Rescue Nights

by Nina Hamilton

  ‘Don’t forget those older model four-wheelers don’t have a very well insulated fuel tank so make sure there isn’t any chemical leakage onto the patient or fume inhalation,’ she said, as he waited for the rest of the team on the tarmac.

  It had become her usual habit, after the official briefing, for Kate to take a minute to give him some extra advice. Today’s replacement paramedic Matt took it all in good humour.

  The specialized field of rescue medicine was such that only a certain number of individuals could fill in for Kate’s job. Until next week’s contracted replacement arrived, the base was getting by with paramedics from other shifts and paramedics from the hospital who had completed the training.

  All assisting rescue personnel were highly competent and former solider Matt was no exception. However, Kate wasn’t the only one missing her ability to participate in rescue missions. Andrew missed her presence beside him and even the way that she always pushed him. As good a professional as Matt certainly was, he couldn’t replicate the unspoken communication between them or the shared belief in their partnership.

  ‘I’ll radio ahead and get the first officers on the scene to run a double check for a fuel spill.’ With those words, Matt shouldered his med bag and made his way to the helicopter.

  Experience now told Andrew that he had another full minute before Joe would be ready for take-off. ‘Call with any new information that comes through. We should be back before end of shift, so maybe we can have Thai takeaway.’

  Kate’s mouth tightened and Andrew knew he had put his foot in it again, by referring, even obliquely and out of the hearing of everybody else, to their relationship, here in the workplace. He also knew that the only thing that would make her mood better in this moment was if she was going to climb into the helicopter with him.

  With her hair braided back neatly and the visible bruises faded and disguised by the collar, Kate looked very like the woman she had been before the accident. Except that, when the helicopter lifted off the landing pad, they left her behind, in the shadows of the rescue base.

  Andrew wanted to say something to comfort, but instead, seeing Joe was only seconds away from finishing his pre-flight duties, he forced himself to turn and walk away.

  By the time that Andrew had made it to the door of Kate’s bungalow that night, she had already arrived ahead of him. They might be sleeping together every night and sharing a workplace, but last time he had suggested it, commuting together seemed to be definitely out of the question.

  ‘I’m on my way out,’ said Kate, by way of greeting, as she opened the door to his knock.

  The tight fitting lycra warm-up pants and the towel over her shoulder would probably have given him that clue.

  ‘Light duties are not just specified for work,’ he said. ‘Pushing yourself in the gym could leave you with serious complications and even more setbacks.’

  Kate stepped even further away from where he had reached out to drop a kiss on her cheek.

  ‘Trained medical professional here,’ she said; even her upbeat joking tone was sounding forced. ‘I know my ribs are not healed but if I lose my aerobic fitness and strength it will take me even longer to come back.’

  Watching her walk out the door, Andrew thought he could probably use a workout. Between the stress of working with different paramedics on varying days and coming home to a new girlfriend who needed to be watched so she didn’t re-fracture her bones, it hadn’t been the most relaxing of months. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the amazing sex and those moments where Kate would turn around during dinner or a movie and smile that blinding smile at him, Andrew was sure he would have been burying his troubles in some rather large bottles of whiskey.

  He might not need numbing spirits but after dealing with an annoyed Kate, Andrew thought a beer wouldn’t go astray. Locking her door behind him, Andrew had decided that without Kate in the space he felt somehow her absence more strongly. Dropping his bag on the marble bench-top, Andrew barely made it to his fridge before his phone began to ring.

  Looking at the phone display, he was grateful that it wasn’t work. Aside from the human cost, he was just too plain exhausted to deal with a major disaster requiring his immediate attendance.

  ‘Hey,’ he said, not needing any formalities for John.

  ‘Have the colonies really gotten so casual that hello is just too much trouble?’ His friend and colleague’s English accent was something he suddenly realized he had missed.

  John’s chuckle made the distance to London suddenly seem much shorter. ‘If you have only rung me up for insults, I’ll think that you don’t have enough patients to make rounds interesting.’

  It would be seven-thirty in the morning over there and Andrew could hear the sounds of lifts opening as John was obviously arriving for work. The hospital building where they practised together was mammoth, with the impressive lobby having its own unique echo.

  ‘That is no way to greet a friend who is calling to give you the heads up that a certain head of department will be tendering his resignation before the end of the year. So you might want to start your networking now.’

  Andrew’s spine straightened at the news, ‘I thought they were going to have to remove his cold dead body from that office. You can’t tell me that he is leaving voluntarily.’

  ‘Apparently a teaching position turned up where the prestige outweighed the undoubtable advantages of having interns and residents treat you as their god and shudder in your sheer presence. So, Dr. Wentworth, the field is open and the candidates are already lining up so I wouldn’t dally on this for too long.’

  Andrew was immediately transported back into his old world where hospital politics meant so much. It had been easy to forget about it here, where most days the biggest controversy was over whose turn it was to do the tea run, and the fact that doctors were not disqualified from washing up duties.

  ‘Yeah well,’ Andrew said, ‘I’m not sure why you are not putting your hand up for the job.’

  ‘Even longer hours, even more paperwork, less attractive administration staff and attending committee meetings. I’ll wish you well but I won’t bother fighting you to volunteer.’

  What John was describing was Andrew’s dream job. It was just that he hadn’t dreamt it for a while. Andrew couldn’t help the wave of nostalgia as he heard Miranda greeting Dr Adams at the other end of the phone. That life might feel very different from what he was doing here but it had been what had defined him for his adult career.

  ‘So calls in to the different heads,’ John brought him back to the present. ‘I know you were coming back when your contract ended there anyway, but coming back promotion in hand would be something else entirely. Maybe as the chief of cardiothoracic surgery you could get rid of the cheating man and his unfairly acquired spouse. Then my aesthetic sensibilities wouldn’t have to object to his slimy face each day.’

  ‘Well, that is a point,’ Andrew said, taking a long draft of beer.

  ‘Enough shop talk. You haven’t emailed which makes me think you could have been busy checking out the native wildlife there.’

  Andrew hoped that John was closed behind his office door by now, or at least hoped that none of his colleagues would be able to identify the other participant in the phone call. Anyway, he wasn’t sure how ready he was to talk about Kate. The protective impulse seemed to extend further then her physical wellbeing.

  ‘Maybe there is someone around who might have caught my interest,’ Andrew hedged.

  ‘Three months to go. Get that deal sealed sooner rather than later.’

  Andrew got off the phone with some haste at the definite idea of a deadline on his relationship with Kate. He had always known he was going back to London, it was just somehow he hadn’t definitively linked it in his mind with completely leaving her behind. Maybe it was the tenuous nature of the links between them. There certainly hadn’t been anything he had been able to tell John, no labels that he and Kate had discussed. They slept together, spent ti
me together and didn’t seem to hold hands in public.

  An hour went past before Kate knocked on the glass panel next to his front door, and came in at his greeting. From the dampness of her hair where she had perspired, Andrew didn’t need to be told that she had pushed herself too hard. Andrew felt enough annoyance at that fact to not feel the need to get up to greet her. Instead, he shut down the screen where he was working on updating his resume with the skills he had gained while working on the Cairns emergency rescue squad.

  ‘If you want to shower at your place, I’ll call the pizza place for dinner,’ he said, trying not to sound like he’d prefer a dinner for one, here in his own space.

  The pain that was evident around Kate’s mouth was obviously not going to allow her to be completely deterred. ‘I’ll have a bath,’ she said. ‘And then I’ll cook a stir fry, like I planned. I’m running low on eggs, so I thought seeing as you were going to be eating the meal, getting some of yours wasn’t going to be technically stealing.’

  Andrew realized that outrageous rudeness wasn’t going to make either of their lives better. He turned to face her and was surprised by the readiness with which she entered his arms.

  Her lips nuzzled gently at the point where his neck met his shoulder and her hand tenderly traced a pattern down the top of his spine.

  The rush of emotion he felt at her touch only made the guilt at his plans to withhold his conversation with John worse. However, as he tipped his head back to better receive her caress and steadied his hands on her hips, guilt wasn’t going to be enough for him to change either his mind or his plans.

  A month later, Andrew and Kate sat with a gearbox between them, outside the consulting rooms of Cairns’s best orthopaedic specialist.

  ‘Do you want company?’ Andrew asked, suddenly not wanting her to get out of the car without him.

  ‘Joining someone in a doctor’s office is for parents, partners, or the terminally confused,’ Kate replied, as she fussed with her file of X-rays and scans. ‘We definitely don’t qualify. Anyway, seeing as you insisted on driving even though I was perfectly capable of doing the same, I’m not even going to feel guilty about leaving you out here in the car.’

  ‘Hard arse,’ said Andrew, as she opened the car door.

  ‘You’d know,’ Kate flashed a wicked smile. ‘You handle that particular part of my anatomy on a regular basis.’

  Andrew was glad to see the light-hearted way she bumped his car door closed with her hip. In the last few days, she had withdrawn behind her anxiety as the big day when her doctors decided if she was ready for active duties approached. That was why he was willing to sit in the humid heat of his car in case the news was unexpectedly bad.

  As far as he could tell, she had mainly recovered, but such were the demands of her job that she needed a report that confirmed statistics much as that of an elite athlete. He really didn’t know how she would take the news that her body was anything less than good as new. Not when she had worked so hard.

  Forty boring minutes later, as he typed up the last of the week’s incident reports on his laptop, movement at the building’s doorway had him looking up. Kate fairly galloped towards him. She stuck a document in her hand on his windscreen with panache.

  ‘Be careful with that,’ Andrew warned, as he wound the window down. ‘Command is going to want to see the original copy. I’m pretty sure that anyone who has seen how bored you have been lately wouldn’t put forgery past you.’

  When Kate got within clasping distance, Andrew snaked out his arm and pulled her towards his car door, kissing her enthusiastically through the opened window.

  ‘I am a perfectly healthy specimen, and the doctor says there is no reason for me not to resume full duties,’ she reported, in between quick touches of lips.

  ‘I assumed so,’ Andrew said. ‘That has been my professional opinion of your figure for a while.’

  Kate’s joy was contagious and Andrew’s doubts were temporarily banished. However, his hand running down her back and hers at his jaw were all too quickly halted by the blast of the horn of a passing car.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, a little public,’ said Kate. A shrug of her shoulder as she pulled back told Andrew that there wasn’t a lot of regret behind the words.

  Even as she walked around the car, she was pulling out her mobile to call base.

  ‘My ribs are healed and oxygen stats are back to normal,’ she explained to a delighted Margo.

  Impatient, Andrew started the car. Caught in her elation, he realized he was so damn sick of being so damn careful. Her body might have been getting better for a long time now, but the habit of treating her like glass had become ingrained and second nature.

  ‘See you tomorrow,’ said Kate, before she pressed the end button of her phone.

  Before she could make another call, he plucked the phone right out of her grasp.

  ‘Everyone else can wait for an hour,’ he said. ‘You can tell them the waiting room was overbooked. We’ve got plans.’

  ‘We do?’ she raised her eyebrow in question.

  Handling the wheel one-handed, Andrew ran a gentle hand along the inside seam of the thigh of Kate’s jeans. Australians didn’t do formal wear when visiting the doctor.

  ‘We should celebrate a return to good health,’ he said.

  ‘Fancy dinner? Dancing?’ she drawled.

  ‘No,’ said Andrew. ‘Maybe I should have rephrased it to my celebration. We are just going to have sex.’

  As they were speaking, he had been inching his hand higher, enjoying the texture of denim and firm thigh under his hand. He turned his attention from the road for long enough to note her pupils dilating, just a little.

  ‘All about you, huh,’ she said.

  Contradicting those words, Kate stretched one foot up to the dash to give him better access.

  Because he was getting genuinely distracted, Andrew decided that driving with both hands on the wheel might be the option preferred for safety reasons. After a definite sound of protest from the back of her throat at the ceasing of his attentions, whatever his well thought out reasoning, Kate decided an exploration of the zipper of his jeans was suddenly of great interest.

  His vision went a little blurry around the edges and he had to stop his hips from thrusting further into her hands.

  ‘I know I started it,’ he said. ‘But for future reference, for the safety of all passengers, all hands should be kept to oneself while vehicles are moving more than twenty miles per hour.’

  A lingering squeeze had him seriously considering the propriety of pulling to the side of the road and taking her there. Laughing eyes made him so glad that he had pushed her to let him accompany her to the doctors, even if he hadn’t been perfectly sure that he was going to get laid sometime in the next quarter of an hour.

  Pulling in to the parking space, he wrenched open his door and turned to Kate. ‘You’ve been practicing your jogging — run, don’t walk,’ he ordered.

  He wasn’t entirely sure what the other guests who saw them might have thought at the sight of a couple in their thirties chasing each other through the tropical paths. All he knew was that bursting, winded, through the door, all he could think about was how desperately he needed to be inside Kate, right now.

  Andrew barely cared enough about the outside world to shut the door behind them. Luckily, Kate didn’t seem to have any protests about the lack of romance as her hands were already under his t-shirt, as she eagerly tried to push the cotton material over his arms. Andrew decided that getting him undressed was secondary to seeing her skin. With that in mind, he crowded her back towards the kitchen island bench and with two hands around her waist lifted her clean off the floor onto the marble surface.

  Lying with her back on the flat surface, Kate made the most of the opportunity that enabled her to wrap her legs around him. His breath was audible as a giant exhale as she locked her heels to the small of his back.

  It was only then that their mouths fused, and Andrew’s arousal
had him jack-knifing against her as he clenched the cold stone, trying to get some control. Because that control was rapidly slipping when Kate returned the passion in her kiss.

  ‘Top off,’ said Andrew.

  He didn’t have the patience to undo what looked like twenty buttons himself. A half-smile softened her mouth as she watched him shed his own shirt, jeans, and boxers. Even in his haste, he didn’t forget the foil packet that he scrambled to remove before he dropped his clothes to the floor and kicked them away.

  Kate parted the sides of her shirt shyly, revealing a conservative tank. ‘I knew he was going to examine my ribs. I didn’t want to look like I was there to seduce the doctor.’

  Andrew decided that if she had enough time for explanations he wasn’t doing something right, so he leant down and ravished her mouth with his.

  His cock rode against the denim she still wore and the roughness of the zip had his eyes almost rolling back into his head. Bitting down on her neck the way he knew she loved, Andrew waited until he felt the involuntary shiver of her body underneath him.

  Laid out below him, she was like a feast ready to be devoured. For the first time, he didn’t feel like he had to be gentle and he was making the most of that. He didn’t even bother unclasping her bra, just pulling it straight over her head before filling both hands with her generous curves. Two days of beard growth scraped against the tender soft skin as mouth met nipple and then suckled, to Kate’s loudly expressed pleasure.

  Andrew forced himself to move away from her body long enough to be able to wrestle the tight denim and panties down her long legs. With her legs finally bare, his mouth followed a path from breast to stomach to wet heat.

  A strong kick almost brained him as his tongue hit a pleasure centre. As her body began to quake, Andrew stood up and pressed against her to luxuriate in the sensation of finally being skin-to-skin.