by Radclyffe
“Maybe after the fact it was,” Jude acknowledged with a grimace. “For a few seconds there, I thought I was going to scream or throw up.”
“Yeah, me, too.” Melissa smiled wanly. “But ten minutes later, when they just lumbered past and left us with nothing to film, we laughed.”
“Nerves.”
“Well, I haven’t laughed yet. Seeing someone I know almost die like that freaked me out.”
“Do you need some time off? I can handle the camera.”
“No, it’s just that...I might have screwed up.”
Melissa looked so miserable that Jude couldn’t imagine what she was talking about. “Mel,” she said gently, “what happened?”
“After you went to the on-call room to wait for word about Aaron...” If Melissa had been standing, she would have been shuffling her feet. But, as it was, she just rearranged her silverware incessantly.
“Yes?” Jude prompted, now really worried. “Mel, hey, come on. It’s me.”
In a rush, Melissa blurted, “I was on my way out of the hospital, and I realized I was starving, so I detoured by here to get a late lunch, and I ran into Deb, and we started talking, and then we went out for a drink, and then we went to her place, and then we...ended up in bed.”
Nonplussed, Jude stared, her mouth opening and closing but no sound coming out.
“Oh man—I knew you’d be upset. I’ve never fooled around before when we were working,” Melissa said hurriedly. “Well, almost never. That one time with the soccer player—but that was after we’d already finished the shoot. Well, I mean we were almost done.”
“I’m not upset.”
“And that one time in Brussels, with the airline attendant, that didn’t—” Melissa stopped abruptly and stared. “You’re not?”
“No.”
“But I know how uptig...um...how strongly you feel about separating work and personal stuff.”
“Do I?” Jude asked quietly, thinking about that for a minute as if it were a new concept. Actually, it was more the case that, for her, there wasn’t any difference. Work was personal—more than that, it was her passion—and she didn’t want any extraneous diversions like relationships to interfere with it. None had, until recently. “Well, sometimes things just...happen, don’t they?”
“They do?” Melissa asked, a note of incredulity in her voice. “Right! They do, absolutely, they do.”
Jude slowly and carefully spread cream cheese on her bagel, wondering if it had all been some kind of group psychosis—an emotional time warp, a bizarre twist in the fabric of reality—like a David Lynch movie. That would explain it. But then, if that were the case, it should be over. And every time she thought about waking up beside Saxon Sinclair, her skin grew hot and her stomach did flips. It didn’t seem to be over.
“Jude?” Melissa queried in a puzzled tone. “Is that it?”
“I’m really not hungry,” Jude announced, pushing her bagel away. She glanced at her friend, who was regarding her with a mixture of curiosity and concern, and sighed. “Are you okay with what happened?”
For the first time, Melissa looked like herself. Shrugging, a rakish grin on her face, she said, “Well, yeah.”
“Is Deb?”
“Seems to be.”
“Are the two of you going to have any trouble working together?”
“Don’t see why we should,” Melissa replied seriously.
“Then I don’t see a problem.” Jude stood to leave. “Just try to save the personal stuff for your own time, okay?”
“Right,” Melissa said hurriedly. “It was just—you know—one night. Just one of those crazy things. It’s not serious or anything.”
“Yes, I know. Just one night. Nothing serious.”
“So,” Melissa gathered the remains of her breakfast and followed Jude to the tray disposal area, “are you okay? With what happened?”
“What do you mean?” Jude retorted sharply.
“With Aaron,” Melissa replied. Why do I feel as if we’re speaking two different languages?
“I’m fine. Come on, let’s book a conference room. I want to schedule an on-tape interview with Deb as a follow up to the shooting.” She really just needed to get back to work, back on track. Everything would make sense then, and if it didn’t...well, it wouldn’t matter. Because she wouldn’t have to think about it.
“Good idea,” Melissa agreed, delighted to leave the topic of her indiscretion behind. She’d save her questions about what the hell was wrong with Jude for another time.
August 6, 7:51 a.m.
Sax stopped as someone called her name and smiled when she turned to see Pam approaching. “Hi.”
“Hi,” Pam said warmly. “I just ran into the plastics resident, and he says they’re available this afternoon to harvest rib grafts for me. I’d like to take that boy in bed two to the OR if we can get him on the schedule. I’ve got office hours until noon, but after that, I want to debride that clot from the frontal sinuses so that plastics can plug the holes with bone.”
“He’s running a fever, Pam.” Sax propped one shoulder against the wall outside the double doors of the TICU. “And Kline says his blood pressure’s been all over the place since last night. He’s not in great shape for surgery.”
Pam shrugged and replied with a hint of irritation in her voice. “No guts no glory, Saxon. He’s not going to get a lot better with us just standing around waving our hands in the air. If that intradural hematoma turns into an abscess, we won’t have to worry about his blood pressure because he’ll never wake up at all.”
“Go ahead, put him on the schedule,” Sax relented, rubbing her eyes briefly. She was tired and that was odd, because she was almost never aware of fatigue no matter how long she went without sleep.
Of course, she’d never gotten to bed at all after dropping Jude off at her apartment. She hadn’t been able to stop replaying the events of the night before. Remembering the way it felt to be with Jude, her whole system had kicked into hyperdrive. She’d been ready to climb the walls.
Forcing herself to focus on Pam, she added, “I’ll clear him if he’s stable for the next few hours. If his pressure bottoms out, though, you’ll have to wait.”
“Thanks,” Pam said, satisfied. Her attention shifted abruptly as she noticed people coming down the hall toward them. “Your fan club has arrived.”
“What?” Sax recognized that predatory glint in Pam’s eye. She looked back over her shoulder, and her eyes met Jude’s. The filmmaker was just a few feet away with Melissa beside her. Sax smiled, suddenly feeling energized. “Good morning.”
“Hi,” Jude said softly, slowing as she drew near. She was pleased that she managed not to blush, because Sax’s gaze was unexpectedly intense. “Is Deb—”
“Inside.” Sax gestured toward the unit with a nod.
“Thanks.”
“Sure.”
Sax followed the two women with her eyes as they walked past and disappeared inside.
“So, how’s it going with her?”
“What?” The word virtually erupted from Sax.
“Whoa! Just asking,” Pam exclaimed, studying Sax through narrowed eyes. “They’re filming downstairs, right? Must be a royal pain in the balls having them underfoot all the time. Although,” she added with a suggestive laugh, “the scenery is nice.”
Sax worked to hide her annoyance, although she wasn’t sure what bothered her more—Pam’s curiosity or the way she’d surveyed Jude as she walked by. Pam had a way of appraising women as if they were an exotic food group.
“It’s not that big a problem. Jude’s accommodated to working with a small crew, and she doesn’t interfere with Deb’s training.”
“Jude. That’s that very attractive redhead, right?”
“Yes.”
“Nice. Is she gay?”
“Jesus, Pam,” Sax exploded angrily. “Don’t you ever quit?”
“Why, Saxon, your temper is showing,” Pam chided with a laugh. “And everyone says
how cool and unflappable you are, too. I’ll take that as a yes.”
“Why don’t you ask her?”
“I might,” Pam responded thoughtfully, “since I can’t seem to tempt you.”
“I’ve got to get back to work,” Sax said, ignoring the comment.
“If I don’t hear from you, I’ll assume that case is on.” Pam was all business again.
“Fine.”
Pam watched Sax push through the double doors with an impatient shove and wondered exactly what she’d said to make her so angry. Whatever was going on, it had something to do with that enchanting redhead. Perhaps the lovely filmmaker would be interested in dinner. She glanced at her watch and sighed. Well, that intriguing possibility will have to wait until later in the day, but it certainly is a most pleasant thought.
Chapter Twenty-Two
August 6, 1:47 p.m.
“Let’s do this somewhere less formal,” Melissa suggested, surveying the conference room with distaste. “This place looks too much like a boardroom.”
“You’re right. Too impersonal,” Jude agreed. She glanced at Deb. “Got any ideas?”
“How about the roof?”
The roof—Sax’s favorite sanctuary. It was difficult preventing images of Sax—sweat drenched and exuberant with a basketball in her hands, pensive and still in the moonlight—from distracting her from her schedule, but Jude managed to chase the memories away with an impatient mental shrug. “Good idea, guys. We can get the skyline and the heliport in the background.”
Melissa hefted her camera and the three of them trooped out.
Interview—Dr. Deborah Stein
August 6, 2:00 p.m.
“What were you thinking when those boys came into the trauma admitting area with their guns out?” Jude asked. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Melissa give her the thumbs-up sign. Good. Sound and visuals are okay.
“I didn’t think anything at first,” Deb admitted. “You learn not to pay attention to peripheral activity when you’re operating or in the midst of a crisis. People walk in and out of the operating room, the radio might be playing, the anesthesiologist is talking to a student a few inches away—it doesn’t matter—while the pressure’s on, you don’t hear them or even see them.”
With her back to the cement wall at the roof’s edge and her strawberry blond hair blowing around in the wind, Deb, Jude thought, still looked like the young athlete the country fell in love with during the Olympics. But there were lines at the corners of her eyes now and something harder in her gaze that had been missing before. She’s getting battle scars.
“How do you filter those things out?”
Deb shrugged. “You forget everything except the moment. No mortgage worries, no car problems, no relationship issues. Just you and the case.” She grinned, and this time her eyes smiled, too. “That’s where I was that night—in the zone. I was concentrating on the patient and nothing else registered.”
“So you didn’t realize for a second what was happening?” Jude remembered vividly the commotion at the door and the shouting and Aaron…
“Not until I heard the shot. That got my attention. I used to shoot pistols in competition when I was a teenager. I know what a gun sounds like.”
“Even when it was so completely...out of context?”
“A hospital isn’t a church. There’s nothing sacred here—only life and death.” Deb grimaced. “I’ve taken care of plenty of felons apprehended during a crime. I’ve treated patients handcuffed to the bedrails with armed cops standing guard. As soon as I heard the shot, I knew we were in trouble.”
“And your reaction? What made you put yourself between the gunman and the boy you were treating? What made you risk your life?” What made Sax risk hers?
“Totally automatic,” Deb said quickly. “I didn’t even think about it.”
“But there must have been something behind that response, that desire to shield your patient?”
“I wish I could say there was.” Deb looked uncomfortable for the first time. “But I wasn’t being heroic. It was just that…he was mine, you know? I was the first one to see him, he was my patient; it was my responsibility to see that he didn’t die.” She shook her head ruefully and her gaze traveled away from Jude to fix on some point in the distance. “Believe me, if I’d had time to think, I don’t know what I would have done.”
“It was still a very courageous thing to do,” Jude said. Apparently, talking about surgery was a lot easier for Deb than exploring those highly emotional few moments.
“Maybe. But I can’t take too much credit for it. I told you—I wasn’t even thinking.”
“But it’s what we do when we don’t have time to rationalize, or even to reason, that really tells the truth about us, don’t you think?”
“Yeah, I do think that,” Deb replied softly. “Now, what Sinclair did—that was brave. She knew that guy had just shot Aaron. She knew he wanted to shoot my patient. And she knew he was probably going to shoot somebody else, but that didn’t stop her from stepping in front of you.”
“No,” Jude murmured faintly, “it didn’t.”
“I can tell you this”—Deb was emphatic—“Sinclair knew exactly what she was doing. She always does. That’s brave.”
And you’ve got a bit of a case of hero worship, Jude thought fondly. But she couldn’t help wondering if Sax really had acted intentionally and not out of some basic instinct. And if she did? What would that mean?
“You both deserve a lot of credit.” It was all Jude could manage as she raised a hand to Melissa to signal that the interview was a wrap.
“Cripes,” Deb said, shaking her shoulders as if to loosen them. “That’s nerve racking. It’s a good thing it was you behind the camera, Cooper.”
“Oh yeah?” Melissa was playful. “And why’s that?”
“I trusted you to make me look good on the tape.”
“Well, it was a challenge, but I managed,” Melissa jibed, thinking that the one thing Deb Stein did not need was to look any better. She turned the heads of too many women to count as it was, and when the documentary started airing, she’d be inundated with calls for dates. Melissa considered that revelation for a second and decided it was a good thing she didn’t have any long-term plans with this one. Yep, good thing, all right.
Personal Project Log—Castle
August 7, 12:20 a.m.
Apparently, this is one of those aberrations that occur often enough that neither Deb nor Sax seem surprised by it. Specifically, nothing much has happened all night. Well, nothing compared to the way things have been all the other nights on call. Around 8:00 last evening, two people were transported by chopper following a fender bender, but both of them were evaluated, screened with X-rays, and admitted overnight for observation only. No surgery. Then again, at a little after 11:00, a young man was brought in with a broken jaw he got on the losing end of a bar brawl. No other injuries. Plastic surgery was contacted, and they scheduled him to have his jaws wired together in the morning. And that was it.
Deb went off a few minutes ago to get some sleep, and I’m about to follow her example. Still, I have this uncomfortable feeling that I’m going to miss something. Deb said that she would much rather be working if she needed to be on call. It was better, she said, to be up all night in the operating room than trying to sleep while expecting that at any moment she might have to get up again. Work rather than sleep. It’s astonishing how your entire life gets turned around in this place.
Jude clicked off her recorder and thought about what she had just said. Oh yeah—life certainly does get turned around in this place. Sighing, she let herself into her on-call room.
August 7, 3:13 a.m.
It was the middle of the night, and she couldn’t sleep. Melissa was breathing softly in the darkness across the room, clearly sleeping the sleep of the innocent at heart. Or the untroubled of mind. Jude had been trying to occupy herself with plans for the project—writing script in her head and editing sections
of tape she had reviewed the day before—anything that might tire her mind and help her to relax. Her usual tricks didn’t help. After forty fruitless minutes, she thought she would start cursing aloud. That was when she decided to go in search of company.
One thing she had learned was that, in the hospital, there was always someone up and about. The nurses on night shift were bright and energetic, because for them this was their normal workday. There were usually one or two surgery residents camped out in the OR lounge, either waiting for cases to start or unwinding after one had finished. If it’d been a week earlier, Aaron would have been in the trauma admitting area, reviewing billing forms or checking an order status or simply waiting for the inevitable moment when the phone would ring or the radio would chirp to announce incoming patients. But of course, Aaron wasn’t there now.
Even though she knew he wasn’t there, Jude glanced automatically into the trauma bay as she walked down the hall toward the elevators. The bright overhead lights were off, but a row of flickering fluorescents under the cabinets on the wall above the long counter where the doctors and nurses did their paperwork was illumination enough for her to see the figure bent over the chessboard.
From the door, Jude asked, “Planning the next campaign?”
Sax turned at the sound of her voice, raising one eyebrow as she answered, “You can never have too much in the way of strategy, don’t you agree?”
“Honestly?” Jude succumbed to an exhausted shrug. “I don’t know. I never seemed to have any—where chess was concerned.” Or anything else, now that I think of it—except work.
“No, I imagine that you didn’t need one.”
Perhaps it was the hour, or the unnatural sense of limbo a night without trauma alerts produced, but Sax couldn’t seem to call upon her normal sense of distance as she took in the dark shadows beneath Jude’s eyes and the weary slump of her shoulders. Gently, she observed, “You look worn out. Shouldn’t you be getting some rest?”
