Chapter 2
The Golden Retriever Gets A Leash
Casey
There’s blood on my Stegosaurus.
I hold my left arm up under the fluorescent lights, squinting at the splatter pattern across the cartoon dinosaur on my scrub top.
It's a solid arterial spray shape, very dramatic, which is wildly misleading considering it came from a nine-year-old named Brayden who flailed at exactly the wrong moment during a scalp laceration repair.
Head wounds. They bleed like the kid's auditioning for a straight to Netflix horror movie, and then twenty minutes later, the little guy is sitting up asking for apple juice and a WiFi password.
“Dr. Welling? Bay six has a query fracture, and bay nine just threw up on Dr. Hutchins again.”
I catch the chart that Nurse Tamsin frisbees at me without looking up from the Dermabond I'm peeling off my knuckles. “Tell Hutchins to angle left next time. The kid in bay nine telegraphs.”
“I'll pass along your tactical analysis.”
I grin at her, shoving the chart under my arm and shouldering my way through the double doors of the paediatric ER.
The afternoon shift is the screaming chaos I live for.
Somewhere to my left, a toddler is howling at a pitch that could shatter plexiglass.
Two nurses are wrestling with a portable X-ray that has a wheel that’s jammed and only turns in counterclockwise circles.
A harried father’s trying to explain to the triage desk that yes, his daughter did actually swallow the Lego, and no, it was not a small piece; it was an entire Lego horse, and also could we please move this along before his wife gets off of work and finds out this happened?
I love this place.
I’m built for this exact brand of disaster.
I'm too big, too loud, and I take up way too much space in every room I walk into. My scrubs are a size too small because the hospital doesn't stock them for guys who are six-three and spent their formative years getting body-checked into boards in Northern Ontario hockey rinks. My hair’s doing something objectively criminal right now. There’s a holographic dinosaur sticker on my stethoscope because a four-year-old named Maisie put it there this morning and told me it was “for bravery,” and I would rather die than take it off.
I check the X-ray on the fracture kid, confirm it's a clean, non-displaced buckle fracture of the distal radius (classic falling-off-the-monkey-bars job), and spend four minutes doing a magic trick with a tongue depressor to stop him crying long enough to get the splint on.
I give him a T-Rex sticker. His mom cries and thanks me.
I tell her he's going to be great, and I mean it. I always mean it.
I’m in the middle of charting, wedged into a nurses' station chair that is comically too small for me, writing notes with a pen that has a fuzzy purple pom-pom on the end because someone stole all the normal pens, when I feel it.
It's not a sound. It's not even a movement I consciously register.
It's more like... a shift in barometric pressure.
A tightening of the air. The way the atmosphere in a hockey arena changes right before the puck drops.
Every nerve ending on the back of my neck stands up at full attention, and my heart does that embarrassing and involuntary thing it's been doing for two full years.
I look up.
Dr. Arjun Kapoor is standing in the doorway of the paediatric ER.
And he looks like hell.
My pen stops. My brain, which has been happily bouncing between fracture classifications and whether there are any Timbits left in the break-room, goes offline.
Because Arjun Kapoor never looks like hell.
Arjun Kapoor normally appears as if a slightly cruel deity hand-sculpted him, specifically intending to ruin my life.
Sharp cheekbones, dark, meticulous curls, and green eyes that seem stolen from a Renaissance painting of a furious saint define him.
He wears his white coat like it's ceremonial armour, and he walks through this hospital like he owns it, which, honestly, given how much grant money he pulls in, he sort of does.
But right now, the armour is cracked.
His jaw’s locked so tight I can see the muscles jumping in his cheek from thirty feet away.
His hands are clasped behind his back in that thing he does, that very specific posture that he thinks hides how stressed he is and does not.
His green eyes are slightly red-rimmed, his dark curls are fractionally less immaculate than usual, and there's a tension in his shoulders that I've only seen after his worst marathon surgeries.
Something’s wrong. Something’s very, very wrong.
My whole body goes on alert, shifting from ER-chaos mode to a frequency that’s solely reserved for this man.
I have an internal Arjun Kapoor monitoring system and I'm not remotely sorry about it.
Two years of watching him from across hallways, operating rooms, and hospital cafeterias have given me a PhD in the micro-expressions of Dr. Arjun Kapoor, and right now, every single indicator is flashing red.
He scans the ER floor. His gaze sweeps past the crying toddler, the broken X-ray machine, the Lego horse crisis, and locks directly onto me.
My stomach flips over so hard I'm briefly concerned I'm having a medical event.
Because Arjun Kapoor doesn't look at me.
That's, like, a foundational law of the universe.
The Dread Prince of Paediatrics occupies a stratosphere eleven kilometres above the disorganized, Dermabond-covered, dinosaur-scrub-wearing plane of existence I inhabit.
We exist in the same hospital. We sometimes work the same cases.
He hands me referrals with long, elegant fingers, and I hand him consult notes with my big, clumsy ones.
Once, our hands touched during a chart exchange, and I thought about it for three consecutive days like a deranged person.
But he doesn't look at me. Not like this. Not with his face focused on me like I'm the only stable thing in a room that's spinning.
He walks toward me. His stride is precise and deliberate, the way he moves when he's made a surgical decision and nothing on earth is going to stop him from executing it.
Nurses part for him like he's Moses in a white coat.
An intern physically flattens herself against the wall, squeaking as she sees him push by.
“Dr. Welling,” he says when he reaches me, and his voice is that low controlled murmur that makes every hair on my arms stand up. “I need to speak with you. Privately. Now.”
I blink. “Uh. Yeah. Sure.” Eloquent. Shakespeare would weep. “Let me just finish this chart and—”
“Now, Dr. Welling.”
His eyes are doing that thing. That laser-focused thing where the green goes so intense it's almost luminous, and if I stare directly into them for over four seconds, I lose the ability to form sentences and become a puddle of unrequited longing.
I put down the fuzzy purple pen. “Okay. Yeah. Now works.”
He turns on his heel and walks, and I follow, because honestly, Arjun Kapoor could walk straight off the edge of the building and I'd follow him down, trying to figure out how to cushion the landing with my body.
He leads me past the nurses' station, past the break room, past the supply corridor, and pushes open the door to a storage closet. A supply closet. The kind with metal shelving units stacked with gauze, saline bags, and boxes of nitrile gloves. It’s roughly the size of a parking space, and I fill approximately seventy percent of it just by existing.
He pulls me inside and shuts the door.
We’re now standing in a closet. Together.
His shoulder’s about four inches from my chest. I can smell him, that sharp, expensive citrus soap he uses, cutting through the antiseptic and the faint copper of Brayden's blood on my scrubs.
My heart is hammering so loud I'm positive he can hear it, because the man has the auditory sensitivity of a bat and the emotional radar of a Cold War satellite.
“So,” I say, trying very hard to sound like a normal, functional adult man and not someone who is vibrating at a frequency only dogs can detect. “What's up, Doc?”
He closes his eyes. A muscle in his jaw twitches. “Please do not do that.”
“What, the Bugs Bunny thing? Yeah, fair, that one's on me. Bad timing. You okay? You look like you're about to tell me someone died.”
“No one died. I performed a flawless cerebellar resection this morning.
The patient is stable. That is not why I'm here.” He opens his eyes, and I see something in them that stops every joke in my throat.
It's panic. Real, barely leashed panic, and on a man who operates inside the skulls of children with steady hands and ice water for blood, it’s genuinely terrifying.
“Hey.” I shift, instinctively angling my body so I'm blocking the door, putting myself between him and the rest of the world. I don't even think about it. It's just what I do. “Whatever it is, it's fine. Just talk to me.”
He takes a breath. It's measured, the kind of controlled inhale he probably uses before making his first incision. Then he squares his shoulders, lifts his chin, and looks me dead in the eyes.
“I told my mother that I'm engaged.”
I wait for the rest of the sentence, certain there has to be more.
It doesn't come.
“Okay,” I say slowly. “Congrats? I didn't know you were seeing anyone, but that's... that's great, man. Who's the lucky—”
“You.”
The word hits me like a clean, open-ice body check. The kind where you don't see it coming and your skates leave the ice and for one long, suspended second, gravity just stops working.
“I'm sorry,” I reply calmly. “What?”