by Radclyffe
“Occupied,” she called out irritably. She’d never understand why huge academic institutions couldn’t afford decent on-call rooms, but she’d never run across one yet. Whenever she’d had a rotation in a small community hospital, the residents were treated infinitely better. She’d had one rotation where she received three meals a day for free, and there’d even been a television in her private on-call room. Amazing. At the University Hospital, however, that was not the case. Everyone vied for limited sleeping space, and even though she’d heard rumors that new on-call rooms were planned for the next addition to the megalithic complex, she’d believe it when she slept in one.
“It’s me,” Pearce whispered as she closed the door and flipped the lock.
“Pearce?” Wynter bolted upright. “What time is it?”
“Quarter after one.”
Wynter snapped on the bedside table lamp and checked her beeper to make sure it was working. When she saw that it was, she put it down and swung her legs over the side of the narrow bed. She pushed both hands through her hair and then dropped her hands to her sides, curling her fingers around the thin mattress. She looked up at Pearce, who still stood just inside the door. She was in jeans, her black boots, and a black fisherman’s sweater. She held her leather jacket in her fist. “What are you doing here?”
Pearce shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“You’re supposed to be in Harrisburg in about six hours.”
“I know.”
“Are you still going?”
“Yes.”
“Take off your clothes and come to bed.” Wynter snapped off the light.
Pearce kicked off her boots, unsnapped her jeans and pushed them off, and added her sweater to the pile. Although the room was dark once again, Wynter’s figure was imprinted on the backs of her eyelids in a blaze of yellow light. She made her way to the narrow hospital-issue bed and put one hand down, finding the sheets pulled back in welcome. She sat down and slid under, turning on her side to face Wynter. She stretched out her arm, found Wynter’s bare shoulder, and pulled her close.
Wynter nestled her cheek against Pearce’s chest and wrapped an arm around her waist. The bed was narrow for one, dangerously so for two, and she slid her thigh between Pearce’s as much to anchor them as to be close to her.
“Is it okay if we don’t make love?” Pearce murmured. She smoothed her lips over Wynter’s forehead. She’d been in her car and had gotten as far as Doylestown before turning back. She hadn’t felt such a chasm of despair since her grandmother had died, and her only thought as the miles stretched away behind her had been of lying in Wynter’s arms that morning and how good it had felt. Even as she’d made an illegal U-turn across the median, she’d refused to question her actions. She knew any answers she might find would only frighten her. She closed her eyes and tightened her hold, waiting for Wynter to ask.
“This is fine just like this,” Wynter whispered. She kissed the hollow at the base of Pearce’s throat and rubbed her face against Pearce’s skin. She loved Pearce’s smell, windblown and untamed. She was aware of desire, the steady pulse of flesh seeking flesh, but she could enjoy the wanting without craving satisfaction. For the moment. She kissed Pearce’s throat again, then the underside of her jaw. “Are you all right?”
“Pissed.” Pearce stroked Wynter’s shoulders and down her arm, slowly smoothing her fingers up and down, reveling in the softness of her skin and the steel beneath it.
“Mmm. Me too.” Wynter sighed. “I know you have to go, but I want you to be angry that we’re being separated. I guess I…I’ll miss you.”
Pearce gave a small groan and buried her face in Wynter’s hair. “Yeah. I know.”
“But I’ll probably see you when you get a weekend off, right?” Wynter tried to sound upbeat, but they both knew how hard it would be to coordinate their schedules, especially long distance. “We’re supposed to go running, remember.”
“Sure.” Pearce knew that now was the time to call things off, and if she’d just kept driving, it wouldn’t even have been an issue. No complications. They’d agreed. They’d had a night together. A great night, sure. A night like none she could ever remember. But it was just a night, like so many nights before. A few hours of frantic connection, of desperate joining, of grateful respite from loneliness. So why wasn’t that enough? “I expect you’ll be seeing other people.”
Seeing other people. Wynter knew what the words meant, she just hadn’t considered them in relationship to herself for quite some time. Even after her divorce, the last thing she’d wanted to do was create any more chaos in her life by getting involved with someone. She’d had to take time off from the surgery residency in the midst of the divorce because moving out, arranging child care, and dealing with all the legal issues was too much for her to handle and still work the way she needed to. Getting the temporary emergency room position had been a godsend. She’d been able to work and had gotten paid. That was all she had wanted. Now she had an excellent residency position, a new home, and a great environment for her daughter. This was not the time to upset the hard-won balance in her life.
“I don’t know,” Wynter said. “I’m not sure I want to.”
“But if you do,” Pearce forced herself to say. “You know, you should.”
Wynter doubted it would be long before Pearce sought company, and she could hardly ask her not to. From everything she had witnessed, let alone what she had heard, she knew that Pearce was no stranger to casual encounters. She smoothed her hand between Pearce’s breasts, a movement so new to her, and yet completely familiar. Without knowing completely how she knew, she was aware that she wouldn’t be with a man. Ever again. “Yes. All right.”
Pearce closed her eyes tightly. That was right. That was best. Then why did that empty space inside of her come roaring back again?
“Pearce?”
“Yeah?”
“Why did you come back here tonight?”
There it was again. The question she didn’t want to ask. The answer she didn’t want to face because it left her not knowing what her next step would be. “I didn’t want to say goodbye.”
Wynter kissed the spot beneath Pearce’s breast where her heart tapped out a strong, sharp rhythm. “Good. Neither do I.”
“Where does that leave us?”
“I don’t know, but I feel better than I did when I left you this morning.”
“Doesn’t take much to make you happy,” Pearce murmured, sifting her fingers through Wynter’s hair.
Wynter laughed softly. “That’s what you think.”
Pearce tilted Wynter’s chin up and kissed her slowly, a lingering, searching kiss that would not soon be forgotten.
“Good start,” Wynter murmured. “Now go to sleep. You have to drive soon.”
Pearce closed her eyes, but she didn’t sleep. She had only a few more hours with Wynter, fleeting time too precious to lose.
*
At nine thirty the next morning, Wynter shuffled to her front door, opened it a crack, and said, “Go away.”
“You think I don’t know when you come home?”
“Mina,” Wynter said with as much patience as she could muster, bracing her knee against the door as Mina pushed from the other side, “I’m going to bed now. Ronnie will be home in five hours, and I’m going to have to play mommy.”
“You can go to sleep just as soon as we have our little talk.”
“Later,” Wynter said, trying to close the door. She looked down and saw Mina’s foot, encased in her substantial snow boot, blocking the way. “Mina…”
“This is the first time in six weeks you haven’t stopped over to chat when you came home. What’s going on?”
“Just tired.” Despite her desperate need to be alone, Wynter opened the door. “Come inside. It’s freezing out.”
Mina forged ahead like a great ship steaming into port, and she didn’t stop until she was well into the living room, where she removed her woolen coat and draped it over the back
of the couch. “Let’s go upstairs and put you to bed. We can talk there.”
Wordlessly, Wynter trudged upstairs. In sweats and a T-shirt, she crawled under the covers and curled up on her side. When Mina came in, she eased over enough so that Mina could sit beside her, several pillows propped behind the small of her back.
“Thank God this child will be out of here in a few weeks. There’s not enough room inside my body for it and all of my other parts.” Mina struggled to turn enough to see Wynter’s face. “You’ve been crying.”
“I pity your children. I really do. They’ll never have any secrets.”
Mina smiled and petted Wynter’s hair. “Now is it work or your personal life?”
“Both.” Wynter sighed, then went on to explain about Ambrose Rifkin’s plan to send her to an outside rotation and the fact that she’d refused and been transferred to another service instead.
“He sounds like a charmer.”
“Unfortunately, he’s a brilliant surgeon and I can learn a lot from him.”
“Doesn’t mean he’s not a…SOB.”
“True.”
“Somehow, I can see that little power play making you mad, but not causing any tears. What else?”
Wynter bunched her pillow into a fat misshapen ball and wrapped her arms around it. Her arms felt empty without Pearce, and it frightened her that she could feel that way after only holding her a few times. “He sent Pearce instead. She’s gone.”
“For how long?”
Wynter shrugged. “Six months at least. It might as well be six years.”
“Honey,” Mina said gently, “are you serious about this girl?”
“Serious? Serious how?” Wynter rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling. She didn’t see the spiderweb of fine cracks. She saw Pearce’s face above her, intense, fiercely focused, wildly passionate. “I had the most incredible night of my life with her.”
“That’s saying something,” Mina agreed. “Are we just talking sex here? Because I think that’s reproducible given the right circumstances, no matter what kind of parts someone brings to the table.”
“No, it isn’t.” Wynter rolled over again and propped her chin in her hand. “It goes both ways, making love. It’s not just how much pleasure someone brings you when they touch you, but how good you feel when you touch them back. Touching her was the most amazing thing I’ve ever experienced. And it had everything to do with the parts.” Wynter smiled faintly. “Especially when they’re hers. She’s so beautiful.”
“Do you think you’d feel that way with another woman? Or is it just her?”
“It’s her. Everything about her.” Wynter shrugged. “And part of that is that she’s a woman. I never knew I wanted that, needed that, until I touched her. Now I know.”
“And you’re okay with that?”
“It feels too good not to be.”
“Right,” Mina said, dusting her hands together as if one problem had been solved. “So we’ve established that you’ve now gone over to the dark side.” She smiled when Wynter laughed. “Now explain to me why, assuming that Pearce has any kind of brain in her head at all—which from meeting her, I’d say she does—she would agree to just up and leave.”
“She doesn’t have any choice.”
“Everyone always has a choice. You didn’t go.”
“That’s different,” Wynter said. “If he’d fired me for refusing to go, I probably could’ve won if I’d contested it. It would have been ugly, but I probably would’ve won. And even if I hadn’t, I was willing to take that chance.”
“You’re willing to give up your career?”
“For Ronnie? Of course.” Wynter shook her head. “I can see where you’re trying to take this argument. You should go to law school. But Ronnie is a child, my child, and she didn’t choose to have a mother who’s a surgeon. I can’t make her pay any more than she already does for my choices. Things are different with Pearce.”
“What would’ve happened if she’d said no? He’s her father. Wouldn’t he make exceptions for her?”
Wynter snorted. “I don’t think so. From what I can see, he’s never made any exceptions for her. Quite the opposite. The expectations placed on her are enormous.”
“Well, what could he do?”
“First of all, you don’t say no to the chairman if you have any desire to get a good fellowship or a top faculty appointment. The right connections can make or break a career, and Ambrose Rifkin can pretty much place residents wherever he wants.”
“Why would he try to make life difficult for his daughter? I don’t get it.”
“I’m not so sure it’s about making life difficult for her. I think it’s about paving the way for this other resident. He probably figures Pearce is the easier person to place because she’s so damn good.” Wynter gave an aggravated sigh. “And who cares what she has to suffer through to get there.”
“There’s something very wrong with a process that makes you think it’s all right for someone to treat anyone, let alone their own child, this way. Why aren’t the both of you fighting mad?”
“We’re mad,” Wynter said quietly. “But I don’t see a way out right now.”
“So just what do you plan to do? Forget about her? Wait to see if she turns up again in a few months and still wants to play house?”
“That’s not very likely. By the time she comes back, we’ll probably be in different places again.” Wynter closed her eyes, suddenly more weary than tired. She knew that neither she nor Pearce had very much control over their lives at this point and that any kind of relationship during training was fraught with difficulty and usually didn’t last. She’d had a wonderful awakening, a brilliant night of discovery with a tender, passionate, wildly beautiful woman. That experience alone should be enough to make her happy and, in all likelihood, would have to be enough. She knew it. She’d been telling herself that since the first time she’d said goodbye to Pearce the day before. Nevertheless, she clenched her fists and said, “I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I don’t plan on waiting another four years to feel something like this again.”
“Even if you have to find it with someone other than her?”
Wynter said nothing, wondering how that could ever be possible.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Wynter popped the top on a can of Diet Coke and dropped onto the cracked dark green vinyl sofa pushed against one wall in the surgeons’ lounge. It was flanked by a battered refrigerator at one end and a large, square end table at the other. A phone and a pile of last year’s magazines covered the table’s surface. She pushed some of the clutter aside and, after draining half the soda, put down the can. Closing her eyes, she let her head fall back, wishing she could go to sleep. Unfortunately, she was only halfway through her night on call, and if the first six hours had been any indication, it was going to be brutal. Immediately after evening sign-out rounds, she’d gotten a call from one of the intensive care nurses reporting that the patient in whom they’d corrected a carotid blockage the previous morning could no longer recall his name and had one-sided weakness. She’d known immediately that the area of surgical repair was blocked, and that if it were not treated immediately the patient would have a full-blown stroke. As she’d hurried to the ICU, she’d paged the attending, and within an hour, they were in the operating room. No sooner had they finished that case then the trauma fellow had called about a twenty-year-old drug dealer who had ended up on the wrong end of a machete. In addition to several stab wounds to the chest, he had also sustained a complete transection of his brachial artery and was in danger of losing his hand.
She’d learned long ago that the only way to get through a night like this was not to think about the time or how tired she was or all the things she had left to do. When she heard footsteps and then felt someone settle onto the other end of the sofa, she didn’t bother to look over. Five more minutes. She’d give herself five more minutes to rest, and then she’d get up and check the arteriograms that h
ad been finished late in the day.
“Heard anything from Pearce?” Tammy asked, heaving her feet, clogs and all, up onto the coffee table.
“No.” Wynter didn’t open her eyes. Even though she didn’t want to, she heard herself say, “Have you?”
“I didn’t even know she was gone until yesterday.” Tammy’s usual undertone of petulance and annoyance was absent. “This sucks.”
“Yes,” Wynter agreed, finally opening her eyes. Tammy looked as tired as Wynter felt. It’d been almost three days since Pearce had left. Wynter kept hoping that Pearce would call, despite the fact that she didn’t really expect her to. Pearce would be busy getting adjusted to a new hospital, a new group of residents. And in all likelihood, they’d put her on call immediately. Besides, what was there to say? That was the most frustrating part of all. They both understood what was required of them. They both accepted that their life would not be their own for years. Still, being powerless did not sit well. “Sucks big-time.”
“Plus Dzubrow is a real pain in the ass,” Tammy muttered.
Although Wynter tended to agree with Tammy from what she had seen of him, she made no comment. It was prudent not to openly criticize other residents. She never knew when she might find herself working closely on the same service with one of them.
“Bruce says he’s hogging all the good cases,” Tammy went on. “Pearce didn’t need to steal cases. She already knows what she’s doing.”
“He’s probably just trying to get back into the swing of things after coming out of the lab,” Wynter suggested mildly.
Tammy gave her a look. “He was never in the swing of things. I heard him tell one of the other guys that he’s got an offer from the NIH, and that’s why Rifkin brought him out of the lab early. He’s always been a lab rat. I don’t even know why he wanted to be a surgeon.”
What Tammy said made sense. It would explain the sudden shift in the residents between services, and why Pearce had been farmed out. Ambrose Rifkin was priming Dzubrow for the chief resident’s position, which would bolster his credentials at the NIH. She wondered if Pearce knew. Surely she must suspect, and although Wynter knew Pearce would never admit it, it must hurt. “God damn it.”
