Standing up, I look at her for a moment, this woman who has managed to knock me off my feet in every possible way tonight, including literally, and something between exasperation and helpless amusement moves through my chest.
I pull the blanket up over her shoulder where it’s slipped. She doesn’t stir.
I lean down and press my mouth to her cheek. “Go to sleep, you little tease.”
She’s already gone.
I close the door behind me and stand in the hallway with the back of my head against the wall.
I’m never letting her drink again.
Chapter Ten
Miranda
The fluorescent lights in this hospital have never been my enemy. Today they’re personal.
I squint at the hallway, and my eyes water. The low-grade throb behind them has promoted itself to a full percussion section, and whoever is in charge up there has no concept of rhythm. Whatever was in that beer of his, it was not what it said on the label.
Noted. For next time.
There won’t be a next time. There won’t be anything because I am going to die in this corridor, and no one will find me until the smell gets bad.
The morning handover goes fine until Axel walks in.
He doesn’t look at me. He picks up the patient board and starts reassigning without explanation, and I watch my morning reshuffle in real time. The two straightforward post-op vitals I was expecting disappear. In their place: bed four, who hasn’t had a bowel movement in four days and has been vocal about it, and bed nine, who is eighty-three, incontinent, and has alreadysoaked through two changes this shift according to the night nurse’s note. She adds, helpfully, that he’d been eating curry.
Axel caps his pen and walks out without a word.
I look at the board. I look at Brooke. She is looking at the ceiling.
“Right,” I say.
Bed nine is everything the note promised. I change him, dispose of everything, change him again when he goes a second time before I’ve finished washing my hands, and stand in the bathroom doorway for a moment with my forehead against the door frame. My stomach is climbing into my throat. The percussion section behind my eyes has found a second drummer.
I am a senior nurse. I have held a man’s bowels in my hands while a surgeon worked, and I did not flinch.
Today, with a hangover that is making the air visible, I am flinching.
Bed four is worse because he wants to talk about it. At length. He wants to describe the exact nature of the blockage, his working theory on the cause, and his opinion on the laxative the last nurse gave him, which he has ranked as inadequate. He says this while I’m inserting a suppository. I am not in a position to leave.
“Fascinating,” I say.
Brooke catches me in the corridor afterward and falls into step beside me. “Why is Axel acting as if he’s out to get you?”
“Because he is,” I mutter.
“The date went that bad, huh?” She makes a sympathetic noise. “You look like you got hit by something.”
Rubbing my temples, I mumble, “I feel worse.”
“So what did happen between you two?” Brooke presses. “I was waiting for you to call me when you got home, but you never did.”
“Because there was nothing to tell, Brooke.” I strip my gloves and toss them without slowing down. “I really don’t want to talk right now. I have the mother of all hangovers, and I can barely function right now.”
My friend tilts her head. “You drank last night?”
“Yeah, big mistake. I was with a friend, and the end of the night is just gone.”
