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“Are you purposely trying to fight with me, Emily? Because I refuse to fight with you. If you want me to go, I’ll go. But not without you knowing that it’s not because I want to go. What I want is to be with you and to sleep with you in my arms.”
She sank onto the edge of the bed and stared at him. “You’re crazy.”
Yeah, he was.
“About you.” With that, he leaned over and kissed her forehead. “Good night, Emily. Sweet dreams.”
* * *
A couple of weeks later, Emily was on duty when Kevin Rogers was admitted. He was a four-year-old pedestrian who’d been a hit-and-run victim. According to eyewitnesses, a taxi driver had driven up on a sidewalk while glancing down at his cell phone, hit the boy, then disappeared quickly.
The boy had been admitted with multiple fractures and traumatic brain injury. The emergency-room physician had given him poor odds of surviving.
The CT of his head had shown active brain bleeds. If he wasn’t taken to surgery to relieve the pressure and stop the bleeds, he’d be dead before midnight. If he did manage to survive, he’d likely have permanent damage from the increased pressure on delicate brain tissue.
Probably because Emily had volunteered when Cassie Bellows had needed emergency surgery, Emily’s charge nurse had informed her she was being shifted over to the operating room to assist Dr. Cain along with the rest of the assembled surgical team.
“But I have patients,” she reminded her, not wanting to go back into the operating room with Lucas.
“Meghan and Amy are down to one patient. I was going to have to send one of them home. I’m going to reassign Jenny and Cassie to them and send you to the OR rather than someone having to be called in.”
What the nurse manager said made perfect sense. But Emily fought the urge to beg the woman not to make her.
Although she opened her apartment door to Lucas night after night, she tried to avoid him as much as possible at the hospital. She didn’t want others to see how he affected her. She didn’t want others to associate them together.
She didn’t want to deal with the aftermath at work when things fell apart.
Been there, done that, had ended up leaving the job.
Whereas during Cassie’s surgery Emily had been assigned care of Cassie, this time she was assigned to directly assist Lucas.
Which meant she’d be right beside him.
Which meant there was no avoiding him.
Which meant she’d have to touch him, albeit through sterile gloves and under harsh lights and circumstances.
She was still mentally bemoaning having to assist Lucas while she scrubbed up. It wasn’t that she didn’t enjoy being in the surgical suite. She’d enjoyed the time she’d worked there, but she’d missed direct patient care.
She entered the surgical suite, made sure she had everything Lucas would need on her tray and winced a little on the inside at how tiny the boy looked on the hospital bed when he was wheeled in.
A sterile decked-out Lucas followed him into the suite and the surgical team jumped in to try to save the little boy.
An hour into the procedure, Emily was dabbing sweat from Lucas’s forehead and studying the exhaustion showing on his face.
* * *
An hour later, he still meticulously worked, doing all he could to stop the tiny bleeds in the boy’s brain.
By the time Lucas finished, Emily’s heart hurt for him, but because of the others in the room, she didn’t say anything, didn’t offer comfort.
The surgery had gone past the end of her shift, so she performed the rest of her duties, cleaning her area, changing back into her own scrubs from the hospital-issue surgical scrubs, then clocked out.
Prior to heading home, she went by to check on Jenny and Cassie and was pleased to find them stable.
She swung by a take-out shop and picked up enough food for two. Who knew if Lucas would have eaten when he came by later that night?
Only, as the clock minutes ticked by, Lucas still hadn’t shown at close to 1:00 a.m. Unable to stand it anymore, worried about where he was, but not wanting to wake him if he had just gone home to sleep, she texted him.
