The District Attorney stood up to object just as the final question was being asked. "Wouldn’t you just prefer to not have men around at all?"
Garrett’s response was quiet, her throat parched from all of the answers she had given. "No."
Just as the District Attorney got the words, "I object" out of his mouth, the petite blonde woman in the back of the gallery was standing up yelling. "Stop! Just stop it!"
The surgeon’s eyes adjusted to the figure in the distance off to the right of the Defense Attorney. There stood Danni, protesting the injustice that was befalling one of her menagerie, the most cherished one of all.
The Judge slammed his gavel down on the bench looking for compliance in his domain. "Order! Order in this courtroom."
"But Judge, they are lies, they are all lies." The petite nurse leaned over the chair in front of her, her arms now supporting her weight. "He doesn’t know her like I…"
"Young lady, if you don’t sit down and be quiet, I’ll throw you right out of this courtroom." The Judge banged the gavel once more for emphasis to his statement. "Not one more word, Miss." He cautioned her.
Karen and Rosie both reached up, grabbing onto Danni’s tensed arms and pulled her down into her seat. The small body plopped into the hard wooden chair in disgust.
"Hey, what are you trying to do, get us thrown out of here?" Rosie’s eyebrows were furrowed deep with concern for her friends. "She needs all of our support in here, where she can see us, not standing out in the hall behind closed doors." The blonde sighed and crossed her arms over her chest in a defensive positioning.
Mom leaned into Danni’s ear and whispered softly to her. "Do you want to give them more ammunition to use to discredit her?"
The young woman froze in the realization. Her green eyes grew wider and she found herself locking gazes with the raven-haired woman on the stand. Trying to draw no more attention to her, or Garrett for that matter, Danni closed her eyes and shook her head. "No," she whispered and then closed her eyes to the pain that was gathering in her being.
Danni’s face registered disbelief that anything Garrett said could or would be taken out of context. But the lawyer was doing a fine job of twisting everything that Garrett would answer to use in his favor. Danni sat riveted to her seat watching it all unfold.
Garrett let her eyes stray from the sparse country landscape outside of the car and turned her head only enough to bring Danni into view out of the corner of her eye. The blonde woman had been sitting quietly in the rear seat with the surgeon. ‘I guess she has a lot to think about, too!’ It wasn’t like Danni to travel this long and not try to get a conversation going, especially with the likes of Rosie and Mom in the front seat. The surgeon wondered if the four of them would ever be that friendly again after what had transpired in the courtroom today. She’d surely understand why if they chose not to be with her again.
The surgeon let her head drop and rested it in her hand, wiping her forehead as she tried to ward off the ensuing headache. When did everything start to go wrong? She loved her work, she was feeling comfortable in the hospital, and she was finally making friends, even letting one small blonde nurse begin to touch her heart. She’d never felt that comfortable before, no matter whom she was with. Now, in the matter of several minutes of courtroom interrogation, she felt like she was losing it all. She closed her eyes and let her left hand slide off her lap, coming to rest on the seat. She was just so tired from the night of surgery that the tension from the courtroom only made it worse. She felt as if all of the life had drained out of her being, leaving nothing but an empty shell.
Danni hurt for her friend. She could see the torment written in the tense muscles of Garrett’s face. She wanted to do nothing more than reach over and hug the woman, soothing her pain. The nurse wondered at this point how wise that might be. She had to do something to show the surgeon that she was not alone. That’s when she saw Garrett’s hand slip onto the seat. Reaching with her right hand, she let it worm right under the large palm and slide smoothly into place, locking their fingers together. Danni held her breath waiting for Garrett to notice her touch.
The surgeon cast her eyes down to her right hand. There she could see the petite fingers and thumb clutching onto her. The warmth that it brought with it seemed to invade and pulsate outward into the drained woman. Like a tiny battery it began its charging of Garrett’s depleted soul. ‘She’s wormed her way into my grasp just like she wormed her way into my heart.’ The surgeon could feel her heart warming and the love being poured into it. ‘To be there for someone when they are down? When there is no one else to stand by you? Is this what love is really all about?’
Garrett sighed. ‘Sex, is that all everybody ever thinks about? Is that all that love is really about?’ Hell, she was not a stranger to the mechanics of making love. ‘No,’ she thought, ‘not love, but rather the act of sex, itself.’ She was a doctor, for gods’ sake. They had made her well aware of anatomy and its uses in medical school, even in her early level biology courses. Then, who could forget the health classes that were a part of her high school years? They were all meant to prepare her for life…for love, whatever that was. She felt a sinking feeling in her stomach, a single thought raced through her mind. ‘Am I in love?’ Terror gripped her heart causing her eyes to widen, allowing the whites to show completely around the shimmering blue. ‘I’ve just learned…I’m still learning to be a friend. How could I possibly be in love?’ She fought back her fear. The idea of being intimate, that close to someone, letting that person know you sometimes better than you know yourself scared her. They said that you lost all control when you were in love, and control was one thing that the surgeon loved to be in. ‘Besides, who would I possibly be in love with…Danni?’
The surgeon lifted her eyes to gaze at the woman next to her. The concern and thoughtfulness of Danni’s small action was feeding into Garrett’s own insecurities about what love was supposed to be. It slowly became evident to the surgeon that love was a feeling that reached deep into your soul and gave your being the strength to survive. If that was what she was truly feeling now, it could be compared to the jump starting of a dead battery with one so full of energy.
She had thought of herself as incapable of love, well, at least in that sense of the word. Sure, she had experimented in college, just about everyone did. Heck, they were all young adults still searching for the meaning of life and love. But the few attempts had all been so meaningless, devoid of emotion. Maybe that was why the experiences were only that and nothing lasting had ever become of them. Perhaps it had not been the partners that she had paired herself with, but rather that she was primarily the cause of the lackluster couplings. There never was any passion or unbridled sentiment in it, just the mechanical couplings and manipulation of highly sensual areas. Besides, it didn’t seem to matter what the anatomy was. They had done nothing for her but reaffirmed her solitary life, spurring her unquenchable thirst for the knowledge that would be necessary for a stellar career as a surgeon. That seemed to be the only place that brought meaning to her life. It was the place where she found her passion giving her a sense of fulfillment. But now, she drew in a deep breath, was she indeed in need of something more, something that had always alluded her before?