5. Emma
5
EMMA
“D r. Chen. Can we talk about intake protocols?” Dr. Walker’s voice had a condescending tone to it.
“What about them?” I may have snapped.
“I observed you yesterday. Damn, you are smooth.” Marcus Walker’s voice had a growl in it that was simply not fair. I refused to let anything about this man affect me, especially that rumble.
“Smooth as silk,” I retorted.
“Are you this driven in all aspects of your life? I’ve found that drive and passion go hand in hand.”
Damn it, had his voice gotten even deeper in tone? I needed this man to take a step back. His proximity felt confining. And it seemed that I wanted to lean in. No, not happening. No entanglements, no leaning into deep, rich voices. I straightened my spine.
“My private life is just that, private. Good day, Dr. Walker.” I spun on my heel and began walking away, head up, shoulders back.
His footfalls were heavy drumbeats on the floor behind me. And then he was next to me again and in my personal space.
“Let me buy you dinner,” he said.
I kept walking, barely glancing over at him. I had to tilt my head to see his face. Deep voice, great shoulders, and tall. He wasn’t being fair.
“I don’t date doctors,” I said as flatly as I could muster.
“First off, I didn’t say it was a date. I wanted to talk to you about establishing some intake protocols.”
I stopped and shot a glare in his direction.
He held his hands up defensively. “Okay, okay, I did ask to buy you dinner. But that’s funny, seeing how you are a doctor yourself.”
“I don’t date myself, so the dating rule still applies.” I started walking again.
Marcus matched my pace. “I like a good challenge.”
“That wasn’t a challenge, Dr. Walker.” I stopped and faced him, tipping my face ever so slightly to look up into his eyes and then narrowing my own. “That’s a boundary.”
I didn’t wait for his response. My heart was pounding heavily and loudly, and my breathing echoed in my ears. I didn’t want him to hear just how loud my body was being at the moment, afraid that if he did, he would know I was faking it all. Who the hell did that man think he was, telling me that we needed intake protocols for the trauma department?
I was not going to let this new doctor get under my skin, no matter how much my skin seemed to want it to happen.
I could just hear Sarah chuckling in the back of my head. He wants to work with you. He wants to collaborate.
“Is that what you’re calling it these days, collaboration?” I muttered. “We used to just call it hooking up.”
I scrunched my face and tried to shut up the inner voice that sounded entirely too much like my best friend. I didn’t want to collaborate or hook up with Dr. Marcus Walker. Well, maybe I did, and that was the real problem.
No, I didn’t want to collaborate or hook up with that man. I was done collaborating with other doctors. After all, that was what got me into trouble with Kevin.
It had started off as an innocent collaboration between colleagues. At least that’s what I told myself. He said he was interested in my technique. The techniques Kevin was interested in had nothing to do with emergency room surgery and everything to do with positions in the bedroom, in the office, and positions behind that tree over there in a very crowded park.
“No, really, come on, Emma. Who’s gonna notice?”
God, Kevin had been smooth, and I had fallen for it. He reeled me in like a landed fish—hook, line, and sinker. I flopped right into his hand. He barely needed bait, which is why it was so easy for him to manipulate me. He had me eating out of the palm of his hand. He had me wrapped around his finger. He had every single metaphor and cliché that I could think of, because I thought I was in love with him.
No, because I thought he was in love with me. I was in love with him.
I didn’t have to think about it. I knew it. I knew it with every fiber of my being, from my split ends to my toenails. I had been so in love with that man, and he played me like a maestro playing a two-hundred-year-old violin—with expertise, precision, and just the right amount of vibrato to make me sing.
I even believed him when he told me I was so smart that it was a good thing we hadn’t gone to the same med school.
“You would have intimidated the hell out of me with your brain,” he had said.
Of course, he said that while we were naked, and no one was using their brains at that moment. So, I believed him. I believed him so thoroughly, it almost cost me that kid.
I had been elbow-deep in surgery, needing to clamp off a bleeder. Kevin was in for observations, or at least that was his excuse to the administration. He had told me he just loved to watch me work. One casual little remark of his had me second-guessing myself. There I was, poised to make a major surgical move that would save the kid’s life. It needed to be done, and it needed to be done fast, but I hesitated because his words had me thinking I was wrong.
I remember so clearly looking up at him, our eyes locking. Even though I could only see his eyes, the way he twitched his eyebrows in that oh-so-cocky expression told me exactly what he was thinking beneath his face mask. He thought he had won one more round.
This wasn’t a game. This was a kid’s life, and the only person who needed to win that day was the patient.
“Ah, fuck it,” I said loudly and changed direction.
“Emma, are you sure that’s what you?—”
“Shut it, Dr. Thompson.”
I proceeded to save that child’s life. If I had followed Kevin’s direction, would that kid have survived? I don’t know. But I didn’t think they would have. If they had survived that surgery, someone would have been cracking them open again to fix what hadn’t been done right the first time. Instead, they were taken care of and fixed properly.
So when Dr. Marcus Walker came sauntering up to tell me that we needed incoming trauma protocols, I didn’t see him at first. I didn’t see his flashing blue eyes, his shock of silver hair against tanned skin, or his sharp jawline. No, I saw that same damn cocky-ass expression and sandy hair that belonged to a different man entirely.
It felt like Kevin was back in town, making me question myself.
And I did not like it. Not one bit. And just as suddenly, I was overwhelmed by everything that wasn’t Kevin. I went from being on the defense because of an old memory to being on the defense because I wanted to be helpless around Marcus Walker. I kept my spine as straight as I could and walked directly from that unsettling interaction with Dr. Walker to the nurse’s station.
“What happened yesterday with Dr. Walker?” I asked Rosa Hernandez.
“I didn’t think anything happened,” she replied, tilting her head. “Why?”
“He mentioned something about needing incoming procedures for patients. I’m just wondering what about yesterday’s situation didn’t meet his expectations.”
Rosa frowned. “I don’t know. We were going over charting procedures when the call came in. He seemed to understand fully that triage disseminates all information to all concerned parties at once. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary to me.”
I bit my lip and thought for a second. “What do we know about him?”
Rosa shrugged. “Nothing. You’d have to talk to administration.”
“You know where he came from?”
“You mean his military past?” she asked. “He seems to let everyone know about that.”
“No, no,” I said, shaking my head. “He came here from another hospital, right?”
“Oh, that.” She shrugged again. “Haven’t really had a chance to talk to him around the water cooler, if you know what I mean.”
I knew exactly what she meant. She didn’t actually care where he came from or what his work history had been. As long as he showed up, did his job, and didn’t tell her how to do hers, she didn’t much care. She left, and I turned to talk to another one of the nurses.
“Can I help you, Doctor?” one of the nurses asked.
“Quick question for you,” I said.
Two nurses turned their attention to me, eyebrows raised.
“When we have incoming patients, what kind of information do you get?”
One nurse shook her head. The other shrugged and stepped forward. “Depends on who’s running the ambulance, I guess. Depends on how bad it is.”
“I mean, if we’ve got some little old lady with elevated blood pressure, we’ll know her whole life history because she’s capable of being chatty and telling the EMT everything,” the second nurse explained. “But if you’re talking about, like, yesterday…”
I nodded.
“Or, like, this morning, when we had that gunshot victim—we didn’t have much to go on because the EMTs were too busy in the van trying to keep them alive. We were lucky to even know we had an incoming gunshot wound.”
“Gotcha,” I said. “So, you can’t really share information with us that you don’t have.”
“Yeah,” the first nurse replied. “This job doesn’t come with a crystal ball, though I swear it would make my life easier sometimes. Especially when patients hit that call button like I can magically know what’s wrong without their saying a word.”
I nodded in understanding. Not that most of my patients were able to help me figure out what was wrong. They were usually unconscious, screaming, or just telling me, “It hurts.”
Maybe he was right. Maybe we did need to figure out something to make the process smoother—so we weren’t asking annoying questions when answers weren’t readily available.
Maybe I would sit down with Dr. Walker and discuss what he thought the protocols should be. At the very least, I could figure out what needs of his weren’t being met by our current way of doing things.