“Get up,” Wes called into the dark room where I’d only just closed my eyes for the first time in nearly twenty-two hours. Before my head hit the pillow, my stomach had churned and growled. My best guess was it had been just as long since I’d last eaten as well. “We’ve got two coming in now.” His words made me jump from the most uncomfortable cot in the world, my pulse immediately racing inmy veins. “Forty-five-year-old female, unresponsive on scene. They’ve been working on her in the ambulance, but she hasn’t made any progress. Forty-eight-year-old male, breathing, but vitals are weak.”
Before my eyes adjusted to the bright lights lining the hospital hallway, the loud crash and bang of gurneys bursting through the swinging doors made my heart leap out of my chest. I was only amonth into my emergency room rotation here at North Florida Regional Medical Center, one of the busiest ERs in the state. Every day I learned something new, and it looked like today was the day I would learn how to save a life without sleeping for the last day.
“Carpenter,” Dr. Meyers, the lead doctor on staff, called out. “You’re in room two.” Wes followed behind Meyers into room one where themale patient had already been brought. As I stepped into my room, the harsh sounds of machines beeping competed with the orders being barked out by Dr. Cosentina. For the first time ever in my medical studies, everything was moving so quickly, I could barely catch up to what was going on. The rush of the incoming patients combined with my drowsy fog made me very unsteady on my feet. “Carpenter,what the hell are you doing? Holding up the wall?” Everything spun around me, and two seconds later, I was crashing against the floor.
“What the hell happened?” I mumbled as I came to. Blinking took too much energy, and my eyes felt heavy as they worked far too hard to focus on the face before me. Carefully, I sat up on the gurney I was lying on. My stomach roiled, and the room moved slightlybefore steadying itself. Resting against the wall behind me, I blinked again and Wes handed me a bottle of water.
“You passed out. Slammed your head on the floor before anyone could get to you.” The dark circles under his eyes and worry lines creasing the corners of his mouth told me much of what I needed to know, but that sick desire to know every single detail of it all made me ask, “What happenedto them?”
After taking a long chug of his own water, he looked up to the ceiling. “Didn’t make it,” he choked out, quickly following his words with another mouthful of water.
Unable to deal with it all—their deaths, my exhaustion, my inability to do anything because I’d been too much of a… of a… of a weakling to even stay on my fucking feet—I leapt off the gurney, ignoring how the room spunaround me. “My shift is over.”
There must have been something in my voice or something in what he saw in the past hour that made him realize it was in his best interest to let me go. There was no sense in talking about anything anyway. No amount of words would bring back the patients I wasn’t strong enough to help.
They were gone forever, and nothing would ever change that.
“What’s going on with you?” Rob, my live-in boyfriend, asked over brunch the following week. “You’ve been out of it for days.” He paused long enough to shove a forkful of eggs Benedict down the hatch before asking, “Have you even slept in the bed this week?”
Not caring enough to answer him with words, I shrugged, downing the last of my mimosa at the same time. “Just been a rough week, I guess,”I added when he stared at me as I lowered my glass to the table. Not feeling one bit like dealing with his judgmental attitude, I eye-fucked the waiter as I nodded for another drink. Sure it was only noon, but fuck if it wasn’t five o’clock somewhere.
As I downed my third drink of the morning, or afternoon, depending on how you looked at it, I listened to him drone on and on about something orother at work. How this one said something about the woman in the cubicle next to him. My patience for his office drama had grown more than thin over the years we’d been together. And to make matters worse, my late hours at my residency had done nothing but drive a wedge between us in more ways than just the physical. As he carried on and on, I realized he’d never feel the weight of someone’s lifeslipping away from right under his fingers.
The death of that couple had such a profound effect on me that in the week since their passing, I’d reconsidered my life as a doctor entirely. If it hadn’t been for a few very candid conversations with Wes, I might have quit entirely. Knowing it was my calling seemed to be enough to keep me on track. But there was something about losing your first patientthat made you stop and reevaluate your life, and if you didn’t, then maybe there was something wrong with you.
Which brought me back to Rob.
On the night I stumbled home, late that night, with an egg-shaped bruise on my forehead he asked me about what happened. But ever since then, he hadn’t brought it up once. He knew they’d died. He knew I’d passed out and couldn’t do a damn thing to savethem. He knew they’d left behind two sons, barely old enough to take care of themselves, let alone one another, but not once since that night had he bothered to ask me about how I was holding up.
Tipping my chin at the waiter once more, I silently asked him for a fourth drink as Rob continued to go on. It wasn’t until the crystal champagne glass was pressed to my lips that he thought to ask,“You okay?”
Laughing around the cool rim of the glass, I let the bubbles tickle my nose as I said, “Yeah, I’m just fucking fine and dandy.” The glacial chill in my tone let him know I was anything but.
The returning eye roll he served me was the last straw on what I already considered a shitastic morning. That was until he opened his mouth. “I don’t know what the hell your problem is,” he mutteredunder his breath, trying his best not to draw attention to our table. “But I’ve had enough of it,” he added, before wiping his mouth with his napkin. With a flourish that was completely unnecessary, he tossed the napkin onto the table as he shoved his chair back. The leg of it caught on the cobblestone sidewalk, and we both watched as it tipped over in what felt like slow motion. His starecut me down, and if I hadn’t remembered what an ass he’d been to me in the last week, I would have felt horrible for how he felt. But patience was the last thing I had, especially for his feelings. So when he spat, “I’ll see you later. And maybe you’ll be less of… of…” After looking me up and down as if I were some piece of waste, he said, “Whatever the hell you are right now.”
Anger bubbledat the surface, and I fought every instinct I had to keep it from spilling over. Just then the waiter came over, check in hand. Before handing it to me, he picked up the chair and slid it back into place. “Whatever it is, I hope it works out soon.” He smiled, washing away some of my anger. It wasn’t lost on me that a simple smile from a stranger, one who was inexplicably gorgeous, did more to helpmy emotions than anything Rob had offered in the last week.
When I opened the small leather folder holding the check, a slip of paper fell to my lap. Sitting back in my chair, staring at the note he had written me, thoughts of going home with him crossed my mind. That’s why he’d given me his number, right? A complete stranger didn’t hope you’d call them simply for coffee and good conversation.
A smile melted across my face thinking the waiter, whose name was Todd, had propositioned me for sex.
“Slow down there, big guy,” I coached myself quietly as I tucked the money inside the folder. Laughing, I walked down the block. As if I hadn’t already known my head was all over the place, fantasizing about some random fuck with the waiter was even more proof of my messed-up state.
Withoutthinking too much about it, I walked to my best friend Chelsea’s house before even considering going home. Even if Rob wasn’t there, I didn’t want to be there. It was too claustrophobic, proof of our crumbling relationship hanging around me like a black cloud of smoke, choking the air from my lungs.
Within a few minutes, I found myself at her door and even though I knew I could walk right inwithout a problem, her fiancé had just moved in last week. Thoughts of walking in on them in a compromising position made me lift my hand to the dark wood door.
“You look—” She paused, looking me up and down. With mild disgust on her face, she looked at my face again before completing her sentence with a rather sarcastic, “Awesome.” Without paying her sarcasm any mind, I pushed past her and intoher dining room. “Nice to see you, too.” Her words bounced off my back.
“Hey, Noah,” Alex, Chelsea’s fiancé, called from the kitchen. He walked toward me, maneuvering around the boxes piled everywhere. “How’s it going?” Pumping my hand, he smiled, a blindingly gorgeous smile.
“Good, I’m good,” I lied. “How’d the move go?” I asked, feigning interest in it all. Personally, I thought it was a touchold-fashioned for the two of them to wait until right before the wedding to move in together, but they both seemed happy about it, so who was I to say anything.
“Still going,” he said, spreading his arms out to the boxes haphazardly placed all over. “But so far so good.” Laughing, he walked to the fridge. After pulling out a few beers, he popped the tops on them. “Here you go.” He handed me mybeer and then pulled Chelsea to his side, adding, “And for you, my bride.” If he wasn’t such a genuinely nice guy, it would all be over the top—the cavity-inducing sweetness—but he made Chelsea happy, and that’s what mattered the most. Looking at them made me almost crack a smile. But when Alex asked, “So how’s my brother treating you?” I chose to chug my beer rather than let any bit of happinesspull at my lips.
“He’s good,” I lied. “He’s… uh… busy today,” I lied again. “Doing some… uh… stuff around the house.” For fuck’s sake, I sounded like an idiot. Chelsea caught on, shooting me a concerned look.
“We’ll get out of your way.” Reaching up on her toes, she popped a kiss on Alex’s cheek. “You have lots to do, anyway,” she added, tipping her head toward the pile of boxes behind him.He rolled his eyes before scooping her up into his arms for an overly dramatic kiss. By the time he let her down, I was already halfway out the door.
