“It is,” Nick said with an emphatic nod. “Gotta be crazy to do it, to stick with it, to put up with all the bullshit. But I pulled a golf-ball-sized tumor out of the top vertebra of a toddler’s spine yesterday, and that doesn’t suck.”
“And the kid’s going to live to tell about it?”
“Very funny, dickhead.” Nick shook his head and checked his pager. “Everything always goes to shit after midnight. I’m giving you an hour, tops.”
“I’m seeing this girl…or not. I don’t know.” I sighed and tossed a balled up napkin to my plate. “She’s building a school in Dorchester. Really cool girl. Funny, smart, gorgeous, bossy. Totally turned my life upside down since I met her.”
Nick crossed his arms over his chest, his dark eyebrows raised. “Turned your life upside down how?”
I drained my beer as I contemplated my response. “I spent about four days straight with her.” I gestured to the bartender for another.
“And I take it she’s redecorating your place and naming your kids?”
I thought about Lauren’s presence in my loft more times than I could count, and went so far as to stop into a few shops in search of velvet pillows. Rubbing small pillows in a swanky boutique—alone—felt exactly as weird as it sounded.
“I’d rather that than the cold shoulder I’m getting.” I shrugged and sipped the beer when it arrived in front of me. “I think she only wanted help with her project. Or she’s blowing me off.”
Again.
Nick rolled his eyes, his fingers drumming against the table impatiently. “She’s the chillest chick ever. Hot and maybe a little dominant? Do I have that?”
“Yeah. And she drinks tequila like a boss. She’s on the road for work right now, and only wants to talk about her project.”
“And she’s using you for architectural services?”
I shrugged, and Nick continued shaking his head, running his fingers through his dark hair until it pulled in haphazard directions. “Matt, you know I don’t get much time for interests beyond surgery and pissing off my attending, and I am rusty in the areas of relationships that don’t involve on-call rooms. But everything you’ve said is fucking nuts. You’re a steel trap, man. I don’t care how hot she is, I don’t see anyone manipulating you—and for architect shit no less. If you could tell this story again, hooked up to an EEG, I might have something for theNew England Journal of Medicine.”
I balanced my arms on the table, gesturing toward Nick with my glass. “By all means, what do you recommend?”
Nick’s pager beeped and he frowned at the readout. “Hang on.” He punched a few numbers into his phone and waited. The transformation from Nick to Doctor Acevedo always fascinated me, and I tried to decide whether I kept my personal and professional sides separate as seamlessly as Nick did. It probably wasn’t possible, not when my work was so intertwined with my family that I could barely tell where one started and the other ended.
“This is Doctor Acevedo.”
We had it easy compared to Nick. It probably didn’t seem that way, with our sixteen-hour days and working straight through most weekends, but architecture wasn’t life and death. We took our work seriously—sometimes too seriously—but it was a challenge we freely accepted. If we took a day off once in a while, we weren’t putting the lives of sick children on the line, and we needed to remember that.
“That’s early sepsis but I’m most concerned about this kid throwing a clot. Get the on-call pediatric resident, page the attending, and press broad-spectrum antibiotics. I’ll be there within the half hour. Get me an OR. Three or five, but not four, definitely not two.” Nick disconnected his call and pocketed his phone and pager before turning back to me. “As predicted.”
I stretched a hand across the table for a firm shake, and he slipped out of the booth.
“Something I learned about diagnoses,” he said, turning back toward me. “Unless you ask the right questions, you will always get the wrong answers. You missed something. Get in front of her. Couldn’t be any worse than crying into your beer.”
*
I gulped, proppingmy hands on my hips and mentally picking through the passengers streaming through the jetway. This was the definition of a poorly conceived idea, and I was probably going to have my ass handed to me in the middle of the New Orleans airport by a little blonde hurricane.
That was assuming Lauren didn’t already see me waiting, and evade. She knew how to tap into that ninja sense when she needed it.
Finally, a crown of golden hair caught my eye. Head lowered, eyes glued to her phone, she was walking past me and would have kept going if I hadn’t put myself directly in her path. She bumped into my chest and braced herself on my arm.
“I’m sorry, didn’t look where I was…Matthew.” Her mouth quirked into a beautiful, stunned smile and she laughed. “You’re here.”
Her tote bag slid from her shoulder and tumbled to the ground, her phone falling on top of it, and she reached up to wrap her arms around my neck. She struggled without the ass-kicking heels, stretching up and pulling at me, drawing me down to her. Her lips were on me, and I reacted, pushing my tongue into her mouth, tasting her, drowning in her. She was commanding and impatient, and exactly how I wanted her. With my hands comfortably seated in her back pockets, I squeezed her ass, and she met my hungry growl with a laugh.
“What are you doing here? I mean, seriously, why are you here?” Her hands moved down my chest and under my shirt, fingers cool against my skin.
“I wanted to get a drink with you,” I said into her mouth.
Every kiss was frenetic, a bit too eager, a bit too aggressive, and our hands were everywhere, touching, pulling, holding. I couldn’t keep my mouth off her, not after the weirdness of the past two weeks. Not after the way she jumped into my arms and attacked me.
