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Well, probably not.
“Are you ...” Calista doesn’t finish the sentence, but she points from Lucy to me, which is enough to know what she’s getting at.
“Oh,” Lucy says, shaking her head, the apples of her cheeks pinking again. “No. We’re friends.”
“Yeah,” I add, quickly. “We go way back.”
“Right,” Calista says. “It would be none of my business anyway. So, what else have you done for this challenge of yours?”
“We sang karaoke yesterday,” Lucy says. She does a little shaking thing with her shoulders. “And I won.”
“Oh,” Calista says. “So there are winners?”
“Yes, and the person who wins the most challenges gets to pick the scrubs that the loser has to wear for a week,” Lucy says.
Calista chuckles. “I love it.” She snaps her fingers and then points at Lucy. “If you win, Lucy, I’ve got a great idea for Dr. Shackwell here. OB scrubs. Uterus and fallopian tube pattern.”
“Yes!” Lucy says, clapping her hands. “I’m going to need that link.”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” I remind her.
“Yesterday put me ahead of you by two challenges.” She folds her arms, giving me a smirk.
“We still have a little more than a week,” I remind her. Something stirs in my stomach. What happens then? I don’t want this to end. I know it doesn’t have to, but without all the competition, without the challenges, will Lucy want this? This friendship we have has become something akin to breathing. It feels necessary.
“You should send me the link, Calista,” Lucy says, giving me a Cheshire cat grin.
“I will,” Calista promises. She pulls her phone out of her pocket, looks at the screen, and then turns her gaze to me. “I need to get out of here. But first, Graham, the test for Mr. Jenkins’s abdominal pain came back with elevated levels of amylase and lipase.”
Right, the reason we got into this conversation in the first place. Dr. Monroe was giving me a report of all the patients currently here, before I take over.
“Pancreatitis,” I say, jumping back into work mode.
“Yes,” she says. “He’s stabilized. I’ve got him started on morphine for the pain.”
“I’m on it,” I tell her.
“Have fun with Evie,” she says as she starts to walk away. “Someone called out, so she’s staying late and she’s not happy about it.”
“Great,” Lucy says, looking down at her scrub top covered with my face. “It’s going to be a long evening.”
“Yeah, maybe you better take those off,” I say, pointing to her shirt. “Not that I don’t like to see my face on your bod—shirt.”
That wasn’t obvious or anything. You’d think that with practice and time, I’d stop with these stupid flirtatious lines. Old habits really do die hard.
Lucy eyes me, her lips pulling up and her eyes sparkling with the glint of someone who’s just caught someone else in the act.
“Okay,” she says. “But I’m leaving the earrings. I worked hard on these.” She reaches up and pulls on the dangling pictures of me.
“Better hurry, Price,” I say, looking behind her as I see a pissed-off Evie walking this way. Not that she looks different than any other day.
“Crap,” Lucy says, understanding dawning. She quickly removes the faces from her scrub top, tucking them in her pocket.
“Lucy, go to room one,” Evie says, approaching the nurses’ station, her tone biting.
“Yes, ma’am,” Lucy says, her eyes widening for only me to see before she turns and walks toward the patient room.
I LEAN BACK IN MY seat in the break room, running a hand down my face, the events of tonight weighing on me in a way I haven’t felt in a while. It’s a small hospital, but tonight feels like one of those times that we could use another doctor working. I’ve only just caught my breath after going nonstop the last five consecutive hours.
