Just Once: A Sequel Pt. 02

At other times Trey would be walking and someone would bump into him. Later on he would discover his wallet was missing and would call the cops but then he would discover his wallet was on the counter in the kitchen or on the floor of his car. This happened often enough that the cops were beginning to think he was nuts.

He had several fancy cars and they began having trouble. He would be driving his high end Tesla and the self drive feature would kick in suddenly when he was on the highway and it would be changing lanes and making him go really fast, scaring him enough to make him pee his pants, and then it would suddenly go back to normal. Rick took it into Tesla and they could find nothing wrong. That car started getting him speeding tickets and while he would claim it was the self-driving feature kicking in and misbehaving, the car would be checked out and nothing found wrong with it, so the tickets stuck.

It was getting close to him losing his license, so he started driving his fancy Porsche Panamerica instead. Soon that started having problems, he would be driving and it would go into limp home mode. Took it into the dealership and 2000 dollars later, they couldn't find anything wrong. He would be driving and suddenly the car would die. Turn out the car was out of gas but he swore it showed a full tank but it worked properly when the dealer checked it out.

He would be dating someone he was trying to impress and his card would be declined at a fancy restaurant. He would call customer service and the rep would tell him there was a security hold on it that couldn't be lifted. He would try other cards, same thing, then he would have to call someone to give the restaurant their card number. He would call the bank later and not only was there nothing wrong with his card, they had no record of him ever contacting them or anything happening with his account.

His love life took a hit, too, as rumors about his lack of prowess and a less than stellar dick size spread, not just in the hospital, but also online, too. Rick didn't know if he was still seeing Marcy, but apparently even if he was that didn't stop him from playing the field or trying to.

Cardozo decided that Marcy was to blame and had her moved off his team to another surgical team, one where she was demoted to staff nurse. When Rick heard that he knew Marcy was devastated by what had happened. He could have considered that a nice side effect of his revenge on Cardozo, but he wasn't that cruel. Marcy had been promoted to chief nurse on her talent, he knew that, and he knew how important it was to her and how much it must have hurt her to be demoted.

His kids told him that she was not in great shape, that she was a zombie between the loss of her marriage and now this. Rick wondered if the loss of the position hurt her more than the loss of her marriage but he still felt pity on her and anger at the asshole who had gotten her fired. The kids said she said she was going to work simply for a paycheck and they all knew that wasn't like her, they had never heard her say that before.

Rick's friends had people in places high and and low reporting in, and they found out that Cardozo was such a dick that he openly boasted that he had moved Marcy out so he could move in a nurse (another married woman) he fancied, and told this woman that if she didn't put out for him that he would find someone else. This wasn't just hearsay, they had access to his texts and email where he boasted to others, solid (if illegal) proof of what he was trying to do.

Also unluckily for Dr. scumbag, the chief surgeon in the hospital retired and Trey wasn't even get close to getting the job. As skilled as he was the other surgeons despised him and made clear to the hospital administration they wouldn't work for him. Though he didn't know it at the time, the person they did hire did not bode well for Trey Cardozo, MD.

Dr. Anthony Portelli was a name known to Rick and his friends in the army. He had been an Army neurosurgeon who had saved the lives of many of the soldiers they knew who had had serious head trauma and he was something of a legend.

Rick knew him well enough that when he had survived the IED blast, Portelli sent an email to him to reassure him that he had nothing to worry about, that to get traumatic brain injury you need to have a brain.

Rick called Portelli and gave him the rundown on Cardozo. He didn't blame Cardozo for what had happened with he and Marcy, he told him that was on Marcy and to a certain extent himself. He told the older man that Cardozo dumped Marcy as head nurse out of spite and that he was planning on promoting a nurse whom he had his eye on and planned on dangling the job in front of her as a way to get her into bed, despite her being married. He told Portelli he had proof that he was welcome to see but given that it wasn't obtained totally legally it might be better if he (Portelli) could claim ignorance of it in case it surfaced.

The older man wasn't shocked particularly. He already had met the team and he had Cardozo tagged as one of those talented but arrogant surgeons, one who thought his skills should let him do what he wanted. Rick had not told him the details about the trip to South America, but he did some digging himself and figured out that Cardozo had been kind of the ringleader of what went on there. At least two staff member's marriages were on the rocks and one was already in divorce court because of what happened there.

Portelli especially wasn't happy with Cardozo's plan for the nurse he wanted to promote, her husband was a serving Marine, deployed often, and he didn't want to happen to the husband what had happened to Rick and plenty of other military people.

He also had met Marcy and talked to others about her, and everyone bar none thought she should be the chief nurse, that the only reason she was removed was because she had fallen from Trey's graces and that it had nothing to do with professional competency.

Trey was summoned to talk to the new chief surgeon. He went in there arrogantly, seeing himself as the star of the team, but he quickly he realized he was being pissed on by a top dog. Portelli made clear that Cardozo's time at the hospital was short lived and that as gifted as he might think he was he was a cancer on the team. He made clear that he would not have a doctor around who used his position for his own purposes.

Trey tried to bluster his way through it, telling Portelli that the hospital administration would never side with a hack administrator over a star surgeon with his reputation.

Portelli laughed and asked Cardozo if he knew how long the hospital administration had been trying to get him and the lengths they went to try and recruit him, that he doubted they would side with Cardozo after all that.

He then asked Trey why would they hire him as chief surgeon when they had such a star like him on the staff? That maybe, just maybe, their admiration for their 'star' surgeon went only so far.

Trey realized that the older man was not a pushover and for the first time in his career he knew that he had gone too far. Portelli told him that he should start looking for another job; hopefully well away from this area. He also told Trey that in the remaining time he had left that if he heard anything about him stepping out of line he would see to it that he would have a very hard time finding another job, other than places he wouldn't want to live in.

From what Rick heard later from Portelli's secretary, Cardozo for the first time anyone remembered looked totally deflated. 6 months later he found a position at another hospital in the Midwest and last Rick heard, while still a talented surgeon he supposedly was no longer the playboy he had been. Rick's friends however decided that he hadn't been punished enough and he continued his streak of 'bad luck' with cars and especially in the romance department; if social media was to be believed Cardozo was a charter member of the STD of the month club and it crimped his social life.

The friends finally let him off the hook when he somehow got married and his whole demeanor changed. From what they heard he no longer was the arrogant prick he had been, he actually became known on the staff and the community as a caring doctor who went out of his way to help people.

Most people gave credit to him getting married to a formidable local woman who was reputed to be both stunning but also someone not to be trifled with. Whether it was he found the woman of his dreams whose passion could tame his own, or as other rumors said, she caught him cheating and Cardozo, rather than be ruined by the divorce, ended up staying in a marriage where she dominated him and reputedly often cuckolded him to remind him who was in charge. Whatever the real story, they never tried to confirm what the truth was, Rick's friends felt that Cardozo had been humbled and didn't need them to torture him any more.

Marcy, too, was called into Portelli's office. She was a little bit nervous, she knew that Portelli had a past with Rick and she wondered if this was going to be it, Rick's final revenge. She was shocked to find out that Portelli planned on reinstating her as chief nurse of the top neurosurgical team that Trey had run and was pleased to find out her colleagues had unanimously supported her coming back. She was even more shocked when he told her that she also should also thank Rick for going to bat for her even given the circumstances.

That, though, wasn't as shocking as what Portelli told her next. He told her things about Rick that her ex husband had never told her, the many dangerous missions where he risked his own life to save fallen comrades, the number of people alive today because of Rick.

He also told her that through his contacts he had kept tabs on Rick's career and told Marcy that as an intelligence officer he had helped prevent a madman in North Korea from starting a nuclear war, that through his work the US and other countries were able to convince China to put an end to that particular madness. He told Marcy that is why he had that long tour in Korea, which had been extended because of the crisis at the time. Marcy was shocked, Rick when he spoke of it only spoke of it as a routine assignment, cooked up by pencil pushers at the Pentagon and designed to torture any poor SOB sent there, like himself.

Marcy began to realize just how little Rick blew his own horn all those years and that he never told her of the many things he had done, if anything she remembered he had spent most of those years telling her how proud he was of her. While she knew Rick couldn't talk about a lot of the (classified) things he had done, he could have easily puffed himself up, but remained the humble man he was when she married him.

Their kids noticed the big change first, that Marcy no longer was saying that Rick had blown things out of proportion. She went out of her way to say that what she did was wrong and that she had betrayed the one man she truly loved, that she let her own selfishness and petty anger build up into resentment that allowed a self centered asshole to convince her that she deserved better.

The truth hurt, and for the first time she felt anguish over what she had done rather than blaming Rick for the end of their marriage. She acknowledged for the first time that she had squandered a relationship with a wonderful man over a fantasy with a jerk. The deepest hurt of all was realizing all she had had to do was to talk to Rick, that he would listen to her, as he had when giving up flying choppers.

The problem was she had created a barrier built out of loneliness, anger and frustration , one that wouldn't allow her to try and talk to her husband because emotionally he was the cause of it all in her eyes. Instead she created the fantasy that she was supposed to be the super wife who can't complain to justify not talking to him. She realized that Cardozo sensed this anger in her and used it to his advantage, which while she had pure hatred for him, also drove her into deep depression because she really had no one to blame but herself; as they say depression is rage turned inward.

It got bad enough that she started seeing someone to deal with the depression and guilt this generated in her; for a time the children and through them, Rick, were worried about her, but as time went on she seemed to get back on solid ground, to be able deal with what had happened to her life.

While she realized that while it was highly unlikely Rick would ever forgive her, through therapy and her own resolve she realized that she needed to make amends for what she had done to him and her family if she was going to ever heal. The fact that she could acknowledge what she did was unforgivable was a major step in the healing process.

As part of her repentance she made an effort to let friends and family know, many of whom had blamed Rick for not reconciling after Marcy's "fling", the truth about what she had done. As Rick's relationship with those people re-emerged, it helped a great deal with his own rebirth as a person.

For Marcy, it meant she had to face the consequences of her actions even more so than losing her husband, when she finally told people the truth about what had happened she was treated as a pariah by some and lost relationships with friends and family she had cherished, but she faced it with resolve, knowing her suffering was helping Rick to heal. It was a form of true penance for what she had done in other words.

Just before all these actions the real healing started with one small sentence sent via E-Mail. "You were right, I was the asshole, and I will spend the rest of my life regretting what I did, but more importantly, to try and make it up to you as best I can, as little as I can likely do. "

Rick on receiving that for some reason didn't do what he usually did with communications from Marcy, ie delete it without reading it. Instead for some reason he read it, and a small smile came upon his face, with that admission he felt the past was closed and he could look forward to the future with hope and to start his own healing.

***

My closing thoughts:

Thanks to those of you who got to the end of this, it was one of those things that refused to finish quickly. This story, like other story ideas I have had, comes out of the question of why a seemingly loving wife would do something so horrific to the person they loved. Another author on here, tnicol, and I had email exchanges about this, where we wanted to get beyond the Martian Slut Ray idea or the woman just dying for a big cock and to answer the question why. Why I chose another person's story I don't know, must be the masochist in me!

I left the story where I did because I don't know what Rick and Marcy's future holds, maybe someday after I finish some other writing I want to do I'll revisit it and see where the spirit takes me.