Obeying (Doctor’s Orders #1)

1. Kristen

KRISTEN

Breathe.

Breathe.

Don't make a sound.

But the breath comes out shaking, too loud in an apartment that has gone wrong somehow, the walls pulled in tighter than they were an hour ago.

My back is flat against the door. My palm covers my mouth so hard I can taste my own skin.

Somewhere past this room, he is moving, and I track him the way you track weather, by feel, by the change in pressure.

A cabinet opens. Closes. A door I know the sound of, the bathroom, the hinge that always sticks.

He's being patient about it. That is the part that turns my stomach. He's not rushing.

"Kristen."

My name in his mouth is soft. It's always soft right before it isn't.

"Where are you?"

I don't move. I can't. My legs have stopped belonging to me, and my hands won't quit their trembling, and I press back harder like the door might agree to take me in, fold me into the wood, hide me.

The floor gives him away. One board near the hall closet has a voice of its own, and it speaks.

It says he is closer now. Close enough that I can hear him breathing, slow and unbothered, a man who has all the time in the world because he knows the apartment better than I know my own pulse.

My heart drops with each step. The walls are closing in on me.

The footsteps stop right outside.

"Found you."

I watch the handle turning, and there is nowhere behind me, no window, no second door, nothing but the corner of a room I thought I'd be safe in.

Don't scream. If you scream, he wins faster.

The handle finishes its turn.

The door slams open.

I sit up, gasping for air.

I'm in my room. My own bed, my own house, the light coming in the way it always does. My shirt is stuck to my back, and my hair is damp at my temples. I press my hands flat to the mattress and just feel it under me. Solid. Real. Only me here.

A dream. Just a dream.

Actually, a nightmare if I'm being honest, and I'm too tired to be anything but honest this early in the morning.

I sit for a while and just breathe through it.

In, hold, out. I've done this enough times to know it passes eventually, my heart slowing, my hands going still again.

I'm fine. The door's shut. There's no one behind it, no one in any of these rooms but me.

And that's the whole point. New place, new start, a life I'm building out of nothing. Mine.

The phone says 5:31.

No reason to chase the last half hour of sleep. It never comes back clean anyway.

I get up.

When I leave the house, it's early enough that the streets are mostly empty.

There's a café near the hospital that opens at six, so I stop in, like I have most mornings this week, and get a coffee.

The same girl is working. She remembers my order now, which is a small thing, but it's nice not having to explain myself, even about coffee.

By the time I get to the hospital and change, it's almost time for the morning huddle. A few of the residents are already there, bent around a phone, shoulders shaking, trying to keep it down and failing.

"He outmogged him so bad," one of them says. "It's actually criminal."

"Bro got cooked. Look at his face. Look at it. He's done. He has to move towns."

I smile like I'm in on it. I'm not. I haven't touched social media in years. I deleted it all when I decided to disappear and pause my life. It felt like a loss then, but when I had to disappear the second time, it proved useful. It was easier.

So when they talk about whatever the internet decided to care about overnight, I do what I've gotten good at. I nod. I laugh half a second after they do and hope nobody notices it's half a second late.

Priya drops into the spot next to me, already mid-yawn. She's a second-year, and my closest friend here.

"Morning," she says. "You look how I feel."

"Woke up too early. Couldn't fall back asleep."

"Ugh, I hate when that happens. Lying there awake when you could've had another hour? Tragic." She doesn't bother with whatever's got the others huddled around the phone. "What's the move today? Anything good on the board?"

We trade the small stuff, who's on what service, which attending is in a mood. It's easy, and I've learned not to take easy for granted.

The years are mixed in our group, interns up through residents, so nobody blinks at standing shoulder to shoulder with someone a level above or below.

What they blink at is me. The decade above.

I caught it the first week, the quick recalculations when my age came up, and I don't hold it against them.

I'd be curious too. A resident starting this late is a question with a story behind it.

But they've never once made me feel like I don't belong here. That part, I do all on my own.

Priya's the easiest of them. When my age came up, she didn't go wide-eyed, didn't ask the thing everyone wants to ask. She just nodded as if it were one more fact about a person and moved on. I don't think she knows how much I appreciate that.

Rounds pull us out of the lounge and onto the floor, and we move bed to bed behind the attending, the residents taking turns presenting.

Between patients, he asks questions, the kind meant to catch you flat-footed.

Differentials, next steps, what you'd order, and why.

I know the answers. I keep my voice low and let whoever's presenting take them, but they’re there before he finishes asking every time, sitting on my tongue where no one can see them.

By the time we break, I'm starving, and Priya and I end up against the wall outside the lounge with vending-machine coffee that tastes like a dare.

"Okay, I have a theory about you," she says.

"That sounds dangerous."

"I think you're some kind of secret genius."

"What do you mean?"

"I see you. Every question thrown out, you whisper the answer, and it's always right. Every time." She points the coffee at me like evidence. "You were top of your class, weren't you? Back in the day."

I huff. "No, I wasn't."

"Oh, there it is. You're being way too humble. I can tell you're smart, Kristen. You don't have to do the bit."

"Thanks. You too."

She lets it go and tells me about a consult of hers that went sideways. I listen, and we trade the usual complaints until our coffees are gone and the break's over. She heads off to her own floor. I head to mine.

And it's only when I'm walking the hall alone that what she said catches up to me.

I wasn't being humble. I was top of my class, all the way through, the kind of student who didn't know what second place felt like.

Then med school happened, and I met someone who outscored me.

Not always, but enough that I finally learned the shape of coming in behind.

I hated it, but I let it make me better.

We did that to each other. Two people who couldn't stand to lose, sharpening each other for four years. He was both my rival and my motivation.

I wonder sometimes where he landed. Somewhere impressive, probably. Some gleaming hospital with his name on something, or off being the private physician to people whose names you'd know. He could do that. He was built for it.

I could have too. If I'd wanted it. If a lot of things had gone differently.

Maybe someday.

For now, instead of a high-profile patient, I've got a high-maintenance one. And he's waiting.

Walter Hale. He is in 412, and he is, by every account but mine, a nightmare.

He's seventy-three, four days out from a hip repair, and he has run off two physical therapists and made a nurse cry, less from cruelty than from a stubborn streak that makes him bristle at help.

He won't do his walking for PT, won't do it for the nurses.

The chart is full of polite notes that all mean the same thing—the patient refusing to mobilize.

Yet he does it for me.

I don't have a good clinical reason for it.

He's my post-op patient, so I round on him, check the incision, and follow his recovery.

That's the job. The walking isn't the job.

The walking is PT's, and I have a hundred things I should be doing instead.

But the first day I met him, he looked at me for a long moment and said I reminded him of his daughter.

The next time PT gave up on him, I told them I'd handle it, and now somehow it's a standing arrangement nobody approved.

So I get him up on his feet, his hands wrapped around the walker, and we make our slow way down the hall.

"You're late," he says.

"I have other patients, Walter."

"Sure. The ones who don't give you any trouble." He shuffles forward. "Boring."

"Eyes up. Look where you're going, not at your feet."

"You're just like my daughter,” he grumbles, but follows.

"Yes, you've mentioned that."

"Always telling me what to do."

"Someone has to."

"That's exactly what she'd say too." He takes another step. "She'd also tell me to stop yapping and start moving."

"She sounds smart."

"And bossy. Like somebody else I'm looking at."

He huffs out a little laugh and keeps going, and I stay at his elbow, there if he needs me, gone if he doesn't. He gets all the way to the window at the end of the hall before he has to stop, and when he turns around, he looks so pleased with himself that something in me goes soft and aches at the same time.

This. This is the best part of my day, and it isn't even mine to do.

I'm writing his progress in the chart when the overhead pager goes off, and my body answers before I do.

Trauma activation. Incoming. Multiple injuries, ETA short.

I'm moving. Everyone is moving. The hallway narrows to one direction, and I go with it, and for the length of that walk, I'm not the woman who checks doorways: I'm just a pair of hands that know what they're for.

The bay is loud. The floor attending is calling shots and doing it well, but it's a lot: two patients off one vehicle, and the worst of them is losing color fast. Someone overhead is paging the head of trauma.

The patient in front of me has a belly as hard as a board and a pressure that won't stay up, and I'm in it now, calling numbers as they drop, hanging fluids, working fast. Rigid abdomen.

Seatbelt sign across the chest. Heart rate climbing because the body is trying to compensate for blood that's going somewhere it shouldn't. I know what this is.

The doors bang open, and every head in the bay turns. Someone comes through fast, already gowned, already gloved, mask up.

He takes it in one pass. I watch him do it. His eyes go over the patient, the monitor, my hands, the numbers I'm calling, and I can see the moment he arrives at the same answer I have. Then he starts giving orders, and the room falls into line.

"Hang another unit. I want the OR aware now, not in five minutes. You, pressure on that." A half-beat passes. His eyes land on me. "You, keep doing exactly what you're doing."

I don't have time to think about it. We find a rhythm, the two of us and the team around us, and it is something I forgot my body still knew how to do.

I anticipate the instrument before he calls for it, and it's already in my hand, moving toward his.

He shifts, and I've shifted. There's a seamlessness to it that I haven't felt in years, this clean wordless thing where the noise falls away, and there's nothing but the work and the next right move.

He is fast. He is precise. He's better than anyone I've worked beside in a long time.

And for a few minutes, I forget to make myself small, because I'm too busy being entirely involved in something.

The pressure climbs, then holds. The color comes back to the patient's face by a shade. The OR team takes over for transfer, and the bay exhales—that collective drop in the shoulders that comes after the worst part passes. The man across from me peels his gloves and pulls down his mask.

I freeze. I know that face.

I knew it before he was anyone's department head. I knew it across a lecture hall and over a library table at two in the morning with our notes bleeding into each other's. I spent years training myself not to walk back into it.

Dr. Vance is already crossing to him, the relief plain on her face. "Amazing work, as always, Doctor. God, it's good to have you back. The place falls apart without you."

"It clearly doesn't," he says, glancing at the stabilized patient. "You did fine."

"Flattery. From you. I'll mark the calendar." She turns to round us up, the residents who jumped in. "Everyone, while I have you. Introductions are overdue." She tips her head toward him. "This is Dr. Logan Maxwell, our chief of trauma. You're on his service now. He's your attending."

Logan.

His gaze moves over the group, unhurried, that same composure I remember sitting on him like it was tailored.

It passes across me without catching. Or it catches for half a second and lets go.

I can't tell, and I hate that I can't tell.

I hate that some part of me is still watching him close enough to wonder.

The mask is still on me. He doesn't know.

I used to lie awake, furious that this man was always half a step ahead of me.

Now he's a dozen steps ahead, with a title and a service and my name somewhere on his roster, and I'm the one keeping my eyes down so he won't look too close.

Because how am I supposed to survive residency when Logan Maxwell is the one evaluating my every move?

The man who spent four years pushing me to my limits. The man I never wanted to lose to.

My rival. And somehow, now my attending.