“I don’t care,” he griped again, shifting uncomfortably in the bed. “Just tell me what it says, Doc?”
His CT lit up the screen in front of me, and while everythinglookedclear and safe, I had to run it by my attending. “Let me get Doctor Vaughn. He’ll be able to give you a sound answer.”
“Just give me the answer, Volkov.” The fire chief snapped, a little harsher than I had expected. I did my best not to flinch. I wasn’t that girl.
“No, and I apologize, Captain Marshall. But residents have to present to attendings.” I turned to him, noting that itwasn’tangeron his face. Just impatience. “Doctor Vaughn should confirm my thoughts for your safety. I’ll just be a moment.”
“That’s what you all say,” he called after me as I shut the curtain.
Desmond was just a few steps away, talking to Carter over a chart. I fiddled around at the nurses’ station while I waited for him to finish.
Once Carter walked away, Desmond turned to me. “Marshall back?” He held his hand out, waiting for the clipboard.
“Mhmm,” I nodded, handing the chart over. “I don’t see anything on the CT, but I’d feel better if you checked it over. Just to be on the safe side.”
“Trust your gut, kid.” He laughed, shaking his head. “You’ve got good instincts. If you don’t see anything, I trust you.”
“You don’t trust me when I ask you to sit down,” I replied, glancing up to meet his gaze for just a moment. “Or when you need a break and are too stubborn to listen to your body.”
Desmond’s mouth pulled into that crooked, infuriating half-smile he used whenever he knew perfectly well I had a point and intended to ignore it, anyway.
“That’s different,” he said, flipping through the chart as if the pages had offended him.
“Oh?” I asked, folding my arms.
“That’s me.”
I rolled my eyes, but the familiar warmth of the exchange still spread through my chest before I could stop it. It was a dangerous sort of comfort — the easy rhythm we had fallen into over the last months, the one that lived entirely in glances and quiet comments and the constant awareness of each other that we both pretended not to notice.
I was opening my mouth to argue when the curtain to Marshall’s bay snapped open hard enough that the metal rings screeched along the track. “Doc.” The voice was deep and impatient and entirely unsurprised to find us standing outside the room as if we’d been waiting for him to do exactly this.
Giovanni Marshall stepped out of the bay like a man who had spent twenty minutes forcing himself to sit still and had finally decided that the experiment had run its course. His hospital gown hung loose over broad shoulders that clearly had no business being contained by thin cotton, and the bandage at his temple had already spotted faintly through the gauze.
He looked irritated. But not mean. Just… finished with this.
“You haven’t been discharged yet,” I said automatically, already stepping toward him.
“I’ve got a warehouse full of people waiting on me,” he replied, running a hand over the back of his neck. “My scan’s clean. You said so yourself.”
“I said I didn’t see anything,” I corrected, trying to keep my voice steady even as the old reflex—the one that had been trained into me during my intern year — flared somewhere behind my ribs. The reflex that remembered being spoken over. Dismissed. Corrected in front of rooms full of people.
I swallowed it down. “That’s not the same thing, Captain Marshall.” I added.
Behind him, Ezra slowly pushed himself up from the chair in the corner, dragging a hand down his face like a man who had watched this exact scene unfold dozens of times and had long since lost patience for it. “Chief,” he said, voice flat with familiarity, “sit down.”
“I’m fine.”
“You said that before the CT.”
“And I was right.”
Desmond moved then. He didn’t rush. He didn’t raise his voice. He simply stepped around the end of the bed and into the space between Giovanni and the hallway, his presence alone enough to alter the shape of the room.
Even after months of working beside him, I still noticed that about Desmond — the way he seemed to take up space without trying. Tall, broad, steady in a way that made people instinctivelyslow down around him. “Marshall,” he said calmly, “give my resident two minutes.” The word resident still felt strange when it applied to me.
Giovanni exhaled sharply, clearly measuring his patience against whatever responsibility was waiting for him outside these walls. “Two minutes turns into twenty in places like this.”
“Then you’ll have spent twenty minutes not passing out on a job site,” Desmond replied evenly.
