Prescription for Passion
Vital Signs 3

Excerpt

It was summertime in Statesville, North Carolina. Everything was green, blooming, and beautiful –-from the mountain rhododendrons, to the dogwood and honeysuckle trees, to the valleys and hillsides covered in wildflowers. The mountain air was heady with pollen and dew, the skies were bright, the weather glorious.
There is nothing more beautiful than an Appalachian summer, a Blue Ridge Mountains summer in particular. You couldn’t ask for anything more perfect. So by all accounts, life for anyone living in Statesville, North Carolina in summertime should be perfect, too. Only it wasn’t.
Harlan and Joanna Wilkinson were newlyweds. They’d married in the spring after a whirlwind courtship. Even though their relationship was only a few months old, they’d already seen more than their share of ups and downs. They had sex for the first time within literally minutes of meeting in an elevator. They had their first argument soon after. Joanna’s ex-husband dragged them both into a ludicrous court battle and scam that landed him in jail and almost tore their budding relationship apart.
Harlan and Joanna survived it all. They even got married in the same courthouse where Joanna’s ex-husband Bob tried to destroy them. It was a true storybook romance, filled with passion, intrigue – –and plenty of hot sex.
So like any true storybook romance, it was all happily ever after, right?
Well, not quite.

****

“Where’s my breakfast?” Harlan shouted. “I need to be in the OR in fifteen minutes and I can’t get through a five-hour operation on an empty stomach!”
Joanna was lying face down on her bed, half-asleep and still wearing her nursing scrubs. She’d just come off the night shift at Covington Community Hospital twenty minutes ago. And yet her infernal husband somehow expected her to serve him an eight-course meal at six in the morning? What planet was he living on? “There’s cereal in the cupboard,” she murmured into her pillow. Then she pulled the covers over her head and tried to go to sleep.
That didn’t satisfy Harlan at all. In less than ten seconds he was pounding on their bedroom door. “Joanna, I need something to eat. Where the hell is my breakfast? You know I can’t cook worth a damn. Help me out here, please.”
Joanna groaned and dragged herself upright. “You know, Harlan, you cooked me some very nice breakfasts when we were dating. Did you suddenly forget how to cook when I slipped that wedding ring on your finger?”
He rolled his eyes. “Joanna, you know I’m no good around the house when I’m working double shifts in the OR.”
“I’m working double shifts right too, you know. At night. I’m supposed to be sleeping right now.”
Harlan sighed. “That’s different.”
“Really? How so?”
“You’re a nurse. I’m a surgeon.”
“And?”
“And I think the answer to that question should be obvious. My job is much harder than yours.”
Joanna slapped a palm to her forehead. “Oh, no, you don’t, Harlan. I am not having this argument with you right now. I’ve had a grand total of three hours’ sleep in the past three days.”
“Yeah, well I haven’t slept at all in four days, and I’m about to perform complex surgery on three different people today. So don’t you dare complain to me about being tired.”
Now it was Joanna’s turn to roll her eyes. “Oh right, I forgot. You macho surgeons think sleep deprivation is a badge of honor. Well, I don’t. I still remember enough of my nursing-school education to know that sleep deprivation is bad for you. ”
“Joanna –-“
“Don’t Joanna me. Pour yourself a bowl of cereal and leave me the hell alone!”
“Fine,” Harlan snapped. He slammed the bedroom door shut. Joanna heard him stomp out of the house and lock the front door. She supposed that meant he’d be driving through McDonald’s for breakfast again. He’d been doing that every day for the past month and had already packed on almost ten pounds. Meanwhile, Joanna wasn’t eating much at all, to the point her skin was mottled and her eyes were sunken. The stress they were both under was enough to drive anyone to the edge. Harlan and Joanna both looked terrible, and felt worse. And they were taking it out on each other.
Working opposite sixteen-hour shifts at the hospital six and seven days a week were taking their toll on both of them. They hadn’t made love in weeks. They couldn’t. They were never in the house together for more than fifteen minutes at a time, and they always spent that fifteen minutes arguing.
Things couldn’t go on like this for much longer.
There was trouble in paradise, that was for damn sure.
****

Billy Hartzell was new in town. A big-city boy from Atlanta, he’d decided to take a chance on a six-week contract nursing job at a small-town hospital he’d booked through the job placement office back at the University of Georgia Nursing School. He’d been only one of five male nursing students in his class, but despite the nationwide nursing shortage, he’d had trouble finding a job.
Nobody came right out and said so, but Billy knew that the reason he’d had no permanent job offers at all when the female nursing students were fielding ten and twenty offers apiece was because of reverse discrimination. It might be the twenty-first century, and nursing might be more open to men these days, but this was still the South. In the South, people tended to do things the old-fashioned way. And a male nurse – –let alone a male nurse who looked like just he walked off the set of a Hollywood movie –-was anything but old-fashioned. In the South, nurses were supposed to be portly, and middle-aged, and female. Not a hot twenty-two-year-old version of Brad Pitt.
So it went without saying that Billy had plenty of trouble finding a job. After weeks and months of fruitless searching, the job placement officer at nursing school took pity on him and told him about “contract nurses” – –nurses who travel across the country working six-week-long contract jobs. Contract nurses filled temporary holes in hospitals’ nursing schedules, taking on extra work or filling in for nurses who were on sick or maternity leave. The take-home pay was very high, though there were no fringe benefits and no opportunity to put down roots or have any kind of stable life. The job placement officer told him she didn’t usually recommend contract work to her nursing school graduates, but she thought it might be the only way for a male nurse like him to get a nursing job in the South, at least for the time being. And maybe at some point, a contract nursing job could lead to something permanent –-especially if he was willing to travel to another part of the country.
Billy wasn’t too keen on the prospect of moving every six weeks, but he needed a job. Plus, the opportunity to see different parts of the country appealed to him, even if the lack of stability didn’t. And what did he really need with stability right now, anyway? He was only twenty-two; he had no wife or steady girlfriend, no mortgage. All he owned was an old, battered pickup truck that was completely paid for, and a single suitcase of clothes. Billy figured he probably wouldn’t have too many opportunities to travel the country without being tied down. He might as well give it a try.