TWENTY-NINE
CALLUM
There are a million bad things in the world.
Bad two-day-old egg sandwich. Bad shift. Bad patient outcome.
Slightly worse: Sticking a cannula in Jordie Mitchell’s arm last week and pretending it was purely clinical.
And somehow, now standing outside her house, holding a six-pack of beer like a goddamn idiot, might be the worst idea I’ve had.
Which says a lot, considering I told a patient’s husband, “At least she’ll be comfortable,” after the surgeons opened his wife, found the cancer too far gone, abandoned the procedure, and declared her palliative.
I called Jordie when I got home and told her I’d had a shit day. I didn’t ask for company. Didn’t even hint. But she didn’t hesitate—just insisted, “Come over. We’ll bake cookies. It helps. Or it gives you salmonella if you eat the dough raw. Either way, it’s a distraction.”
I said yes before my brain caught up to my mouth.
Now, I’m staring at the chipped blue paint peeling off her door, thinking this is a mistake, wondering if I’m here for comfort or just asking for punishment.
Because every moment I close my eyes, I see her. Her face tilted up to mine, breath caught somewhere between a question and a confession. That fraction of a second where we almost gave in to whatever the hell this is. Biology. Chemistry. Something.
And every time I’m near her, it takes everything I have. Every scrap of willpower not to just—
Christ.
—see if it feels as right as it looks.
I should bolt. Make up an excuse. Get back in the car. Go home. Be emotionally repressed the way normal adults handle this sort of thing.
But the door swings open.
“Hey!” Jordie beams. “Spotted your car from the window.”
And just like that, I am fucked.
She’s standing there, grinning, wearing the exact kind of thing a sane person shouldn’t wear around a guy hanging on by a thread.
Pale pink satin pajamas—shorts that are too short, a button-up top dipping just enough to make swallowing a challenge.
Hair loose, tousled as if she just rolled out of bed looking like a damn Victoria’s Secret fever dream.
And yet, still, she’s Jordie. Larger than life. The kind of girl who makes you feel like you’ve stumbled into a safe space you didn’t know you needed. Also, the same girl who sent me thirty-two consecutive texts about cheese fries at 2 a.m.
Now, I don’t think this is a mistake. I know it is.
And I’m walking straight into it, anyway.
I thought she was joking about the cookies. Apparently not.
Because baking cookies is therapeutic, according to the infinite wisdom of Jordie Mitchell, in an apron that reads Procrastibaker. And she might be right. There’s something mindless about it. Mechanical. Scoop. Roll. Tray.
The first batch is already cooling on the counter, untouched, while we work through the second.
Meanwhile, I’ve said a grand total of zero real things.
Just drank my beer and dissected every clinical detail of the case like it’s a morbidity meeting and Jordie’s my second chair.
She doesn’t interrupt. Doesn’t placate. Just matches me beat for beat—clinical, sharp, logical.
She knows I need to bleed out every fact first before I can get anywhere near the feelings.
“Her ejection fraction was borderline. Forty-two percent.”
Jordie hums, nudging another dough ball into line. “What did the repeat ECHO show?”
I glance up. She’s asking. Letting me say it. Unpack it.
“Same,” I mutter.
She nods, efficient, even. “Frailty wasn’t in the numbers. Most likely, poor reserves.”
“Maybe it’s my fault.”
It scrapes out raw. Guilt-fractured.
“I spent two months optimizing her meds, chasing labs, trying to make her fit. If I’d fast-tracked it, the cancer wouldn’t have spread. Maybe I could’ve—”
I cut off. Can’t even continue.
Jordie doesn’t rush to fill the silence. She just lets it exist.
Finally, I ask her, “What do you think?”
“I think,” she says, turning on the tap, “if you’d rushed it, she would’ve arrested while you were putting her to sleep.”
She rinses her hands like she didn’t just say the thing I’ve been avoiding all day.
I step to the sink and watch the soap spiral down the drain.
“At least then, I wouldn’t have had to look her husband in the eye. Sell him comfort like it meant something. Pretend hope wasn’t a lie.”
She slides the tray into the oven. Her movements are calm. Steady. In control.
The oven shuts with a dull thud. When I glance over, she’s already looking at me.
“You didn’t lie,” she says. “You gave her a chance. That’s more than most people ever get. She just . . . didn’t get lucky.”
It hits harder than anything I’ve been telling myself all night.
The silence that follows feels bearable now. Weighted, but still breathable.
Jordie plucks a cookie off the tray, takes a bite, and lets out a low, utterly indecent hum that is definitely not safe for work.
I swallow. Hard. “That good?”
She shrugs, already going in for a second bite. “Angst adds flavor.” Then she nudges the tray toward me. “Therapy’s not complete ‘til you taste your own emotional damage.”
I grab one. Bite. Chew. It’s warm, gooey, criminally delicious. She watches me, eyebrows raised, mouth curved into something smug.
“Well?” she grins. “Go on. Moan.”
I let out a dramatic, exaggerated moan just to make her laugh.
Her grin is a triumphant “I told you so.”
“See?” she muses. “Proof today wasn’t all bad.”
I glance at her—at that stupid apron, at that too-soft smile, at the way my stomach flips like I’m fifteen and got noticed by the prettiest girl in class—and nod.
“You’re right,” I murmur. “Definitely not all bad.”
Apparently, painting toenails is also good for the soul.
Jordie shoved a bottle of neon pink polish into my hand and announced, “You look like you need a project.”
Now her foot is in my lap—warm, distracting in ways I’m trying not to think about—and I’m hunched over it with the hyper-focus of someone guiding a Mars rover.
Except instead of remote controls, I’ve got a tiny brush and a shade of pink so violently fluorescent NASA probably had to recalibrate its satellites.
Jordie watches me like she’s conducting a controlled study on male fluster response. One eyebrow raised. One cookie in hand. One poor fool absolutely spiraling beneath her, pretending this is normal.
“Why are your hands so shaky?” Jordie teases. “Is that why you went into anesthetics? Surgery too high stakes for you?”
I lift my head slowly, giving her a flat, unimpressed stare. “Take that back. Don’t ever compare me to a surgeon.”
“Just saying. Surgeons might handle pressure better.”
“Please,” I mutter, carefully navigating her second toe. “If ‘handling pressure’ means standing around looking smug while I keep their patient alive, then yeah—total heroes.”
I can only hope she chalks my shakiness up to inexperience and not .
. . whatever the hell this is. I keep my hand on the arch—neutral territory.
Any higher and we’re skimming the gastrocnemius and heading for the femoral triangle, which is just the anatomical landmark for the “dangerously-close-to-the-region-that-upgrades-this-from-footcare-to-foreplay” territory.
I clear my throat, searching for an anchor. Something. Anything to focus on that isn’t her skin or the way her breath hitches when she laughs.
My eyes land on the couch. Laptop cracked open. A sprawl of folders, highlighters, and crumpled notes.
“What’s all that for?” I nod toward the mess. “Did you mug a med student?”
She brushes a crumb off a folder. “Writing a submission for the Australian Neuroscience Journal for Nurses.”
“What’s it about?”
“Early recognition of subdural hemorrhage in primary care.” She flips through a stack of stapled pages. “There’s a 2006 NEJM article I need. It links symptom progression to ED presentation. But I can only access the abstract. Useless if I can’t quote it.”
I pause mid-brushstroke. “Were you working on it when I called?”
“Yeah.” She shrugs, setting the pages aside like it’s nothing. “But you needed me. So, I got the cookie stuff ready instead.”
And just like that, something in my ribcage folds in on itself. As if it were obvious. Like, of course she’d shelve a neuroscience article to bake cookies and paint my mood back together.
I return to her toes. The pinky a little crooked, probably bumped one too many times.
“Do you miss Claudia?” she asks.
The question hits with the precision of a missed step on a staircase. “What?”
She’s looking at her half-painted toes. Her voice is light, but she’s fiddling with the pillow beside her.
“I just wonder sometimes. If you weren’t here, in my living room with a nail polish bottle and flour on your shirt, you’d probably be doing something more . . . well . . . you.”
“And what exactly is me?”
She considers. “Fancy bar. Expensive wine. Big city doctor banter.”
“Hate to break it to you, Mitchell,” I say, a small laugh slipping out, “but most city doctors just get drunk and argue about guidelines.”
She smirks like she’s picturing it. I shift on the stool and give her foot a gentle squeeze—maybe for emphasis, maybe because I just don’t want to let go.
“If I weren’t here,” I add, “I’d probably be bored out of my mind.”
Funny how everything I used to think was fun feels diluted now, as if nothing else quite measures up to this.
She’s quiet. Waiting. Because I haven’t answered her actual question. So, I dip the brush again and return to her toes, painting careful strokes like I can stall the truth with precision.
“Sometimes, yeah,” I admit. “I miss Claudia.”
I pause.
“Or . . . the idea of her. Of being in something.” I glance up. “Truth is, we were done way before we ever said it. We became two people in the same room, doing life side by side without actually sharing it. We just kept going because we didn’t know how to stop.”
Her foot is still in my lap. I’m not painting anymore, just holding it, brush hovering mid-air since I seem to have forgotten what I was doing.
Jordie shifts, curling one leg under her body. She pulls a pillow closer to her stomach and nods. “Yeah, I get that.”