Chapter 1

Paul Elias had only known Ophelia for a few weeks, but he was already half in love with her.

So what, if Ophelia was black, quite a bit overweight and about the age of Paul's mother? She was the kindest and most considerate human being Paul had run into lately.

She was a nurse at the enormous east-coast Veterans' Hospital where Paul was a patient. Paul, just eight weeks ago, had lost both his legs to a land mine explosion in Afghanistan.

The first few weeks after that were just a blur -- sudden, incredible pain followed by some merciful periods of unconsciousness. Even when he'd been conscious, Paul had been so heavily drugged that life was just a fuzzy, vaguely pleasant drift through timeless nothingness.

But now Afghanistan was on the other side of the world where it belonged, and Paul -- what was left of him -- was stabilized, conscious, and beginning to cope with his losses.

There were lots of doctors, including some shrinks, coming around to talk to him, and most of them were decent- enough people. Paul was trying to listen to their advice, both medical and psychological. He was trying to teach himself to be grateful for being alive, instead of bitter about having lost both his legs, well-above the knees.

"You've got enough of your legs left to get excellent results from prosthetics," one of his doctors had told him. "You won't be doing any 100 meter dashes, but you'll be able to walk! With time, you'll be able to move around better than you think!"

Paul knew how to stun the Medicos, though. He'd just sit there, cheerful and cooperative, until the newest visiting physician asked him what, sooner or later, they all asked him: "What did you do before the army, Captain Elias?"

"I was a professional athlete," Paul would say, keeping his voice calm and matter-of-fact. "I was a baseball player."

He was waiting for one of the doctors to promise him that, with his soon-to-come high-tech artificial legs, he would be able to go from home to first in 3.4 seconds, just like he had in the old days.

Of course, none of the doctors was ever going to say any such thing.

Not that he really expected them too.

No, most of them, after innocently stumbling into asking that soul-wrenching question, would find some reason to leave his bedside, pretty promptly thereafter.

Everybody was pleasant to him, there at the Veterans' Hospital. Nothing quite like getting your legs blown off to make folks smile at you and say nice things. Paul was determined not to mope around, feeling sorry for himself. He did feel plenty sorry for himself, but he didn't want to show it, anymore than he could help.

And Ophelia Parker, his nurse, his friend, was the most pleasant of them all. He saw her more regularly than he saw any of the doctors, or the other nurses. She was there five days a week, and during the busiest part of each day. She was there when he got moved around for this test or that evaluation in other parts of the hospital, and she was there when they brought him back.

And unlike most of the smiles he got from the people who had occasion to visit his ward, Ophelia's smile was genuine. It was a smile of affection, not of pity. It was a smile of friendship. Oh, Paul knew that she was a professional employee of the hospital and that she was getting paid to take care of him and the other patients in the ward.

Didn't matter. The kind of kindness Ophelia Parker displayed couldn't be bought with hourly wages. She was a sweetheart.

Every weekday, Ophelia bathed the four men in Paul's little ward. Most of the time, they got sponge baths, right there in their beds. Once a week or so, three of the men, Paul included -- the three judged capable of being safely moved from their beds -- were bathed in a shower room, just off the ward. It was a big, fully equipped shower compartment with all the hand-holds and plastic seats necessary to accommodate almost any kind of disabled patient.

Paul remembered three of his weekly trips to the big shower room -- always accompanied by Ophelia. There might have been other such trips, earlier, but if there had been, he had no memory of them. The weekly full-scale shower was always a pleasant change from his otherwise humdrum hospital life.

But the other days -- the sponge-bath days, were actually even better. Ophelia's gentle, unhurried hands on his body were the closest thing to a sensual interlude that Paul Elias expected to experience, any time soon.

Not surprisingly, the sponge baths, very often, caused him to get an erection.

"I'm sorry," he would say, each time, to Ophelia.

Her response was always pretty much the same. "Don't you be sorry!" she would say, voice low enough that only Paul could hear her. "You be glad God didn't let them cocksuckers blow this pretty thing off, too, 'long with your legs!"

He had laughed out loud, the first time Ophelia had said that to him. "If they'd blown off any more of my legs," he told her, "they'd of sheared off part of my Little Buddy, there, too! It's a good thing I'm not hung like a porn star, I might' a lost a' inch or two!"

Ophelia surprised him, the time he'd said that. She had grasped his erect organ in her hand and squeezed it lightly. "You got yourself a nice piece of sausage, there, Captain! I see more of them things in a week, workin' here, than most women see in a lifetime, and for a white boy, you big, honey!"

Then she leaned over him, still with his penis held lightly in her hand, and spoke to him very softly: "Y'know, God gives our black boys big ones, mostly. I think it's 'cause He knows that Life don't oftentimes give them boys a whole lot 'a other good things."

Her body shielded their little intimacy from the other men in the ward as she whispered, "... but He treated you right good, too, Cap'n Paul! Maybe The Lord knowed you was gonna run into some bad luck, down the road."

"Maybe I'm just part black, my own self," Paul said, smiling at her.

"Could be! Could be," Ophelia replied, laughing. "But it wadn't nobody in your fam'ly tree, real recent, I don't think! That there 'the pinkest organ I ever did see! The ones I seen -- or, leastwise, the ones that's seen me back -- they a whole lot darker meat than that!"

And then Ophelia would laugh at her own remark, and, almost reluctantly, she'd release his still-hard shaft from her gentle grasp, make a show of reverently tucking it away and covering it over with his green cotton hospital gown, and, after that, with the sheets and blankets.

And then she'd reward Paul with a final smile and go about her business.

Well, who wouldn't fall in love with a woman like that?

In addition to the professional staff, there were occasional hospital volunteers who'd come around to the patients with magazines and newspapers, and sometimes with light snacks, working their way through the wards. Most often, these were motherly type women, or elderly men. They were kindly souls, trying to do a little good in the world while there was still time.