“I’m sorry—” she starts at the same time I ask, “What happened?”
We smile at one another, and she pulls out the tiniest pair of scissors I have ever seen from her kit.
“Ladies first,” I offer, reaching for my beer. I bring the bottle to my lips for a much needed sip of courage when she brings the scissors to the first suture. She clips the knot and gently pulls the string through my skin with a set of tweezers.
“I wanted to apologize to you. To maybe explain everything to you. Both from that night and from a few weeks ago.”
My heart kicks up, and I nod once as my breath catches in my throat.
“To start, I never got a chance to properly thank you for your kindness all those months ago. I was a random, neurotic woman on the street, and you were so warm.” She smiles a bit at the memory, that soft, beautiful smile, and my eyes are glued to her lips. Specifically to the one corner that seems to kick up a little higher than the other. Her lips are so pretty, light pink, like a pink lemonade, something sweet yet tart, something refreshing after a long day of working in the sun. What I wouldn’t give to taste them, to taste her, to know if she’s as sweet as she looks. “That day was awful,” she continues, and I snap out of my daydream.
“Will you finally tell me what happened?” I’ve had so many guesses of my own over the last few months. I thought maybe she got fired from her job, dumped by a boyfriend, or lost a loved one. Or maybe it was one of those days when everything goes wrong. Flat tire on the way to work, coffee spilled all over your clothes, smashed fingers in a door. Sometimes enough little things add up to make you feel like you’re going to break.
“I have anxiety.”
Holly blurts the words, slurring them together so fast I can barely catch the space in between them.
“I have anxiety,” she says again, tugging a particularly pesky knot, mumbling a soft “sorry” as it pulls at my skin when she removes it.
“I was an ER doctor, and my anxiety made it hard to work there sometimes. I’d end up with nightmares, bad dreams that I forgot to give medication and someone died. Or sometimes I’d be doing CPR and trying to press on someone's chest but my body wouldn’t move. I’d be looking at my arms…” She looks down at her arms as she says that, holding them out in front of her. “I’d be staring at them, willing them to move so I could save the person in front of me, but they’d be heavy. Weighed down as if they were filled with cement. My dream would play out like that until my patient died.”
“Jesus,” I mutter, reaching a hand to rake my fingers through my hair. Dreams like that would mess with anyone’s head.
“Sometimes, I get so worked up that my face will go numb. I’ll get myself to the point of tears and then berate myself because no one wants a doctor crying as they care for them.” Holly lets out a forced soft chuckle, but I don’t return it. I don’t want her to think I find any part of thatfunny or embarrassing. “Sometimes, I can’t even listen to someone’s heartbeat because mine is pumping so wildly in my chest it drowns out everything else. That anxiety continued on for a while … until … that day.”
She purses out a ragged breath, and her eyes flick to mine. I nod, letting her know that I’m invested in this, that I want to know what brought her to me that day. And what took her away.
“That day at work, I had a full-blown panic attack.”
I can’t help my reaction, and I wince a little.
“Pretty much,” she says. “I collapsed right in the middle of the ER. I didn’t have time to be embarrassed because I couldn’t breathe.” She runs a palm over my arm, and when I look down, I find she’s already halfway done. “I wasn’t the doctor anymore. My colleagues rushed to me, tried to talk me through it, but it was too much. My heart was out of control, beating wildly in my chest and I couldn’t calm down until they sedated me.”
“Christ, Holly.” I take a long swig of my beer, setting the empty bottle on the table with a clink.
“I’ll spare you the rest of the embarrassing details, but after all the tests were done, the house supervisor met me at my bedside and recommended immediate medical leave. They said I needed to “work onmyself.”” She lifts her hands for air quotes, and I can feel the annoyance in her words.
“I, um … I didn’t feel safe driving home. My mind and body were wrecked.” She pauses again, this time the silence lingering, and her eyes flick up to lock on mine. “I was engaged when you and I met for the first time.”
My stomach churns even though I knew she had a fiancé. I didn’t know then, but two weeks ago I knew. I thought it’d make it less shitty to hear about, but I find myself gritting my teeth, jealous of the faceless lucky sap who gets to call her his.
“I had just left the hospital. Tried to call my fiancé to see if he could come pick me up. He, um…” She releases an awkward laugh. “I hadn’t been able to get a hold of him all afternoon. I sent him text after text, updating him on what was happening. I tried to call, and he didn’t answer. Eventually, he was just sending me straight to voicemail. He kept his location on his phone, and I saw he was at one of the bars downtown.”
That son of a bitch. His fiancée was going through something like that, something that devastated her, and he was at the bar?
“Here’s where you’re going to ask me to leave.”
“Doubt it,” I grit out.
“I went to the bar he was at. I had to see it for myself, you know?”
“I think I would have done the same.”
Holly pulls the last thread from my skin, discarding it along with her tweezers on the disposable pad. She pulls off her gloves and leans back in her chair. “He was there.” She stares at the mess on the table for a second, before leaning forward in her chair. She carefully folds the garbage inside the pad to contain the mess. “He was buying shots for a group of people. Some I recognized as coworkers, some I didn’t.”
“Did you go in there? I would’ve stormed in and caused a hell of a scene.” I can think of a handful of ways right off the bat that he could have been put in his place.
She finally looks up at me as her face splits in a laugh. “I wanted to. I had so many ideas of what I could do, but … no, I’m too chicken.”
