I folded the piece of paper—his number and his name, Johan, in neat handwriting—and involuntarily ran my thumb over the fold. He saw me do it.
I nodded toward the phone he held, its screen badly splintered. “Is that thing going to ring if we call it?”
He laughed. “No guarantees.” He tossed it from one hand to the other. Watching me. Then he turned to go, and I got another whiff of him: loamy earth, laundry, warm skin. I found myself inhaling. It was for the best that he was leaving.
As I came back to A&E I found Dell at the door, her eyes fixed on me. Dell was doing vascular at the moment; she too was on call today.
Her left eyebrow had risen above the rim of her glasses. “Oh,right,” she said.
“What?”
“Oh,right, Carrie!”
“What are you—”
“Carrie.” She cut across me. “Don’t even. I saw the whole thing.”
I glanced around just in time to see Johan reach the exit, where he stopped and turned as well, seeking me out. He smiled at me for a moment longer than he needed to, then headed off.
“Help,” I said, turning back to my friend.
Dell whistled. “Carrie! Christ, the state of you…” She was laughing.
Then I started laughing, too; I couldn’t stop myself. We laughed so much, we had to hide in resus. Nobody likes to see doctors laughing in A&E.
—
“That sounds sexy as all hell,” Maya said when I told her.
I’d been on the way home from dinner with Dad when she’d called to say she had decided to resign from her city lawyer job and retrain as a therapist. But after ten minutes on the subject she’d become so anxious about the decision that she demanded a subject change and started firing questions at me about my love life.
“The usual,” I’d said. “Although…”
“Although what?”
“Nothing. Just an unreasonably hot man who came into work today. There is no story to tell.”
I blushed, because I’d never used the wordhotto describe a man before, and because I had been thinking about him from the moment he’d left A&E this afternoon, in spite of having spent the evening with my father in a charming old restaurant near Aldwych.
Just as Dell had sensed it in my body earlier, my sister sensed it in my voice. She wouldn’t let it go, because she never does, and before long she’d got the entire thing out of me, even the rage attack at the policeman.
“Sexy as all hell,” I sighed. “You’re right. And the thing is, Maya, I don’t find men sexy. I find them disappointing, for the most part. But this…I don’t just want to see him again, Ineedto see him again. Which is a problem, because I can’t.”
There was a delighted silence on the other end of the phone.
“He was attracted to me, too. I know he was.”
“I imagine saving that woman’s life on your own was quite a factor,” Maya said. I could hear the grin. “Not to mention telling the registrar he’d done a bad job and then throwing a policeman out. And also, Carrie, you look unspeakably attractive in your scrubs and white coat. I think probably most men fancy Doctor Carrie.”
“They absolutely do not. Anyway, I didn’t just throw the policeman out. I went mad at him. Full-red mist.”
“Oh, Carrie. Are you OK?”
“I’m just tired. Exams were only a few days ago. It’s been intense. And just to clear this up, Maya, my colleagues do not fancy me. Most of them just see me as a high-achieving nerd.”
Maya, who really was in no position to give me advice about love or sex, didn’t argue. From the age of sixteen her love life had been very busy indeed, but nobody had ever stuck. Until six months ago, whenshe’d gone on a Lake District weekend retreat for burned-out lawyers and fallen for Eagle, the vegan chef. Every morning Maya had gone down to the kitchen to beg for some food before the first yoga class of the day, which went on for two hours before breakfast was served. On the third morning Eagle had fed an almond-butter-filled medjool date straight into her mouth, she had bitten his finger, and before she knew it they were having sex on the wall of an eleventh-century well as dawn broke. They’d been having a very intense relationship ever since.
“We need to talk about this Johan. Is there really no hope of you seeing him again? I’d give a month’s salary to help you find that man’s phone number, Carrie. If I had a salary. Oh my God! What am I doing?”
