Miss You

THIRTEEN Gus

It began like any other morning, or perhaps with a little more attention to the clock, because it was at the beginning of the Integrated Clinical Care courses which we spent in hospital, behaving more like real doctors. I was pleased to be in at the deep end in the Accident and Emergency department, seeing it as a life-or-death test for me as much as the patients. If I couldn’t handle mangled people, then it was probably better to find out sooner rather than later. I’d discovered that I wasn’t squeamish as I examined the crushed hand of a construction worker, and some festering lesions on the bottom of an old man who had been found in a dressing gown tied with string in a council flat full of newspapers and pigeons.

What neither Lucy nor I had fully anticipated was the pressure of being in the public gaze, acting like we knew what we were doing without the safety valve of black humor in coffee-bar post-mortems with our peers. That first evening we’d both arrived home exhausted and would have got takeout from our local Indian had Lucy not thought about our breath the following morning for our already suffering patients. So I’d made cheese on toast.

“How was it?” Lucy asked me, as we both slumped onto the sofa.

“No one died,” I told her. The cliché has a grim resonance for medical students. I was too tired to go into any detail.

To my surprise, Lucy had found Pediatric Outpatients unexpectedly challenging.

“The thing they don’t teach you is it’s not just about dealing with the children, it’s about dealing with the parents. There was this father who threw a real fit at the pediatrician, and I’m sitting in the corridor outside with the child pretending not to hear the shouting... I just had no idea how to handle it. I was completely useless at it!”

“You’re not useless. You’re going to be a brilliant doctor.” I tried to boost her. “Honestly, I’d put money on it.”

“Really?”

“Only a fiver, obviously.”

It was easy to make her laugh, but the next morning, I think I was the one who felt more up for work than she did.

At the junction with Euston Road, we kissed quickly, then our paths divided. As I stood waiting for the lights to change, I watched Lucy walking away, half-expecting her to swivel and wave to me before disappearing from my line of sight. But I could see from the stiffness of her gait that she was preoccupied. She didn’t turn, and my arm, halfway to raised, returned quickly to my side.

It’s funny how an image can stick in your mind. Now, the memory of standing there in the incessant noise of London traffic, with a slightly crisp September breeze blowing through my hair, watching my girlfriend walk away from me, seems like a turning point in my life.

AE was constantly busy: a Japanese girl had fainted on the Tube, but there was no indication of anything more serious than her not having eaten breakfast; a toddler stung by a bee at the zoo, whose ear had swollen up alarmingly, was given antihistamine and observed, his mother instructed to go to her GP for an EpiPen in case of future stings; a courier who’d come off his bike was diagnosed with concussion, X-rayed and admitted.

On my break, I was on my way to get a breath of fresh air when I noticed an old lady sitting alone in a wheelchair near the entrance where the ambulances came in.

“I’m just waiting for the ambulance men,” she told me.

Once I’d made the mistake of asking, I found it hard to get away because she was garrulous and, like a lot of old people, eager to apologize for causing a fuss. She explained that she’d called her daughter, at work, who’d told her to dial 999. It wasn’t something she’d have done herself, because it probably wasn’t anything, just her arm feeling a bit funny.

“How do you mean, funny?” I asked. Was that a doctorly sort of question?

“Well, my hand’s all cold. And it’s not exactly freezing out, is it?”

Once you’re inside a hospital, you lose all sense of time and weather, but I recalled that the sun had been shining as Lucy and I walked to work.

“When did you first notice this?” I asked.

“Must have been a couple of hours ago now? It suddenly didn’t feel right. And then it went all cold. Couldn’t seem to warm it up. It was my daughter who told me to call an ambulance. I felt a bit daft, you know, telling them, ‘Well, I’ve got a cold arm.’”

“You did the right thing.”

“So you do think it’s serious?”

My naive attempt to reassure had only alarmed her. To my relief, two ambulance men appeared. “OK there, Mrs.Collins?”

“I was just talking to this nice doctor. He thinks it might be serious.”

The ambulance men gave me the look of contempt that proper professionals reserve for student doctors. “We’ll take you to the triage nurse now, who’ll go through all the details.”

I was called away to a dance student who’d had a fall and sprained or broken her ankle and after that it was my lunch break, so by the time I saw Mrs.Collins again, she must have been waiting for over an hour.

“How’s the arm?”

“It’s ever so white...”

“Have you seen a doctor?”

“Just waiting for one. It’s very busy, isn’t it?”

The only reason I could think of for someone having a cold, white arm was lack of blood supply. Which, in the absence of a tight sleeve or tourniquet, seemed to me to indicate a blocked artery. And the only way I could think of for an artery to be blocked was a clot. And clots weren’t good.

I was wracking my brain to think of another explanation. Who was I to think I might know better than a triage nurse who’d been seeing patients for years? And yet, once the alarm had started ringing in my head, it wouldn’t stop. I went to the desk and enquired what was happening with Mrs.Collins, trying to imply that the old lady was badgering me. The desk nurse looked at her screen and told me that Mrs.Collins was on the list for the vascular registrar.

“Has he been informed that it’s urgent?”

I got a look that said I was now reaching beyond my competence, which I already knew, but having taken the decision to brand myself a troublemaker, I had already done the damage and I wasn’t prepared to back down.

At school, I was never very good at not-blinking contests, and I’d never, ever managed to beat Ross, but I was determined to get the nurse to pick up the handset of her phone. She punched a number into the keypad, then handed the handset to me. “Probably best you explain.” There was a whisper of triumph in her voice.

The vascular registrar was clearly not someone to be messed with.

“Yes?” Curt. Female.

“Hello... Er... I’m a student doctor, and I may be wrong, but I think there’s someone down here you should see rather urgently...”

“And that’s because...?”

I was in the middle of describing Mrs.Collins’s arm when I realized I was talking to a dead line. A smirk glimmered on the desk nurse’s face.

I’d alerted the expert. It was all I could do. If it was a clot, I wasn’t qualified to prescribe a blood-thinning agent anyway. And if it wasn’t, and I did, there’d be a risk of hemorrhage. I wasn’t even any good at getting anIV in. That had been proved pretty conclusively on several occasions when I’d had to call in a nurse to help me. Ultimately, what you find yourself thinking is: If she dies now, it won’t be my fault.

There was nothing more I could do.

I dislike that phrase.

It sounds so worthy and sincere, a shorthand for: We’ve tried everything, we’ve worked as hard as we could, we’ve really thought about the individual concerned, but in reality, that’s rarely true. Not that I’m saying doctors are lazy, or that they deliberately make mistakes, but when it’s busy, things are missed or delayed. Very often, survival is just a matter of luck.

I made my way towards the ambulance entrance and stood in the diesel fumes fantasizing about taking off my white coat and walking away, a free man.

In the first year of studying medicine, I had been determined not to let my parents down. In the second, Lucy had convinced me that everyone else had the same worries and insecurities as me. In the third, as other university students graduated and started earning, I realized that very few people really like the job they’re doing. At least it was possible to earn good money as a doctor. But I’d never quite managed to silence the voice in my head that screamed, whenever I was under pressure, I don’t want to do this!

On my way back in, I almost bumped into a very slim woman in a white doctor’s coat, which, unlike most doctors, she was wearing buttoned up. Intriguingly, no other clothing was visible apart from very sheer black tights, or stockings.

“Angus?”

Nobody apart from my parents had called me that for years.

“Charlotte!”

“Dr.Grant to you!”

Was it a joke, or an order? Probably a bit of both.

“Dr.Grant.”

I grinned.

She didn’t.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

Clearly, she was working at the hospital, but I hadn’t seen her before or noticed her name on the board in AE.

“I’m the vascular registrar. I’ve just come in and some bloody student calls me down here. What about you?”

“I’m the bloody student.”

She sighed impatiently.

“OK then. Where?”

I took her to Mrs.Collins’s bed, stepping away as she drew the curtain around. I’ve never quite understood why that’s the procedure, because it gives the patient a totally false sense of privacy and makes neighbors even more inclined to listen in. I hovered, hoping to learn something from Charlotte’s cool, professional consultation.

“...right, well, Mrs.Collins, what we’ll do is get a nurse to put a line into your other arm to get some medication in, and we’ll see if we can’t get this arm better very soon.”

The curtain swept back sooner than I anticipated and I felt as if I’d been caught in the act of eavesdropping.

From her voice, I’d never have known that Charlotte considered the situation anything other than routine, but her fury was obvious as she stormed towards the nurses’ desk, telling them in no uncertain terms to get anIV of heparin into Mrs.Collins as quickly as they could.

“Then I want her admitted to my ward, understood? Who the bloody hell was in charge of triaging this patient?”

The nurse on the desk cowered visibly. “She’s on her lunch break.”

“That’s very fortunate for her!”

Again, Charlotte turned around quicker than I expected, making me feel as if I was stalking her.

“Good call, Dr.Macdonald.” She gave me a little wink as she marched past.

The exotic scent of her perfume lingered for a couple of seconds after she’d disappeared down the corridor, giving fleeting relief from the usual sour odor of disinfectant that never quite masks the persistent background of sepsis and shit that pervades a busy AE department.

The end of the school day brought in several boys with assorted football injuries, but the slight lull that often occurs in the early evening before the place starts filling up with alcohol-related conditions didn’t happen that day because there was a pile-up in which seventeen people were injured, one fatally.

At five in the afternoon I was asked if I would stay on, and only just had time to call Lucy on the new mobile phones we’d bought when we realized we would be in separate places. It’s strange to remember a time when mobile phones weren’t connected to the Internet, and were only carried for use in an emergency. I stood in the bit where the ambulances come in, because you weren’t allowed to make calls in the hospital, as the sirens’ wails got closer and closer.

When I said I wasn’t squeamish, that was before I saw people with their faces burned off. Strangely, the horror didn’t make me want to walk out, because I knew I could be useful. The adrenaline keeps you going. You just do what you’re supposed to do. You live in the present. I only got time for one breather between ambulances. Standing in the same spot where I’d earlier dreamed of walking away, I found myself thinking, I love this job!

That was the night I started smoking. You’d think doctors wouldn’t, with the health risks. But it doesn’t work like that. When you’re witnessing how tenuous life is, you don’t seem to care as much about the vague notion of future health. I’d smoked at school. You had to if you didn’t want to get labelled a wuss. So when I was offered a cigarette by the male nurse who was standing beside me, it felt like a gesture of solidarity to take it.

I didn’t get off until after eleven, having kept myself alert for sixteen hours. I wasn’t tired, but I would have gone straight back to the flat if I hadn’t run into Charlotte at the hospital entrance.

“Angus,” she said. “Again!”

I couldn’t tell whether the repeat encounter was welcome, or an irritant.

She had just finished her own shift.

“How is Mrs.Collins?” I asked.

It all seemed a very long time ago. I’d lived several lives since then.

“I think we’ve managed to save her arm,” she said. “It’s a bit of a miracle, really, that you called when you did. My colleague hadn’t been made aware of the urgency of the situation.”

I wondered if she was covering. “So, are you enjoying it?” she asked, walking just ahead of me, inclining her head back slightly to talk. A soft grey cashmere cardigan was slung casually over a black vest and skirt that caressed her sheer black legs just above the knee. Her heels tapped the pavement.

“Enjoying is probably not the right word...”

“The accident?” Word had obviously travelled fast. “Was it nasty?”

“Nasty” seemed like a child’s word for the injuries I had seen.

“Pretty nasty.”

We’d come to the junction with Tottenham Court Road. She was heading south, and I was heading north.

“Do you have to be anywhere?” Charlotte suddenly asked. “You look like you could do with a drink.”

It was more of a diagnosis than an offer. Was there some protocol about socializing with senior colleagues? This was Charlotte, I told myself. I’d known her since I was thirteen.

I glanced at my watch. It was long after the pubs had closed.

“I don’t know where we’d go,” I said.

She let out a light laugh.

“We’ll go to my club,” she said, throwing her arm in the air to stop a taxi I hadn’t even noticed approaching.

The club was one of those chic Soho networking places with a camera entryphone and cool-looking staff on reception. It was thronging with sophisticated types in their twenties and thirties.

“It’s mostly media,” Charlotte told me, as we carved a way through the throng. “But someone I know is on the committee.”

Was that someone a man or a woman? I wondered, keeping my eyes on the loose chignon of raven hair in front of me. A man, I decided. Charlotte was too intimidating, not someone I could imagine with a gaggle of women friends like Lucy. My eyes scanned the cocktail bar, the contemporary art on the walls, the kitchen counter where chefs were working, the specials chalked up on a blackboard—pumpkin ravioli with sage, slow-cooked pork belly, braised radicchio—trying to take in all the details so I’d be able to fully describe this night-time party world we didn’t even know existed.

“Is it always like this?” I had to shout to be heard.

“I suppose it’s slightly more Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire tonight,” said Charlotte.

We pushed through a room where people were watching what I initially assumed was a disaster movie on a huge plasma screen.

I stopped for a moment, realizing that the broadcast was coming from an American news channel, the same footage again and again of a plane flying over the heads of a fire patrol and straight into one of the World Trade Center towers. Then a long shot of both towers: one with smoke billowing from it, the other approached by a plane, as tiny and black as a bird, which flew straight into it.

“Holy cow!” said the reporter, as the entry point erupted.

“What’s happening?”

Charlotte frowned at me as if she thought I was being facetious, then realized my bewilderment was for real.

“Oh my God, are you the only person on the planet who doesn’t know? Do you think it’s too cold to go outside?”

“No, let’s...”

Charlotte led me up a narrow flight of stairs with a door at the top which opened onto a roof terrace with soft lights and luxurious garden furniture. The night air was refreshing after the sweaty heat of drinkers.

A waitress approached as we sank into the deep, linen-covered cushions of a rattan corner sofa. “What can I get you?”

“I’ll have a Grey Goose martini, very dry, with a twist.”

“The same,” I said, when the waitress turned to me.

Grey Goose, it turned out, was vodka, no doubt an incredibly expensive brand. The sting of anxiety about who was going to pay the bill when the first round arrived was soothed by the balm of the second. The martinis were viscously cold, the relaxation so immediate, it was the nearest thing I could imagine to mainlining morphine.

As Charlotte recounted as much as she knew about what had happened in New York, I took my second cigarette of the day. She smoked red Marlboros. I remember thinking how ballsy she was. No Silk Cut or Marlboro Lights for her. Everything about her was cool, I thought, trying not to stare at her lips.

“I’m surprised they haven’t closed the airspace over London,” she said.

Our eyes followed the lights of planes dropping silently westwards across the night sky towards Heathrow.

“Do you think the world’s going to end?” she asked.

I remember thinking, What a way to go if it does! Sipping cocktails with Charlotte, in a magical rooftop world of spires and baroque porticoes which couldn’t be seen from the street. How amazed Ross would be if he could see me talking to her here, occasionally even making her laugh. And how livid...

“How long have you been a member here?” I asked.

She considered the question. “I suppose a couple of years.”

Not with Ross, then.

I noticed she smoked her cigarettes no more than halfway down, then ground them out decisively, as if telling them—and herself—she didn’t need any more.

“And your friend? The one on the committee?”

I was at that stage of drunk where I could hear my voice, but it was as if someone else was speaking.

She stretched like a cat along the cushions.

“You’re not trying to ascertain my personal history, are you, Dr.Macdonald?”

“Not at all!”

“Do you go to the theatre often?” she asked.

It was such a non sequitur, I wondered if I’d missed some important chunk of conversation.

“Never,” I said.

“Oh. It’s just last time, you said you’d been to the National.”

Last time? Did she mean that first Christmas after Ross? It was nearly four years ago and it seemed longer. I’d been just a boy, all enthusiastic about what London had to offer. I couldn’t believe she’d remembered.

“...so I assumed...”

“Yes, well, I still like the theatre,” I said. “It’s just I never go.”

“We should see something,” she said.

I looked at her empty martini glass, and thought I wasn’t the only one not making sense. Was she flirting with me?

“Another?” she asked.

“Why not?”

I’d reached the level of drunkenness just before oblivion sets in, when you feel absurdly in control.

I can’t remember how many more we had, or how the bill was settled, or what we talked about before I found myself walking with her, past the little Tudor folly in the middle of Soho Square, across a deserted Oxford Street and along a street parallel to Tottenham Court Road which was lined with Greek restaurants and pizzerias, all closed.

“Charlotte Street...” I read the street sign, wondering, not for the first time, whether I was dreaming.

“Yes, perfect, isn’t it?” she said, with her breezy, disparaging laugh. “This is me.” She pointed at a door beside a newsagent.

I vaguely remembered her telling me at some point in the evening that she’d moved from Battersea to be near the hospital, but my brain took a moment to catch up.

“Are you coming up for coffee?”

It was a studio flat on the top floor with cupboards into the eaves and a big dormer window with French doors out onto a small roof terrace.

“Have a seat,” Charlotte instructed, as she went to put the kettle on. The tiny kitchen was too low for me to stand up in.

The only place to sit was at a small circular table with two bentwood chairs, or on the queen-size bed, which was covered in a heavy white cotton and lace bedspread. There was a chandelier dangling from the ceiling with colored glass flowers. The style of the room was rather like one of those exclusive antique shops in the backstreets off the boulevard Saint-Germain, the sort that don’t look as if they’re open to the public.

Charlotte returned with mismatched porcelain cups.

“It’s not much more than a pied-à-terre, really, but come and see the view.” She brushed past me to open the French doors.

One way, the Telecom Tower, amazingly close and huge; the other, rooftops, surprisingly dark for so near the center of London. There was an almost suburban stillness here that there hadn’t been on the roof in Soho, with only the occasional distant sigh and clank of trains coupling on the mainline out of Euston, which we could hear from our flat when we had the windows open in summer.

“Look,” I said, “I think it’s probably time I went home.”

“Oh...”

Not OK. Just “Oh...”

The roof terrace was so small, I could smell the chamomile steam from her cup, mingling with a powerful blast of her perfume. Had she squirted herself with scent just now? Why would she do that? Did she like me? Of course not! Not like that. So, was this all a joke? Downstairs, my mind had been very clear. I thought I’d walked the vodka off. But now, reactivated by the hot, dark coffee, the alcohol seemed to have gained new momentum. I felt jittery, almost frightened, because I somehow sensed that if I turned towards her, even one degree, I would be in danger.

She was the one who moved, walking inside, kicking off her shoes, sitting on the bed and pointing a remote at the television.

“Jesus!” she said.

“What?” I perched on the bed beside her.

On the television were images of the towers coming down, those great, symbolic towers collapsing into ruins and people running in the street pursued by a monstrous tsunami of dust and debris, images that meant that the world would never be the same again.

We both stared silently at the screen and then Charlotte turned towards me, fear making her face even more beautiful, and I knew, suddenly, that I could. Then we were kissing, eyes tight closed as if to obliterate reality, as we tore at each other’s clothes.

They were stockings, the kind that stay up on their own, with a broad band of lace around the thigh.

Fucking Charlotte was as surreal and thrilling as fucking a film star. Her pliant body, her hungry mouth, the willful act of succumbing to temptation, carried me to a place on the cusp of pleasure and exquisite pain that I’d never been to before, nor even knew existed.

I lay spread-eagled with my brother’s lean and stunningly beautiful girlfriend stuck to my chest, unable to believe what had happened, unwilling to move in case the fantasy would suddenly dissolve into sticky embarrassment.

Charlotte finally lifted her face, her lips dark from kissing, her long hair falling untidily around her shoulders.

“You’ve certainly grown up,” she said.

I didn’t dare to speak.

She rolled off me, moving my arm to allow her to lie next to me.

“You know what...” She took my hand and guided it between her legs. “I think there’s even more.”

Sinning is like lying. When you’ve done it once, it doesn’t seem any more sinful to do it again.

The first time, my mind was so focused on trying to sense what she wanted, I’d kept my eyes shut. Now I saw the wonderful moment she disappeared into climax and I never wanted it to stop, my fingers wet with her, my head full of her gasps.

“Thank you,” she said afterwards.

What was I supposed to say? I said nothing.

“You’ve got handsome. Did you know? Definitely improved with age.”

“Like cheese?”

“Or wine.” She laughed.

I tried to think of something to say to her, but every compliment I rehearsed in my head seemed crass or underwhelming. I didn’t want to be naked and disdained.

“I have to go...” I kissed the cute tip of her nose.

“Really?” She drew a sheet over her perfect little round breasts.

Was she slightly annoyed? Because I was going? Because I’d said it, not her?

“Really,” I said.

She watched me dress.

“I’ll see you around, then,” I said.

She said nothing.

I let myself out and ran down four flights of narrow stairs.

Dawn was breaking as I walked home. I went straight to the bathroom and ran a deep bath and lay in the purifying water, unable to believe what I’d done.

It was the accident.

It was the vodka.

It was the apocalypse in New York.

It would never happen again.

So, how much, or how little, was I going to tell Lucy? It began to dawn on me that in a moment of sheer intoxication I had jeopardized my whole life. The strange thing was that I hadn’t felt guilty until then because Charlotte was so separate from my life with Lucy. If I had betrayed someone, it was Ross.

Should I confess everything and get it over with? I was almost sure Lucy would forgive me, if I explained. Or would she? Why hurt her? It was never going to happen again. I hadn’t encountered Charlotte until now, so it was unlikely I’d run into her again. If we did see each other, she’d behave as if nothing had happened. We both would. She was probably regretting it already. It was a blip on the timeline of our lives. A wave from the past had rolled into the present, broken with a thunderous splash, then ebbed away again.

As I toweled down, I began to work out what I’d say. Not the sex, so not the rooftop apartment, so not the club, so not Charlotte. Cupping my hands over my mouth, trying to smell my own breath, I wondered if I could get away with not mentioning the alcohol? No. In my account of events, maybe I’d put a bottle of vodka in the hands of the male nurse who had given me a cigarette. It had been a traumatic day, we’d needed a drink after work.

I lay down on the sofa in the living room and when Lucy woke me up a couple of hours later from a dead, dreamless sleep, nothing about the previous evening seemed to have any reality at all.

“It was very considerate of you to sleep in here,” she said, presenting me with a cup of hot tea. “But I honestly wouldn’t have minded being woken.”

So I didn’t say anything at all.

My head felt peculiarly clear but I was jittery and a little clammy, as if sweating vodka. I guessed that the alcohol level in my bloodstream was still way above any sensible level for treating patients, but there was no way I could call in sick in my first week, so I made myself toast and scrambled eggs with lots of butter while Lucy ate a bowl of muesli.

“Isn’t it awful?” she said as we listened to the news on the radio.

“Unbelievable,” I said.

For the rest of the day, my hangover was only a heartbeat away from palpitations. When my shift finished, I left immediately, walked back to the flat and was asleep long before Lucy arrived home. I woke before dawn and decided to go for a run, my first that week, and when I returned, I showered and made pancakes for breakfast and it felt as if all the bits of me that had been blown apart were melded together again.

We spoke about going back to Lucy’s parents’ house in Broadstairs if the weather stayed nice for the weekend. Walking away from me at the junction with Euston Road, Lucy raised her arm and waved. The world had not ended. Everything was fine and normal. I promised myself I would never again drink martinis, Grey Goose or any other brand.

Halfway through the afternoon, I was listening to a small boy’s chest with a stethoscope, which still gave me a childish thrill, when my pager went. I ignored it while speaking to the boy’s mother. His chest appeared clear, so we needed to investigate the possibility of asthma. The alarm on her face made me remember what Lucy had been saying about dealing with parents. Adults are generally far more stalwart hearing about their own diagnoses than they are listening to their children’s.

My pager went again. The message said there was a call on the internal phone for me.

“Have you got five minutes, Dr.Macdonald?”

Charlotte’s brusque tone immediately made me think I must have done something wrong.

“I’ll meet you on the top floor,” she said.

The lifts were notoriously slow so I took the stairs, which allowed me to observe her in her buttoned-up white coat and stockings for a second or two through the glass door on the landing. There was an impatience about her, as she moved from one foot to the other, checking her watch. “Dr.Grant?”

“Dr.Macdonald,” she said, swiveling on her heels as I surprised her. “There’s something I’d like your opinion on. Follow me.”

She led me back through the door to the staircase, but instead of going down to the wards, we went up a flight, to another landing where there was an emergency exit onto the roof. Leaning back against the door, she took my hand, and guided it under her white coat.

I could hear the clatter of people running up and down the lower flights, and the hum and whirr of the lift. As she began to pant short, sharp breaths, I instinctively held my other hand over her mouth to stop the noise, which drove her even wilder. Ripping down my zipper, she clamped her legs around me, pinioning my buttocks with the pointed heels of her shoes, giving me no choice but to thrust and spill into her as she rode waves of climax.

I’d never done it standing up before. I’d never done it with my clothes on. I’d never done it in a hospital or on a landing against a door with a green running man in front of my eyes. It felt dirty and wrong and fantastic.

We stood, locked together, breathing against each other’s necks until she nudged me away. I zipped up and watched her combing her fingers through her hair, securing her chignon, smoothing down her white coat.

“Do you ever wear anything under that?” I asked.

“I don’t do this all the time, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

It wasn’t. But now it was, and I didn’t know if that made it better or worse.

“I can’t do this,” I said. “I’ve got a girlfriend.”

“And that’s a problem because...?”

“I love her,” I said.

There was just a hint of a raised eyebrow. Enough to make me feel a hypocrite.

“Well, that’s a shame,” Charlotte said. “We’re good together.”

She reached up to touch my face, the caress of her hand on my cheek almost more intimate than anything else we’d done. So I had to kiss her again. She was brilliant at kissing, slow and temptingly sensual.

“You’re the loveliest thing,” I said.

“You too,” she said. “You’re the best, Angus. The best ever.”