Fling with the Children's Heart Doctor

by Becky Wicks

  ‘Angela was just having a... conversation...with her husband. Unfortunately he couldn’t make it for their son Antonio’s surgery.’

  Her eyes told him these were difficult patients, but nothing she couldn’t handle. He was about to excuse himself again when the young mother, Angela Regio, stood up from the couch. ‘Dr Van de Berg?’

  He hovered in the doorway, not wanting to step into Freya’s territory. He hadn’t seen her outside the hospital all week, or been alone with her without the team around. If Freya wanted to distance herself from him, and that almost-kiss on the boat, he would accept it, even if he didn’t really want to.

  ‘Now that you’re here, perhaps you can describe the procedure to my mother here?’ Angela said, fixing him with wide, deep brown eyes rimmed with red. ‘I know you told me and Stanyo, Doctor, but he’s obviously too busy with his new girlfriend to be at his own son’s heart surgery appointment. What is aort...stemu...what...?’

  ‘Aortic stenosis,’ he corrected her, as Freya crossed her arms and averted her weary gaze to the polished floor. He’d overheard her saying to Joy she’d been unpacking boxes till late, and that that was all she ever seemed to do when she wasn’t at work. He’d been planning on following up with his offer of helping in some way, but she hadn’t approached him about it either.

  They seemed to have reached a tense stalemate, and he was getting increasingly more annoyed with himself for still not being able to get their almost-kiss out of his head.

  ‘Please, do explain, Doctor.’ Angela’s mother was in her mid-fifties. Her ruby-red lipstick had stained a paper coffee cup, which she’d placed on the table.

  ‘I’m sure Dr Van de Berg has to prep for surgery,’ Freya cut in, walking back over to them. ‘We do have some illustrations here that might help make things clearer.’

  ‘Nurse Joy is taking care of things for now,’ he said, and he thought he saw a flicker of annoyance cross her face. Still avoiding his eyes, she picked up a copy of the journal featuring Roshinda’s work and leafed to a page with a full-colour illustration of what he was describing.

  The journals had bothered him up to a certain point but now it was Freya’s determined refusal to acknowledge their chemistry that was getting under his skin. He crossed to the couch in interest, wondering how she’d use them.

  ‘When a child has aortic stenosis, the area where blood exits the heart’s lower left chamber...right here...is too narrow, and the left heart has to work much harder to pump blood around the body...’

  He peered over Freya’s shoulder. She straightened up at his proximity, and somehow he could tell he was making her nervous. Like he had done on that boat.

  Pure panic. That was the only way to describe what he’d seen in her eyes, right before they’d come so close to kissing he could almost taste her. He’d gone over it in his head afterwards on the way to the shelter. In spite of her candour, she had walls up a mile high. She seemed to have issues even accepting his friendly gestures...like when he’d offered to help her down the ladder. He was only being a gentleman, but she had made it pretty clear she didn’t need one of those in her life, thank you very much, and backing away from that kiss had just proved she had no intention of taking their simmering attraction any further.

  ‘Dr Van de Berg will place what we call a stent-based tissue aortic heart valve into here...using a catheter that he’ll insert right here...but the difference is, it will go in through a tiny incision in Antonio’s leg. Then it’s threaded up to the heart through the arteries...’

  ‘So very clever,’ Angela’s mother pronounced, looking at him in awe. ‘These really do work, Doctor?’

  He nodded curtly, pushing his glasses up his nose. He’d stood over Roshinda’s computer while she’d been drawing these exact illustrations. He could still see her giant computer screen casting a white glow on his black marble dining-room table and their wine glasses, while her pen moved expertly over the mousepad, rendering, reshaping, colouring. She’d turned his profession, which he’d always considered scientific, into art.

  Lucas had to admit that while Roshinda had a way of making something incredibly complex, like the human heart and other body parts, look nothing short of beautiful, and simple, Freya had a way of bringing it even more to life with her words.

  Her phone buzzed in her pocket.

  She pulled it out and swiped yet another of her mother’s calls away, looking at him in annoyance, or embarrassment, or both, he couldn’t tell which. Did she ever talk to the woman, or just ignore her all the time? He could tell she was stressed over it—why didn’t she just answer the phone and put herself out of her misery? More to the point, why did Freya’s broken relationship with her mother bother him so much?

  He assumed it was because spending time with his own father was so precious these days and he couldn’t imagine ever shutting a parent out on purpose. He frowned. He was getting far too invested in Freya’s life when she’d clearly indicated he should butt out.

  ‘I should get back to work. I see everything is under control here,’ he said coolly, before he could take her aside and speak his real thoughts out loud.

  ‘Sorry you had to hear me shouting at Stanyo, Dr Van de Berg,’ Angela said, looking sheepish.

  ‘No need to apologise,’ he assured her. ‘Ladies, I will see you and Antonio very soon.’

  Freya simply bobbed her head in his direction as if he were a stranger—another attempt to douse the sparks he damn well knew they could both still feel. They were more like painful prickles now.

  Leaving for the neonatal ward, he wondered if she’d ever let a man back into her heart since that guy Johnny had ditched her for her best friend, back at college. Maybe it was a good thing she’d put a stop to their kiss before it had even started, he considered. A woman like Freya would be all too easy to get involved with, but not only was she altogether emotionally unavailable, she had her eyes on her next destination already, too...just like Roshinda had.

  With his father’s mental health going downhill, he really didn’t have the time to chase after another woman with wings, even if he wanted to. He should just put Freya out of his head for good.

  * * *

  Little Antonio was wide-eyed and smiling, sitting up in bed in his private room, oblivious to the fact that he’d soon be under in what Joy called, in her Irish sing-song voice, the HAC-HOR. Their ‘highly advanced cardiac hybrid operating room’.

  ‘He’s being such a brave boy, aren’t you?’ Joy crooned, tying Antonio’s blue gown behind him. Freya noticed Joy had Minnie Mouse laces in her trainers today, which matched her red polka-dot headband.

  ‘You’re in great hands, little man,’ Freya followed up with a smile, just as Lucas entered the room. She bit the inside of her cheeks as he strode up close, and the scent of his cologne made her feel giddy, just as it had earlier when he’d intervened in her consultation room. She’d picked up Roshinda’s journal just to test him, maybe. To see if he’d flinch, or leave the room, but she’d only felt his thoughtful eyes on her.

  It made her feel guilty for even testing him. She wondered if he had been thinking about that night on the boat as much as she had.

  She’d been trying to stay away from him because now, more than ever since their almost-kiss, she was confused around him. It was like his very presence sent her straight off her carefully navigated course and wreaked havoc with her plans to be a strong, independent, man-free zone whilst she was temporarily living in the place she hadn’t much wanted to come back to. She hadn’t succumbed to the temptation to kiss him, but she might as well have done. It was all she’d been thinking about.

  ‘Are you ready, Superman?’ Lucas said, wriggling the child’s little toes gently in his Superman socks. Antonio giggled and said something in Italian.

  It was clear Lucas didn’t understand, so without thinking Freya translated. ‘He said he’s happy to be getting a new hear
t from you.’

  Lucas was looking at her surprise and admiration. ‘Boarding school, I forgot,’ he said, and she nodded brusquely, trying to ignore the way her heart still all but imploded every time he met her eyes. It was why she’d been trying so hard not to look his way.

  ‘I think the heart you have already will be just fine,’ Lucas replied, letting Freya translate again, and his fingers brushed against hers on the bedside railings as he went to ruffle the kid’s hair. It set off a Catherine wheel in her chest that took her straight back to her dream last night, when they’d done far more than kiss until she’d woken in a sweat with her heart pounding.

  ‘Should we find out where your heart is, Superman?’ she managed to say in Italian. ‘Is it here?’ She placed a finger softly on the boy’s forehead. Antonio giggled and shook his head.

  ‘Is it here?’ Lucas said next, moving his finger to Antonio’s belly button, and the boy laughed again.

  ‘Here?’ Joy asked, picking up his foot. Antonio was almost beside himself, giggling. The laughter was infectious and this time she did look up at Lucas. In a heartbeat she realised why these new feelings unnerved her so badly. She already liked him more than she had ever liked Johnny, and look what had happened there.

  She winced internally as her phone buzzed yet again.

  ‘Go talk to your mother,’ Lucas said in a lowered voice, glancing at the screen over her shoulder. ‘It might be urgent.’

  ‘I’ll call her later,’ she told him, careful not to sound as annoyed with herself as she felt. She said ‘See you soon, Superman,’ to Antonio in Italian, and then wished Lucas a good operation in English, feeling the heat race to her cheeks at the frown on Lucas’s face, just for her.

  He wasn’t annoyed at the phone ringing, she could tell. He was annoyed that she never answered it, which of course she didn’t, not at work anyway. It wasn’t like she ignored all her mother’s calls...although, if she was honest with herself, she didn’t exactly look forward to them either, considering the stilted, almost painful small talk they always seemed to involve.

  Still, why did Lucas care so much what she did, or didn’t do, with her mother?

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE EVENINGS WERE long now, as summer was in full bloom. It didn’t get dark till eleven p.m., which was great because cycling all the way from Jordaan to Amsterdam North two weeks after Antonio’s successful operation with two bags of trinkets for her bargain-hunter took longer than she’d anticipated. She must have got herself lost about four times in the narrow, winding streets on the way to the ferry behind Centraal Station.

  Maybe her internal homing device wasn’t quite as accurate as she’d thought. Then again, a lot of things were new to her here now. Sometimes it didn’t even seem like the same city she’d grown up in. Guilt made her stomach churn every time she thought about how she still hadn’t confirmed with Liv that she could visit.

  Poor Liv didn’t realise how badly Freya had been affected by the way their mother had ignored her, prior to getting pregnant for the second time. With her break-up and everything else going on, it wasn’t fair to involve her now. It wasn’t Liv’s problem anyway—it was hers and Elise’s.

  She pushed her bike onto the ferry, along with what felt like two hundred other people, and watched the other shore grow closer as the music from a band on a rooftop swirled across the water to her ears.

  Most of what had been built north of Amsterdam Centraal, beyond the river Ij, was new to her. Before, when she’d visited Centraal Station with Anouk or Beatrice, there had been hardly anything to look at across the river. Now there were tower blocks and apartment buildings, parks and a film museum. Pieter and Ruud had even invited her and Lucas to a virtual reality experience over here, somewhere in a huge hall.

  ‘Let’s all go put sexy goggles on and shoot zombies together. Then we’ll eat dinner in that nice Mexican restaurant—the one with the fancy tacos that cost fifteen euros each. Unless you want to cook for us all, Lucas?’

  Ruud had turned to her then. ‘He used to have legendary dinner parties on his houseboat, you know. Have you cooked for Freya yet, Lucas?’

  Lucas had said something about their schedules not matching up, and being busy, which she knew by now was everyone’s reason for not doing something they just didn’t want to make time for, and the guys had thrown each other knowing glances. About what, she could only imagine. They were probably trying to set them up in their most unsubtle, unnerving way, but Lucas was having none of it.

  The ferry chugged noisily beneath her. Clutching the handlebars of her bike, she thought of Lucas. They still hadn’t spent any more time together outside the hospital. Maybe she had pushed him away, like she seemed to do with anyone who threatened to get too close, she thought, watching a seagull cut through the sky.

  It’s better this way anyway. You’re here to work, and sell a house, and then leave.

  Where would she go next? Back to the States? It didn’t seem like an option right now. There had been a time when all she’d wanted was a Green Card, but now most of her friends there were green with envy over her European passport. As a European with her qualifications, she could now work anywhere. There was still the job she’d seen, starting in the new year, in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam. She was too busy to think about it properly just yet, but what was life if she didn’t have some vague travel plan on the horizon?

  A life without Lucas’s handsome face in it, she thought, without meaning to. It made her cheeks flush and a vague twinge of nausea swirl through her stomach that she chose to blame on the boat crossing.

  Something was off when she pulled up at the location she’d been given by the guy she’d arranged to meet—Tom. There was no one in sight.

  Still on the saddle, she dug in her bag for her phone to double-check the address. Her heart did a funny leapfrog in her chest when she saw a missed call from Lucas, but she swiped away the notification. This wasn’t the time. Had she gone off track again and ended up at the wrong place?

  Her map said, no, she was exactly where she was meant to be. Tom had said it was a brasserie, which it was, but she hadn’t expected to find it closed.

  Parking her bike, she flipped the stand down and wandered towards the restaurant entrance. The doors were bolted, bound with heavy chains. Weeds sprouted messily through cracks in the paving slabs out front. Cardboard boxes and bins full of bottles greeted her as she walked around the back.

  ‘Hello? Is anyone here?’

  A bird took flight, and something in the bushes scuttled off, but otherwise she could have heard a pin drop. ‘Hello?’

  Where was Tom?

  ‘Talk about a waste of time,’ she muttered to herself, peering over an overgrown hedge to look through the window. Nothing. The place had been stripped bare. ‘What the...?’

  She jumped at a sudden sound out front. Footsteps on the asphalt. ‘Hello? Is that Tom?’

  Hurrying back the way she’d come, she scaled another pile of boxes, only to see the back of a guy with shoulder-length dark hair in a red striped sweater and army combat pants. ‘Hey! Tom, is that you?’

  The guy didn’t look particularly surprised to see her. He looked more annoyed than anything. The second he noticed her, he jumped onto her bike and flipped the stand up.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Freya sprinted towards him in her sneakers and sundress as realisation hit home. She had left the bags of stuff for Tom in the basket. ‘Tom? Did you bring me here to steal my bike?’

  ‘I did,’ he said simply. ‘Sorry.’

  She stopped short in shock. ‘Sorry? Are you serious?’

  Quick as a flash, he sped off, leaving her chasing after him across the empty courtyard in vain. ‘I don’t believe this! I’m calling the police!’

  ‘Thanks for the bike, lady!’ he called back.

  ‘You’re a terrible human, Tom, if that’s even your name!’
/>   Chocolate-bar wrappers and newspaper coupons swirled up in the breeze as she stopped on the barren street, panting and fuming. His red sweater shrank to a dot in the distance, then disappeared.

  Her phone was ringing. Lucas again.

  ‘Sorry to call again,’ he said when she answered, still out of breath. ‘Pieter says you’re the only one who knows where the lily-scented candle supply is. I don’t know what he wants them for right now, but he doesn’t have your number.’

  ‘The candles?’ she echoed, feeling confused. Where was the ferry? Suddenly every direction looked the same and she couldn’t remember now which way she’d come. A siren wailed in the distance.

  ‘Where are you?’ Lucas sounded concerned now.

  ‘I... I don’t know...’

  ‘There’s an app for that,’ he said.

  ‘I can’t use it when I’m on the phone, can I?’ she huffed back. She dragged a hand through her hair, turning around again. She was fuming and embarrassed. ‘Sorry,’ she said quickly. ‘The aromatherapy candle supply ran out, that’s why he can’t find them. I haven’t had time to get any more...’

  ‘What’s happened?’

  She swallowed back a growl. ‘Some guy just stole my bike,’ she told him, starting to walk towards the gap in the buildings up ahead. The river must be somewhere around here. ‘I thought I was selling someone some stuff from Anouk’s place but when I got here...’

  Lucas let out a long groan. ‘Damn, Freya, you fell for the oldest trick in the book. You didn’t make any bank transfers, did you?’