Sebastian:Yeah, I guess it's a date if that's what you want to call it…
Sara:No. It is NOT a date. You need to tell me when you're available, as in day and time. Which date?
Sebastian:Ah. Okay. Monday? 7 or 8?
Sara:7 will be fine.
Sebastian:It's a date, right?
Sara:For fuck's sake, no!
Sebastian:Did I just hear you screech from three floors away?
I tossedmy phone aside and groaned up at the ceiling. I'd distracted myself reading menus and forgotten for a few beautiful minutes that Sebastian wasupstairs. By virtue of sturdy yet randomly flimsy brownstones, everyone in the building's three apartments knew when the others were showering, climbing the stairs, or loudly breathing. Forget about watching TV or having sex.
Not that I'd had a lot of sex since moving here from New York but Alex and her husband Riley hada lotof sex. I owned several different types of noise-canceling headphones and white noise machines, and scrolled the local real estate listings every day.
I'd never had a conversation with Alex about the sex noises. I didn't even allude to hearing them—and that was another difference between friends and best friends. One of them could say, "Look, sweetie, it's so nice that your husband's cock can make you see stars. Maybe now is a good time to invite some new toys into your play and try out a gag? Perhaps some light choking?"
Sara:I do not screech.
Sebastian:You do.
Sara:Monday. 7. I will meet you there. Please figure out your five things in advance.
Chapter4
Sebastian
"What else?"I asked O'Rourke.
I paced the sidewalk across the street from Pastoral in the Fort Point neighborhood while my trauma fellow murmured a few lines from an old Snoop Dogg song through my earbuds. It was fucking freezing out here but I was a minute early, and I'd take all manner of damp, bone-chilling wind if it saved me from dealing with Shapiro. At least for one more minute.
"I think that's the last update I have for you," he said. I could hear him flipping through his notebook and the ambient noise of the hospital around him. "For now, that is. I will come up with something soon enough."
"Please don't complain to me about the general surgery fellow grabbing another case out from underneath you again," I said, giving the restaurant resentful glance.
"Did you hear me complain? Because I didn't. You extrapolated a complaint about that case-thieving sneak from my overall report. The last time I complained out loud was when I was an intern and had so many pagers, my scrubs kept falling down."
That was fully inaccurate but I wasn't interested in debating that with him now. "And how many pagers does it take to drop your pants, O'Rourke?"
"Yeah, this sounds like a fully appropriate question," he snarked. "And for your information, it was nine. Nine pagers. Urology, trauma, ENT, cardio, surgical oncology, colorectal, vascular, limb salvage, plastics. What a fucking nightmare."
I stifled a groan at the mention of plastics and frowned at my watch. I was going to have to go in there and get this over with soon. I wouldn't put it past Sara to break a chair over my head if I rolled in ten minutes late.
I shoved my hands into my pockets as another gust of cold, raw air blew in off the water. I hated the way summer bumped and stumbled into autumn here, starting and stopping like there was some serious question over whether seasons were supposed to keep on changing. And then, after cold snaps and heat waves and hurricanes, there was always one day in October, just like today, when it all collapsed and the debate was over. Summer was finished, autumn was here to stay, and I fucking hated it.
I hated wintry weather and all the nonsense that went with it. Snow, ice, everything. Goddamn, it was awful.
"Anyway, that was a night I wouldn't wish on anyone," O'Rourke said.
"What?"
"Did you dip out on me there? You do that a lot, Stremmel. I have to check the paperwork but I think you're supposed to pay attention to me. You're also supposed to be teaching me, not flaking out in the middle of my twenty-car pileup story, but that's a neglect I've come to accept from you."
It had taken me a bit to get my arms around it but I now understood this was O'Rourke's personality. He was obnoxious in a jaded, cynical way, though he never pretended he was in this business for any altruistic purpose. He thrived on ego and half-baked contempt for everyone. I understood it too, even if I didn't function the same way he did. But the guy had a dry, silly side too and it often came out in stories about his intern years in Minnesota, his assertion that I didn't teach him enough, or riding the line between delinquent and savant.
O'Rourke was a brilliant surgeon but not a single day went by without me wishing I'd known all these quirks of hisbeforeselecting him for a two-year fellowship.
