Chapter 3

That night, Paul was dozing after lights-out in the ward when he had another visitor. This one was a nurse he'd never seen before. She was attractive and fairly young -- perhaps 35 or 40 -- and she spoke softly, so as not to awaken any of his ward mates. "You OK, Trooper?" she asked.

"I'm fine."

"Need to run a test," the nurse said, and gestured for Paul to work with her to leave his bed and move into a wheelchair beside it.

This was unusual. What test would be scheduled for 11:30 p.m., after the men had retired for the night?

She wheeled Paul out of the ward and down the hall for a good distance, along a corridor that looked pretty much like all the others in the hospital. This one, however, was very quiet, and seemingly unoccupied by patients. "They're remodeling," the nurse explained.

Still in the ghost corridor, she wheeled Paul into an empty single room, unfurnished except for a wall full of electronic equipment similar to that found behind each bed in Paul's own ward. She closed the door to the corridor behind her, leaving them both in darkness.

"Why are we in here?" Paul asked.

"This is where your therapy is going to take place," the nurse said. She turned on a light in the adjoining bathroom and partially closed that door. She and Paul were in the dimly lit empty hospital room. The only light was from the bathroom. The room's Venetian blinds were drawn closed.

The nurse got on her knees alongside the wheelchair and unceremoniously reached under Paul's hospital gown and extracted his penis from his shorts. Pushing the gown out of the way, she exposed him to view and, while stroking his hardening organ, said one word: "Nice!"

"What is this?" Paul asked.

"Therapy, Soldier," the nurse said.

She expertly massaged him with her hand until his penis had reached its full length. Then she leaned over, took it into her mouth, and bathed his erection in warmth and wetness.

Paul had experienced, and greatly enjoyed, fellatio in the past -- on several occasions.

But not lately. This was his first sexual experience worthy of the name since before he'd gone overseas. And this clearly was shaping up as possibly the best blowjob he'd ever had.

She only took about half of him into her mouth, but, oh, it was enough! With both of her hands, she reached around Paul and grasped his buttocks for control and, because of his missing legs, she was able to take his penis into her mouth with what seemed like maximum leverage.

Paul had no idea who this woman was or why he was getting this treatment, but he was in no mood to look a gift blowjob in the mouth. He just let it happen.

It didn't take very long. The nurse knew what she was doing ("I'm definitely not her first," Paul told himself, smiling inwardly) and she kept at it until Paul felt the pressure building.

"Gonna come," he warned her. It was only fair to let her know. Maybe she would want to pull off and finish him with her hand.

She did use her hand -- vigorously -- but she didn't pull away. So Paul just let it happen, sighing with pleasure at the enormous relief that came with his ejaculation.

He had forgotten how good it was.

The talented nurse took it all, swallowed it, and lovingly licked him clean.

"That was sensational!" Paul said. "But -- who are you?"

"A friend, Sailor. Just a friend."

She got a washcloth and a small towel from the bathroom, ran warm water on the cloth, and came back to tenderly wash all around Paul's groin before drying him and expertly re-inserting his organ into his somewhat rumpled and stretched Jockeys. Then she re-covered him with his hospital gown and unlocked the brakes on the wheelchair. "Bedtime," she said, in a voice that reminded Paul of his mother, when he had been a child.

Back down the corridor. A quiet re-entry into the ward, and expert professional help from the nurse in regaining his bed.

"Goodnight, Private," she said.

What the fuck had that been all about? Even the best civilian health plan from Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Paul was certain, wasn't going to pay for that therapy session! And this was a bare-bones veterans' hospital!

The next morning, Paul tried, indirectly, to question Ophelia about his experience. He figured that, somehow, she had to have been involved. Without telling her exactly what had taken place, he tried to find out.

"Is there any after-hours therapy that goes on here?" he asked.

"After-hours?"

"Yeah. Y'know, like, taking patients out of bed, after lights out, and -- giving them -- uh -- therapy, at night?"

"What are you talkin' about?" Ophelia asked. She seemed genuinely perplexed. Paul concluded that Ophelia either knew nothing about his late-night visitor, or was too good an actress to give away what she knew.

He said no more.

But Ophelia didn't just let it lie there. "What do you mean, 'therapy at night'?" the nurse repeated.

Paul wished he hadn't brought it up in the first place. "Never mind," he said. "I guess I must have just had a dream, or something."

"You dreamed somebody gave you therapy?"

"No, no. It was one of the other guys -- Barnes, over there. I dreamed they came and got Richard Barnes, after lights out, and took him away for therapy."

Ophelia looked across the big room at Richard Barnes, one of the other patients. "What'd Barnes say about it?" she said.

"I haven't asked him yet," Paul said.

"Well, I don't know anything about it. You'll have to ask Barnes."

"Yeah, I will. Probably, it was just a dream."

"Uh-huh."

As soon as she left the ward, Ophelia went to the nurses' station and telephoned her shift supervisor, Edna Donavan. "Edna," she said, "I think we've got Crazy Mabel back with us again."

Crazy Mabel was the name the hospital support staff had given to a phantom night visitor who had accosted several male patients over the past two years. Scattered reports -- all of them, until now, occurring more than six months earlier -- indicated that the woman invaded the hospital in the dead of night and, posing as a member of the staff, administered "therapy," by hand or mouth (or both) to selected patients -- often young and good-looking ones.

On several occasions, but not always, "Mabel" had been on a true mission of mercy. She had visited quadriplegics; patients who couldn't even approximate doing, for themselves, what she had done for them.

Crazy Mabel's visits had only occurred on isolated occasions. (At least, there had only been sporadic reports of such incidents. Ophelia was pretty sure that the beneficiaries of Crazy Mabel's "therapy" didn't always choose to report the incidents later.)

"Paul Elias thinks I arranged for him to get an after-hours hand job, or maybe more," Ophelia thought, smiling to herself. Ophelia might have been an angel of mercy. There might even have been a couple of somewhat similar incidents in her own distant-past experience in the nursing profession.