THIRTY-THREE
CALLUM
Seven days of pretending things are normal.
As normal as two people can be when there’s a whole something wedged between them.
Polite greetings. Clinical handovers. Like there hadn’t been hands, mouths, and soft, gasping breaths. Like I don’t still hear her whispering my name when I close my eyes.
We’re playing the world’s worst improv game: Act Normal. The prompt is “nothing happened.” The subtext is “everything did.”
She stands beside me in Bay 2, a fraction too near. Her sleeve skims mine every time she shifts the chart, and the cherry blossom scent she always leaves behind in the drug room has apparently decided to take up permanent residence in my hippocampus.
“Mr. Temple, I’ll be assisting Dr. Han—”
“We’ll be overseeing your anesthetic today,” I say at the same time.
We freeze.
She’s blinking at me, caught between a smile and an internal scream.
“Go ahead,” I say quickly.
“No, sorry, you—”
“Please—”
“Right. Yes. Okay.”
Mr. Temple shifts in bed. I can feel him watching us, silently weighing whether he should be signing a consent form or buying popcorn.
I stare at the chart like it might burst into flames.
She clears her throat and starts again, all professional polish. “Your procedure’s scheduled second on the list. I’ll chase your pathology now, but everything looks fine so far.”
“Thank you, Nurse Mitchell,” I say too formally, like I'm afraid I might accidentally say “sweetheart, come for me” instead.
Her eyes meet mine for a heartbeat—brief confusion, then neutral again.
She walks out without another word.
I try to care about the numbers on the chart. About airway scores. But all I can hear is Mr. Temple clearing his throat like a man who has seen things and now has opinions.
“So, lover’s tiff?” Mr. Temple asks.
My eyes snap up, “Sorry?”
“That nurse,” he nods toward the door. “I figured—” He laughs softly, almost to himself. “Sorry. Just reminded me of my wife and me, is all.”
“Oh?” Because what else do you say?
“She was a waitress. Ran the floor with the precision of a general. I was a line cook. Swore I’d never date someone at work. Thought it’d be messy.” He chuckles. “Then she critiqued my béarnaise. That was that.”
I smile, flipping through the anesthetic checklist.
“Started out fighting over small things,” he adds. “Sauce ratios. Napkin folds. Next thing I knew, we were arguing over which side of the bed was closer to the fan.”
I chuckle under my breath. “Let me guess. You lost that one?”
“Lost all of them. Happily.”
I offer a polite nod, but remain quiet.
“She used to argue with me over everything,” he adds. “Prepping onions or plating mains, she always had something to say.” He fidgets with the hem of his blanket. “Sorry,” he murmurs. “I talk when I’m nervous.”
“Yeah. She does that too,” I smile.
I sit in it for a moment. The kind of silence with teeth.
“Just—” I start, voice lower now. “Out of curiosity, how did you and your wife—”
The door slides open.
We both straighten, almost comically fast.
Jordie walks in holding a pathology slip, brows faintly furrowed. Her eyes move between us. Mr. Temple, rigid with fake nonchalance, and me, frozen mid-reaching for the computer.
It’s . . . off.
She narrows her eyes. “Everything okay?”
“Yep,” I say at the same time Mr. Temple chirps, “peachy.”
She raises one suspicious eyebrow. “Right.”
I straighten. Professional again. “What do the blood results say?”
She watches me for a second longer before answering. “Potassium’s 3.1. Bit low.”
I nod. “I’ll order 10 mmol of potassium in a hundred mLs saline to run pre-op.”
Mr. Temple shifts in bed. “Nurse, would you be a dear and fetch me another blanket? Bit of a chill.”
Jordie frowns, eyes drifting to the two blankets already tucked around him.
“I am delicate,” Mr. Temple adds solemnly.
She reaches for the tympanic thermometer, tucking it into his ear.
“No fever,” she says after checking the reading. “I’ll grab the forced-air warmer.”
She steps out, door sliding shut.
Mr. Temple exhales, like he’s just disarmed a bomb.
Before I can speak, he reaches out and catches my wrist. Pulls me toward him.
“Alright, son,” he leans in, lowering his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Listen well and listen good—”
The dose titration chart is glaring at me.
I’m supposed to be summarizing methoxyflurane data on outpatient procedures for my QI project. I’ve rewritten the same sentence five times. Each one objectively worse than the last.
Delete. Reword. Delete again.
My brain: an empty PowerPoint slide and the sound of dial-up internet.
Clearly, my thoughts are elsewhere.
Specifically, on the photocopy sitting just to the left of my keyboard. Faded. Slightly warped from the scanner.
NEJM, 2006. Jordie’s missing citation for her journal submission.
I spent three nights chasing it. Westmead Hospital Library archives. Called in favors. Promised a bottle of Lagavulin. Bribed with eternal guilt-tripping rights. Got it. Scanned. Highlighted. Annotated. Printed.
And then just . . . didn’t give it to her.
I don’t know why I haven’t handed it to her yet.
Maybe I’m waiting for the moment to feel normal again.
Or maybe I’m still pretending that one night didn’t change everything.
But Mr. Temple’s words from this morning circle back—gruff, casual, and smarter than they had any right to be:
“You wanna know the secret to getting past the awkward part? You don’t. You live in it. You show up anyway. And eventually, it tires of being awkward and gives you something better to do.”
I push back from the desk and stand. Grab the printout. I’m going to find her. Give her the article. Say what needs to be said. Nothing scripted. No perfect line.
Just me. Showing up anyway.
I open the door—
And stop.
Jordie’s standing there, hand mid-air about to knock.
In her other hand: a peace lily in a terracotta pot. The pot’s chipped, paint smudged in a way that suspiciously suggests she started a DIY project and gave up midway. Two googly eyes stare up from the front. A toothpick in the soil holds a hand-cut speech bubble in blue pen:
Please don’t kill me. Peace is fragile, and so is my root system.
I blink.
She blinks back. “It’s not a metaphor.”
I smile. “You sure?”
She glances at the plant. Then at me. “Okay. It’s a tiny metaphor.”
She steps inside. Not with the usual awkward shuffle or tripwire caution—just walks right past me, close enough that our shoulders brush.
She crosses to my desk and sets the plant down. The googly eyes wobble. The speech bubble leans to the left.
“Did you want—” I start.
“I’m sorry,” she blurts.
That shuts me up.
She clears her throat. “I should’ve talked to you. The next morning. Not seven days later, like some emotionally stunted possum.”
I raise an eyebrow. “Possum?”
“Yeah. Looks harmless, but hisses if you get too close.” She lets out a tight, shaky laugh. “Anyway, I didn’t mean to make things weird.” She nods toward the plant. “This is my olive branch. Except leafier. And harder to kill. Hopefully.”
“Appreciated.”
My fingers twitch against the paper in my hand.
Her gaze drops to it. “Is that . . .?”
I nod and offer it. “The article you need to cite for your submission.”
She pauses, her gaze dropping to the page. Her fingers lift, brushing her lower lip as if holding a thought in place, keeping it from slipping out.
For a second, she just stares at the pages.
Then, softly, “You remembered.”
She takes it as if it’s more fragile than it is. Like it means more than she’s ready to admit.
“Page four’s your money paragraph,” I say, because I don’t know how else to tell her: “I remember everything about you.”
“Thank you,” she says, not quite meeting my eyes.
A pause. Weighty.
She doesn’t look at me when she says, “Look, I was thinking maybe we could just go back to being friends. But, maybe . . . with occasional benefits.”
Friends with benefits.
She says it like it’s practical. A harmless indulgence. Like it didn’t rattle me at a molecular level.
And maybe it’s dramatic. It’s just proximity, loneliness, and dopamine. Whatever excuse I’ve been feeding myself all week.
But the truth is, it wasn’t just that.
It’s her laugh stuck in my head like a song. It’s knowing she reads the acknowledgements first because she wants to know who made the author feel loved.
It’s the way she curled away from me the next morning, all calm detachment, after I’d already handed her a part of myself I didn’t even know was there to offer.
I want to ask what she’s scared of, or why this thing between us needs disclaimers and emergency exits.
But I don’t.
Because she’s already offering the hardest thing—herself, in the only way she knows how.
“I miss being us,” she says, “I miss my friend.”
And it’s so earnest the way she said that.
She finally glances up. Eyes soft. Guarded. Desperate to make this okay.
I give a small nod. Not because I agree. But because I miss my friend, too. And mostly, I don’t trust myself to say anything else without asking for more than she’s ready to give.
“Okay,” I say, quietly. “Friends.”
Because maybe Mr. Temple was right.
Maybe you don’t fix the awkward part.
You just stay. You live in it.
Until it stops being awkward.
Or until it becomes something else entirely.