Under the Doctor

1. Chapter 1

Sarah

The zipper on my dress is stuck halfway up my spine, one arm bent behind my back at an angle that already aches, when Dana lets herself into my apartment with the key I regret giving her.

"You're not dressed," she says.

"I'm mostly dressed."

She kicks the door shut with her heel. "You're trapped in the dress.

That's a different thing." She crosses the room, sets a bottle of wine on my kitchen counter, then comes over and yanks the zipper up in one clean motion that pulls me half an inch off my heels.

She steps back to look at me. "There. You look hot. Let's go."

I turn to face her and roll my shoulder to work the ache out of it. "We're not going anywhere yet. You just walked in with wine."

"The wine is for after. It's for when we come home and dissect everything." She's already back at the counter, opening the cabinet above my sink, taking down two glasses like I never said a word. She glances at me over her shoulder with a little shrug. "Okay. It's also for now."

My apartment still has boxes in it. Four of them, stacked against the wall by the window, labeled in my own handwriting from another life.

Kitchen. Books. Winter. I flew in nine days ago with two suitcases, then the boxes came by freight, and I've unpacked exactly enough to survive.

Everything else can wait until I know whether this city and I are going to work.

Dana pours, watching the wine climb the glass. "To your last free night."

"Don't say it like that."

"Tomorrow you belong to St. Vincent's. Tonight you belong to me." She holds a glass out until I take it. "Drink."

I drink. It's cold and cheap and somehow perfect, and I feel it go down warm.

Dana is the only person I know in this whole city.

We did undergrad together before she moved south for a nursing job, then I stayed north for med school, and when the residency match spat out my future and it landed in her city, she screamed on the phone for a solid ten seconds.

She's the reason I picked this apartment.

She's the reason I'm standing here in this dress.

She hops up to sit on the arm of my couch, glass balanced on her knee. "I still think you should've taken a month to settle in. Who moves across the country, then starts a surgical residency transfer nine days later?"

"People who don't have a choice."

"You had a choice."

"Staying wasn't a choice." I finish the glass faster than I mean to, and Dana's eyebrows go up.

She watches me over the rim of hers. She knows the shape of it without me having to draw it.

Three years with a man I'm not naming tonight, one shared lease, one ring I found in his sock drawer and panicked over for a month before I understood the panic was my answer.

He proposed at his sister's wedding anyway, in front of eighty people, because he knew I wouldn't say no with an audience.

I said no with an audience.

There was an open transfer spot in a general surgery program two thousand miles away, so I applied the same week, and everyone at my old hospital looked at me like I'd set a church on fire.

Dana stands, takes the empty glass out of my hand, and sets it in the sink with a soft clink.

"Okay. New rule for tonight. We don't say his name, we don't check your program email, and we go out.

" She holds up a finger for each one. "We go to Halyard, we drink one overpriced cocktail because that's all either of us can afford, then you remember that you're twenty-nine and hot and free. "

"Halyard. Is that the boat place?"

"It's the place by the water where the drinks cost fourteen dollars, then everyone pretends that's normal." She points at my feet. "Get your shoes."

The bar sits down by the river, all warm light and dark wood, the doors thrown open to the water so the night air moves straight through the room and lifts the hair off the back of my neck.

It's crowded without being packed. The music stays low enough to talk over.

Dana finds us two stools at the corner of the bar, then orders something with grapefruit in it before I've even sat down.

She swivels to face me, chin in her hand. "So. Tomorrow. Are you nervous?"

"No."

"Liar."

"I'm a fourth-year resident, Dana. I've done this job for three years." I set my purse in my lap. "Different building, same blood."

Her mouth curves. "You practiced your introduction in the mirror, didn't you."

I look at the bottles behind the bar instead of at her. "Twice."

She laughs so loud the man on her other side glances over. She waves him off without looking. "Say it for me. Do the mirror version."

"Absolutely not."

"Sarah."

"No."

She turns on her stool to face me fully, hands folded in her lap, patient as a nun in a pew. She'll sit like this for an hour. I know from experience.

I lower my voice so only she can hear it. "Hi. I'm Sarah Mitchell, I'm the incoming fourth-year transfer, and I'm excited to be joining the program."

"'Excited to be joining the program,'" she repeats, delighted, drawing the words out. "You sound like a hostage video."

"I hate you."

"You sound like they're holding your family in the next room."

I lift my glass toward her like a threat. "I will pour this on you."

The drinks arrive. Mine is pink, and it tastes like grapefruit with something meaner hiding underneath it. Dana clinks her glass against mine, then her phone buzzes on the bar, face up, and I catch the name Mark with a little heart beside it before her hand covers it.

"Take it," I tell her.

"He can wait."

"You've been dating six weeks. He cannot wait. Nothing waits at six weeks."

She's already sliding off the stool, phone to her ear, mouthing five minutes at me while she holds up five fingers like I might have forgotten what five is.

She heads out the open doors toward the water, then leans against the railing, laughing at something before he's probably finished a sentence.

I watch her a second longer, then turn back to my pink drink.

That's when I hear the man to my left order.

"Macallan. Neat." A short silence. "Actually, make it a double."

I'm not looking. I promised myself months ago that I'd mind my own business, and I've been good at it.

But the voice sits low and a little rough at the edges, the sound of a man who's been talking all day and stopped bothering to be polite about it, and my eyes slide sideways on their own like they've made a decision without asking me.

Dark hair, short on the sides, pushed around on top like a hand's been through it fifty times since morning. Sleeves rolled to the forearm. He's got both elbows on the bar and his head dropped forward a little, staring down at the grain of the wood like it's done something to him.

He's older than me. Mid-thirties, maybe. He is, without much room for argument, the best-looking man in this bar, and he doesn't seem to care.

The bartender sets the scotch down. He wraps his hand around the glass and doesn't drink. Just holds it. His jaw shifts once, like he's still chewing on whatever the day handed him.

I mean to leave him alone. I really do. The wine from my apartment and the grapefruit thing in front of me are working together now, though, and my mouth opens before I can stop it.

"That bad?"

He turns his head toward me. He doesn't move anything else, just the head, slow, and then I'm being looked at by a pair of gray eyes that make one quick pass over my face like he's deciding whether I'm worth the words it'll cost him to answer.

He decides I am.

"Lost one today," he says.

"Lost one what?"

He drinks instead of answering, then sets the glass down and turns it once between his fingers. "Doesn't matter. Long day at work."

"What do you do?" I ask.

The corner of his mouth moves. It isn't a smile so much as the first attempt at one. "Tonight? Nothing. Tonight I'm a guy at a bar."

"That's very mysterious."

"It's very tired. That's what it is." He shifts on the stool now, turning a few degrees toward me, enough that his knee ends up pointed at my leg.

I notice the knee. I notice that I've turned toward him too, that the eight inches between us has quietly become five, and that the whole loud room has pulled back a step. "What about you? What do you do?"

I don't know what makes me say it. Maybe it's the last-free-night thing. Maybe it's that tomorrow I go back to being Dr. Mitchell, transfer resident, hostage video, and tonight is the only night in front of me where I get to be no one at all.

"Tonight?" I lift one shoulder. "Nothing. I'm a girl at a bar."

He looks at me for a full second, long enough that I feel it move across my skin.

"Fair," he says.

"You started it."

"I did." He takes his hand off the glass and holds it out. "Nick."

"Sarah." His hand is warm and dry, and he doesn't do the thing men do where they hang on a moment too long. He lets go right on time, which is somehow worse, because now I'm sitting here thinking about the hand.

He tips his glass an inch toward my drink. "So, Sarah. What is that?"

"I have no idea. My friend ordered it. It's pink, and it's fighting me."

"Winning?"

"We're even."

That earns me the real one. It comes up slow, and it changes his whole face, drops about five years and whatever weight he walked in carrying, and I have the completely unhelpful thought that I'd like to be the reason it happens a second time.

Out by the railing, Dana is still on the phone.

She catches my eye through the open doors, looks at the back of Nick's head, then looks at me, and her entire face lights up like a sign.

I give her the smallest shake of my head.

She gives me a thumbs up anyway, then turns back to the water, and I understand that her five minutes just became thirty. Traitor.

"Your friend abandoned you," Nick says. He didn't even turn around.

"How did you—"