It Started At Christmas...

“It’s going to be okay.” He hoped he told the truth.

“I know. It’s not that.”

“Then what?”

She shook her head.

“Seriously, you can tell me. I’ll understand. I’ve had blood exposure before. I know it’s scary stuff until you’re given the all-clear.”

She didn’t look at him, just stared back out the window. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“What do you want to talk about?”

She glanced toward him again. “With you?”

He made a pretense of looking around the car. “It would seem I’m your only option at the moment.”

“I’d rather not talk at all.

“Ouch.”

“Sorry.” She gave a nervous sigh. “I’m not trying to be rude. I just...”

“You just...?” he prompted at her pause.

“Don’t like needles.” Her words were so low, so torn from her that he wasn’t sure he’d heard her correctly.

Her answer struck him as a little odd considering she was a highly skilled physician who’d just expertly performed a procedure to open a choking man’s airway.

When he didn’t immediately respond, she jerked her hand free from his, almost as if she’d been unaware until that moment that he even held her hand.

“Don’t judge me.”

How upset she was seemed out of character with everything he knew about her. She was always calm, cool, collected. Even in the face of an emergency she didn’t lose her cool. Yet she wasn’t calm, cool or collected at the moment. “Who’s judging? I didn’t say a word.”

“You didn’t have to.”

“Maybe I’m not the one judging?”

She didn’t answer.

“If you took my moment of silence in the wrong way, I’m sorry. I was just processing that you didn’t like needles and that it seemed a little odd considering your profession.”

“I know.”

“Yet you’re ultrasensitive about it.”

“It’s not something I’m proud of.”

Ah, he was starting to catch on. McKenzie didn’t like to have a weakness, to be vulnerable in regard to anything. That he understood all too well and had erected some major protective barriers years ago to keep himself sane. Then again, he deserved every moment of guilt he experienced and then some.

“Lots of people have a fear of needles,” he assured her. They saw it almost daily at the clinic.

“I passed out the last time I had blood drawn.” Her voice was condemning of herself.

“Happens to lots of folks.”

“I had to take an antianxiety medication to calm a panic attack before I could even make myself sit in the phlebotomist’s chair and then I still passed out.”

“Not unheard of.”

“But not good for a doctor to be that way when she goes around ordering labs for her patients. What kind of example do I set?”

“People have different phobias, McKenzie. You can’t help what you’re afraid of. It’s not like we get to pick and choose.”

She seemed to consider what he’d said.

“What are your phobias, Lance?”

Her question caught him off guard. He wasn’t sure he had any true phobias. Sure, there were things that scared him, but none that put him into shutdown mode.

Other than memories of Shelby and his immense sense of failure where she was concerned.

Could grief and regret be classified as a phobia? Could guilt?

“Death,” he answered, although it wasn’t exactly the full truth.

She turned to face him. “Death?”

His issues came more from having been left behind when someone he’d loved had died.

When his high school sweetheart had died.

When it should have been him and not her who’d lost their life that horrific night.

When he didn’t answer, she turned in her seat. “You are, aren’t you? You’re afraid of dying.”

Better she think that than to know the horrible truth. He shrugged. “Aren’t most people, to some degree? Regardless, it isn’t anything that keeps me awake at night.”

Not every night as it had those first few months, at any rate. He’d had to come to terms with the fact that he couldn’t change what had happened, no matter how much he wanted to, no matter how many times people told him it wasn’t his fault. Now he lived his life to help others, as Shelby would have had she lived, and prevent others from making the same mistakes two teenagers had on graduation night.

“The thought of needles doesn’t keep me awake at night,” McKenzie said, drawing him back to the present. “Just freaks me out at the thought of a needle plunging beneath my skin.”

Again, her response seemed so incongruent with her day-to-day life. She was a great physician, performed lots of in-office procedures that required breaking through the skin.

“Is there something in your past that prompted your fear?” he asked, to keep his thoughts away from his own issues. Shelby haunted him enough already.

From the corner of his eye as he pulled into the hospital physician parking area he saw her shake her head.