by Callie Hart
Damn. He’s on the verge of snapping. I’ve seen it on so many people. There’s a flicker people get in their eyes, a visible fracture in their temper that could either splinter them open or shut them down at a moment’s notice. “You obviously have a very good understanding of your sister’s condition, Mason. I’m impressed at the level of care you’ve been giving her. Let me ask you, though…do you think you can give her the same level of care at home that we can give her here at the hospital?”
He clenches his jaw. “I’m not fucking stupid, okay? I know I’m fucking up. I know she deserves better than I can give to her, but I’m trying. I’m doing my best. Of course she’d be better off here, but I can’t afford to keep her here longer than she absolutely has to be. This wasn’t her worst seizure. There are plenty more to come, and I need to make sure I can afford those five-star visits to the wonderful St. Peter’s of Mercy hospital.”
Gracie shoots me a complicated look. It contains many mixed emotions: worry; anxiety; stoicism; and lastly, guilt. The last flash of remorse is undoubtedly because of what she did a few months ago. She told the DEA she’d seen me sneaking out of the hospital, carrying bags of blood I needed to save Zeth’s life. Lowell tried to threaten me with the fact that I’d been caught stealing from St. Peter’s. I nearly lost my job. I nearly lost everything. To say things have been awkward between us since I came back to work is an understatement. I don’t blame her, though. Denise Lowell is a conniving cunt who will always get her way. Gracie has a kid to take care of. Her own job to think about. I’m sure Lowell implied she’d lose both if she didn’t tell her everything about me when she came calling at the hospital.
“So can I take her? Or shall I call the police?” Mason folds his arms across his chest, huffing heavily down his nose.
Exasperated, I scramble to think of a way to keep him here. He hasn’t been unreasonable. He hasn’t said anything that isn’t true. The seizure Millie just had was bad, yes, but given the nature of her condition it really won’t be her worst. The worst is yet to come. LSG might not kill her, but in the same vein it could. Mason’s essentially saving for his sister’s funeral. I wonder if he realizes that. I squeeze the pen I’m clenching in my hand, digging my fingernail into the hard plastic. “Look. Just give me an hour, Mason. Give me one last chance to look her over. If she really is stable enough, I’ll let you take her.”
His eyes flash. “And if she’s not stable enough?”
“Then…then I don’t know. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.” It’s a pretty poor answer to his question, but it’s all I’ve got at the moment. I’m a doctor, though. A problem solver. Give me a pair of stockings and a rubber band and I’ll figure out how to stop someone bleeding out. Give me an hour and a cell phone, and I’ll figure out how to make sure Millie Reeves receives the care she needs and deserves. Mason doesn’t believe in me yet, but he will. He blinks, the muscles in his jaw working overtime.
“I’m—I’m supposed to be at work,” he says. “I don’t have an hour.”
“Then give me eight. Go to work. Come back later on this evening and I’ll have this figured out, I swear I will.”
Mason doesn’t say anything. He shifts from one foot to the other, his right shoulder lifting up and down as he looks from me to Gracie and back again. “She’ll look after her,” Gracie says softly. “She’s an excellent doctor. We’ll call the second anything changes with your sister, Mr. Reeves.” She already has her hand on his arm, ushering him out of the reception; she doesn’t give him the option of refusing the suggestion. The anger and the frustration that was spilling out of him a second ago seems to have fizzled out in the past few seconds. I’ve seen it happen many times before; the weight of responsibility is a heavy, heavy thing. Making difficult decisions on a daily basis is crippling. Carrying around the burden of someone else’s care every single hour of every single day is enough to bow someone’s back to the point of breaking. The second someone offers to relieve you of that burden, people are often too shocked to react.
I watch Gracie walk Mason out of the building, and I feel the weight of my assumed burden pressing in already. God knows how the poor guy has borne it for so long.
******
I find Oliver Massey furiously washing his hands in the residents’ lounge. He cuts me a sideways glance when he notices me slipping through the door. “Goddamn flu bug. There are barely any nurses in the ICU. How the hell are you supposed to operate an intensive care unit when there is no staff to intensively care for anyone? Jesus.” He takes a step back when water sloshes over the side of the deep stainless steel trough he’s bending over. His suit pants slowly turn from grey to black at the hem where the water has drenched them. “Great.” Oliver picks up a towel from the neat stack beside him and pats himself down, grumbling under his breath.
“You okay? Is Alex okay?” Oliver’s usually pretty upbeat, no matter how shitty his day has been. His current bad mood is likely related to his brother’s condition.
Oliver throws the towel into the laundry bin by the lockers and sighs heavily; his chin rests on his chest as he leans, resting his back against the row of steel locker doors. “Who the fuck knows,” he says quietly. “He should be on a recovery ward by now, Sloane. He should be back at fucking work or something, not still hooked up to life support.”
Anything I might say seems futile. Oliver knows the lines we feed to people when their loved ones are fighting for recovery, because he feeds them to people too: it’s a process. These things take time. The only thing we can do now is wait. We avoid giving false hope. We skirt around words like hope altogether, because it gives the impression that the situation is no longer within our control. Hope implies an unknowable force has taken the reins on their brother/mother/sister/daughter’s health, and we are nothing more than mere bystanders, peering through a window, lips bitten between our teeth and fingers crossed behind our backs.
Instead of trying to placate him, I ask him this instead: “What can I do?”
Oliver’s shoulders slump. He’s a picture of exhaustion. “I don’t know. Something? Nothing?” He spins around and props himself up against the locker beside me, and I suspect he’d crumple to the ground without the rigid metal’s support. “Anything?” he says, breathing out loud and slow. “We’re trained for this. We’re trained to detach ourselves, and I thought fuck yeah. I have this. I can do this. If anyone I love is ever rushed through those trauma doors, I’ll be able to switch it off. There won’t be time to have a meltdown. I know I’ll be able to do everything in my power to fix them, and my hands won’t be shaking as I do it. I’ll be determined. Focused. Because that’s what they drill into us, how they teach us to be.”
“And you were, Oliver. You were all of those things. You didn’t flinch once when they brought Alex in. You were single minded and you got the job done. You saved his life.”
My words wash over Oliver like water over rock. He doesn’t feel them, doesn’t allow them to affect him in any way. “Maybe,” he whispers, staring down at his hands. He gives me a thin, hangdog smile, kind of watery around the edges. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I did do everything right in that operating room. But fuck, Sloane. They don’t equip us to deal with this part. We’re never taught to feel like them, the people pacing the hallways like caged lions because they feel…because they feel so fucking useless.”
They really don’t teach us that. It’s not in a doctor’s nature to sit back and let time do its job, as we advise so many other people to do every day. We’re relentless in nature—or at least good doctors should be. There’s no giving up. No patience. Our lives—especially the lives of trauma surgeons—are lived in five-second bursts. So much can change in those fleeting five seconds. Lives are made and broken. Loved ones survive, and loved ones are lost. Oliver and I were trained that every single second passing by is a grain of sand trickling through our fingers, one we will never be able to snatch back, and it is our duty to make each and every one of them count. So waiting
for a trauma surgeon? Waiting is an impossibility. A torturous concept that would cripple even the most pragmatic of us. Oliver must be going out of his mind.
“I need your help with something,” I tell him. This is the kindest thing I can possibly do—give him some other purpose to take his mind off his brother. “I have a situation, a tricky one, and I need your huge brain to come up with a solution for me.”
Oliver’s eyes flicker to the ceiling, and they stay there. “I’m not on shift, Sloane.”
“I’m aware.”
“Then I can’t just go interfering in your cases.” This is hospital policy—If a doctor isn’t on duty, he or she may not work on patients in any way, shape or form. They could have been drinking. They could have been doing any manner of questionable things before they walked through the entranceway of St. Peter’s of Mercy Hospital. They’re not mentally prepped to take on whatever they might be faced with, so they’re not permitted to even touch a patient. Oliver may be breaking that rule with Alex today, but he can get away with that. The chief’s given up trying to keep him away from his brother, but it will be another matter entirely if she catches him consulting on a different patient.
“You don’t need to interfere at all. You don’t even need to see the kid,” I say. “I just need some help figuring out how to keep her here.”
“The kid?”
“A little girl, suffers from severe grand mal seizures. Her older brother’s her legal guardian, and he can’t afford to keep her in for another few days.”
“Is she likely to seize again?”
Now it’s my turn to shrug. “I don’t know. There’s a risk. She’s stable for the most part.”
“Then send her home, Sloane. Let the guy minimize the costs.”
I’m surprised by this response. Oliver’s usually a proponent for as much observation as the situation can afford. “She’d be better off admitted for the next two days at least,” I point out.
An anguished look flashes across Oliver’s face. “Can we prevent her from seizing again?”
“No.”
“Can we re-admit her later if her brother’s insurance won’t cover her?”
I don’t even need to answer this one.
“Then you know what you need to do,” Oliver says flatly. “Send her home with her brother. Let her recuperate in her own bed, and give her brother some peace of fucking mind.”
Chapter Four
ZETH
We draw yet another blank at the warehouse. The calls we’ve been making for days now have all ended the same: no one knows what Lowell is up to. No one knows what her purpose is here, and no one wants to get involved, either.
Michael and I spend six hours kicking over rocks, seeing what we can discover, but the time is wasted. The bitch could be back on vacation for all we know, come to check out Pike Place Markets and the E.M.P, and we’d be none the wiser.
There is one person we could ask, of course. Mason obviously knows what she wants. He’s been asking weird, probing questions about my life, trying to tease information out of me, but I can’t quite figure out what he’s trying to make me spill. I don’t want to pin the guy to a wall and demand he tells me what the fuck is going on yet, though. Something’s telling me to watch, to wait, to see what happens. Either way, the kid’s going to fucking pay. My blood was boiling in my veins for days after I saw him talking to that unmistakable blonde bitch outside Mac’s, and it’s still simmering quietly now. It won’t quiet until I’ve made the kid hurt for betraying us. Fair enough, he doesn’t know me. He doesn’t owe me much, aside from the fact that I didn’t kick his ass and straight up leave him in the gutter when he first broke into the gym. But there’s honor amongst thieves in this shady, dark world we’re treading water in, and you can’t just go around working with the fucking DEA and expect no one to find out.
Michael and I sit in silence as we drive back into the city, each of us thinking deeply as we slip through the early dusk, heading toward the gym. As we grow closer to our destination, I feel fucking itchy and uncomfortable in my own skin.
Lowell isn’t just here for a vacation.
She’s here to mess up my shit, just like Rebel said she was. I did professionally embarrass her. I did steal her dog. Technically, she gave Ernie to me at the end, but I doubt she sees it that way. Of course she fucking doesn’t. Just when things were starting to look calm, like life was slowing down a little, like I was done dealing with shitty people, done with looking over my shoulder every time I walk out of the house, Lowell shows up again and throws me back in at the deep end. Sure, I could ignore this and let her do her thing, but it won’t work out that way. I know it won’t. Her arrival in my city is a precursor to terrible, awful things, and I need to be ready for every last one of them. If I’m not, I’m either going to end up dead or back in Chino and neither of those options are acceptable to me. Not now that I have Sloane to think about.
Speaking of which…
My phone, sitting on the dash of the Camaro, chimes, and I see ‘Doc’ quickly flash up on the screen.
Sloane: Are you busy? I need you, baby.
I immediately throw the car into fifth. “You okay to lock up after you work out?” I ask Michael.
“Sure.”
“Great.” I burn my way through the last five minutes of the journey, hands clenched tightly around the steering wheel. I’m not worried. If Sloane were in any kind of trouble, she wouldn’t have text me to ask if I was busy. She would have called until I picked up. If she absolutely had no other choice but to send a text, she’d have written SOS and nothing else—she knows the procedure if she’s threatened in any way.
Still, she needs me. She said she fucking needs me, and I won’t ever keep her waiting when she sends me a message like that. I drop Michael off, barely stopping for the guy to climb out of the vehicle before I’m tearing off in the direction of the hospital. I find Sloane in St. Peter’s deserted loading dock at the rear of the building—she’s taken to escaping there when she needs a moment to breathe—sitting on a concrete step where nurses and hospital porters sometimes come to smoke, hiding from their patients and their families.
It’s almost dark now, but I can see the pale shape of Sloane’s white coat shifting ever so slightly as I jog across the loading dock toward her. She looks up at me as I reach her, unsurprised by my sudden appearance.
“That didn’t take you long,” she whispers.
“I knew a shortcut.”
She scowls, because she knows my shortcuts involve running red lights and undercutting any driver I consider too slow, which is basically everyone else on the road. “My reckless boy. You’re gonna end up on a gurney, flat on your back, being wheeled into here one of these days.”
I shake my head. “I won’t. And if I did, I know a really good doctor. She’d probably put me back together again.”
“I don’t know about that.” She smiles softly. “All the doctors at St. Peter’s are out sick. This miracle worker of yours might be feeling a little under the weather, too.”
I sit down beside her, wrapping a protective arm around her shoulders. “I thought you’d shaken that cold?” She does look a little grey, actually. Tired, perhaps. I’m not completely stupid, so I don’t tell her this, but concern squeezes at my chest. Emotions like this still surprise me. I’m not used to caring about anyone else, especially this deeply. I thought there was a limit to how much one person could care about another, but it turns out I was wrong. It turns out the depths you can love someone are boundless. I don’t think I’ll ever reach a point where I can truly say I’ve reached my capacity for caring for this woman. It makes me weak. Vulnerable. It feels dangerous most of the time, but there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m fucking addicted to her, and I wouldn’t change that for the world.
“So? You needed me?” I nuzzle my face into her hair, breathing in deeply. Nothing smells as good as she does. She’s been working twelve hours straight and a faint chemical smell clings to her, but it ca
n’t mask the scent of her skin and her hair. I close my eyes and I can feel my dick getting hard in my pants.
Sloane knows me inside out. She knows by my inflection on the word need that my mind is already in the gutter, along with the rest of my body, where I’m coincidentally fucking her like an animal. She places one hand on my thigh, her fingertips running up and down the inside seam of my jeans.
“I’m sorry. I probably shouldn’t have text you. I’m just having a tough day.”
“Violent patient?” My mind instantly goes to these places. If any of those fuckers have been causing trouble for her, they’ll leave St Peter’s more injured and broken than they went in, I don’t give a shit who they are.
Sloane laughs. “No. Just red tape. It’s so goddamn frustrating. This little girl needs treatment and her brother’s doing his best to provide it for her, but his insurance doesn’t even come close to covering her bills. He wants to take her home. I promised him I’d have figured out a way to keep her here by the time he finished work. I have less than two hours to pull a miracle out of thin air.”
I watch her as she speaks. Lines of concern have formed between her eyebrows; her cheeks are blushed and red from her annoyance. She’s such a strong, fierce, independent person. It’s unsurprising that she’s so wound up about something so inconsequential as health insurance, or the lack thereof, and the fact that it’s preventing her from doing her job.
I plant a kiss on the side of her head, humming deeply. She pulls these reactions from me, and yet she has no fucking idea how badly she affects me. I love how committed she is to her job and to helping others. A lot of people become doctors because of the money, or because of the challenge, and invariably those are the people who end up being bad doctors. The greats, the ones people remember forever, are the ones likely working double shifts just to make sure there are doctors available to help. Just like Sloane is right now. I’d had so little experience with people who genuinely cared about the wellbeing of others that I thought it was all an act when I first met Sloane. It made me uncomfortable. Now, looking at her as she tries to overcome this bureaucratic hurdle so she can take care of a little girl, my heart aches in the strangest of ways. I could never tell her. I could never tell anyone.
