Limits

by Susie Tate

  ‘I’m taking her,’ he told Millie, reaching up for her hands and pulling them apart to hold in his larger ones. She started in surprise (something she always seemed to do when it came to physical affection) and her eyes dropped from his to fix on his shirt collar before she swallowed. He moved closer, focusing on her lips, and heard her quick indrawn breath as she stiffened. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ he said, his lips a hair’s breadth from hers. Before she could pull away he brushed his lips against hers in a barely-there kiss, which was broken when he received another poke in the shoulder. Millie used the opportunity to snatch her hands away and take a step back. Pav grinned; he’d take her retreat for now but he had felt her shiver when their lips met, and he could see her dilated pupils even without direct eye contact.

  ‘Okay, okay,’ he said, turning to Lindy and holding his hands up in surrender. ‘Let’s get going.’

  As he drove away he looked in his mirror to see Millie still frozen on the pavement. Her hand lifted so that her fingers could touch her mouth.

  ‘Yer a chancer, hey, laddie?’ Lindy piped up from the passenger seat, and Pav smiled.

  ‘That I am, Mrs McBride, that I am.’

  Pav eventually slowed to a stop in front of the small terraced house. He got out of the car and pulled open the passenger door but Lindy remained firmly in her seat.

  ‘I cannae get oot, laddie,’ she told him. ‘Millie always helps me.’ Pav nodded, extending his hand to take hold of hers.

  ‘May I escort you inside, Mrs McBride?’

  Lindy scowled at him but took his hand in a fierce grip to help lever herself out of the car.

  Pav was taking nearly all her weight as he supported her onto the pavement. He couldn’t imagine how Millie managed it at her size. As he walked her to her door his definition of slow pace took a hit. Lindy was practically going backwards. She stubbed her toe on the first step and some very colourful language was directed Pav’s way (at least what he could understand was colourful, the rest was in Scottish).

  ‘You dinnae tell me it were there!’ she accused after her tirade was over.

  ‘Sorry, I –’

  ‘Millie always tells me where the step is. I dinnae have to tell the lass to do it either. She’s a cannie as well a braw, that one.’ Once Pav had half-carried Lindy up the steps, the search for her keys in her cavernous handbag commenced. It was another five minutes before he had the door open, and once inside he realized that supporting Lindy up the steps was the least of Millie’s duties. Lindy had him turning on her lights and then feeding her numerous cats.

  ‘Lindy, I really must be getting –’

  ‘Impatient lad, aren’t you?’ Lindy’s low croaky voice interrupted him as she settled back into a large armchair in her sitting room. Pav suspected it was where she spent the night. ‘My Millie needs patience. Come over here.’ Lindy waved him over impatiently then when he was standing next to her chair she tugged on his hand so that he would crouch to her level.

  ‘She needs kindness,’ Lindy said, her accent still strong but her words much clearer now. Pav suspected that when she wanted to Lindy could speak however she wanted. Her faded blue eyes caught his and it was like she was peering into his soul. ‘I’ve been around a long time, laddie. I know pain when I see it. You be kind to her, you ken me?’

  ‘I understand,’ said Pav as the smile he’d been wearing faded from his face.

  The truth was that he didn’t. Not completely. But he wanted to. He wanted to understand a beautiful woman who shut herself off from others to such an extent that she had built a reputation as a notorious bitch. A woman whose anxiety didn’t allow her to speak in public. A woman so brilliant that she would revolutionize a whole aspect of medicine, but had so little self-belief that she would not consider attending a single international conference. A woman who would go to bingo with her gran every week and make sure that an old lady she wasn’t even related to was safely home, whilst showing little or no impatience or annoyance.

  And he’d eaten one of those shortbreads tonight.

  There was no going back after that.

  Chapter 13

  Lamb to the slaughter

  ‘Jumped-up little know-it-all bitch,’ Lucas muttered under his breath, and Pav stiffened next to him. Millie was across the conference table, her face giving nothing away, but when his gaze flicked down to her hands he knew she’d heard the arrogant bastard: they were curled into tight fists and the whites of her knuckles were showing.

  ‘Watch it,’ Pav growled low. Lucas flicked him a look of annoyed confusion before focusing back on the cause of his irritation.

  ‘I’ve already consented the patient,’ Lucas told the room through gritted teeth, but his eyes were focused on Millie.

  ‘You consented her for the wrong procedure,’ Millie told him, or to be more accurate she told his chest, before looking down at the notes in front of her. To everyone else at the meeting her words would sound cold, devoid of any emotion; only Pav could make out that fine tremor in her voice and the stress-induced tightening around her eyes.

  ‘I consented her for an open procedure and that is what she is going to get.’

  ‘The evidence is clear that a percutaneous destruction of the stone would lead to enhanced recovery and lower post-op risk.’ Millie paused then, with visible effort, unclenched her fists so that she could pass a sheaf of papers across the table. Lucas levelled a furious glare at her before he snatched them out of her hands. Millie flinched and sat back in her chair.

  She was scared.

  Christ, Pav was going to lamp this moody bastard if he carried on like this. Lucas had settled back in his chair and was now glaring at the papers in front of him. Despite his annoyance, Pav had to bite back a smile. Millie was right: the evidence was clear.

  ‘I’m not having this conversation,’ Lucas spat out. ‘I’m a consultant surgeon and this is my patient. You’re not even a fully functioning junior doctor, if the rumours are true.’

  ‘Lucas,’ Pav said in a warning tone which Lucas, the dumb bastard, ignored.

  ‘It’s true,’ Lucas said, his voice rising along with the colour in his face. By contrast Millie’s cheeks were almost deathly pale. ‘She’s not a consultant. Why are we letting her dictate this stuff to us? Why is she even here? She’s a junior bloody doctor but she can’t even do that right. Pisses everyone off too much to be let out on her own.’

  The MDT was a weekly run-down of the complex urology patients and their treatment plans. The urologists, the pathologists, the oncologists and more recently the interventional radiologists were in attendance. Millie always came with another of the radiology consultants (until recently Pav had just thought this was because they travelled in packs, but he now realized that she was too junior to be radiology’s official representative in the meeting. The fact that the useless blokes that generally accompanied her didn’t seem to have any idea what they were on about didn’t seem to matter). Usually Millie said very little in the meetings. Instead she whispered to the consultant she was with or passed them notes with the relevant information. It was unfortunate that Lucas had decided to be on his period the very same day that there was no consultant with Millie. Pav would be having words with the fucking radiology department, but not before he’d sorted this mess out.

  ‘Sit down, Lucas,’ he said, managing to maintain his calm voice despite his growing anger.

  ‘Pav, mate, I’ve already booked the patient onto my next list. This is complete –’

  ‘Judging by this lot,’ Pav said, pointing at the now discarded papers in front of Lucas, ‘you booked her for the wrong procedure.’

  ‘Now just a –’

  ‘Shut the fuck up,’ Pav snapped, and Lucas’s mouth fell open. ‘Sit down.’ Still gaping at Pav, his mouth opening and closing in shock, Lucas sank down into his seat.

  Pav was a ‘good lad’. He was charming, sometimes outrageous, mostly easy-going; he did not issue sharp orders at meetings with an almost fierce expression o
n his face.

  ‘Now you listen up, mate. I’m going to let it go this time that your knowledge of the subspecialty you have been specifically employed to deal with is woefully lacking. Open removal should only be used as a second- or even third-line option; even with a stone this large. I will be asking for an audit of your other cases to see if the management decisions were evidence-based or not. Millie might not be a consultant … yet. But that makes the fact she knows a hell of a lot more about this, frankly, quite scary.’

  Lucas narrowed his eyes and his mouth flattened into a disapproving line, but he sat back in his chair. Pav was the Surgical Director. Lucas had to accept his opinion, but from the way he glared at Millie through the rest of the meeting it was obvious he did not like it at all. Millie’s hands stayed clenched so tightly it had to be cutting off the blood supply to her fingers, and when she wasn’t doing that she kept straightening her files and lining up pens in front of her.

  So when the meeting came to a close and Millie bolted for the conference-room doors Pav decided to let her go. She needed to calm down in her office. He would check on her later.

  ‘So, she’s Millie to you is she, Pavlos?’ Lucas sneered as Pav pushed up from his seat. ‘Okay, I get it. First name terms and all that. Not a single other person I know calls her anything other than Dr Morrison – well, that is if you don’t count Nuclear Winter as an actual name – but you, for you she’s Millie.’

  ‘Careful, Luc,’ Pav muttered, feeling a muscle jump in his cheek.

  ‘This proves once and for all that you will fuck anything that moves,’ Lucas said as the room started to empty out. ‘Christ, I already thought your standards were low after that locum last year, but I did at least think you went for actual live females rather than poorly reanimated corpses with as much personality as a badly programmed android. Jesus, didn’t she freeze your dick off the first time?’

  Pav’s vision clouded with fury. It wasn’t a totally alien feeling; with three beautiful sisters at the same school as him and a lot of arseholes wanting to trash-talk them when they couldn’t get into their pants, Pav was no stranger to this type of anger. But it had been years since he’d been driven to it. Without thinking he spun around and stalked over to Lucas. His expression must have communicated just how angry he was, as Lucas took a quick step back, lost his balance and fell into one of the chairs behind him. Pav leaned over Lucas’s shocked frame and pointed a finger into his chest.

  ‘Don’t you ever talk about her like that again or I swear to God it won’t just be your career that’s fucked up.’

  After Lucas gave him a sharp nod Pav released him and stepped back. Movement at the doorway of the conference room caught his eye and he turned to see Millie a few feet inside, her eyes wide and her mouth open as she regarded the two men in front of her. Lucas, still breathing heavily and bristling with fury, flew out of the chair and stormed around the table, before skirting Millie without giving her a second look.

  ‘I … I came back for my bag,’ Millie’s shaky voice came to Pav, and he watched her retrieve it from under the table. ‘I thought everyone would have left. I … um …’ She started backing away towards the exit and Pav moved quickly to cut her off.

  He took a deep breath to help calm himself down as she spun to face him. Not only had that stupid twat wound him up, but also he found himself unreasonably annoyed that he should always be trying to block Millie’s escape from him in some way or another. Why couldn’t she be like the vast majority of the other females Pav interacted with? None of those women ran the other way.

  ‘Uh … hey, Mils,’ he said softly, watching with satisfaction as heat hit her cheeks and her lips parted on a sudden exhale, ‘how much did you hear?’

  ‘I … um … you … you were very angry,’ Millie whispered.

  ‘Yes, I was,’ Pav told her, narrowing his eyes as she took a small step back. ‘I’m sorry, Millie, but in my opinion he deserved a lot worse. But that’s not what I want to talk about. I want to know how much of that shit you heard.’

  ‘I … you …’ Millie spread her hands in front of her. ‘Do you do that a lot?’

  ‘What?’ Pav asked, frowning at her and cocking his head to the side.

  ‘Get angry and … shout at people. Do you do that a lot?’

  ‘He can take it, Millie,’ Pav told her. ‘If it makes you feel any better he likes to play Head or Gut when he’s drunk: nearly broke my jaw last year. There’s no way he’s reporting me to HR for … encouraging him to sit in a chair.’

  ‘Head or Gut? What on earth is –’

  ‘So, now we’ve established that the little prick deserved it,’ Pav said, cutting her off, as he had no intention of explaining the dynamics of Head or Gut to Millie and giving her any more ammunition to keep backing away from him, ‘now, I’d like to know what you heard.’

  Millie looked beyond him to the door and sighed. ‘It’s nothing I haven’t heard before. Believe me. I don’t even blame people for disliking me.’

  The matter-of-fact way Millie spoke about something Pav knew had to hurt her made his gut clench. He walked to her slowly, relieved that she wasn’t backing away from him anymore, and reached up to put his hands on her shoulders.

  ‘They don’t know you.’

  Millie rolled her eyes. ‘If they knew me they would think I was even more weird than they already do.’

  She said it as if she was telling him the weather. To anybody else it would seem that it was all the same to her, like she was just stating a fact. But Pav could feel the tension in her shoulders under his hands. He was great at reading people, always had been. Millie might be the most complicated, guarded woman he’d ever met but he knew that, whatever she said, other people’s opinions mattered to her. He knew that although her words sounded practiced, as if she’d accepted and become used to the situation, it still hurt her. But he also knew that he wasn’t going to be able to change the way she viewed her life right now. He had to pick his battles.

  ‘Tonight,’ he said, and she frowned in confusion at the rapid subject change. ‘I’m taking you out for dinner tonight. Okay?’

  She bit her lip. ‘I can’t tonight.’

  ‘Look, it’s just dinner, I swear. I don–’

  ‘No, really, I can’t. It’s book group again. They want to do it every week and … well … Kira’s coming to pick me up this time.’ She lowered her voice to a whisper as if expecting Kira to leap out from under the table at any moment. ‘I’m a little scared of her to be honest. I didn’t know how to say no.’

  Pav almost groaned. He’d been the one to coerce the girls into forming a bloody book group for the express purpose of coaxing Millie out of her shell. It seemed that his tactic was backfiring on him. Did they have to meet every goddamn week?

  ‘I’ll pick you up,’ he told her, and her eyes slid away from his to his shoulder.

  ‘Uh … I don’t even know where we’re going.’

  ‘I’ll find out, don’t worry,’ he told her.

  ‘Um … okay,’ she whispered, and then something beautiful happened. Her clear grey eyes met his and she smiled. It was the first spontaneous smile he’d managed to squeeze out of her. He felt like he’d won the Olympics. He started to lean in. She blinked as her smile dimmed and her eyes lost focus.

  ‘There you are, Dr Morrison.’ An impatient voice sounded from the doorway and Pav’s head jerked away from hers. Millie blinked again. They both turned towards the balding man who was pushing his way into the room. Pav recognised him as the head of the radiology department. The one who’d helped him bully Millie into presenting at the Grand Round. A wave of guilt swept through Pav, morphing rapidly into anger at the guy’s next words. ‘I thought you’d got lost on the way back from the meeting. There’s a whole stack of reporting to do, you know. We kind of need you down in the department.’ His eyes flicked from Millie to Pav’s hands on her shoulders, and then to Pav himself. ‘Oh … er … hello, Pavlos, old chap. What are … ?’ He trailed off and rubbe
d his beard.

  Much to Pav’s annoyance Millie had lost that unfocused look in her eyes; it had been replaced with anxiety and her hands had coiled back up into tight balls. She pulled back from Pav and took two steps away.

  ‘Barney,’ Pav said through gritted teeth.

  ‘I was just getting back,’ Millie muttered, looking down at the carpet and pushing a rogue lock of hair, which had escaped the complicated hairstyle at the back of her head by sheer force of will, behind her ear. Pav caught her arm as she passed him.

  ‘Sorry, Millie,’ he said as she shot him an adorable, wide-eyed, annoyed look. He bit back a smile. Millie’s annoyance he could handle, in fact he was unreasonably heartened that she would show him that much emotion. He was getting somewhere. ‘But I need to talk to Barney for a sec. I’ll catch you later, okay?’ Millie nodded in vigorous agreement and pulled her arm away to leave.

  ‘Right,’ Pav started as soon as the door closed behind her. ‘Barney, were you aware that Millie came to the meeting alone today?’

  ‘Well …’ Barney paused and scratched his head. ‘She seems to cope okay with this stuff and we’re so stretched on the consultant rota at the moment that we may have just …’ He trailed off and shrugged. ‘I’m sure Dr Morrison conveyed the relevant facts.’

  ‘Her name is Camilla, Millie for short. But I’m sure you already know that,’ Pav told him in a low voice.

  ‘Uh … right, yes, of course, I –’

  ‘You know as well as I do that a registrar issuing orders to a room full of consultants is not going to go down well, however many facts she manages to convey. And passing her off as a consultant is not going to work from now on. Not after Lucas’s little outburst in the meeting.’

  ‘Look, we’ve all got to pull together at the moment,’ Barney told him. ‘If that means a perfectly capable junior like Dr Mor … I mean Millie has to go to a couple of meetings without her hand being held, then …’

  ‘How many of your other registrars would you send unaccompanied to the MDT?’