I knew what I signed up for and I accepted it, and yet I was pointlessly irritable after getting a message from Whit late Thursday afternoon saying she was headed into a procedure and wouldn’t be finished until after midnight. That irritation spread like an ugly, itchy rash as Friday wore on and I still hadn’t heard or seen her and it chafed in all the spots where this thing between us was fragile and undefined, the places where she held me at a distance.
I wanted the right to Whit’s time and attention. I wanted the right to ask her medical assistant what her schedule looked like today and I wanted to leave pens and muffins on her deskwithout first developing a cover story in case someone caught me in the act. I wanted her to come home to me at the end of a long day and I wanted to wake up beside her in the morning.
I wanted her to belong to me and that irritated me the most of all because it was like a vague, distant dream. I knew we’d make it out of this rotation, but what then? I knew what I wanted and I also knew it scared the shit out of me because I’d never,everentertained those possibilities for myself.
On the one hand, I had a fuck-ton of fear and a serious shortage of healthy relationships to build on. On the other, I had the realization that Whitney might have no interest in belonging to me or anyone else. Not that we’d ever talked about it. No, any conversation we had about our relationship centered around the aggressively hierarchical structure of teaching hospitals and all the things we couldn’t do until we’d put enough distance between us and the professional radioactivity of falling for your boss.
I trudged through a procedure with Dr. Hirano, my pissy mood multiplying with every hour spent holding a retractor while he whistled along to a short playlist of old-school country tunes that he ran on an infinite loop. By the end, I’d worked up a good head of steam over everything and nothing and many other things I couldn’t change. It only intensified when I checked my phone and found no new messages from Whit.
I knew she was busy. Her sister was a significant weight on her shoulders. Her schedule was packed. Heart transplants only happened when organs became available and she had no way of planning for that. I knew all of this and still I couldn’t shake this irritable mood.
When I made it to the residents’ lounge, I flopped down on a bench and folded my arms over my face. My shoulders burned from retractor duty and the rest of me was drained from two weeks of orbiting Whit. I hadn’t had a decent night’s sleepin forever and I’d adopted the practice of sticking around the hospital later than usual on the off chance of catching her in the elevators or on her way out. Add to that the fact that when we did talk, neither of us gave a damn how late we stayed up.
Though I didn’t regret any of it, I was really fucking tired.
The door banged open and I heard Tori’s voice. “She’s going on twenty-four hours straight! What a fucking machine. Goddamn, I want to be her when I grow up.”
I groaned into my forearm for no other reason than it gave me something to do with all the bitterness I’d gathered up for myself this week.
“It is impressive.” That was Reza. “Have you practiced the stitches she modeled on Tuesday?”
“Every chance I get.” Cami. “I think I’m working up to better efficiency too.”
“I didn’t realize how much extra work I was doing until she pointed it out,” Tori said.
I sensed people surrounding me and I grunted when someone kicked my running shoe. “What the fuck?” I grumbled, glaring up at Cami.
“What’s wrong with you this week?” she asked.
“Tired.” That was more than enough explanation for any resident’s bad mood. We were all exhausted, all the time. Mostly from holding retractors for seven hours while the attending hummed off-key with the same Hank Williams song you’ve heard sixteen times. Or worse yet, spending seven hours staring at the back of a surgeon’s head because you were only allowed to observe, which loosely translated to standing wherever the circulating nurse told you to, even if that meant seeing all of nothing.
“You don’t get tired.” Tori approached, dropping her lab coat and stethoscope onto my chest before opening her locker. “And you don’t get into funks like this. What’s going on?”
Before I could formulate a response, Cami asked, “Do I have time to observe from the gallery? I need to go home and change before the softball game, but I really want to watch Dr. Aldritch. I can’t believe she’s still going.”
I sat up, Tori’s coat falling to my lap in the process. “What’s Dr. Aldritch doing?”
“You haven’t heard?” Cami was aghast. You’d think I’d insulted her entire family with one question. “How are you so far out of the loop?”
“I’ve been in the OR all day.” I motioned to my scrubs and the cap I hadn’t bothered taking off. “The only thing I’ve heard is Hirano’s version of ‘Jolene’ and?—”
“Christ, the whistling.” Tori groaned as she buttoned her shirt. “It’s like water torture after an hour or two.”
“I am inclined to agree,” Reza said.
“Easy there, Ansari,” I said to him. “You’re going to knock us over with these strong opinions.”
“Anyway,” Cami said, “Aldritch is on herfourthtransplant since Wednesday night.”
“She—what?” Ihatedthat I didn’t know this.
“Yep,” Cami said, holding up a finger. “First one came in after hours on Wednesday, then another on Thursday, one this morning that was a patient of Galbraith’s but he has a stomach virus. Vomited all over the scrub sink, told everyone he was fine, and then vomitedon his residentwhile they were walking into the OR. It was a whole messy thing. They called in Aldritch to cover, and while she was working on Galbraith’s patient, the call came in from the organ center about a match for one of her patients.”
I stood, shoving Tori’s things toward her. “She’s been in the OR since last night?”
“Yeah, they said she walked out of Galbraith’s case, ate a protein bar, took a thirty-minute nap, and then went back into the OR,” Tori said. “That’s how you get shit done.”
And here I was, marinating in my own pointless feelings because it had been days since putting eyes on her, as if she needed another selfish asshole in her life. I couldn’t believe I’d managed to wind myself up over this—to get myself to the point of wondering if she ever thought about me—when she’d spent the past three days hooking up new hearts.
