Sadie
Tuesday starts wrong.
My alarm doesn't go off, which means my phone died in the night.
The outlet by my bed must be bad, so I need to remember to buy a power strip I can't afford.
I'm out the door in nineteen minutes with damp hair and no breakfast, and I'm chewing a glucose tab at the corner of Chandler and Fifth because I forgot to eat one before I left and my legs feel like cotton wool.
I hate this. I hate rushing. Rushing is how I make mistakes, and I don't want to make mistakes at work.
It’s colder than yesterday and my coat isn't quite enough as I walk with my hands in my pockets and my chin tucked into the collar.
I move past the closed dry cleaner, the bar that props its door open in the afternoons, and a woman walking a small white dog that sniffs at my flats and then loses interest. It's six blocks from my building to the corner of Chandler and Fifth, and somewhere around the third block the back of my neck starts to prickle.
There’s no one behind me when I glance over my shoulder.
I keep walking. The prickle doesn't go away.
I tell myself it's the groceries or the fact that I know now that somebody, somewhere, watched me look at blueberries in a corner store and bought them for me. I tell myself that's enough to make any woman feel paranoid for the next week of her life, and that I should file it under the growing list of things I don’t have the bandwidth to think about on a workday morning before I’ve even had my first coffee.
I pull my coat tighter and I walk the rest of the way to the clinic without looking behind me again. The prickle stays until I push through the staff door and the warmth of the lobby closes around me, and then, in the business of the day, it is gone.
Priya is already at the coffee machine. She looks at my wet hair and hands me a cup without asking.
"Rough morning?" she asks, a sympathetic tilt to her head.
"Phone died,” I manage after a gulp of hot coffee.
"Happens." She watches me take another sip. "You eaten?"
"Glucose tab."
She opens a drawer and pushes a granola bar across the counter at me. "Eat that. Dr. Mehta's got a heavy morning. You're in rooms three and five."
I eat the granola bar standing up in the break room while scrolling through the appointments diary.
My hands have the faint tremor they get when I've run my sugar down, and I breathe slowly as I wait for the carbs to catch up with me.
By the time I'm pulling my scrub top over my t-shirt, I'm steady again.
Work settles me the way it always does. The smell of the soap, the steady whirring and then clean beep of a blood pressure reading. I’m good at this. I’m good at this, and nobody at this clinic has any reason to think otherwise.
I pull up my schedule on the tablet.
Eight, a twelve-year-old with a sinus infection.
Eight-thirty, a new patient intake, male, forty-one, name blocked out on my screen as Confidential because Dr. Mehta has a handful of patients she rooms herself for reasons she doesn't explain and I don't ask.
Nine, an annual physical. Nine-thirty, a sports injury.
I like the rhythm of it. I like knowing what's coming.
By ten-fifteen I'm washing my hands at the sink outside room two and thinking about whether I'm going to walk to the deli at lunch or eat the sad peanut butter sandwich I made in a rush this morning.
Denise rounds the corner with her arms full of paper charts.
"Sadie. Mehta wants you in four."
"I thought four was hers."
"She's running behind in six. Needs you to do the vitals and the intake. Follow-up on stitches." She's already past me. "Patient's already in the room. Big guy. Tip your head up, not down, he'll scare the shit out of you if you're not ready."
My hand is on the door before the words catch up to me.
Big guy.
I open the door.
He's standing beside the exam table.
He turns his head to look at me, and for one second the whole room goes silent.
Gray eyes. Dark hair. A charcoal suit jacket draped neatly on the exam table beside him.
The sleeve of his white shirt is rolled up over a bandage on his left bicep, similar to the one that I taped there myself eleven days ago.
My hand is still on the door.
"Good morning," he says.
His voice does the thing I remember. Just a shadow of an accent underneath the consonants, a faint rasp that is entirely recognizable. He's looking at me the way he looked at me in the sedan, except now he's upright and easily the most composed person I have ever seen in my life.
I close the door behind me slowly in a bid to gather my bearings. I knew he was big. I even knew he was handsome in that threatening sort of way…but for some reason, seeing him here has thrown me completely off balance.
"Good morning," I say.
It comes out professional. I don't know how. I don't know how any part of me is working right now because I can feel my pulse in my throat where his fingers pressed, and I can feel the place on my jaw where his hand was before that. It’s so visceral that none of those sensations feel like memories. They feel like they’re happening now. Like his fingers are on my skin now.
I walk to the counter and wash my hands.
I keep them under the water longer than I need to, and I watch the soap lather between my fingers while I count backwards from ten in my head. Ten. Nine. Eight. By one I am a medical assistant again and he is a patient. I dry my hands on a paper towel and turn around.
He's watching me.
"I'm Sadie, and I’ll be assisting Dr Mehta today" I say. It's what I say to every patient. "I'm going to take your vitals and do a quick check of your incision, and then Dr. Mehta will be in with you. Can you confirm your name and date of birth for me, please?"
"Nikolai Zhirinovsky." He spells his surname without being asked, then rattles off his date of birth.
Thirty-seven. My brain snatches at the number and holds it like it matters, then I try to force it to let it go.
I pick up the blood pressure cuff.
"Can you roll your other sleeve up, please?"
He does. He does it slowly enough that I have time to understand I’m going to have to put my hand on his arm in the next three seconds and I am going to have to be normal about it when my entire nervous system has come alive and is lighting up like a Christmas tree.
His forearm is warm under my fingers. I try to ignore the way the contact sends a zap of electricity through me.
I wrap the cuff and press the button on the machine, listening to the faint whir of it inflating. I keep my eyes on the gauge and not on him, because I know in my bones that if I look up, I’m going to lose whatever thread of composure I have left.
"One-twenty over seventy-six," I read.
"Better than last time."
My hand stalls on the Velcro. I look at him before I can stop myself.
He's smiling.
Not with his mouth, but with something in his eyes. A private amusement that I’m suddenly and overwhelmingly certain is for me and only me.
I put the blood pressure cuff down on the counter very carefully, like it's breakable, because my hands have started to shake again and I don’t want him to see it.
"Mr. Zhirinovsky."
"Nick."
"Mr. Zhirinovsky, I need to check your stitches now."
He holds out his arm.
I don't move. I stand at the counter with my back half turned, and I make myself breathe. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. Four seconds in. Six seconds out. It's a thing a nurse taught me a long time ago and it has never once failed me.
I cross the two steps to the exam table and take his arm in both hands. Unpeeling the tape at the corner of the gauze, I lift the pad away as gently as possible and frown.
The wound is healing well. The stitches are neat.
Whoever put them in did a better job than any ER surgeon I've seen in five years of work, and there's no sign of redness or swelling or any of the things I am trained to look for.
It's almost rude how perfect this wound is. It’s certainly not a wound that needs medical attention.
I look up at him because I can’t help it.
"Who did these?" I ask.
He tilts his head as though I’m asking a trick question. "A doctor."
"I can see that,” I murmur. “Which hospital?"
"Private."
"Private." I let the word sit there. "There was no reason for you to come in today." the words come out as a whisper and leave a trail of goosebumps down my spine.
"There was. It just wasn’t the stitches."
He says it simply. His gray eyes are steady on my face, and his skin is warm under mine. My stomach is doing something that it’s never done before, but I know I don’t like it because it feels dangerously out of my control.
"Why are you here?" I ask. It comes out flat and low, closer to his register than mine. My pulse is beating in my ears.
He doesn't answer right away.
Several reasons run through my mind. Maybe he is still in pain. Perhaps the stitches are tight and he isn’t aware that’s normal for this late in the healing stage. He could be looking for easy access to prescription drugs or—
"I wanted to see you," he finally says.
I freeze.
His mouth does something small. It’s a shape that could become a smile if he permitted it, but he doesn't.
"Sadie," he says, and his voice is the same low, careful voice he used when he said my name in the sedan. "You walked into a pile-up on the day you moved here and you didn't flinch when I put my hand on your throat. I needed to see you."
The door opens behind me.
Dr. Mehta says something I don't hear.
I let go of his arm like it's on fire, and step back. I grab my tablet because I don’t know what to do with my hands, and turn to Dr. Mehta with what I hope is a professional expression.
"Vitals are stable,” I say. “Incision is clean with no redness or weeping. I'll let you take it from here."
I walk out of the exam room, past Priya and Denise and the break room. I push open the door to the alley behind the clinic, close it behind me, and put my back against it.
It's him. I know it is.
It's been him the whole time.