Bend (9 page)

For a while, we just stay like that, glaring at each other. Then Jay’s gaze falls to my shirt, and his countenance darkens even more, his nostrils flare, and his jaw flexes.

Huh?
Now
what’s his problem? Looking down at myself, I realize I’m wearing my powder-blue tee with a grungy beach-and-palm-tree image printed on it along with the word
Cabo
in big, fat letters. It’s a shirt I got while I was in college, when I went to Mexico for spring break.

With Matt.

“I’ll hand your case over to Dr. Yamada,” Jay says, his tone hard. “He’ll take care of you, and then I’ll take you home.”

Then he’s gone.

And I’m alone again, lying here feeling glum.

I loved Cabo. Five days of fun. Sun, sand, frolicking in the balmy ocean, partying…and yeah, sex. A lot of it. With my boyfriend, who I thought was my forever love.

We stayed in a hotel right on the beach with a bunch of friends, and I’m pretty sure I’ve never been as purely and deeply happy as I was that week—not before and definitely not afterward.

Jay didn’t go. He was too busy busting his ass in school and working the jobs he needed to help pay for it. Which I guess means that he had no college savings and got no help from his parents. I asked him about that once, but he just snorted and changed the topic.

This T-shirt, though. Several times in the past, he’s given me crap about even keeping it, let alone wearing it. Guess he thinks it should remind me too much of my asshole ex, and I should want to get rid of it?

I don’t get what the big deal is, though. It’s just a damn shirt. And I happen to like it, so if I tossed it only because of Matt, doesn’t that give him more power over me? If anything, having kept it and not being bothered by it should tell Jay that my ex-boyfriend means nothing to me now.

I heave a sigh. Jay clearly thought I behaved like an idiot tonight. He’s going to be some poor kids’ terrifyingly stern dad someday.

Actually, Jay would be a great father, and his kids would be lucky to have him.

Don’t go there.

His wife would be lucky, too. Maybe it’ll be Brooke? She’s a beautiful, young, and possibly unattached nurse. He’s a hot, young, and definitely unattached resident. I know how this works. Straight out of college with my BSN, I worked in Labor and Delivery for a while, and yeah, I flirted with the doctors sometimes.

More than flirted, sometimes.

Jay and Brooke would be a nauseatingly cute couple. He’s probably slept with her already.

Stop it.

With a grimace, I reach for my purse so that I can get my phone and call my mom like I promised. That should be a foolproof way to distract myself from these nagging thoughts, at least for a little while.

“I
need antibiotics.”

I clench my teeth so hard my jaw hurts. I’m standing at the foot of the stretcher where my patient is sitting upright and glaring at me, the privacy curtain pulled closed around us. A woman in her mid-thirties, she’s wearing a baby-pink velour tracksuit and a pink infantry cap with the word Diva across it. In sequins.

She’s giving me a you’d-better-do-as-I-say look, and I’m having a harder time than usual keeping my gut reaction in check. Although I’m pretty sure I’m managing to maintain my poker face.

“I’m sorry, but we don’t prescribe antibiotics to treat colds,” I say with deliberate, tightly controlled calm. Regretfully and compassionately, yes, but firmly.

She scowls at me like I kicked her puppy. And she probably does have a dog, too—a Shih Tzu or some other tiny breed, and she’s named it Princess even though it’s a male, and she dresses it in pink, sequined doggie sweaters and carries it around with her everywhere. Even places where there are signs that say No Dogs Allowed.

Yeah, she hates me. So here’s the challenge: knowing she’s going to give me a shitty survey score, I should, for the sake of ethics and my own conscience, still be polite to her. Dr. House makes for entertaining television, but in real life no one behaves like that and keeps their jobs for long.

What I refuse to do, however, is give her what she wants.

“Unfortunately, a cold is caused by a virus,” I explain. “Antibiotics are used to treat bacterial infections. They won’t help you feel better. And if you keep taking antibiotics needlessly, your body could build up a resistance, so when you actually need them, they might not work.”

The diva is still looking mulish. “But a cold can turn into a bacterial infection, can’t it?”

Oh, for the love of…
Right. Time to wrap this up. I give her what I’m hoping is a convincingly empathetic nod. “It can, but right now you don’t have symptoms of a bacterial infection. You just have a bad cold, and a lot of the time those can make you feel sicker than you really are.”

Although, in her case, she’s clearly not so under the weather that she didn’t take the time to style her hair and put on so many layers of makeup it’s a miracle she can move her face.

Suppressing a sigh, I force myself to give her my best kindly doctor smile. “I recommend that you go home, take some Nyquil, and get some rest.”

She gapes at me. “So you’re not going to give me a prescription for anything?”

“No, I’m sorry. Your best bet will be over-the-counter medications,” I say, brushing aside the curtain. “Take care. Hope you feel better soon.”

On my way back to my desk, I check in with Brooke. She tells me she’s given Mia a tetanus shot and that Yamada has examined Mia and will be stitching her up in a minute. I thank her and go to write up the report for the diva. It’ll only take a few minutes. I’ve managed to stay ahead today—mostly because the trauma pager I have strapped to my waistband has stayed unusually silent—and I should be able to actually leave when my shift is over in about an hour.

At my desk adjacent to the nurses’ station, a mostly uncluttered workspace that’s dominated by a computer keyboard and a large monitor, I take a moment to close my eyes and rest my forehead on my clenched hand, replaying my conversation with my last patient in my mind.

Pretty sure I handled it just fine, but I don’t normally have such a hard time remaining composed. With a few exceptions, it’s not that difficult to make sure patients are happy with their care even when they think they know better than me what’s wrong with them and how it should be treated. I have no idea why I almost dropped the ball just now.

Actually, I do. The reason is lying in Treatment 4 with a sliced-open-to-the-bone hand that I have to leave to my colleague to patch up.

I shouldn’t have gone to her room in the first place. But when Brooke flagged me down as I was checking the patient list on the computer tablet and told me Mia was here and why, I temporarily lost my grip on reason. I didn’t stop to question if I should go to her, why I was doing it, or how seeing her would be helpful when I’d have to afterward ask Yamada to take over, annoying him in the process.

I just did it. And then found her so miserable, crying and shaking, and I wanted nothing more than to help her. To make her feel better.

It’s not that I meant to give her a hard time about how she cut herself. I just found myself doing it without really knowing why. Now I get it, though. Now it’s easy enough to see that along with the worry for her and the need to fix things for her and the urge to tell her she’s been on my mind constantly since the last time I saw her, I also got annoyed at her carelessness.

And just like at the park on Sunday morning, when I couldn’t seem to stop getting pissed off at her, that’s the emotion I latched on to. Because the alternative scared the shit out of me.

Is Yamada stitching her up right now? I want to go find out. Hold her other hand, maybe push stray strands of hair out of her face. She doesn’t seem to be aware of just how resilient she is, and seeing those beautiful green eyes of hers go all liquid with relief when I stepped into her room earlier was more gratifying than it should’ve been. I enjoy it when she needs me.

Guess I chose the right profession. It’s more than that, though.

I enjoy being needed by
her.

So Mia saying she’s attracted to me and wants to have sex with me? It’s like giving a person with peanut allergies a free pass to a banquet-hall-sized buffet of only dishes containing peanuts.

A person who fucking loves peanuts.

A person who’s been thinking about nothing but peanuts for the past three days.

Well, I don’t get paid to sit and agonize over something that most guys probably wouldn’t even think was a problem. Clicking the computer mouse to get rid of the screen saver, I start typing up the report. I should make a fill-in-the-blanks template for reports on patients who come in with viral URIs, wanting antibiotics. Would save some time. Still, I’m done with this one in under five minutes.

I look at my watch and see I’ve got forty-five minutes to go. Should be able to take care of at least three, maybe four more patients before I’m done for the day. That’s an average pace, and it’s what’s expected when you work in the ER.

Sometimes this can start to feel like working at an assembly line. The patients pour in one after the other, and I’m supposed to figure out what’s wrong as quickly as possible before moving on to the next case.

And somehow, in the middle of that frenetic race against the clock, I have to find a way to hang on to my humanity. To find a way to truly see and truly listen to the people in front of me. Because to me they can too easily become just a name and a list of symptoms to puzzle out, but to them, I’m the person they’re trusting to figure out what’s wrong and to know how to fix it.

It’s a responsibility I don’t take lightly. But no matter how difficult it gets, and no matter the moments that I question my sanity for willingly choosing this career, I know I was made for this. I’m doing what I’m meant to be doing. Or at least, I’m on the path to it, and I don’t plan on letting anything lead me astray.

Not even Mia, regardless of how much she seems to need me. Like when she almost cuts off her thumb and has no one else to take her home from the hospital. Which I will do with no grumbling and no resentment.

Because it’s Mia. And because that’s what I do.