Tied Between

by Kira Barker

  “No superficial, sexed-up fuck-bunny? Don’t even deny it—you have a type, Jack. ‘Easy’ is what I’d say best describes it.”

  “Had,” he corrected me, sounding both uncomfortable and satisfied. I couldn’t help but make a face.

  “Yeah, and how’s that working out for you? I’m not even sure I want to know the answer.”

  Jack looked kind of perplexed, followed by a derisive snort.

  “Thank you so much for the immense confidence you have in me! Just because I’ve enjoyed having casual sex for a long time doesn’t mean I’m the one with commitment issues here.”

  “So I am?” I replied, feeling my voice sharpen without even wanting it to.

  “Didn’t say that,” he amended, but sounded less than sincere. “But the simple fact that I didn’t want anything serious with anyone doesn’t mean that I can’t change my mind. Sure, it was fun to chat up women, but it was also exhausting. Not just physically, but mentally. And don’t look at me like you have no idea what I’m talking about.”

  “Yeah, it must have been so hard to find another innocent young thing to teach the glory of sex to each week.”

  What little I’d made good with my admission about maybe fancying him more than I’d let on before, I was clearly destroying now.

  “How many men have ever rejected you, Erin?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “And neither does it matter.”

  “Just a rough estimate. Humor me. Five? Ten? Twenty?”

  I considered for half a block, and when my silence started to get uncomfortable, I gave up. “I don’t know, something in that range. I never made a habit of chatting anyone up, and we’ve already established in the past that I don’t have a very full record of past relationships. Remember, that was what got ‘us’ started in the first place.”

  “How could I forget?” Jack replied, offering me a quick leer. “But seriously, you have no idea how emotionally crushing it can be when you hang out at a bar, chat with a couple girls, dance with a few more, and there’s often not a single one who wants to return home with you, or even give you her number. I know that I never show it, but I got my heart crushed—quite casually—by way more women than I’ve fucked. And before you tell me that I’m to blame myself because girls don’t do casual and wait for the third date to get down to business, that’s bullshit. Even if you know how to game the system, it’s a brutal game. Can’t say I’m particularly sorry that I have two very good reasons to keep myself out of the dating pool right now.”

  “Two?” I asked, uncomfortable enough with his statement to go for the obvious.

  “Well, you and Simon?” Jack offered, a little annoyed at my question. “And, just saying, I get way more sex now. Heck, even if things go down to the average two-times-a-week married couple thing, I still get laid more often than before. And I don’t have to worry about rejections, or other superficial things. Granted, I have to put up with your snoring—“

  “I don’t snore!” I huffed, indignant.

  “You do, and it’s kind of cute, until it gets annoying. But that’s not the point I was making. I’m happy where I am right now. And I want to keep it that way. That’s why I’m concerned about you and Simon getting your shit together in the playroom. And that’s why it eats away at me that he’s clearly still hurting from our little altercation back then. I know that it takes time to get over that, and a lot more even to grow together as a unit. I just don’t want to jeopardize it, know what I mean?”

  I nodded and swallowed the quip that I hadn’t expected something so deep from him. I might often joke that Jack wasn’t exactly the philosopher kind of guy, but I doubted that either Simon or I would have ever become friends with him if he’d actually been the guy he liked to pretend to be with all those floozies.

  “Do you have a game plan for how to get things straightened out with Simon? Honestly, I’m glad that between him and me, there’s a lot less to get over than between you guys.”

  “You really believe that?” Jack asked, clearly thinking otherwise.

  I shrugged. “We have some issues that we need to move past. But mostly, I can use the fact that he’s feeling awful because he knows how I feel about him but he doesn’t quite return my feelings as leverage against him, should any other issues arise. Which I doubt, because we’re pretty much on common ground there, just got a little sidetracked with all the drama.” I paused, thinking about my own words for a second before I glanced over to Jack. He was watching me, raising his brows when he caught my gaze. “Not that different from what we have, really,” I admitted. “Except, of course, I feel absolutely no remorse about not having fallen for you. That’s your fault, not mine.”

  “Of course not.” He laughed, and I felt weight lifting from my heart at how sincere he sounded.

  “Really, it takes more than stellar skills in the sack to make me fall for you,” I teased.

  “Time, as you already said,” he grumbled under his breath.

  “Acting like you don’t take me for granted might help, too,” I offered.

  “I’ve done a lot of shit in my life, but I’ve never taken you for granted,” he shot back, but there was a considering look on his face. “I might get back to you on that when you’re not all sweaty and gross.”

  “As if that ever deterred you.” I laughed, then quickly danced to the side and increased my speed when he tried to make a grab for me. “But first, you have to catch me! First one home gets to jump Simon and rub her disgusting, sweaty self all over him!”

  “Oh, you just watch!” Jack called after me, slowly increasing his own pace. “Or I just might. Because there’s no way he’ll appreciate such a wake-up call, and you make those hilarious squealing noises whenever he holds you down and tickles you. For being such a brat, I might just help him there.”

  Shaking my head at him, I tried not to grin, but that was pretty much impossible at the mental image his words conjured up.

  Yeah, we might still need some time—but we were definitely getting there.

  Chapter 9

  Jack let me win, but considering I had agreed to go running with him in the first place, I found that only fair. Neither of us actually accosted Simon in our sweaty, stinky state, which was likely for the better, as he still needed an entire hour to make it past the glare-at-us-over-his-coffee-mug morning state. In hindsight, remembering that morning a few weeks back when I’d crashed here after Jack had abandoned me and Simon had gotten up extra early—my kind of ass-crack-of-dawn early—to get breakfast for us made me realize that part of the dejection I still felt over the fact that he hadn’t fallen head over heels in love with me was a truly selfish, silly notion. As was my latent fear that Jack would very soon tire of screwing just Simon and me.

  We spent the rest of the day lazing around, until I had to return to work—as usual. Having to leave the guys grated like few other things, and for a boring night shift no less didn’t make it better. I was used to grueling work schedules—as was everyone working in medicine—but it had never emotionally dragged on me as it did now. Everyone had warned me about my oncology rotation because of the obvious—and watching more than one family having to say goodbye to their loved ones weighed heavily on me, of course—but it wasn’t the frustration of not being able to save everyone that started to weigh on me. It was the bore of regularity—OR schedules that everyone stuck to, virtually no deviation, and endless shifts where nothing happened at all except making rounds and trying to assure people who were beyond assurance that we were doing the best for them and their loved ones, on the rare occasion that I wasn’t in the OR. I’d always known that I wasn’t made for this, but as my first month drew to a close, I was even more sure that I wouldn’t have a future here. I just needed the thrill and the challenge of the emergency room, where split-second decisions decided between life or death, and where I didn’t have to read patient files that were thicker than a Stephen King novel.

  And it was exactly on the afternoon when I thought that t
hose last couple of weeks I still had on my rotation would be the end of me that I received a phone call. Not just any call, but the call I had been hoping for—or so I guessed, when I saw Zoe Tyne’s new office number flash on my missed calls list.

  I called her back immediately, not expecting to get her on the line, but the sudden churning in my stomach wouldn’t have let me dawdle otherwise—ignoring the fact that it was the middle of my day shift and I shouldn’t have taken any private calls unless they were an emergency. In many ways, this one was.

  The call went through and I held my breath, but it wasn’t the sharp voice of my former mentor that answered me, but the pleasant soprano of the administrative assistant of the HR department of the Memorial Trauma Center who replied. Fighting down my sense of dejection, I told her who I was and who I was calling for, and after checking her computer, she told me that Zoe had called me to arrange a job interview for me at my earliest convenience. I rattled off my work hours quicker than I thought the woman could possibly coordinate the schedules, and hung up a minute later with a huge grin on my face.

  I knew that it wasn’t a real job interview, but I was still nervous as hell as, a few days later, I walked through the visitor entrance of what I really fucking hoped would be my new workplace soon. Everything was new, barely a speck of lint or a scrape mark anywhere in sight. Not that I cared about that—the fact that they had state-of-the-art everything in equipment was much more important—but I couldn’t deny that the impression it all left on me was a great one. Not that any of the teaching hospitals I’d worked at had been anything less than top-notch, but this was different. This was something more. But then I was biased.

  Thanks to the directions I had gotten, I found Zoe’s office quickly enough. I’d half expected her to meet me in the ER, or maybe the cafeteria, but this was a lot more formal than anything I’d ever encountered her in. It was a small office, but not shared space, and a lot better than a corner in the doctor’s lounge.

  I felt immediately better when I saw that she was wearing her usual surgical scrubs underneath the crisp white lab coat. Actual street clothes would have been too intimidating. It was bad enough that I was here as a civilian.

  Her light brown eyes lit up and her mouth curved into a real smile as she saw me enter and quickly got up, shaking my hand professionally. Like mine, her grip was strong, but then it needed to be. She hadn’t changed since I’d last seen her—which was no surprise, seeing as that had been just a month ago. She was still more power and energy packed into her wiry, blonde-fury frame than I’d seen in anyone I’d ever worked with. If a doctor could simply will a patient not to die on her table, it was her.

  Small talk had never been her forte, and she thankfully kept it to a minimum, just asking me about my current rotation because I figured it would give her some sense of innate satisfaction to hear me complain about it. I tried to fill my words with more enthusiasm than I felt, but couldn’t hold back a relieved exhale when she cut to the chase.

  “No doubt you already know why I called you here today,” she started, then paused for a second. “Or think you know. And I’m not going to keep you guessing much longer. I have good news, but it’s likely not the news you want to hear.”

  I forced myself to relax in my seat and tried my best to keep my heart from sinking.

  “Hit me with it. Any good news sounds great to me.”

  She shrugged, taking me at my word.

  “I know you’ve been gunning for the trauma surgery fellowship. And you’ll get it. Just not this year’s match, but the one after that.”

  I didn’t need to do a quick calculation in my head. From what I’d expected, I would have had just a few months between the end of my residency and the beginning of the next step in my career. Now I had more than a complete year in between.

  I tried to take the news with a straight face and a smile, but it was pretty obvious from the look in Zoe’s eyes that I was failing miserably.

  “But I have it for the next round,” I finally tried to ask, but my voice was barely working. Sure, I’d always known that there was the possibility that I wouldn’t get it, but getting confirmation of that now was a lot harder to take than I’d thought.

  “I have the papers for you to sign right here,” she replied, briefly looking at a folder on her desk. One of five, I noticed. I wondered if the others held the papers for the young surgeons who’d outperformed me.

  “Thank you,” I got out somehow, because it was about as much as I was able to get through my constricted trachea. I didn’t even read the papers, just skimmed them, but the black script on white blurred too much before my eyes, even when I tried blinking. My eyes were dry, that was a small comfort, but it only helped me so much.

  “I’ll have our human resources department mail you a copy,” she promised, then halted, clearly uncomfortable. I’d never seen her like this, unsure what to say or do, so completely at odds with how she usually acted. “You’re the most promising surgeon I’ve ever had the joy to work with. I wish I could have offered you something else, but they’re already doing me a favor by creating this one additional slot out of the usual rotation. It wasn’t possible to get it financed on a shorter time frame. And before you think that it’s any kind of alms or favoritism, better think again. If your application hadn’t shone out of the pile of crap the committee has had to wade through over the past months, you wouldn’t be sitting here today.”

  That was more like her, but I still had a hard time keeping a straight face.

  “Guess then I’ll see you in two years from now, right?”

  Her eyes bored into mine, keeping me rooted in my spot—not that I’d tried to get up.

  “Not so fast. Unless you’re planning on lazing away that year on sabbatical or some other shit?”

  I wondered if she was asking something else, but then why wouldn’t she have said so out loud?

  “Quite frankly, right now I don’t know what I’ll be doing,” I admitted, happy that my tone sounded wry rather than pressed. “Continue to moonlight in any ER that wants me, I guess. Been working well so far to keep me sane.” And kind of ahead in paying my student loans, thankfully.

  “Now that sounds like a recipe for a malpractice suit waiting to happen,” she grunted, then snorted when I looked at her sharply. “Not because you screw up. I know you’re better than that. But it’s awful enough to work a job like that as a nurse, constantly confronted with teams you’re not exactly a part of. It’s worse when you’re supposed to head said team.”

  “And what do you suppose I should do instead? Not operate at all and be so out of practice when I show up for my fellowship that a first-year intern would do a better job?”

  Even beside myself, I couldn’t help but like her derisive laughter.

  “Oh, you’d go insane within a month. No, on the contrary. With your main concern out of the way, I have a proposition for you. A rather unconventional one, but hear me out before you balk.”

  “That bad?” I interjected, only half joking.

  “After working with you on and off for several years, I know you well enough to be aware that, like so many others of our calling, you don’t exactly suffer from lack of confidence and arrogance where your standing as surgeon is concerned,” she told me succinctly.

  “Wasn’t it you who told us in the second residency year that you can’t be a good surgeon if you don’t have a god complex?” I reminded her.

  “And I stand by that conviction,” she agreed. “You have to rely on your skill and judgment to make calls and turn them into action, and you can’t do that if you aren’t a hundred percent sure that you are the right woman for the right job. But I also feel like, sometimes, humility serves us well to remind us that we’re only human.”

  “Just spit it out,” I told her. Really, stringing me along was worse than anything she could tell me.

  “It’s a two-part proposition. The second part is what you’ve already planned—I’m in dire need of someone to pick up
the slack in the ER when we’re understaffed, and we are always understaffed. Weekends, holidays, times when our in-house doctors like to put up their feet and turn in before they actually keel over. You’re young, you don’t have a family to ruin yet that would suffer under these hours, and I’ll make sure to put in some regular shifts so you get the nice cases, too, but you know that the ER doesn’t work on a normal schedule.”

  “Saturday night at a full moon is our Black Friday,” I agreed, already feeling the heavy blanket of despair lifting. “So do I have this right? You’re offering me a non-regular job right here, in this hospital?”

  She nodded.

  “Three twelve-hour shifts a week, plus two five-hour blocks in the clinic. You won’t get the benefits of our residential personnel, but close enough. You’ll also be working with the people who will be your responsibility once you start your fellowship, which can be a bonus. You’ll get to keep your skills sharp, and I’ll have one more reliable little worker bee under me, just as I like it.”

  I couldn’t help but snort. “Don’t they tell you that statements like that could get you sued for sexual harassment?”

  Probably a low blow, seeing as she’d had massive problems with false allegations of that at her old job, but as I’d expected her to, she took it with a grin.

  “Slater, if I were hitting on you, you’d know it. But if you were thinking about getting a better position this way, better don’t get your hopes up. The hospital has a strict no fraternization policy, a policy you just signed, I’d like to remind you. I hope this is not going to be a problem for you?”

  She knew it wasn’t, but I dutifully shook my head. “Of course not.”

  “Good. Moving on, then, I can see that you’re still sitting on pins and needles. The other half of my offer is indirectly tied to your position here. You see, the Chief of Staff only allowed me to offer you the intermittent ER job under one condition.”