So instead of sulking and enjoying a nice evening of Harrison Ford punching Nazis and looking super-hot, I was here, wearing a tight, short sequined dress, makeup, and my sexiest pair of heels. And for what? I was alone and lonely. I could dance alone if I wanted to, and pretend that I felt good, but it wouldn’t make me feel any better.
Caroline tried to get me to stay out on the dance floor after a few songs had elapsed, but I effectively dodged her. She shook her head, shrugged, and continued her get-down solo. I envied her confidence. Even with all the liquor in me, I wasn’t Caroline. I was still a goody two shoes deep down in my soul. After all, I was a twenty-four-year-old single virgin who lived with her super-Catholic mom.
“Faith! Hey Faith!” a voice to my left intoned. I grimaced and cut to the right. Mitch Walker, one of the nurse anesthetists, was approaching rapidly and I’d rather gargle glass than put up with more of his heavy-handed pursuit. He wasn’t a bad guy, I just had no interest in him and he couldn’t seem to understand that.
As I slipped through the crowd away from Mitch, I nearly ran straight into Daniel Finley, a recently divorced, older physician that worked in the pediatrics department. He looked down at me in shock at the near-miss and then smiled.
“Faith, wow,” he told me, “you should do your hair like that more often.” His smile said that he was rapidly reevaluating our previously purely professional relationship. “Would you like to dance?”
I smiled at him and shook my head. Too old. Too weird. “I’ll have to take a rain check Dr. Finley,” I managed. “I’m on my way to get some water.”
Before Mitch could catch up, I dodged Daniel and started edging towards the bathrooms. It seemed like every man I worked with wanted to make a bad decision with me tonight. Every man except the one I wanted, that is. Just my luck.
“Hi Faith, you look beautiful tonight. What do I have to do to get you to dance with me?” The voice was deep, familiar, and so perfectly timed that I nearly laughed out loud.
Of course.
Of course, it was Eric Carter who would find me next. The young doctor was hot, polite, interested, and one-hundred-percent off limits to a girl like me. It was just fine for resident or staff physicians to sleep with nurses. It was career suicide for nurses to sleep with doctors—particularly the residents.
It’s a cruel, bizarre double standard, but it’s also the truth. We worked at a Catholic hospital, which really only made it all that much worse and hypocritical. Eric’s medical career would survive a failed relationship with me, but mine wouldn’t. Once we broke up, I’d be the one who got the crappy shifts, the poor performance reviews, the suggestions to look elsewhere because I ‘made people uncomfortable’.
I was simply more replaceable than he was. I’d worked at this hospital for three years. He’d been here for less than one. I was sure he didn’t even realize what he was tempting me with when he insisted on flirting with me all the time.
As if proving his point, Eric smiled at me and extended a hand. The bright, dancing lights of the dance floor beckoned. Eric looked very different in a suit. Without the white coat, stethoscope, and the scrubs, he looked less serious, although of course he looked phenomenal in the white coat and the scrubs. He’d look good in just about anything.
Especially, um, less. He’d look really great in… less. A lot less. I tried to push the thought aside, but it was sticking in my brain like a glitch. It raddled around and around in there, becoming more visual all the time. My hormones had taken control of the reins. I was just along for the ride.
Tall, clearly in incredible shape, and with the sort of hyper-symmetrical, wholesome good looks that made my heart pound and eyes that made my thoughts flee, he was everything I wanted and more. His green eyes sparkled in the low light, like he knew a secret. He probably just knew how much I secretly liked him.
If it were merely a physical crush, I could probably have resisted him, but the fact that he was also brilliant, tenacious, and easy to work with was icing on a cake that made me stay instead of running away. Thanks to Caroline’s bad influence and my own impressionable weakness, I was in a state of helpless lust. I gaped up at Eric like a guppy that flopped up on land to escape a catfish and ended up staring at a tiger. The tequila running through my veins made me giggle instead of balk. I’d been fighting my attraction to this man for a year.
“What are you prepared to do?” The words coming out of my mouth were brave, but I wasn’t. My heart was fluttering wildly against my ribs, but I couldn’t let him know that. I fluttered my eyelashes instead.
Apparently, it was enough of an invitation. He plucked my hand from my side and held it between both of his. His big hands felt warm and safe, and Eric’s gaze was solemn. He shook his head from side to side.
“Anything,” he told me. His voice was pure awe. “I’ll do anything you want.”
What could I say to that? He led me out onto the dance floor.
1
Eric
The sun wanted to hurt me. It crept through the drapes in my bedroom, found my face, and mercilessly attacked an innocent, deeply hung over man. The cruel, blinding, seeking rays found their ways between my eyelids, baking them with light and heat until consciousness rose back up from wherever alcohol and exhaustion had banished it. I grumbled something and flopped over on my side, confused to find that I was on the carpeted ground next to my bed, instead of in it.
With a concerted effort, I peeled my eyes open a bit wider. I’d slept in my contact lenses and my eyes were not happy about the abuse. It took about thirty seconds of blinking before I could properly understand my physical predicament. During that time, I heard a feminine gasp, a slight rustling to my right, the pitter-patter of bare feet and then a door opening and closing with a decisive pop. All that meant I was alone by the time I was prepared to see what was going on. Understanding what I did eventually see took even longer.
I hadn’t been alone last night. That much was obvious. But since I couldn’t for the life of me remember what had happened, I was forced to put the pieces together like an especially untalented private investigator. Or that guy from the movie Memento.
The scene told the story through a hundred little clues. First, I was naked. I don’t usually sleep entirely naked, although the lack of any condoms, used or unused, and the fact that I was on the floor seemed to imply that I’d been less lucky than I’d perhaps hoped. Still, she’d stuck around until morning. My bed smelled like someone who used a tropical scented shampoo and/or body lotion, rather than my usual ‘mountain fresh’ all-in-one man wash. I crawled up into it and basked in the feminine smell and leftover warmth.
Next, the piercing pressure of something against my left flank provided the real clue to what happened last night. I wriggled back and forth until I could pull the object free. It was a St. Raphael Hospital System ID belonging to Faith McNamara. She smiled out from the photo like the Mona Lisa.
Faith went home with me last night?
Excitement and joy shot through me, although they were quickly tempered by the knowledge that she’d clearly taken off as soon as she woke up. I tried and failed to remember what had happened. There had been dancing, and then drinking, and then kissing against a wall… The memories got fuzzy after that. I shook my head to try and shake the synaptic connections back into their proper alignment, but if I’d been as drunk as I suspected, those synaptic connections might not be there to find. They were too soaked in alcohol to ever stick in the first place.
What the fuck had happened last night?
I tossed and turned and tried my hardest to remember. Little flashes teased moments that I must have experienced but were now reduced to single images. In one, Faith was unzipping her dress. In another, I was on top of her, and kissing her long, beautiful neck. The sound of her sighs and gasps teased the edges of my sensory memory, and I recalled the feeling of her hands on my bare chest, my back, and my shoulders. I remembered the feeling of her gentle teeth on my earlobe, and shivering against t
he sound of her breath in my ear. I remembered her sly smile and the way her long hair tumbled around her bare shoulders. But everything was fragmented and incomplete. After months and months of fantasizing about Faith, it was almost too cruel.
Still, the story came together enough for me to make some sense of it. The pieces suggested a narrative, even if most of the details were missing.
Faith had been here, in my apartment. She’d been in my bed. We’d done… something. Something that wasn’t sex but was clearly close to it. And now she was gone, rushed off in such a huge hurry that she forgot her ID badge.
I hoped to god that I hadn’t embarrassed myself somehow while in bed with Faith. Whatever I’d done had obviously resulted in me sleeping on the floor, so that was troubling. I shook my head against the frustration, and then regretted the sudden movement as my headache reminded me that I was very, very dehydrated. You might think that doctors would know better than to get shitfaced. You’d be wrong.
I declared defeat in trying to remember exactly what had happened with Faith in my bed. It would either come back to me, or it wouldn’t, but clearly my attempts at forcing the memories to recoalesce were not proving successful. I pulled myself out of bed and reached for my phone, only to grab something glinting on my bedside table.
It was my grandmother’s wedding ring. I blinked in confusion. What was that doing on here? I usually kept it in a locked safe in the other room. In fact, I wasn’t entirely sure I remembered the combination to that safe. And yet, here it was.
The ring wasn’t talking. I stared at it for a long, long time. It was a very pretty ring, at least, I thought it was pretty. The heavy platinum ring was set with an enormous, glowing green emerald instead of a diamond. My grandmother had insisted that diamonds were overrated years before it was a popular millennial sentiment. There were diamonds on the ring as well, however, ringing the rectangular emerald in a rainbowed halo. In the light from the morning sun coming in through the window, the ring looked even more luminous and bright than usual.
“One day you’ll find a girl that deserves a ring like this.” A voice from a much older memory echoed in my mind. My grandmother’s eyes glinted mischievously from a distance of fifteen years. Her eyes were the same bright green as the emerald. “If I’m dead by then, you can give it to her. If I’m still alive, she’ll just have to wait!”
Why would my grandmother’s engagement ring be sitting on my bedside table? My memories refused to provide any sort of an explanation. I put the precious ring back down in frustration, noticing that I’d gotten a shiny red string tangled around my own left ring finger. It looked like a piece of tinsel from a Christmas tree. I pulled it off and stared at it, waiting and waiting for an accompanying memory to surface.
Nothing.
Even after the world’s hottest, longest shower, two aspirin, a cup of black coffee and half a pint of orange juice, I was no closer to figuring out what I’d been doing the night before. I did, however, find Faith’s panties in the bedroom. The lacey, black G-string seemed to be mocking me.
Of course. Faith. She would know what happened. Deciding that the only way I’d ever learn the truth was by talking to Faith, I slipped her underwear, ID badge, and the ring in my pocket before heading off to work.
2
Faith
My mom pretended not to notice that I came in at seven a.m., still wearing the dress I’d left in the night before. The door to her room stayed closed when I slipped inside the apartment, but I’d seen the lace curtain rustling from outside. She knew. She definitely knew.
And that made one of us. My head felt like it weighed at least three times what it was supposed to weigh. I blinked blearily at my reflection in the bathroom mirror, noting the wild hair, puffy eyes, smeared makeup, and even-paler-than-usual white skin. I looked like I’d had quite the night.
When I’d woken up this morning, I’d been mostly naked in Eric’s bed. Mostly naked, in that the only thing I was wearing was jewelry. An enormous piece of costume jewelry to be specific—a huge, fake emerald.
A fight or flight response had taken over when I woke up in an unfamiliar place. I couldn’t even face Eric, who I apparently had snored so much in front of that he chose the floor over the bed. I panicked, dove into my dress and made for the door. Eric’s apartment was in an unfamiliar building in an unfamiliar part of town, but at least my phone had enough battery to get me a Lyft before Eric came looking for me. I knew I’d have to face him sooner or later, but at least now I’d do it on my own terms.
I was fairly certain, especially after I took a shower and cleaned myself, that we hadn’t had sex. I’d be starting yet another year as a virgin. Maybe that was why Eric had slept on the floor—I’d disappointed him so much with my inexperience that he didn’t even want to share a bed with me. I scrubbed away with a loofah in the shower, trying to banish the negative thoughts.
The truth was that I wasn’t the type of girl who got super drunk and went home with unattainable coworkers. I barely dated at all, even when fully sober and in control of my faculties. I’m painfully shy. Although I manage to do alright in professional contexts, I’m just not an outgoing personality or the type of woman who knows how to go out and catch and keep a man’s interest. Even when I do get asked on dates, usually I say no for the same reason. I’m afraid to mess it up.
And clearly that was exactly what I’d done with Eric. I’d messed it up. Somewhere between my shyness, my snoring, my inability to hold my liquor, my inexperience in bed, and my mild hang-ups about sex before marriage, I’d ruined whatever it was that we’d been up to in his bed. He’d ended up on the floor, tangled in a mess of blankets so deep that he’d been unable to free himself before I ran away.
Faith McNamara [7:02 a.m.]: Caroline, what did I do last night?
Caroline Riley [7:30 a.m.]: Huh? I don’t know. I left way before you did. You definitely rose to the occasion after your tequila intervention.
Faith McNamara [7:31 a.m.]: What was I doing when you left?
Caroline Riley [7:41 a.m.]: Um. I think you were dancing. I was pretty drunk.
Faith McNamara [7:42 a.m.]: Who was I dancing with?
Caroline Riley [7:53 a.m.]: I don’t remember. Can we talk later? I don’t feel so good.
Faith McNamara [7:54 a.m.]: Are you working today?
Caroline Riley [7:55 a.m.]: Tomorrow. Lunch like usual?
Faith McNamara [7:56 a.m.]: Ok
Caroline Riley [7:57 a.m.]: Ok. I gotta’ go throw up now.
I knew the feeling. Caroline might not remember what I’d been up to last night, but I was beginning to. At least, I remembered dancing with Eric with our hips pressed close together and his hands on my back. I remembered kissing him at midnight. I remembered the taste of champagne on his lips and the way he stole my breath from me. I also remembered him helping me pull my dress down over my hips, and the giddy-excited-frightened feeling of his fingers between my legs for the first time…
But all the memories were like watching a skipping movie through frosted glass. I sensed that there were pieces missing. Important pieces. Pieces that he would remember, and I would only know about if he told me. I wondered if I even wanted to know, and then admitted to myself that I just had to know. No matter how embarrassing, I had to know.
I was going to have to see him today. We were both scheduled to work. Although I’d recently been reassigned to a different unit, and would therefore be seeing him less often, avoiding him altogether was going to be impossible.
So, even though I was hung over and an overall, amnesiac mess, I put on my game face. I put on light, professional makeup. I used the blow dryer on my hair and made sure it fell in sleek, shiny sheet down my back before coaxing it up into a French twist. I even put on a pair of conservative pearl earrings—just small enough to be professional while still being feminine and pretty.
A new text message popped up, this time from my boss.
Betty Rollins [7:54 a.m.]: As soon as you get in today, Dr. K
oels wants to see you.
Dr. Koels was the chief of medicine for the entire hospital. He was my boss’ boss’ boss. I’d met him perhaps twice. Adrenaline spiked through me.
What the hell had happened last night?
3
Eric
Martin Koels [8:05 a.m.]: Come to my office ASAP.
From my car in the parking garage, and still nursing a massive headache, I stared at the incoming text in dismay. The reasons that a resident like me would get called to the Chief of Medicine’s office, alone, and ‘as soon as possible’ were very few and extremely serious.
My first thought was that I must have killed, or almost killed someone under my care. I wracked my brain for recent mistakes and came up empty. I’d made mistakes before (secretly all doctors do, we’re human), but never fatal ones. The model at this hospital meant that every decision I made was reviewed by at least three other people. It seemed impossible that I could have killed someone.
My second thought was that I must have done something really, really embarrassing at the party. Something that, perhaps, involved Faith. Something so mortifying and/or humiliating that I was about to be fired for it. My previous interactions with Koels, possibly one of the most unpleasant people I’d ever met, made me think my firing would probably involve a lot of yelling. I didn’t exactly have a wide catalogue of firing experiences to draw on (exactly zero), but I was fairly certain that being yelled at and fired for humiliating myself in front of both the hospital I worked for and the woman I had a crush on, would make the objectively bad experience even worse.
A Bad Case of You Page 2
