been getting over it, okay most of it, by the time he left Louisiana, though. Crawfish were damned good, and he’d gotten used to the bait. But walking around in water when he wasn’t wearing snorkeling fins and couldn’t see the bottom? That he hadn’t quite adjusted to.
Mitch, thankfully, had been entertained—especially by those snorkeling fins in the bayou—but also laid-back about it all. He’d taken Chase everywhere with him. Especially the bars in the small towns up and down the bayou. Mitch’s work for Boys of the Bayou required a lot of errands that meant frequent trips to the towns around Autre. That meant introducing himself, and Chase, to all of the women, all ages and sizes and backgrounds, that they ran across. It seemed as though Mitch couldn’t help but be charming and sweet and flirtatious. Chase had seen women from age seventeen to sixty-seven bat their eyes at his friend. Interestingly, however, Mitch hadn’t done more than chat and laugh and tease.
It was easy to tell that Mitch had a reputation with the women in the area, many of whom were absolutely gorgeous, and Chase was certain his friend was heterosexual, so after Mitch had a couple of beers in him one night, Chase had finally pressed Mitch about what was going on.