Chapter 8
Terran
By the time my meds kicked in, TJ was on his way out the door, an astonishing amount of care behind the gentle ruffling of my hair while he bid me a good rest of my night before heading out.
I fell into a dreamless sleep soon after, the whirling sounds of the hospital a kind of comforting white noise machine that helped me drift off with relative ease, much different than the restless sleeping I’d been getting over the past few nights.
I hated how much my worrying over Monday was affecting me, how the nagging in the back of my mind was all I could focus on when I was supposed to be relaxing and letting my body do the work while I was unconscious.
There was only so much that could be done while being forced on bed rest, and none of it was anything I could control to push this timeline along in the direction I wanted it to go in.
Obviously, no one would hold it against me if, in the end, a few extra days of stay were needed to ensure I walked out of here well enough to manage on my own once I was back home again. No one but myself, at least.
My niece’s scrunched up face and her pleas for me to come home were still killing me. None of it being helped by my nightly Facetimes with my sister that were only making the guilt dig down deeper.
At least I got to see them both, though. That was a solid positive.
I woke while it was still dark outside of my room’s windows, my eyes strained from the sleep still crusting the corners, and the dim light on over by the sink, kept on for the nurses to come in and out to check on my vitals.
Dragging my finger across my lids to itch them both clean, I froze the moment a figure sitting in the guest recliner caught my attention.
I blinked a few times, the view of Dr. Montgomery slowly coming into focus.
He was hunched over in the recliner with one leg crossed over the other, his tablet balanced on his thigh while he rapidly glided his fingers across the screen with one hand.
The other was tucked under his chin, elbow resting on the arm of the chair while his mask was pulled down just enough for me to get a good look at that handsome face once again.
Don’t expect romantic attachments to be strictly logical or rational.
Of all fucking times for that to come popping back into my head.
Plus, what did ‘romantic attachments’ even mean?
Relationships?
Hook-ups?
There were so many different ways to take a statement like that.
None of them settled the weird twist in my gut while I continued to take Dr. Montgomery in.
Unlike the last time I’d seen him dressed in his plain clothes and carrying around his usual snarky attitude, the quietness of the night had softened him a bit—given him a more relaxed demeanor while he lounged back in the recliner.
The past few days he’d been absent from this floor’s rotation had felt dull, the time dragging much more than usual while none of the monotony had been broken up by anything outside of TJ’s visit.
Now with him here again, a small blip of excitement sparked within me.
“Is there a reason you’re in my room?”
“Taking a break,” came his immediate and clipped response. There wasn’t any bite behind the words, said in an easy manner one would rattle off a usual to-go lunch order. He didn’t bother looking up from his tablet when he spoke, nor did his fingers pause from their typing.
My gaze darted over to the monitor next to my head, 3:58am displayed prominently in the corner. “In the middle of the night?”
“Technically, this is the middle of my shift.”
Now that he mentioned it, he had been the one on call that first night I arrived.
I’d seen him sporadically at times during those first few days I’d been up and trying to talk my way into being discharged early, but who knew if that was in the middle of some long stretch of work or if his schedule was well and truly fucked like mine. “You do a lot of overnights?”
“Depends.”
I waited for the rest of his explanation, nearly rolling my eyes when it never came. “On?”
“If people are stupid enough to get themselves injured when they should be sleeping.”
I let out a quiet huff of air. Okay, so that was definitely a dig at me.
Funny for him to be saying that when it was kind of my job to put myself in compromising situations so innocent civilians didn’t have to.
Who else would be answering those distress calls?
It wasn’t like he was getting up and volunteering his own services.
Instead of rising to the bait, I answered with, “I also work the graveyard shift.”
The tablet’s screen lit up brightly for a brief moment, forcing him to squint at it before he got it dimmed down again. “Is that your subtle way of telling me you’ll be finding your way back into my OR soon?”
“Seeing as I’m not planning on getting stabbed again, no.”
“Considering not many people plan for being stabbed in general, that doesn’t exactly inspire much confidence.”
Was that some kind of joke?
It was hard to tell with the dry tone. Then again, there wasn’t much I could tell off of anything he did.
He was definitely an enigma my mind couldn’t help but want to solve—to figure out and dissect in an effort to keep myself from going crazy while staying cooped up in this hospital. “Is Edgewood usually that dangerous?”
He glanced up. “Wouldn’t you know that answer?”
I shrugged. “Haven’t been here long enough to get a good judge of the place. I thought small towns were known for being quiet, but apparently that isn’t always the case.”
Dr. Montgomery shifted again, lifting his chin up from his hand. In a slow motion, he leaned fully back into the chair, completely abandoning all interest he’d had on the tablet moments before and focusing all of it onto me. “You’re not from here.”
“Ding, ding, ding. What gave me away?”
He ignored the question, coming back with one of his own. “How long have you been here?”
“Just a few months. Came up from the city. Let me guess, you’re a local born and raised.”
“Did the academy teach you such outstanding observation skills or were those developments made all on your own?”
Without meaning to, a small laugh bubbled up from my chest. He was kind of a bitch, but in a weirdly funny way. He had the kind of sarcasm that carried a bit of venom behind it but not enough to do more than sting for a few seconds before the irony of the situation kicked in.
For someone who seemed to keep to themselves and avoided human interaction as much as possible by hiding out in a patient’s room while they slept, he sure had plenty of retorts geared up and ready to shoot back at me the moment I opened my mouth.
“I’m Terran, if you cared to know.”
His brows pulled together. “Yes, I did gather that from your chart.”
“This is the part where you also introduce yourself. I know human customs might seem a little foreign to you but don’t worry, I’ve got until Monday to show you the ropes.”
“Wow, a robot joke. How original.”
“I was going for alien, but robot works, too.”
To my surprise, he rolled his eyes at me.
His mask was slipped back in place right before he stood and tossed his tablet back down one the now-empty chair behind him.
An arm was raised over his head, the audible pop of one of his shoulders causing him to exhale slowly before doing it again with his other side.
Even with his scrubs falling slightly loose on his frame, the muscles moving under the thin material were hard to look away from.
A small sliver of his stomach flashed me when both of his arms were raised over his head, dark inked lines like the ones on his neck and left forearm clashed together with a bit of color from another tattoo I couldn’t quite catch before it was quickly covered by his scrub top again.
When he came over to me, he didn’t bother checking on any of my vitals, gesturing for my arm and grabbing it when I slowly lifted it his way. “Seeing as you have enough energy to talk this much, that means you have plenty to get up and walk the floor twice.”
I groaned. “Seriously?”
“You want to get out of here, don’t you?”
“Weren’t you the one who told me to take it easy?”
“I said resting is the best medicine. Don’t twist my words.”
Yeah, yeah.
Holding back a wince when my stitches pulled at my skin, I swung my legs over the side of the bed until I had them dangling over the edge. He guided me up onto my feet, steadying me before leaning to roll the IV away from where it’d been stashed next to my bed and passed it over to me.
The moment I reached for it, a twinge of pain rocketed through my body, drawing a soft groan out of me.
What were the chances of being able to convince the good ole’ doctor to hook me back up to that morphine drip for the night without having to admit he may have been right about staying longer than a week?
Getting another night’s worth of morphine didn’t have to mean I was admitting defeat about leaving Monday, it was only to get ahead of the pain and let my body relax from the stress of feeling injured so I could rest the way he wanted me to.
Plenty of people did that and were still discharged and sent on their way within a few days.
My eyes widened when he sunk down to one of his knees, both of his thumbs hooking under the hem of my patient scrub top that I’d talked Beth into letting me wear instead of that stupid gown. He pulled my shirt up to the bottom of my ribcage, exposing the incision site.
One hand remained wrapped around my shirt and cupped to my waist while his other poked a few tender spots on my stomach.
“These bugging you?” he murmured.
I tried not to read too much in the gentle way he ghosted his fingers around the stitches or how horrible it felt to suppress the shiver that was desperately trying to make its way from the base of my spine.
In no way was I a ticklish person by any means, but the more he traced along the remnants of his work, the harder it was getting to ignore the blood rushing to places that really needed to remain tame being so close to him.