Chapter 11
Eleven
“I’m surprised you agreed to stay,” I say as Noah moves to the dresser to retrieve the wine.
“Why is that?” He hands me a glass, then sets the other on the side table while he uses the corkscrew to open the bottle.
“Because it’s exactly what Olivia wants,” I say. “She left two wine glasses in my room, and now we’re using them. I think she’d call that a win.”
I hold up my glass while he fills it half full with red wine. “I won’t tell her if you won’t,” Noah says, blue eyes sparkling in the low light. There’s a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth, but he’s putting up quite the fight.
It’s making me itch to see it—to see a full smile and not just the tiny glimpses and snatches I’ve stolen so far.
He clears his throat and takes a long sip of wine. I’d put money on him doing it just to hide his face.
“What would it take?” I ask, keeping my tone light.
“What would what take?”
“What would it take to make you smile?”
“A lot of things make me smile,” he says.
“Then why haven’t I seen it yet?”
He rolls his eyes. “You’ve seen me smile.”
I sit up a little taller. “I haven’t. Little smirks. Tiny grins. But what would it take for you to just…let loose? To smile like there’s nothing in the entire world to be sad about?”
He rubs a hand over his face, giving me the distinct impression that now he’s trying not to smile on purpose.
“Oh, come on,” I say. “I can tell you want to. You want to smile right now.”
“I don’t,” he deadpans.
I scour my brain for a story—something, anything—that might make him crack. “My first year of nursing school, I was doing my very first head-to-toe assessment on a real patient. My instructor was present, as well as a handful of other students, so needless to say, I was really nervous.”
I take a sip of wine, needing a tiny dose of liquid courage. Honestly, it’s harder to tell this story to someone who I know has medical training, but I have a feeling winning a smile from Noah will make my own embarrassment worth it.
“So I was listening for heart sounds, growing more and more uneasy because the patient’s heartbeat was so faint.
I kept shifting my stethoscope, hoping to find something stronger, but on the inside, I was already rehearsing how I would tell everyone the patient was actually dying.
But then my instructor reached over and moved my hand to the other side of the patient’s chest. Where her heart actually was. ”
Noah takes a deep breath, his lips pressing together like he wants to smile, but he doesn’t cave.
“Then there was the time I accidentally told a patient I was palpating her abdomen to check for ticklishness instead of tenderness. Or the time I set up to start an IV on the patient’s right side, only to pull back the blanket and realize he didn’t have a right arm.”
Noah barks out a laugh, head shaking as he finally lets himself smile.
The sight is glorious. His entire face changes. His eyes lift, lines creasing his face in all the best ways while his lips bracket straight, white teeth.
“I need you to know that I am actually a very good nurse,” I say. “At least, I will be. All of those things happened in my first semester of clinicals. Except for the IV thing. That was last month. But that could have happened to anyone.”
He holds my gaze for a long moment. “I don’t have any doubts about how good you’ll be.”
“Really?” There’s a vulnerability in my tone that surprises me.
I do think I’ll be a good nurse. Assuming I can find a job.
But that doesn’t mean I don’t still feel overwhelmed if I think too hard about nursing on my own, without an instructor or a preceptor watching over my shoulder. “I hope I will be.”
“You’ll be terrified at first,” Noah says. “When you realize how much your patients are counting on you. But you get used to that. Just don’t stop asking questions. If you don’t know something, ask. Better to ask than to assume and risk screwing up.”
“That’s good advice,” I say, then a thought pops into my head. “Wait a minute. Is this how you met my brother? As his doctor?”
Noah nods his head. “Sort of. I wasn’t a doctor yet.
But I did a sports medicine rotation when I was in med school and spent two weeks in Harvest Hollow shadowing the team’s doctors.
I met most of the players, but Alec was going through something with his knee, so I saw more of him than any of the others. ”
“Stupid knee,” I say. “He struggled his whole career with that knee.”
“He’s a nice guy,” Noah says, and my heart warms.
“Yeah. He’s pretty great.”
Noah’s eyes shift back to the fire, and I take full advantage of the opportunity to study his profile, his perfectly straight nose, the scar in front of his ear that disappears into his beard.
“Do you really like it here?” I ask, and his gaze shifts to mine, his expression telling me I’ve surprised him with the subject change.
“It feels like home,” Noah says. “But it’s temporary. Another few weeks, and I’ll have to figure out somewhere else to go.”
“You don’t want to—” I cut off my question, not wanting to push.
“It’s okay,” he says. “Go ahead and ask.”
“I was just wondering if you would go home home. Are you close with your parents? I remember you mentioning they live up in Asheville.”
He takes another sip of his wine. “My parents are amazing. But…” He sets down his glass and runs a hand across his beard. “It’s complicated right now. My father is also a doctor. A trauma surgeon.”
There’s a weight to Noah’s words that makes me realize he’s telling me a lot more than what his father does for a living.
“Is he upset that you’re no longer practicing medicine?” I ask.
It takes Noah a long time to answer, but I’m sensing this is just how conversations are with him. That if you want him to talk, you have to be comfortable with a little bit of silence.
“He hasn’t said as much,” he says, “but he doesn’t need to. I can see it in his eyes. He looks at me like I’m broken.”
We sit for another long moment. I am in no position to offer Noah any advice, but I do want to understand.
“Acknowledging my own lack of experience here,” I finally say, “it isn’t hard for me to imagine someone needing a break from the intensity of the ER.
I don’t think that makes you broken. Then again, maybe you walked away because you just didn’t like what you were doing? ”
This time, Noah responds almost immediately. “I love being a doctor.”
I pause, wondering if he noticed the present tense of his words. It’s different than what he said earlier, when he very distinctly told me he wasn’t a doctor anymore.
I lean back in my chair, wrapping my arms around my knees. “Then why did you leave?”
It takes a minute, but eventually Noah begins to talk.
About a patient—an older man who was constantly in the ER due to his bad heart.
He was in and out of halfway homes and shelters, but despite his many struggles, he was always affable and friendly, a lot like Noah’s grandfather, so Noah took a liking to him.
It was clear he needed a pacemaker, but a lack of insurance and family support created huge stumbling blocks in getting him the care he needed.
Despite Noah’s efforts to wade through the bureaucratic red tape required to set up the man’s access to Medicare and other community-based programs, he kept falling short.
“It wasn’t enough,” Noah says after walking me through the challenges of the man’s care.
“And no one in hospital administration seemed all that concerned. He was dying, and I knew he was dying, and there was nothing I could do about it. It was just a matter of time before he collapsed from a heart attack, and I hated that everyone seemed okay with that.”
“It’s a frustrating system,” I say. “That there’s always so much bureaucracy attached to peoples’ lives.”
“Eventually, he did collapse from a heart attack,” Noah says, his voice soft, a little distant.
“At the end of a really long shift when I was already worn thin. Too many losses, not enough wins and then…there he was. Unresponsive in the trauma bay.” He sniffs and rubs a hand across his face.
“At that point, I’d developed some pretty destructive work habits.
I lived alone, in a new city, and I hadn’t made many friends.
” He glances up, meeting my eye like this is one part I might particularly understand, and offers me the tiniest of smirks.
“It might be hard for you to believe, but I’m not the greatest at first impressions. ”
I chuckle and shake my head. “You’re better than you think.”
“At any rate, I was working too much, sleeping too little. Spending too little time doing things outside the hospital. So when I saw him in the middle of the trauma bay, I just…cracked. Yelled. Turned over an instrument tray. Demanded they keep performing CPR even after another doctor had already called time of death. I lost it.”
“Which is totally understandable, considering the circumstances,” I say gently.
“It isn’t,” Noah says, clearly unconvinced. “In the ER, you aren’t supposed to lose your cool. That’s why I chose it. Because that’s always been one of my strengths. I don’t let things get personal. But then I did. I cared too much, and I let it impact my judgment. My steadiness.”
“You’re human,” I say. “And you’re supposed to be human. And if anyone expects something different, they’re wrong.” I hesitate before adding, “Even your father.”
“He doesn’t expect…” Noah pauses and takes a breath. “It’s not that. I just know I’ve disappointed him. And I don’t know how to talk about that.”
“Which is why you aren’t in Italy with your family,” I continue. “You’re avoiding your dad?”
He lets out a little chuckle. “Perceptive.”