It Was Just One Time The Sequel

This is the follow-up to "It was Just One Time!" I hadn't planned a sequel, but etchiboy wrote a comment which sort of 'requested' one, which I wrote to some of his suggestions as to what happened.

***

"Julie! Did you hear what happened to Rick?" Samantha ran up to great me just as I walked in to work at the neurosurgery intensive care unit. Sam and I were both AM shift nurses here, and it was about then minutes before seven. We both liked to drink our coffee before the PM shift gave report.

"No, and who's Rick?"

"Oh, you remember him, Rick Stevens, that really tall med student who was rotated through here last summer?"

Gulp! Julie knew exactly who Rick Stevens was, and her 'encounter' with him. She really, really wanted to forget that it had ever happened, and hoped that she would never see him again. "Oh, yeah," she said, hoping her flinch wasn't obvious, "now I remember him. Why, what happened?"

"Well, it's all really hush-hush, but he's in ICU over at St Joe's."

"Why St Joe's, why not here? I mean, he was a med student here, right?"

"That's where they took him to the ER, 'cause it was closer to his house, but apparently they're keeping everything quiet, no one talking about what happened."

"Well, no one's going to tell us much, but maybe some of the other med students will talk after they make morning rounds."

Morning rounds were always a major pain. The nurses had AM care to be giving, but, naturally, the neurosurgery attending was there, with three residents and five interns and a gaggle of med students in tow, which just made things overly crowded. They had a couple of good, experienced nursing assistants to help with care, because NSICU was a high-pressure unit, and only the best people get assigned here. Some really tough patients get sent there, the gunshot wound to the head and spinal trauma patients. Dodging around the gaggle of doctors and wannabes just made things worse. She wanted to ask one of the med students if he'd heard about Rick, to find out what had happened - thinking that the doctors would really know, or tell if they did - but there just wasn't time in the morning.

Around 10:30, Carla Samuels, a fourth-year med student, came in, to check up on the patient assigned her. As Carla was finishing up with her patient, the guy in Bed 12, Julie asked her, "Hey, Carla, did you hear anything about Rick, Rick Stevens? I heard that he's in ICU over at St Joe's."

The med student kind of pulled Julie off to the side, and whispered, "Word is he got attacked and really seriously injured, and the cops assume that it had to have been done by a jealous husband or boyfriend. The Dean told all of us students what he could, but it wasn't much, but word is that the police are going to be here today, interviewing practically everybody."

Julie was a mess inwardly. "Why, what did the thug do to him?"

"They wouldn't tell us, but word is that he'll never mess with anyone else's wife again. I guess that's why the police are assuming it was a jealous husband."

Well, yeah, it sure could be. Truth was, Rick was a real ladies' man, very tall at 6'6, with dark, bedhead looking hair and, usually, a two or three-day stubble beard, but the palest blue eyes, eyes that just melted women's clothes off of them. The rumor mill had Rick screwing half the nurses in the hospital, practically from the first day he got there, and that was the problem: one day, last summer, he had his way with Julie in a linen closet. It was wildly exciting, and pretty good sex, too, though really no better than what Mickey, her husband, could do, and all that she felt after it was a sense of disgust, more at herself than at Rick.

What the heck would the police do now? If they interviewed only those nurses rumored to have let Rick fuck them, well she'd never breathed a word of the tryst to anyone, and none of her friends ever said anything to her than made her think that they knew, or suspected, that she'd been another notch on Rick's belt, so the police wouldn't bother her.

But if they interviewed everybody, well that might sweep her in, and what was she going to say if they asked her if she'd ever been with Rick?

Even so, even if they did question her, and she admitted the truth, she didn't have to worry about Mickey, her husband, being the one who attacked him. She'd never breathed a word to Mickey about what had happened, and had gotten cleaned up before she'd gotten home that night. They lived thirty miles away from the hospital, so there was just no way he'd ever have had an inkling, unless she spilled the beans.

The 'interviews' started that afternoon, but since Rick had been primarily on other floors more recently, no one from the neurosurgery floor and ICU had been called. Rumor was that the police were pulling all of the security camera tapes from inside the hospital, to identify which nurses might have been 'involved' with Rick, but the hospital didn't retain the footage beyond ninety days, and it had been five months since Julie's unfortunate encounter; there shouldn't be any tapes of Rick and her disappearing into that damned linen closet.

It turned out that there was security camera footage from Rick's apartment building, and the 'suspect' had been caught, not actually committing the brutal assault, but entering the building before Rick got home, and leaving sometime after when the attack was thought to have taken place. The camera hadn't been on Rick's apartment door, so it never caught whether the assailant had gotten into the apartment before Rick opened the door, or whether he had been laying in wait outside. The assailant did know what he was doing, though, as he had hung black plastic bags over the cameras inside the building on Rick's floor.

And the assailant had really known what he was doing, when it came to leaving evidence. He had been wearing some sort of protective clothing, like a clean suit, as well as covers over his shoes. He wore goggles, surgical gloves and a mask. The closest hope that the cops had was that the cameras showed him pulling off the protective suit when he left, but he then disappeared around a corner and wherever he went, the cameras didn't pick him up again. Naturally, the police went dumpster-diving in every receptacle for almost a mile in every direction, hoping to find the discarded protective gear, but came up with nothing. The police went over the apartment with a fine-toothed comb, but couldn't find any DNA evidence.

One thing was certain: this wasn't a spur-of-the-moment assault, but a well-planned attack.

The 'interviews' had been going on for days now, and apparently the police were talking to every female employee there. Clearly, they were basing their work on the assumption of a jealous husband or boyfriend. That seemed wrong to Julie; just because Rick was a player doesn't mean that the attack couldn't have come for another reason.

But the police had good reason to focus on nurses. It had been a couple days before Rick had regained consciousness, and there was still a lot he couldn't remember, but one thing he did remember was that the assailant had said that he'd "never fuck anybody else's wife ever again." Rick had been seized with terror at that point, it was just when he recovered from being stunned from a blow to the back of the head, and was tied up, but before the real damage was done to him.

Of course, after a few days, the scope of the attack had managed to make its way through the medical rumor mill back to the hospital. The nurses at St Joseph's were like nurses anywhere: they knew nurses at other hospitals, and had worked with many of them in the past.

Samantha and Julie were having an easier day than usual, and managed to take their lunch break, at 1:30, together, and Sam had spoken with one of her friends who worked at St Joe's.

"Now, she didn't take care of Rick herself, but she said it was a miracle he was still alive and didn't bleed out. Apparently the guy who attacked him wanted him to live, because he used rags to hold the blood in from the wounds. Of course, maybe he just wanted Rick to take longer to bleed out, and suffer a bit more, but he wasn't the one who called 911 about Rick; that was one of the neighbors.

"Anyway, the guy, and, oh, this is horrible, took a big pair of bolt cutters and cut off Ricks fingers, all of them except one pinkie, and then used the cutters to castrate him as well. Supposedly Rick passed out at that point, and I guess that saved his eyesight, 'cause the guy stabbed him in the eyes with a razor knife, but the doctors think that they've managed to save his right eye, so he won't be totally blind.

"The police recovered the fingers, and they've tried reattachment surgery for the ones that they could, but the prognosis isn't very positive. There was a blood stain in the bathroom, so the cops think that the thug flushed his cock and balls down the toilet. I guess he didn't want there to be any chance that those would get reattached."

"Oh, my God, that's horrible! Poor Rick!"

"Yeah. The med school is going to hold his spot for when he recovers, but I don't see how he'll ever manage to finish. Just one eye, and who knows how good that'll be, and maybe no working hands. I guess that he'll never mess with another woman again."

"Did he ever, you know, come on to you?" Julie asked, thinking how stupid that it was she even brought that up.

"He flirted a bit, but never really pushed it, but face it, I'm short and dumpy. What about you? You're a real hottie."

"Who me?" Julie demurred. "No way. Way too busy at work, and too long a drive home every day."

"Too bad. You being so tall, you might have been perfect for him."

Was it Julie's height which saved her? As the little bit of film evidence was analyzed, the police decided that the attacker must've been about 5'8 to 5'9. One look at Julie, who stood really tall for a woman at 6'1, and the police might simply have assumed that her husband was as tall or taller than her. Might as well interview more likely suspects. With literally a thousand nurses at UK, plus nursing assistants, plus admin workers, plus transport aides and other staff, the police were virtually overwhelmed with possible paramours to interview. A little bit of evidence, including DNA, was collected from Rick's apartment, which identified three different women who had been there, but those identifications all went nowhere as far as fingering their husbands.

The Rick Stevens case dragged on, but eventually went into the cold case file. The cops identified over fifty married women at the hospital who had 'interactions' with Rick similar to Julie's - and that they had found over fifty left Julie, and a few others whose 'trysts' with Rick had gone undiscovered led those ladies to wonder just how high Rick's 'score' really had been - and that fact did become public over the gossip line.

The med school brought in all of its students for a special orientation, the Rick Stevens orientation it was waggishly called, to go over sexual harassment policies again. The case had made the papers, of course, being as sensational as it was, there was no way the

Lexington Herald-Leader

could completely ignore it. Yeah, there were plenty of murders to cover in Lexington, but those were all among the riff-raff, while Stevens had been a rich white kid in med school. The paper never mentioned it when the police decided it was just a cold case, but the Dean of the College of Medicine decided that he needed to 'inform' his students about the dangers of screwing around with the hospital staff. Such could easily have negative consequences.

It was a fine Spring Saturday, when Mickey asked Julie if she wanted to run to Tractor Supply with him; he had stuff to pick up for the farm and his carpentry shop. The sun was shining, and it was very warm for March, almost 80º. They'd made love that morning - their favorite time for sex had always been when they just woke up - and they were both feeling really good about the day. Sarah was 12½ now, strong and sharp as a tack, but still too young to be calling boys over, so she could stay at home by herself for a couple of hours.

With the warm weather, Julie decided to tease Mickey a bit, and dug out her best pair of ragged jean Daisy Dukes, because she knew that he just loved her in those. Top that off with a white wife beater and a plaid shirt, not buttoned but tied just above the waist, and it was a killer look, even if she hadn't gotten much of a tan yet. She thought about flips, to show off her freshly painted toenails, but there was a bit of mud around, so she opted for work boots with some white work socks just peeking over the top. Julie knew that this look might just get her molested again when they got back home. After almost 13 years of marriage, making love more than once a day was a rarity now, but hardly unheard of, and Julie loved Mickey more now than ever before. The hot senior jock she'd married right after high school was even hotter at 31 than 18.

With the windows down, driving to the farm supply store, Julie assumed one of her high school teasing positions, her feet on the dashboard, and her long, long legs shining in the sunlight. It had been kind of casual in high school, but she knew how much it turned her husband on. That other guys they passed noticed her legs was a cheap thrill for Julie, and she knew that Mickey was always chest-puffing-out proud when people saw what a hot wife he had.

There were a bunch of things that they needed at the supply store, some more feed for the chickens and some protective cloth for the seedlings in the garden, and Mickey was forever needing new work gloves; as hard as he worked, he was always wearing them out quickly. Then, just before they checked out, he walked over to the wall and picked up a new pair of bolt cutters.

"What are those for, Mick? I thought you had a pair."

"I did, but somehow they disappeared last winter."