Chapter 362 Part of the Club
Chapter 362 Part of the Club
Lou just changed out of her extremely bloody scrubs from a particularly frustrating surgery on a car accident victim who had a collapsed lung but almost refused the operation because she was scheduled to get breast implants in a week and thought they could get to it then. The medical team was grateful when the woman’s husband finally got there to convince her she was being an idiot mainly because it meant they would knock the crazy woman out so they didn't have to hear the woman's whiny voice anymore.
Lou sank into her office chair, thinking about what she was going to order for lunch as her stomach grumbled when she checked her phone and saw she missed a message from Dominic while she was in surgery. It was sent thirty-seven minutes ago…at noon right on the nose. Lou sat up as her heart rate spiked. Images from her dream last night where he told her he’d text her at noon about soccer came racing back. She shook her head. That was just a dream. This had to be a coincidence. She scoffed at her shaking fingers as she unlocked her phone and opened the message.
Cowboy: If you had to choose one soccer league to watch for the rest of your life, would it be the Italian or the English league? By the way, I can’t wait to try your grits.
Lou dropped the phone as she jumped out of her chair, her eyes wide in shock.
“No, that’s not possible. It was a dream…”
An idea came to her. She only knew one person she could go to with this that wouldn’t tell her she was going insane. She bent down and grabbed her phone, dialing it while pacing her office. It rang twice and then she heard Kirstin’s hyper voice on the other end of the line.
“Hey Lou! What’s up?”
“H-Hey, Kirstin…you got a minute for me?”
“Sure thing. Is everything okay, Lou? You sound shaky.”
“I think I had a stroke.”
“You’re a trauma surgeon and you’re calling me about a stroke?”
“Not in the literal sense…well, actually maybe in the literal sense…but I think I'm going crazier than a shithouse rat.”
She felt her breaths coming a bit more shallow and she sat back down in her chair as her legs grew weak at the idea of saying what just happened out loud. Saying it out loud made it that much more real, even to Kirstin.
“Take a deep breath, I can hear you spiraling. In and out….good. Now, tell me what happened, Lou.”
Lou told her about the dream, how it was different than her usual dreams with Dominic had been, how he said he’d text her about soccer and how he mentioned the grits.
“Woah! He really did it!”
“What do you mean he did it? Why do you sound pleased? What do you already know about this that I don’t?”
“Lou, are you sitting down?”
“That’s never a great way to start a sentence, Kirstin. But yes, I am.”
“Alright. You recognize that I earned my PhD in Psychology and that I am not a quack, right?”
“This conversation ain’t gettin’ any better so far, Kirstin.”
“Just humor me.”
Lou sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose in frustration.
“Yes, I’d say you’ve earned everythin’ you’ve got and you’re a damn good psychologist. Why?”
“What do you know about soul mates, Lou?”
“Nope.”
“Lou, wait a second. Hear me out. You had a very physically visceral reaction when you met Dominic. You even referred to that as having a stroke, remember?”
“Yes, I reckon.”
“You’ve never felt anything like this for anybody before, right? Well it was the same way with Nial and myself. Hell, Lou, I cancelled my club membership for him, like early, without him even asking me to. It was like the idea of even holding hands with anyone except him made me want to cut my arm off and eat it.”
“I get it, you’re in love with your fiancee…what does this have to do with Dominic and myself?”
“Don’t you see? There’s love and then there’s something beyond just those brain chemicals we give a label to. You can’t explain it, can you? You’ve probably poured through every medical journal you have and you still can’t fucking explain it, right? Nikki did the same thing when she met Shane. There’s one tried and true test, we’ve found, and by ‘we’ I mean your fellow soul mate club which consists of Nikki, Valerie, myself, and now you. It’s called dream walking which, in nerd speak, is a shared dream experience where you meet each other on the dream plain. Did you walk through a weird door and end up in a big room with huge windows? And then you left and woke up when the door you walked through opened again? Were you wearing what you want to bed in?”
“How the fuck could you possibly know all that?”
“You dream walked, my dear. I am going to email over a fuck ton of articles, peer reviewed, from a bunch of CIA studies. If you want more proof, my friend and fellow psychologist, Dr. Tina Moore, her dad was one of the soldiers studied by the CIA, I can connect you to him. He’s a big wig at the Pentagon now…either way, you’ll see all of the evidence pointing towards Dominic being your soul mate. AHHHH I’m so happy for you guys! Just wait til you have soul mate sex…ruins everything you’ve ever done before him…”
“Wait! Hold on a second, Kirstin. I think you need to lasso that grasshopper…”
“Because something else explains this? A shared stroke, perhaps?”
“No…”
“Is it because it’s woo woo? Or is it because you don’t want or think you should have a soulmate?”
Lou ran a hand down her face and leaned her forehead against the edge of her desk while she chewed on Kirstin’s words.
“What if….What if I said it was all three?”
“I just hit send on that email, Lou. That should take care of the first woo woo objection. As for the second objection to you wanting a soul mate. What is it you do want?”
“I thought I knew. But then I met Dominic, and now I got a better chance of understanding the cows than I do at answering that.”
“Well, that’s not exactly a bad thing, is it? If you stayed the same your entire life. Wanting the same thing when you’re eleven as when you are thirty-one, life would be fucked up, wouldn’t it?”
“I suppose so…”
“You’re career driven, just like me. Think of it like this…in what way does Dominic take away from your career?”
“Actually, he seems to get it. I didn’t even have to tell him what I needed after a long day in surgery, he just…automatically knew.”
“So, he adds to your career?”
“So far, I guess so. Though that was only one example…”
“It was no small thing, Lou.”
“No, it wasn’t.”
Lou felt her original resistance starting to wane.
“Now, let’s go to the third one which is, arguably, the biggest hurdle. What about a soul mate makes you think you don’t get one or deserve one?”
“You know more about me than almost anybody else still this side of the dirt, Kirstin. If I was never enough for blood kin, how could I be enough for anyone?”
“Blood is nothing but a red goopy liquid that pumps through our veins. It’s thicker than water, not because of the warm and fuzzies, but because it’s hard as shit to scrub out of carpet. Ask Lucian, ask Valerie, ask Nikki…we are a chosen family. I consider Dominic apart of my chosen family and I know Nial does as well. You know enough about what happened to me to know my emergency contact can’t be my blood relatives because they’re probably the reason I’m in an emergency in the first place. At some point, what we aren’t changing, we are choosing.”
“I can’t decide if they’d worship you on Sundays in the South or they’d barbecue you on a spit out back after service, Kirstin.”
“I take it that was inspiring, then?”
“It was somethin’. I’ll read your email and get back to you about all this hoopla.”
“What are you going to send back to Dominic? You know that man won’t eat until you respond.”
A soft smile warmed Lou’s face at the thought of him waiting by his phone.
“Yea, I know. Best put him out of his misery. I don’t know yet. But stay tuned.”
Her pager began buzzing, she hung up quickly with Kirstin after promising to update her as it went and began heading towards the OR. She was thankful for the distraction. Lou found that if she had a bunch of pieces floating around her brain, if she did something that turned it off, martial arts, soccer, surgery, it as like a perfect meditation. She felt by the time this surgery was over and she was once again sitting in her office, her subconscious would have sorted through what Kirstin told her and she’d know more about which direction to go. She spoke into her watch as she went down the hallway, making sure she responded to Dominic before she was away from her phone for who knows how long.