A Left Turn to Hell
“OH SHIT!” Bailey said as Dean pulled his rental car to the front of Outskirts General. “I forgot my ID!”
“Will they let you in without it?”
Bailey wrinkled his nose. “Yeah, I can get a visitor’s ID on my way in. It just, you know, looks flaky.”
Dean’s mouth twisted into a smile that, for Dean, was almost goofy . “Well, I did almost make you late.”
Bailey knew his own smile was just a little bit shy.
“It was… memorable,” he said primly. Oh God was it.
Was it ever . True, he hadn’t had sex in nearly four years before Dean had seduced him in that crib, but this morning, after pulling off little pieces of Dean’s armor, it felt like the sex had gotten…
better. Not that it had been bad before, but it had been like having sex with a tidal wave.
Sure, it was exciting, and it rolled you over and over again inside it, but it was like some huge natural event .
This morning Bailey had felt the human being inside him as Dean had thrust. Instead of being completely blinded by wooolf , damn , he’d been tingling with the distinctly personal sensation of being touched.
Small things—Dean’s fingers breaching him, lubricating him, making sure he was ready—struck him as suddenly considerate.
Dean always had been considerate, but Bailey was starting to see the attention to detail now.
Things that had always seemed too smooth to be mechanical but too mindless to be thoughtful now assumed a special significance.
Dean hadn’t just been “having sex,” he’d been “executing an operation” on Bailey’s body, with forethought and gentleness. Something about the way Dean had said, “It’s all in how I assimilate information,” had struck a chord.
Dean had been collecting little pieces of Bailey’s life and forming a pattern—because he cared about Bailey .
Bailey had expected those conversations to happen naturally, spontaneously, as they had with… just in general. But that wasn’t how Dean operated.
Now, in the car after a long, interesting conversation about Dean’s family, during which Dean had answered questions freely and without reservation as though Bailey could have been asking them this whole time , Bailey kept remembering a moment, his back arched, his head tilted back in climax, and Dean’s gentle fingertips drifting along his hairline, under his cheekbone, along his jaw.
Such a tender gesture from a man Bailey had begun to suspect of using him for booty calls.
That morning after their shower, their talk, that terrible wistful expression on Dean’s face when he’d talked about getting a kitten with his brother, none of that had been about booty calls.
“Was it?” Dean asked now, obviously teasing. “Was it memorable?”
“Val, Laure, Sal, Prock, you, Reg, and Chance,” he rattled off. “ I was not top ten of my med school class for nothing.”
“And your father’s name is Connor,” Dean said lazily, probably to prove he was smarter, “and his dog’s name is Cathy, which is an odd name for a dog, but she’s a golden retriever, and you said it’s short for Catherine the Great.”
Bailey shook he head as Dean came to a stop. “It’s not fair. I told you that weeks ago, and you still remember it.”
He paused, one hand on his door handle as Dean leaned across the console of the sedan to give him a kiss.
One hand came up to brush Bailey’s nose, and Dean pulled back and said, “You have seventeen freckles across your nose and cheeks, but that might be just because it’s summer, and your nose peels even if you never go out in the sun. ”
Bailey covered his nose, feeling the closeness of Dean’s regard pierce him to the bone. Forget “under his skin,” Dean Royal had deftly become a part of Bailey’s soul.
“God, you’re a pain in the ass,” he said, his breath sighing from his chest as he said it, like a swoon.
“I am not,” Dean replied earnestly. “I am very considerate with the lubricant and stretching, and your ass should feel invigorated.”
Bailey’s laughter was partly a gurgle of embarrassment and partly a hoot of genuine glee, because thirty-something doctor or not, that joke never seemed to get old.
And then Dean smiled, letting Bailey know it had been a fully intentioned joke, and Bailey loved him more.
Dean’s lips brushed against his, and Dean said, “I’ll try to remember to text you before―”
“Between!” Bailey warned, because they’d spoken about this at length too.
“Between,” Dean repeated obediently. “ Between visits.”
Bailey smiled at him warmly, trying to ignore the word, the big word, the L-word, the big L-word that he’d just used in his head.
“I’ll look forward to your next one,” he said softly. “Be safe, G-man.”
“Get some sleep, Dr. Dodge,” Dean said, every bit as sober.
And with that Bailey had to leave, forcing himself into the dedicated heat of the Austin summer, two minutes shy of 11:00 a.m. He waved at Dean’s rental for a moment, almost positive he saw Dean’s hand come up in response as he exited the roundabout, and Bailey had no choice but to go in.
Sarree, of course, gave him an absolute ration about forgetting his ID, but Bailey was sort of on cloud nine, so he blithely let her rant at him while he checked his charts, drank his third cup of coffee (only his third), and set about his rounds, Sarree at his side.
Right before he entered the first patient’s room, Sarree stopped him.
“Wait,” she ordered, and he came to a military halt while she eyeballed him intently. “You are entirely too happy.” She scowled at him for a moment, and then her expression lightened. “Oh my God—he’s here!”
Bailey felt heat in his cheeks, and his seventeen freckles probably stood out in stark relief.
“Well not any more ,” he muttered. “He’s probably on his way home to Sacramento as we speak. But yeah. He got in two days ago, just in time for my day off, and….” He shrugged, unable to keep the smile from his face. “It was nice,” he said, as demurely as he could.
She let out a bark of laughter. “Nice? I see stubble burn on your neck, my fair Irish friend—you had yourself a time .”
Bailey had to glance away, mostly to contain his smile. “He told me about his family,” he all but whispered. “And there’s a lot of them. And… and he opened up about why he’s so closemouthed and… and he….” It sounded stupid when he said it.
“Let you know you were important?” she asked kindly.
“ Yes !” he told her, his grin absolutely unstoppable. “God, Sarree, it’s just… just the nicest thing to have someone in your life who cares like that. I haven’t felt like this since….”
And it hit him then that after all his complaining to Dean about what Dean hadn’t been saying, Bailey had been keeping one very big thing to himself.
“Since Emmett,” she said, catching his eyes.
Bailey nodded. “I… I haven’t told him about Emmett yet,” he admitted.
“It was an awful, awful time,” Sarree said, and he heard her voice choking up, and he squeezed her arm in response.
None of them talked about it. It was such a terrible chapter of American history period , and for those who’d been on the front lines, who had lost people on the front lines, it had been so much worse.
Every day— every day— it hadn’t been a question of who but of how many.
And the statistics, over 11,000 deaths in Texas alone, didn’t account for people who had died in their homes unattended, or who died of complications after the initial fever and cough had passed.
Didn’t account for Emmett Coyle, who had wrestled with the disease for two weeks, come back two weeks later, and dropped dead of a cardiac embolism during his second shift, an event that a young man who took stellar care of himself would ordinarily not have suffered.
It had been COVID. Bailey knew it, Emmett’s family had known it, the entire ER had known it—but he’d never been a “COVID statistic” because the bureaucracy didn’t work that way.
It didn’t matter—not really. But the few ER employees who’d been able to wrangle two hours out of the day had been the only ones at the funeral.
They’d stood in the pouring September rain, maskless so they wouldn’t get waterboarded, and said goodbye to as good a doctor, as good a friend, as good a man, as they’d ever known.
And Bailey’s lover, the man he’d planned to marry and who’d told his whole family he was marrying Bailey. They’d been planning on that spring.
Bailey, his heart tattered and useless, had seen his lover put in the ground… and had gone back to work that same day.
Because there was nobody else who could do it.
And Bailey had already suffered his own monthlong battle with the deadly disease.
He’d been secretly hoping he’d drop dead too.
He obviously hadn’t, and he and Sarree and the other survivors of Outskirts General ER, 2020–21, had continued to forge the sort of bond psychologists usually only found in foxholes after world wars.
Absolutely inescapable. They’d fought together; they weren’t going fucking anywhere .
Except Bailey’s dad was getting a little older, and Fort Stockton was farther away than Bailey liked, and the house his father lived in was falling down, and his only company was his dog.
Bailey’s dad, who was a widower, had helped Bailey through med school working as a plumber and electrician and had always had Bailey’s back— always— and had called him every single morning after Emmett had passed away.
Bailey suspected his dad had even gotten Cathy the golden retriever so he could text Bailey pictures of the dog being positively adorable when they weren’t able to visit and Bailey needed something, anything, to smile about.
Bailey’s dad deserved more than an impersonal retirement home, but he hated the city, and Bailey could see a moment of reckoning coming that he didn’t want to face.
And what COVID hadn’t been able to do, the Dobbs decision had done. Many of the die-hard ER staff had begun to peel away a little at a time, many of them going places where they couldn’t get incarcerated for doing their jobs.