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“Stevie,” I said, not wanting to break the bubble of calm, but needing an answer to my question. “I think we need to talk. I-do you, um, do you have feelings for me?”
Chapter Eleven
Stevie
Adrian was mad at me.
Of course, I couldn’t definitivelyprovethat he was mad at me because the stubborn ass of a man was avoiding me. At least, I was pretty sure he was avoiding me. Honestly, it was hard to tell with everything going on. I had been transferred off of his service, and although it was simply because I was moving with Smith and Lehaney to be on Jonah’s service, I couldn’t help but feel the timing for the rotation was oddly fortuitous.
Jonah kept us busy. Bones were always doing that annoying thing of breaking, and we spent our days watching arm after arm after leg after clavicle be set by the expert hands in the orthopedic department. It really was a very gory business, which should have been rich coming from the girl that had her heart set on cardiothoracics, but there was just something deeply unsettling about the way bones looked when they were protruding from the body. Sometimes they stayed under the skin and bulged like an alien egg, and other times they burst through the epidermis and made me cringe with sympathy pains. It was so raw and brutal, the way they were treated in the OR as well. The surgeons worked with saws and drills, the kind I’d have expected to see more in a workshop than a place of healing. It seemed almost crude, the way the orthopedic surgeons held bodies together with nuts and bolts, with the great rings of halos and hard plaster casts. I could understand Lehaney’s obsession with it though—the body wasn’t a delicate map of veins and arteries to him, it was an infrastructure that needed repairs and maintenance. He had the eye of an architect, and Jonah took to him almost immediately.
I grew closer to Lehaney during our orthopedic rotation, and it was a good thing too—without Adrian, I would have felt completely isolated in the hospital. Jonah was nice enough to me and flashed the sort of smiles I knew were reserved for the people he enjoyed the company of, but he never crossed the boundary between student and teacher. I didn’t mind at all, but my existence had definitely become lonelier.
I was helping with a closed fixation in the ER when Lehaney ran in. His eyes were wide with a mixture of fear and nervous anticipation.
“We’ve been called out to the ambulance bay,” he gasped.
Dr. Ibey was the orthopedic doctor on call, and he just shrugged when I looked at him in answer. I handed the rolls of plaster I was preparing over to the intern next to me, a girl that introduced herself very formally as Dr. Green and was on her rotation in trauma. I followed Lehaney out, asking questions as we walked to scrub up. It was never a good sign when multiple doctors were dressing for incoming traumas.
“What happened?” I hissed.
Lehaney looked at me, morbid anticipation sparkling in deep brown eyes.
“Four car pileup on 93—some drunk asshole went up the off-ramp by Millers River.”
I shook my head, but I couldn’t deny the fact that I was equally as excited and scared as the boy in front of me. The sickest part of being a doctor was wanting everyone to be healthy, but also finding fascination in the ways the human body failed to perform its functions adequately—whether by disease or accident. I pulled an apron over my arms and tied it at the back before gloving up. This was our first big accident, and neither of us truly knew what to expect. It was nice though, as we walked out to the ambulance bay, having someone who knew exactly what I was going through beside me.
“What’s your name, Lehaney?” I asked as the distant sound of sirens grew closer.
“Jack.” He smiled.
Standing there in the ambulance bay, waiting for all the unknowns the day might bring with it, I thought I might have found my first friend.
* * *
It turns out, a four car pileup with the kind of speed that a highway off-ramp had was not pretty.
No pileup was pretty, but as stretchers were unloaded from the ambulances, I became increasingly horrified. Three people were dead on arrival, and there was nothing to do except bring them to the morgue and fill out the paperwork. After that, I was shunted into a room with a young man that’d had both his kneecaps crushed when he was thrown forward. Dr. Ibey joined me again and grunted about the foolishness of not wearing a seatbelt. The young man seemed to agree that he was a fool but didn’t have the words to say anything that wasn’t a scream. It didn’t take long before the x-rays revealed that we would be able to do very little for the man from outside his body.
“Call up and get them to prepare an OR,” Ibey asked in his gravelly voice.
I did as I was told and stepped into the hall to make the call. As I was hanging up, someone brushed by me, and for a moment, I was confused. They were familiar but hadn’t even acknowledged me. I watched the retreating form of Adrian and was oh so tempted to run after him, but Ibey was calling my name. There was a young man that was waiting for us to help him.
I turned back into the room, away from the man I desperately wanted to follow, and helped Ibey splint the man for transport. Once his work was done, he sent me to take the young man upstairs and disappeared back into the fray that was the ER. I wheeled the young man out, briefly forgetting that I had a very scared patient with me as I searched for the familiar head, the conspicuously deep voice of the man I was waiting for to make a move.
“Um, so I’m going to surgery?” the man asked.
He couldn’t have been older than twenty, and since the IV filled with painkillers had begun to kick in, he was able to stare at me in the drugged kind of bemusement I had become accustomed to.
“Yes,” I said, “one of our orthopedic surgeons is going to fix your knees. Admin had you sign the papers, so you’re all set.”
The guy looked hesitant but spoke up again.
“They, uh, they took my phone from me, but it’s in the bag with my other stuff,” he said. “Could you call my dad? He’ll be worried if I’m not home later. And also, my girlfriend. I was on my way to see her.”
“We can absolutely call your father,” I said.
The boy got the dopey kind of grin on his face that I assumed was related to both the powerful medication and the thought of the girlfriend he had mentioned. Before I could ask him anymore, though, we were in the OR intake unit, and the young man was being taken from me. I wished him well and turned to head back down to the ER.
