Chapter Three
Five days before Christmas, Piper’s sitting in the ER next to Santa Claus.
Apparently, his latest shift at the mall aggravated a herniated disc in his back.
Piper holds a wad of balled-up paper towels to her temple and nods with sympathy.
“Ms. Sadler?” a nurse in pink scrubs calls from the doorway of the waiting room.
“That’s me.” She wishes Santa a speedy recovery and hurries to her feet.
The nurse, who introduces herself as Nora, walks Piper back toward a curtained-off ER bay.
As they pass the nurses station, “Christmas Wrapping” by the Waitresses plays faintly from a wireless speaker on someone’s desk.
Piper appreciates the effort. She knows what it is to have to DIY holiday cheer. This year especially.
Once they’re behind the curtain, she explains what happened again (she was leaving Second City after class at the same time her boss, Charlie, was coming in with an amp. He didn’t see her, and, long story short, she stopped a stainless steel door with her forehead).
Nora checks her vitals and her pupils, asking extra questions—Piper figures—to rule out the need for a more serious neurological exam, since she hit her head.
After they cover allergies and medications (none) and her tetanus shot status (up to date), Nora promises a doctor will be right in to see her.
Piper exhales heavily as the door shuts. The stinging in her forehead is more acute now that she’s alone.
She lets her chin hang forward. There’s blood down the front of her favorite cream sweater.
There’s no way that’s coming out.
Suddenly, her throat goes tight. She’s not going to cry—she didn’t cry when the door hit her, and it hurt way worse right after it happened—but she can’t ignore, suddenly, how much effort she’s put into her independence lately.
Why did she say no so firmly when Charlie wanted to send someone to keep her company? Letting people in wasn’t a floodgate.
She startles as a man in a white lab coat comes around the corner. When the nurse said “a minute,” Piper assumed that meant like twenty in doctor time. She sits up straighter on the gurney, fighting not to feel fragile under the harsh fluorescent lights. But the doctor isn’t looking at her yet.
He’s scowling, slicing his hand through the air in a knock-it-off gesture at someone Piper can’t see in the next bay over. Someone who’s saying “Hey, Santa, do you think you could bring Dr. Harrison a girlfriend? He’s been awfully good this year” at a volume meant to carry.
Piper’s doc yanks at the curtain divider, sliding it infinitesimally farther on its metal pole, as if hoping that might make the area soundproof.
It’s hard to tell with paper towel covering half her left eye, but she’s pretty sure he’s handsome. She gets a flash of Roman nose, a tousle of dark hair, and—if she’s not mistaken—the beginnings of a faint pink stain at the top of pronounced cheekbones.
“I’m so sorry about that,” he says, turning fully toward her for the first time. “I’m Dr. . . .” He trails off, looking at her face.
“Let me guess,” Piper offers when the pause becomes prolonged. “Harrison?”
The doctor blinks, nods, says “Sorry” again, and then, “Yes,” as he pulls the chart from under his arm and looks at it, as if for confirmation.
“Piper Sadler?” He says it like he recognizes the name.
Piper risks lowering the paper towel for a second to get a full look at him. And even though a slow ooze of blood immediately starts leaking down the side of her face, she’s glad she did.
The hot guy from the back of the club!
She smiles as she places him, even though it’s not particularly comfortable to do so—something about the way her face muscles pull.
“Oh! Hey! It’s you!”
“It’s you”?! Great, now it’s her turn to blush.
Luckily, he doesn’t seem to have noticed her less than cool greeting. The sight of her injury snaps him to attention. He’s across the bay in an instant.
“Here, let me—” He gathers some gauze from a station in the corner, significantly lighter and smaller than her much abused paper towels. “This should be more comfortable.”
“Thanks,” Piper says, dabbing at her cheek and then putting pressure back on her temple. “That is better.”
She runs through what happened for a third time, and then Dr. Harrison conducts an exam that includes staring into her eyes and touching her face gently. He smells like the pack of wintergreen gum she can see sticking out of the pocket of his lab coat.
Thank goodness they took her heart rate before he walked in.
Fifteen minutes later, he’s cleaned out her cut, and Piper’s not glad that the door hit her, but she’s definitely less mad at Charlie than she was when it happened.
“I really enjoyed your set the other night,” Dr. Harrison says, finally acknowledging that they’ve met before.
Under normal circumstances, Piper would be flattered—more than flattered: pleased as punch. She works hard honing her craft. She’s earned that compliment.
But he lifted a needle off the tray at his elbow when he said it. A big one.
She narrows her eyes at him. “You’re trying to distract me.”
“I am,” he concedes, smiling a little in a way that feels honest and kind and disarming. “I need to apply a local anesthetic before I do your sutures. You’ll feel a pinch and then a bit of a burn, but then nothing after that.”
Piper swallows thickly, but nods.
Dr. Harrison steps close with the needle.
She presses her fingernails into her palms, feels the pinch and then the burn, exactly as he described. But neither lingers with her the way his words do when he says, “Just so we’re clear, I do think you’re very funny,” before stepping back to dispose of the needle.
They wait a few minutes, and then he makes sure the numbing agent is fully in effect by pressing his glove-covered thumbs across her forehead.
At this point, Piper decides it’s irresponsible for the hospital to let him wear scrubs the exact same shade of blue as his eyes.
She’s waited her entire adult life for a handsome, gainfully employed, single man to sit across from her and ask “What’s it like, being a comedian?” with seemingly genuine interest.
So of course it happens now, in a situation where there are absolutely no circumstances under which it would be appropriate for Piper to ask him out.
“It’s hard,” she answers. She figures she’s already been vulnerable in front of him: He’s seen her act.
And perhaps even more incriminating, he saw her before her act: nervous and jittery, questioning for the hundredth time if she really wanted to go out there and spill her guts in front of strangers.
Piper’s been doing stand-up for almost a decade.
She is, ultimately, comfortable with the pieces of herself she shares on stage.
But the ER at Chicago General is a lot different from her place behind the microphone.
Sitting in this cold, sterile room, it feels as if the hand-plucked kernels of vulnerability that normally make her jokes land are suddenly stuck in her molars.
“Don’t get me wrong.” She feels the need to elaborate, to explain herself. “I love comedy. I would have quit a long time ago if I didn’t. But it constantly feels like I’m trying to cobble together a career. Stand-up, like the show you came to—that kind of booking is few and far between for me.”
Piper ignores the pulling sensation as he administers her first stitch. The area is truly numb—it doesn’t hurt—but the strangeness of it still makes her blood run cold. She takes a shaky inhale and stares straight ahead at the Ebola poster on the far wall.
“What else do you do, besides stand-up?”
Piper can’t tell if Dr. Harrison is genuinely interested or simply trying to keep her mind off her impending entry into Frankenstein cosplay. Either way, she’ll take the conversational buoy.
“Mostly, I teach. At Second City and the iO.”
Focusing on her hectic, sometimes erratic schedule is grounding. She calls up her iCal mentally as he continues, slow and steady, stitch by stitch, to put her back together.
“Oh yeah?”
She likes his voice. It’s approachable, his tone naturally warm even with the slight raspiness she suspects comes from overuse.
“What kind of classes?”
She can tell he’s from here too—the Midwest, if not the city itself. In his subtle but telltale Great Lakes vowel shift. The way he clips the a in classes makes it short.
“Youth improv and sketch writing, both of which I love. Teenagers are so uniquely, weirdly funny. Plus, public speaking for adults, which is wonderful in a different way. It’s very rewarding, watching people’s confidence grow along with their command of language.”
Piper can’t move her head; Dr. Harrison is holding her gently but firmly in place with one wide hand as he stitches with the other. But she catches glimpses of him in her periphery. His face is serious, his brow folded (adorably) in concentration.
“And what else?”
“Hmm?”
“You said, ‘Mostly, I teach,’” he explains, his eyes never leaving his work.
“Oh. Right.” She’s surprised, and impressed, that he was listening that closely.
“I also write and perform in an ensemble sketch show every second Sunday. The collaboration of that is amazing, the way the energy changes with the audience. But stand-up is still my favorite when I get to do it. It’s cathartic getting to work through whatever’s happening in my life at the time.”
Piper can’t linger over the specifics of the set Dr. Harrison saw without wanting to self-immolate, but it’s safe to say he knows more about her first threesome than all her previous health care providers.
“You’re incredible at it,” Dr. Harrison says, leaning back and snipping the suture thread. “I don’t know how you can get on stage like that and . . .”
“Make a fool of myself?” Piper offers gently, used to people not taking her work seriously.
“What?” He pauses with his hand an inch above a tube of antibiotic ointment. “No. I meant—where do you find the confidence to be so honest in front of strangers?”
And she can see where the question is coming from. Can imagine that he must work hard to maintain a professional detachment in order to do his own job.
Piper shrugs. “I think it’s because at the end of the day, I’m not doing it for the audience.”
She tries to hold still as he brushes on the ointment.
“I guess that probably sounds selfish. Like, yes, of course I hope the people who come to my shows laugh and have a nice time and want to see me again. But I couldn’t do it if that was the only reason.”
She couldn’t leave both her livelihood and her self-esteem completely at the mercy of other people and still manage to get out of bed every morning.
“I write about my life because it helps me understand myself and, sometimes, to be kinder to myself. On stage the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever done isn’t a catastrophe.
It’s a story. And if I tell it right, it’s empathetic.
If I tell it right,” she repeats, thinking.
She’s never interrogated her writing from exactly this angle before.
“Then you’re there with me. We’re in it together. ”
Dr. Harrison is quiet for a moment as he secures a sterile bandage over her stitches.
Piper becomes certain she’s talking about herself too much, that she’s taking advantage of this nice, hot man’s bedside manner. Her face heats to the point that she wonders if he can feel it through his gloves.
“I mean, obviously I’m not a doctor.”
She needs him to know that she knows her job would not be valuable if she survived a plane crash on a desert island.
“I’m not saving anyone’s life.”
But Dr. Harrison says, “You could.”
Piper wants to laugh, but she can’t get quite enough air. A little spike of anger shoots through her chest.
“Please don’t blow smoke up my ass.”
This is a recurring problem with her job. Men hear she is a comedian and it’s like they can’t help themselves; they need to make a quip.
The guy in front of her can get away with a lot with that face and body and voice. And god, a fucking ER doctor? Are you kidding? But no one likes being pandered to.
If the next thing out of his mouth is “Laughter is the best medicine,” Piper’s not going to laugh.
Instead, Dr. Harrison steps back, looking genuinely surprised at the dramatic shift in her tone.
His dark brows draw together. “You think I’m joking?”
“Yes,” Piper says, a little unsure now.
“My job—” He takes a deep breath. And Piper swears she can hear how poorly he slept last night in that inhale. “I care deeply about this work. But it’s intense. Mentally. Physically. It’s heavy.”
Piper nods. She sat in that waiting room a long time. Saw the mothers standing for hours, rocking their unconsolable babies. The older man whose hands were shaking as he checked in his wheelchair-bound wife.
Heavy? She doesn’t know how he’s still standing.
“But I went out last week with my friends, which I don’t do enough.” He manages to pull off adorably self-deprecating even with most of his face obscured by his surgical mask. “And I sat with them in the dark for a few hours, and you made me laugh. And I needed it.”
Dr. Harrison clears his throat.
“Without you, I didn’t know how much I needed it.”
He takes off his mask, the job done. And, wow, Piper somehow already forgot the majesty of his jawline. Holy shit.
For all her preoccupation with words, she doesn’t have a reply. All she knows is she likes the idea of making him laugh, making him lighter, very much.
There’s something about him that is almost familiar. Like her body remembers the wintergreen in his scent. God, that sounds fanciful and ridiculous, even in her own head.
“For the record,” he says, removing his gloves and then stepping on the tab of a trash can to dispose of them, “I wouldn’t.”
“Wouldn’t?” she repeats, confused.
“Blow smoke up your ass.”
Piper beams, delighted. “Are you allowed to say ass in front of a patient?”
“No,” he says, very seriously, and then gives her the hottest half smirk anyone’s ever seen.
Piper’s gonna have to walk home—in the snow!—to cool her face down to something resembling baseline.