6. Chapter 6
Nick
The bay is chaos with a dress code.
Six coming in off the interstate, three of them ours, the worst one mine, a man in his fifties who went through a windshield and looks like it.
I take the head of the bed and the room organizes around the work, and somewhere across the bay I can hear her voice at another bed, steady, running her own room at a volume that carries just far enough, and for the next four hours that's the only contact we have.
Her voice across a war zone. It's enough.
That's the part I'd never say out loud, that hearing her handle her end makes my end lighter, like the building weighs less with her in it.
My windshield man fights me on the table for two of those hours and then decides to live. By the time I close, the board's cleared, the bay's being mopped, and the clock in the scrub room says one-forty in the morning.
She's waiting by the lockers with her coat on and her hair down.
Down. On purpose. She sees me register it and lifts her chin half an inch, daring me to say something in a hallway with people still in it, and I don't, because I'm not new.
I hold the door. She goes through it ahead of me, close enough that her hair moves against my arm, and neither of us says one word in the elevator down to the garage, standing side by side watching the numbers like two strangers, her little finger hooked around mine behind the fold of her coat where the camera can't see.
The whole drive she looks out the window at the wet streets with her hand resting on my thigh, not moving it, just the weight of it there, and I keep both hands on the wheel like a student driver because if I take one off I'll pull over on a residential street like a teenager, and we're both too old and too tired for that.
"You're quiet," she says.
"I'm driving."
"You drive with your jaw." She turns from the window. "It's been working since the parking garage. What."
"Bus versus car. Six patients. Nobody died." I check the mirror, change lanes, buy myself a second. "That's not what's working the jaw."
"Then what?"
"Three years, nobody in the house. I'm doing the math on the last time I wanted anything the way I want you walking through that door." The light ahead goes red and I stop under it, and the red sits on the wet hood like paint. I look over at her. "The math's ugly. That's all."
She holds my eyes across the console. Then she takes her hand off my thigh, unclips her seatbelt, leans across the space between the seats, and kisses me at the red light, one hand coming up to the side of my face, soft, nothing like the stairwell, and she's back in her seat with the belt clicked before the light turns.
"Drive, Dr. Calloway," she says, facing the windshield.
The house is dark when we pull in. I turn off the car and we sit in the sudden quiet of the garage, engine ticking, and I watch her take in what she can see, the single mountain bike on the wall hooks, the workbench with nothing on it, the recycling bin that's all coffee cans.
"You really do live alone," she says.
"I warned you."
Inside, I turn on the kitchen light and she walks the edge of the room slow with her coat still on, reading the place like a chart.
There isn't much to read. Good knives, one pan hanging, a couch that cost real money facing a fireplace I've lit twice, and on the mantel one photograph, my mother and me at my white coat ceremony, her reaching up to fix my collar.
Sarah stops at the photograph. She looks at it, then looks at me across the room with a question she's polite enough not to ask at two in the morning.
"She's in Ohio," I say. "Calls on Sundays. Thinks I don't eat."
"Do you eat?"
"There's a drawer of takeout menus doing the cooking."
"Nick." She takes her coat off and lays it on the arm of the couch, and then she opens my refrigerator, actually opens it, stands in the light of it taking inventory, and I lean against the counter and watch this woman audit my life at two in the morning in her scrubs with her hair down, and something in my chest goes quietly off a ledge it's been standing on for two weeks.
"Eggs," she announces. "Butter that's a war crime. One lemon, personality unknown. Half a thing of spinach that's still legal." She closes the door and faces me. "I'm making eggs. We didn't eat, you don't eat, and I'm not doing what we're about to do on a vending machine dinner."
"What are we about to do?"
"Pan," she says, holding out her hand like I'm scrubbed in with her.
I hand her the pan.
She cooks the way she operates, no wasted movement, cracking eggs one-handed, stealing my one lemon for the spinach, and I stand close behind her at the stove because the kitchen's small and that's my story.
Her hair smells like the hospital soap and underneath it something warmer that's just her.
I move it off her neck with one hand and put my mouth on the skin there, and she leans back into me without missing a stir.
"Eggs," she warns, not meaning it.
"I'm not stopping the eggs." I work slowly up the side of her neck, and her breathing goes shallow, and the wooden spoon slows down in the pan. "You're the one stopping the eggs."
"You're—" The spoon stops entirely. She turns the burner off with a snap of her wrist, turns around inside my arms, and looks up at me with her back against the counter edge and the steam still rising off the pan behind her. "Fine. Intermission."
We eat standing up at the counter out of the pan with two forks, three feet of space between us on purpose, because we've both figured out the same thing, that the wanting is finally allowed and so there's no reason left to rush it, and the not-rushing is its own kind of unbearable.
She sets her fork down when we're done eating.
"Okay," she says. "Tour."
"It's a hallway and three doors."
"Show me the doors, Nick."
The first door is an office. The second is a bathroom. I stand with my hand on the third one, and she comes down the dark hallway toward me with her eyes up, and there's nothing casual left in either of us by the time she's close, and I don't open the door yet.
"Terms," I say.
"You want terms now?"
"You wrote terms last time. It's my turn.
" I put my hand at her waist, thumb finding the strip of skin where her scrub top's ridden up, drawing one slow line there that makes her breath catch.
"No alarm rules. No 'gone by five.' You sleep here, I make you terrible coffee, I drive you to your car in the morning.
That's the deal. All of it or none of it. "
Her hands come up to my chest. "You've been mad about that pen for two weeks," she says.
"I've been mad about that pen since the stairs."
"Deal." She rises up on her toes, mouth an inch from mine. "All of it."
I open the door.
We come through it already tangled, her hands pulling my shirt over my head before we're past the frame, mine finding the tie of her scrub pants, and the two weeks come off us with the clothes, piece by piece, marked by soft sounds in the dark and her laugh once when we get briefly, stupidly stuck on her sleeve.
I lay her back onto the bed and follow her down, and the lamp's off, but the streetlight through the blinds stripes across her in bands, and I take a second, propped over her, just looking.
"What," she whispers.
"I want to remember this," I say.
She pulls me down.
I go slow this time because last time I didn't get to.
I learn her in the half dark with my mouth, starting at the inside of her wrist where her pulse jumps, then the line of her collarbone, the soft skin below her navel that makes her hips lift when I get there.
When I settle between her thighs she says my name once, high and gone, her fingers sliding into my hair.
I take her apart with my tongue, patient, holding her hips down when they rise, listening to her the way I listened across the trauma bay, reading every hitch in her breath, every small sound she tries to swallow.
I circle her swollen clit with the flat of my tongue until her thighs start to tremble and she breaks loud, back bowing off the bed, hand fisted in the sheet like it is the only thing anchoring her.
She's still pulsing when she reaches for me, pulling me up her body with urgent hands.
Her legs wrap around my waist as she guides me, and I push into her in one long, steady stroke.
She is tight heat everywhere, two weeks of stolen glances and careful distance finally gone, and I have to stop buried deep, forehead against hers, just breathing through the overwhelming feel of her around me.
Her nails dig into my shoulders. She rocks up once, twice, and that is all the encouragement I need.
We find a rhythm together, long and deep at first, her body meeting every thrust, the streetlight striping across her breasts and throat as she arches.
It builds until she claws at my back, heels pressing into me, demanding more, and I give it, harder, faster, the headboard knocking a steady complaint against the wall.
Her sounds climb with mine, raw and unrestrained, until she comes again with my name breaking in her throat, clenching around my cock so intensely my vision whites out at the edges.
I follow right after, buried as deep as I can go, groaning into the curve of her neck while release rolls through me in heavy waves that leave us both shaking.
After, she lies across my chest with one leg thrown over mine, drawing slow circles on my ribs, and the streetlight stripes have moved a few inches up the wall.
"Your shower better be everything you promised," she murmurs, already half asleep.
"It'll change your religion."
"Big talk." Her circles slow. Her breathing goes long and even, her whole weight settling onto me by degrees, and I lie there in my own house that hasn't held another person in three years, doing the math again.
The math's beautiful. That's the problem.
Somewhere under this roof there's still a chief and his resident, an evaluation with my signature waiting on it in October, a licensing board, a program director named Whitfield who plays golf with two hospital lawyers, and none of it dissolved because a woman fell asleep on my chest.
I pull the blanket up over her shoulder.
Morning comes at six-ten with sun through the blinds and an empty bed, and one second of pure free fall before I hear the shower running.
I find her in it. She hears the glass door and turns, hair slicked back, water running off her, and points at me through the steam.
"This is amazing," she says. "There are six settings on this thing. Six."
"I told you."
"You said water pressure. Get in, I found the one that fixes your neck."
I get in. There's some honest showering for about ninety seconds, her hands working shampoo through my hair like I'm a patient who needs managing, and then her hands are on my chest and the soap becomes a pretext, and I lift her against the tile with her legs around my waist and take her there in the steam, slower than the night, quieter, her arms around my neck, her forehead against mine, the water drumming on my shoulders.
The six settings watch. Nobody fixes anybody's neck.
She borrows a shirt after, an old gray one from the academic conference in Denver, and stands in my kitchen in it with her scrub pants while I make the terrible coffee I promised, and her phone buzzes on the counter, and mine goes off in the bedroom at the same time, and we both know the hospital's ringtone in our sleep.
Mine's the group thread. I read it at the bedroom door, and then I read it again.
"What?" She reads my face from the kitchen the way she reads a monitor.
"Department meeting moved to eight." I turn the phone so she can see. "Whitfield's coming down himself. Mandatory for attendings and senior residents."
"About the bus crash? We cleared that board clean, nobody—"
"It's not about the bus crash." I set the phone down and drink the terrible coffee and look at her across my kitchen, in my shirt, with her wet hair, twelve hours after I told a stairwell camera's blind spot the whole truth. "Agenda's one line. 'Professional conduct policy review.'"
She sets her cup down slowly.
"That could be anything," she says. "That could be about the resident who parked in the board chair's spot for a month."
"It could."
"Nick. It could."
"You're right." I rinse my cup, set it in the rack, and reach past her for my keys, and she catches my wrist as I go, and holds it, thumb on my pulse like she's taking a reading, and whatever number she gets, her face steadies around it.
"Hey. Last night happened," she says. "Whatever that meeting is. It happened, and I'd do it again."
"Me too," I say, and kiss her once, hard, coffee and toothpaste, her fingers tightening on my wrist. "Separate cars. You first. I'll be eight minutes behind you."
"Eight minutes." She grabs her coat off the couch, stops at the door to the garage, and looks back at me standing in my kitchen, and for a second the professional face isn't on yet and it's just her, in my shirt, memorizing something. "See you soon."
The door shuts. The garage door rumbles up, her engine starts, and I stand in a kitchen that smells like her shampoo, fully aware that walking into that meeting is going to require the best acting of my career, and that somewhere between a stairwell and a shower I stopped being a man with a secret and became a man with something to lose.