7. David
7
DAVID
My heart was heavy, weighed down by feelings of failure. I tried so hard to be there for Lexi, but once again, Claire was there to interfere and make sure Lexi stayed two steps too far away from me to show her how much I cared. I sat at my desk staring at the framed picture of her on my desk. She looked just like her mother, but I prayed that she would be nothing at all like her in temperament and personality.
I sent her a message asking her to call me, and I prayed she'd answer it and reach out. I had wasted far too much time in my daughter's life trying to keep the peace between me and her mother. Lexi was old enough to understand now that not everything that happened between Claire and me was my fault. I wanted this summer and some alone time with her to prove that.
To my surprise, my phone dinged almost immediately. I picked it up to see a message from Lexi. The preview was a smattering of emojis.
Lexi 7:54 AM: It's okay, Dad. I know Mom is a handful. I know you tried. I can't call right now because the train is packed and I won't be able to hear you, but I'll stay with you for a few weeks. I have a huge internship in London. I can't wait to tell you about it.
The message also ended with a half-dozen emojis, and while it made me happy that she wasn’t upset with me, I was a bit discouraged that she would be going overseas and not staying with me the whole summer. That was the way of life, though. Kids grow up and move on.
The door opened and Lauren walked in carrying two paper cups with lids. Her warm smile was enough to dust the chip off my shoulder as she sashayed across the diagnostics office toward my door. I felt heat flood my body at the sight of her too, after having completed this morning with her in mind. I wondered what she thought of that kiss last week and if she had imagined us doing more the way I had.
"Good morning, Doc," she said happily, waltzing over to my desk. She set the coffee cup on the corner and pushed it toward me before sitting down. The snug-fitting slacks she wore hugged her hips and thighs, accentuating her thick curves in a way that drew my eyes toward them. What a sight to behold.
"Good morning, Dr. Newhouse." I straightened in my chair and reached for the coffee. "This is a treat."
"I figured you'd order me to get one anyway, so I saved myself the trouble." The paper cup rose to her lips and she sipped from it before continuing. "I heard we caught a live one in the ER. Someone from radiology was carrying on about it in the elevator. I guess the charts are being sent up soon."
Lauren's deferral to more professional topics than my body had in mind was frustrating, but probably for the best. All week so far, she and I had managed to not bring it up or even be distracted by each other. At least I had. With HR breathing down my neck about the whole "fired, not fired" incident—how they found out I'd never know—I didn't need any slip-ups.
But this entire week, I had been impressed by Lauren's tact and skill. She was leagues ahead of the others, though she still had things to learn. My "orders" seemed to have done the trick too. She was compliant, but not overly. She knew how to get down and dirty with a diagnosis and make sure we were ticking all of our boxes. More than once, she pointed out an error in my thinking, about which I couldn't even be upset. Those instances had been perfect opportunities to show the entire team how we had to rely on each other to see the full picture.
Of course, it had come with a lot of learning moments for her too, about which she apologized profusely without needing to. Everyone had to learn sometime, and I enjoyed teaching her. I also enjoyed watching her learn and found myself mesmerized by her smile each time the light bulb went off and she had an "ah-ha!" moment.
"Well, let's wait and see what they send up," I told her, taking my cup of coffee to sip it. The first drop hit my tongue and I groaned in pleasure. She knew exactly how to make my coffee right—black as night and hotter than the gates of Hades.
She chuckled. "I'm glad you approve."
"I needed this. After last night, today is fixing to be a long day." I'd been up far too late and wrestling with anger and then slept far too long. I'd missed my morning routine and the pit stop at the nurses' station for coffee.
"I felt that way Monday. Man, I had a long weekend. Jason is going through this thing again, and I'm not really sure how to handle it. I feel like I’m still a kid. I don’t know how to parent an adult." I wasn't sure what situation she was in, but I gathered that Jason was her brother. After that info dump in my car two weeks ago, I knew her life wasn't all rainbows and sunshine. My heart went out to her.
"Well, not to make light of your situation, but I have to deal with a manipulative ex-wife who wants to keep me from my daughter—who, by the way, is an adult now and can make her own decisions." I grimaced as I took another sip of the coffee, and Lauren looked at me compassionately.
"That's hard. I'm sorry you're going through that. I wish it were different for you." She had no clue the life I'd lived or the nightmares I'd been through, but I appreciated the rapport we were building and the fact that the modicum of professionality between us was hazed into a friendlier atmosphere. It gave me a pathway to bring up what was on my mind, what I couldn’t get off my mind.
"I wanted to speak with you about something." I wanted to bring it up as tactfully as I could, but I felt like there was no tactful way to say, did you like when I kissed you ?
Lauren leaned back in the chair and crossed one leg over the other and raised her eyebrows. "Sure, anything." She sipped from her paper cup with its plastic lid and smiled. The dimples in her cheeks peeked out at me and made my heart flutter. This woman was infecting me with a toxin so deadly it threatened to consume every cell in my body and destroy me if I didn't get to draw the cure from her body soon.
"The orders I gave you…" I said, hoping she would connect the dots. I knew she was, in her mind. I could see the wheels turning in the way she looked at me, but it was like she was refusing to allow her mind to go there. Like she put a mental block in place on purpose so we could remain professional, and to a certain extent, we were. We had. But I knew it wasn’t going to last much longer.
I only had to think of her lips touching mine to get hard this morning. Even now, my dick was throbbing, and that wasn’t a good thing. If we were off the clock and alone, I'd think it a different story, but we both had work to do and it appeared that Lauren was far better at compartmentalizing than I was.
"Orders?" she asked, snickering. "So you really were going to make me get you coffee? I thought we'd moved past that."
"I meant, the very specific order I gave you Friday evening." I leaned forward and rested my elbows on my desk, raising my eyebrows.
"Oh, God, Dr. Park, I?—"
"Orders in!" Dr. Baine's voice interrupted our conversation, and I looked up at him as he burst into my office with a frantic look on his face. "We have a patient and they need us now. We need to do this in the ED since his condition is changing so quickly." Dr. Baine slapped the notepad on my desk, and I stood in synchronized motion with Lauren as I picked it up.
She grabbed our coffees, and I was already moving toward the office door with my face buried in the notebook. Our conversation would have to continue later on, but at least she knew I wanted to discuss it.
"Patient has presented with neurological symptoms including seizures—did we put him on Depakote yet?" I looked up at Baine, who nodded.
"ER docs have him on the highest dose, but he's only been in for a few hours and it takes days to get saturation. Cooper suggested Ativan and Thorazine, which is a contraindication, obviously. I came to get you as soon as they released the patient to our team." He sounded out of breath even as we rode the elevator downward.
Lauren leaned over my shoulder to look at the notes scrawled on the sheet of paper, and I got a whiff of her perfume. It was intoxicating and a distraction I didn't need. But she needed to see the information as much as I did. I took my coffee from her and handed her the notebook, and she started studying it immediately.
"Coughing, bruising easily, liver enzymes off the charts, and diarrhea. My God, what could it be?" Her face was screwed up in confusion, and I was right there with her. Add to that the seizures, and there were about a dozen conditions that matched a few of the symptoms, but nothing in my mind that matched them all.
"Blood tests were inconclusive, but they did indicate he is negative for HIV." Baine was the first out of the elevator, leading the charge toward the ER. I trailed behind Lauren, even more distracted by the curve of her backside as she walked now. I should never have allowed myself to break down and go personal with her even a little. This was seriously impairing my ability to think properly.
"Okay, well, the lumbar puncture shows no trace of infection, but the Broca's area of his brain has a shadow." She looked up over her shoulder and said, "Toxoplasmosis? What are we dealing with, Dr. Park?"
"I'm not sure," I told her, nodding up the hallway. "We have to see his chart."
We rushed into the ER and met doctors Cooper and Holt there. They stood with a team of doctors who were discussing the patient, and I squeezed my way to the front of the group as Dr. Holt spoke. "What we know is that the antiretrovirals aren't doing a thing."
"Of course they're not. He doesn't have HIV." Lauren rolled her eyes and shook her head. "You should be looking at the blood. He could have an immunoglobulin deficiency, or leukemia. What does the liver tell us?"
She's asking all the right questions, and I turn to the attendings on duty. "She has a point. We could have a T-cell deficiency too."
"If this is an infection, the CBC would have shown the ALC. But the lumbar puncture showed no infection." Again, Lauren caught me in a mistake. I was stumped, but I wasn't giving up.
"He had CD11 antibodies," Dr. Cooper added, but Lauren was there with a rebuttal for that too. This time, she didn’t even look up from the tablet in her hand that someone had given her. "They don't indicate lymphoma, though. He has pneumonia which isn't responding to broad spectrum, so why is his white cell count so low?" She looked stumped.
Dr. Baine walked around the group and pushed his way in front next to me. This situation had us all flustered, but with a patient crashing and seizing, we had no time to stop and have a breather.
"It's CVID. It's the only thing that makes sense." Lauren looked up at me with determination and met my gaze. She was right. It explained the lower T cells and B cells, the bleeding and diarrhea.
"Start him on immunoglobulin therapy now," I ordered, but no one moved.
"CVID doesn't usually cause seizures," Dr. Cooper said, but I knew Lauren was right. I didn’t have to defend her diagnosis, though. She did that herself.
"You’re right, it doesn't. But the nutritional deficiencies caused in the body by CVID will definitely lower the seizure threshold, and any patient with a predisposition or undiagnosed epilepsy will be at a greater risk. Treat him for CVID now." She squared her shoulders and pursed her lips, and I felt pride welling up in my chest.
"You heard her. Go do it," I said, and they scrambled to get to work. For a moment, Lauren stood looking at me with a soft smile playing at her lips, and my God, I wanted to order her to kiss me right then and there. We really had to talk about this because it was out of control.
It wasn't just her body and the lingering thought of that kiss that had me going. I was so turned on by her mind, I couldn’t think straight. I felt like the only thing that would cool me off was a dip in her pool, except that might just be the beginning of the end for our working relationship.
Lauren walked up to me and whispered, "Are you okay?" as if it were scandalous.
"If you keep showing off like that, I'm going to have to order you to be silent. You make my dick so hard I can't work like this." My voice was so quiet only the two of us could hear, but she got my message loud and clear.
"Go ahead and make me," she said, then winked and walked away.
Heaven help me.