Chapter Eight #2
“And I had to sit with my back to you in the end because I could hear you, you were talking to a guy about the day you passed your driving test and how you put a giant stuffed orange elephant from your childhood into the passenger seat for the first few solo journeys because it was so unnerving, driving across Dartmoor with nobody there next to you. I was laughing, but God, Carrie Cole, I’d never wanted anyone so badly. ”
He leaned in and kissed my neck again. His hand traced down my sternum, rib cage, navel, along my legs.
“I was always going to come back for you,” he said again, into my hair. “I’ve thought about you constantly.”
He moved his hands up the inside of my thighs, and I no longer cared about the Pucko or anything else. Somehow I was up, and our clothes were coming off. Fast, but not fast enough.
—
I’d planned to go into the hospital to help the next day, even though it was my day off—even though it was my birthday.
I didn’t go. Eric, the other core trainee, was back after his stint with D he was calling from Devon, where he was doing his usual twenty-minute circuit of the village. I could hear birds.
“Is this your ideal cake?” Johan asked when he came back. He cut me a slice, and in so doing spilled a few crumbs on his duvet. He scooped them up with his fingertips. I found myself able to resist pointing out the ones he’d missed.
“I actually really love cheap coffee cakes. But I know for a fact that two of my consultants like a traditional Victoria sponge, so I bought this. In case…”
“…They fired you? Is that how things work in the NHS?”
“It can feel that way sometimes.”
“I see.” He thought about this. “But surely nobody’s going to fire you on your own birthday.”
“You’d be surprised. Medicine’s bad, but surgery’s something else. I was thrown out of a consultant’s operating theater last month because I was wearing perfume.”
“Was it a bad perfume?”
“I don’t know. It was the anesthetist’s medical student wearing it, not me.”
“That’s appalling!”
“That’s surgery. I have a woman there who’s kind of like my mentor, though, and she went at him like a wolf later on. He actually tracked me down and apologized.”
Johan handed me a piece of cake. “I’m glad women like that exist in your line of work.”
“There’s not many of them.”
“You’ll be like that one day. When you’re a consultant surgeon. I’ve seen you in action. There was fire in there, Carrie Cole.”
“Hmm. I hope that’s out for the foreseeable.”
“I don’t,” he said. “That fire really worked for me.”
The cake was put to one side.
—
I showered again at around six in the evening. When I came back into his kitchen he was leaning against the worktop, writing a message to someone on his phone. I felt something new, something old, fill my body as I watched him.
It was a sense of belonging, I realized after a moment. A sense of the correct order of things, and it was not something I had known in a long time.
I didn’t think I could stand it if this was a one-off, if he disappeared again.
“You’re looking intense,” Johan said, looking up. “What’s happening in there?”
“Intensity,” I admitted, and he just laughed, put his phone down. He was naked.
“About this?”
“Yes. I like you a lot,” I said simply.
“You know I feel the same.”
I couldn’t help smiling. “Well, yes. And that’s caused a lot of thinking. For me, at least.”
“For me, too,” he said quietly. “But I also think this is what happens. People meet. They like each other. And it works out.”
I nodded, hoping he was right.
“I’m going to get those two bottles of Pucko out of the fridge again,” Johan said. “It’s time. And then some beers. Do you like beer? I have other drinks too.”
“I love beer. But I’m very happy with Pucko for now.”
We drank the cold Pucko, which really was good, and then opened beers.
We sat on his sofa and listened to a piano duet between a child and her father through the thin walls of Johan’s flat.
He made me walk him through an appendicectomy, then asked how I dealt with the stress of opening up a human body, especially in emergency conditions.
“It’s one of the only times I feel entirely calm, actually,” I said after a pause. “I wish I could give you a dramatic, Grey’s Anatomy kind of an answer. But it really is my happy place.”
“That’s unimaginable.”
“I get that. But I find it hard to imagine how anyone could be ten meters underwater with a tank on their back and not have a panic attack on the seafloor.”
Johan smiled at me. “Sure you could. If you can stand there and make on-the-spot decisions about a dying human, you’re made of tough stuff.”
I thought about this for a while. “I think I’ve just…I don’t know. Kind of learned to be calm in a storm. Our household often operated in a state of emergency when I was young. My sister says it’s why I’m drawn to trauma medicine.”
I pulled Johan’s dressing gown around me. “But also, my work’s the only thing in my life I’ve been formally trained to do. When I’m doing it, I’m calm. Nothing else is happening in my head.”
“You’re not thinking about what’s for lunch? Or how much you hate your boss?”
“I’m never thinking about what’s for lunch.”
“Really?” He looked genuinely horrified. “Never?”
“I’m sorry.”
Johan leaned in and kissed me. “You get more intriguing every minute,” he said. Then he got up. “I’m going to shower.”
I gave in and sent a message to Dell, telling her where I was. I couldn’t resist any longer. Outside, the sky was darkening for the second time since I’d arrived here and I lit the lamps in Johan’s living room. I took a long look at my face and then started laughing for no reason.
My phone pinged with messages of excited expletives from Dell (eighteen of them). Mum texted, in the middle of Dell’s stream, to say she hadn’t got me a present but that she’d buy me a birthday dinner some time soon. She was busy organizing a sit-in at Whitehall.
Then Maya called. Maya, with her impeccable timing, called to sing “Happy Birthday” and then to tell me she was moving to America with Eagle.
“I just need to do this,” was how she explained it.
My baby sister. I was sitting on the edge of Johan’s bed when she told me.
“The place Eagle grew up is the most peaceful place on earth, Carrie, and that’s what my body needs right now.
I’m stepping out of the rat race for real this time. I have to.”
Johan had come in halfway through the call. He could probably hear what my sister was saying—she was not a woman to talk quietly—but perhaps he could just sense something was happening. Either way, I felt a hand on my shoulder suddenly. A warm hand, rubbing gently.
Maya was too high on her decision, and maybe too anxious about my reaction, to spot that there was something different in me, too. We had a brief conversation about the logistics of her move to Colorado but agreed to talk about it properly in a couple of days, when we were due to meet.
“I know this is a bit of a bomb,” she said before ringing off. “And I’m sorry. But I’m so happy, Carrie—I’m just so happy. This all feels so right.”
It briefly felt uncomfortable, crying in front of Johan, a man I’d spent twenty-eight hours with, but once I started, I couldn’t stop.
I talked about Maya and my family until it felt less painful. And then I stopped, frightened I’d gone too far.
But: “Thank you,” he said, after a long silence. He was staring out of the window, those eyes narrowed. “Thank you for telling me all of that.”
His gaze returned to mine; he ran his hands along my shoulders.
Even now, they brought a current. “Your family sound like fucking lunatics,” was what he said, when he spoke again.
He was laughing. “I think that’s what you’re trying to tell me here?
I mean, I hope so. If not I’ll have spent four months dreaming of you only to fuck it up on day two. ”
I was laughing, too. “No, they are lunatics. The real deal. And I’m probably no better.”
“Happy to risk that.” He kissed my right shoulder, lingering on the bony cape of my acromioclavicular joint, and I laughed even harder because to him it was just a sexy shoulder, not an AC joint, and here, in his flat, I could see very clearly that I was indeed a lunatic, a very different type of creature to this beautiful man.
He made food, something very good involving tiny potatoes, and we ate with the balcony door open.
The air rolled in, cool and silky; I heard an air ambulance come in to land at work, then a donkey braying in its paddock at the city farm.
The sky had formed in shelves of deep charcoal and indigo, dissected by the lights of landing planes.
Johan took a call from a friend in Swedish.
I listened to his voice, which sounded even sexier, and decided on the spot to learn Swedish myself.
My exams were over; I’d have space. I wanted to speak his language, I thought, as I googled classes in London.
I wanted to submerge myself in his world, in him.
And, on the subject of submersion, he was right. I should give scuba diving a try. Maybe he could even teach me. I felt willing to try anything, in that moment.
I washed my scrubs in his washing machine. We didn’t do much sleeping that second night, although he passed out the moment we finally let each other go. I just lay next to him, wanting him too much to be able to wind down.
We left his flat at the same time the next morning, just like any other couple, and he told me he was all in. “Come back tonight, Carrie Cole. And the next night. And the one after that.”
He kissed me. “I need you,” he said, and he looked surprised to hear the words coming from his mouth. “I need you.”