“Propositioned… Propositioned like I did you?” She sounds surprised.
“Right.” Am I holding my breath?
“Oh,” Ellie says. She’s quiet for a minute.
Fuck, is she going to say yes? That’s what I get for not having this conversation sooner.Shit.
“Are we not—” Ellie clears her throat. “I guess fuck buddies means not exclusive?”
Her voice is quieter than before and I’m trying to decipher why. I play what she said back in my mind.Oh. Shit.
“I’m not hanging out or sleeping with anyone else, Ellie. You’re my exclusive confidential fuck buddy. I just wasn’t sure if you’d want that too, since we didn’t really talk about it,” I hurry to tell her. Then hesitate before asking, “Does that mean you haven’t propositioned anyone else?”
“Correct,” Ellie says, less quiet than before.
“Do you plan to proposition anyone else?”
“Definitely not.”Thank fuck.“No need to embarrass myself again when I have my very own CFB, right? Plenty of practice happening here,” she adds cheerily.
Okay, phew.The mention ofpracticestings a little, but I remind myself this is what I signed up for. And, honestly, I can admit thatsomeEllie is better thannoEllie. Hopefully time will change her mind about us being only CFBs, but for now I just have to accept my role if it means spending time with her. And if what we’re doing is making her happy, I can’t complain too much.
“It’s my turn, right?” Ellie asks, a yawn taking over on the last word. I pull the phone away to check the time—just after midnight.
“How about one more and then we can resume next time?” I ask her.
“Deal. I actually thought of a really important one. Would you rather become a werewolf or a vampire?”
I think I laugh loud enough to wake up the unlucky guests above me.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
ELLIE
Workingthe ER will break your heart.The words from my old charge nurse in Boston are ringing true in my head on this shitty Monday.
One of my patients died this evening. He was only thirty-seven. I want to forget him right now so I can focus on my current patient, but I already know she just has the flu and it’s not taking up enough mental capacity to banish the memories of that damn flatline tone. It’s not that we got particularly close; he wasn’t here very long. But he was in a car accident and those cases are always particularly poignant for me.
The dull tone of a flatline is not all that different from that ringing noise you get in your ears. It’s hard to describe and yet everyone knows exactly what it sounds like. Sometimes I feel like I hear phantom flatlines when I’m not at work. They don’t happen frequently, but this is the biggest hospital with the best emergency department in Minnesota, and just based on the sheer quantity of patients, we see a lot of death.
And like everything else in the world, flatlines are really nothing like the movies. Hollywood always depicts them as quite dramatic, obviously—that terrifying tone coming out ofnowhere, followed by doctors desperately trying to shock the flatlined patient back to life.
The one thing theydoget right? The chaos. That’s totally real. It’s organized and efficient, but chaos nonetheless. And sometimes we areterrifiedto hear that tone.
But that’s because it usually means we’re too late.
Flatlines don’t just come out of nowhere. Hearts don’t just stop. They struggle and they fight, the electrical impulses firing away until the very end. It’s during that struggle and fight thatsometimeswe use a defibrillator to “reboot” the heartbeat and try to get it back to normal. But you can’t reboot something that’s gone.
So when you do see that final flatline? There is no fight left. There’s nothing to shock to life, nothing to fix. It’s irreversible.
And it’s haunting.
We’re desensitized for the most part. But sometimes thatnoisejust stays with you. Follows you around all day. Memories of the patient and theirfightreplay in your head like some traumatizing movie reel.
My therapist back in Boston wasn’t sure going into emergency medicine was the best path for me. And honestly? She had good reason to think that.
She was worried it might keep my trauma too fresh, being in that environment—like a scab you keep picking at and won’t let heal. She smartly encouraged me to do my research and talk to other nurses.
And everyone said the same thing. Warned, really.When you get into this field, it is going to take a toll on your mental health.
