Free Broken Arrow: A Military Erotic Romance by Kristin Fletcher Page B

looking letters. As she looked at him that first day, she thought to herself that he was perfect in every way— except for the fact that he was unconscious and totally unresponsive.
     
    She had been present as an evaluation team poked and prodded his unconscious body. Mild electric shock was applied to test muscle response. A small pinwheel device was slowly rolled several times up and down each leg and arm and then on his back and abdomen. One of the technicians even mildly stimulated his penis to see if there was a response. There was. The final conclusion was that all neural pathways were intact, but the mind itself was shut off. MRIs showed no evidence of concussive damage, so they made the diagnosis of “psychotic coma” and Sophie was named primary physician for his care.
     
    Being primary didn’t mean that she had to spend hours holding his hand and talking to him, but she did. There was something about him–a strange bond seemed to exist between them from the moment she first saw him. If she were the patient and he were the therapist, she would put it down to transference. But he was the patient, and she was the therapist. It wasn’t transference. It was... it was... she didn’t know what it was, but it definitely was there.
     
    Each day she would stop by his room after her shift was over and sit at the edge of his bed. She would tell him of the weather and the day’s events. She would hold his hand all the while she was speaking, and then, just before she gave him a kiss on the cheek as her goodbye, she would say, “Soldier, if you can hear me, squeeze my hand.”
     
    He never did squeeze her hand, but on the fourth Friday afternoon, when she asked her question, he mumbled back that he wasn’t a soldier, he was a Marine. His mind had switched back on. The question now was how badly it was damaged. The horror of war is damaging enough; knowing what you are capable of doing can be overwhelming. The trauma of watching your friends die in front of you can be horrifying and leave permanent scars. But when you are the sole survivor of a close-knit group that was extinguished in the blink of an eye, the aftereffects are often almost irreversible.
     
    Her own father had never recovered from his wartime experiences. The Army called it something different in those days, or ignored it all together if you could walk and talk at the time of discharge. He would never talk about it. But he would scream with nightmares in the night and sometimes succumb to his nightmares during the day. It got to the point where he wasn’t able to work, so he stayed home and drank. Drinking made it worse.
     
    It was the Fourth of July when she was thirteen that it happened. She had gone to a party at a friend’s house. When her mom didn’t come to pick her up, the friend’s dad drove her home. Because the house was dark, he insisted on walking her to the door to check that everything was okay.
     
    It wasn’t. Several windows on the house were broken and no one answered his knock or yells. He told her to stay outside and opened the front door. After he looked inside, he took her back to the car and called the police from his cellphone.
     
    Her father had used the couch and piano to barricade himself into the corner of the living room. Her mother was dead on the floor. He had emptied a rifle and two pistols into the walls shooting at what only he could see. The last bullet he used on himself. The inquest ruled that the loud popping of fireworks in the neighborhood had evidently triggered a severe PTSD episode and he had killed his wife thinking she was an enemy soldier. He then killed himself when he thought he was going to be overrun.
     
    As a young girl, Sophie was already interested in medicine and leaned toward the field of psychiatry. But after that, she vowed that she would make a difference for soldiers and others who could never totally “come home.” Seventeen years later she was a “psychiatric trauma specialist”