by Sandi Lynn
“Yeah, well, I hate you too.” He grinned.
He brought his hand up to my cheek and softly stroked it before his lips leaned into mine. His kiss was soft and sensual. After enjoying his warm lips for a moment, I pulled back and he looked at me in confusion.
“I’m not having sex with you,” I softly spoke as I got up from the toilet seat.
“Grace,” he spoke.
I stopped before walking out the door, my back still turned to him.
“You made it very clear that our relationship was to be kept on a professional level and that we would not be having sex again. You stitched me up and we had a moment. We can’t go back. Things have changed between us. We resent each other for what happened, and having sex isn’t going to change that. When it’s all over, nothing will be different. We will still resent each other.”
“You’re right,” he spoke as he pushed past me, went to his room and slammed the door shut.
Chapter 32
Two Weeks Later
Jamieson
I threw my pen at the computer, sighed, and leaned back in my chair. I was exhausted and frustrated. My life was shit. Ever since Grace came to town, my life had been turned upside down.
“There you are. I’ve been looking for you,” Logan spoke. “I sent you like a million text messages and you haven’t responded.”
“Sorry. I’ve been really busy. Is there something you need?”
“No. We haven’t hung out in a while. I just want to make sure you’re okay. How is it living with Grace?”
“Total hell. That’s how it is. We haven’t spoken a word to each other in two weeks at home, and she’s a total cock blocker. Not one nurse in this hospital will have sex with me because of her.”
“Have you actually asked them?”
“No. But I hear them whispering.”
“Then go out and find some chick to have sex with,” he spoke.
“It’s not that simple.”
“What are you talking about?” He laughed. “Sure it is. Wait a minute. Would you feel guilty or something because you’re married?”
I looked away from him.
“Jamieson, come on. You and Grace are only married by signatures on a piece of paper. It’s not a real marriage.”
“I know that.”
“I don’t get it, bro. If the two of you are living in the same house, why aren’t you sleeping together? I mean, I know you’re pissed about this whole situation, but it’s just sex. She has needs too.”
“She won’t because I made it very clear after I found out we were married that our relationship is going to be strictly professional and there will be no sex.”
“Well, did you try to have sex with her?”
“Yeah. I kissed her that night I stitched up her arm. I really thought it was going to happen. I wanted it to happen, but she stopped it and reminded me of my words.”
“Ah, so she’s punishing you. You do realize that’s what she’s doing, right?”
“I guess. Who the fuck knows.”
He placed his hand on my shoulder.
“You’re going to get through this, buddy. To be honest, it doesn’t have to be this hard. It only is because the two of you are making it that way.” He walked out of the room.
My pager went off and I was needed down in the ER. As soon as I stepped off the elevator, I reached back and held the door open as a team of doctors were racing a gurney towards it with Grace on top of the patient. As they approached, and I got a closer look. She had her hand inside the patient’s chest. She stared at me with a somber look as they pushed the gurney into the elevator.
“You got this.” I winked at her.
The corners of her mouth slightly curved upwards as the elevator doors closed.
Grace
“Time of death, thirteen fifteen,” I spoke as I forcefully removed my scrub cap and left the OR.
It was a shit day already and it wasn’t nearly over. I went up to the rooftop to grab a cup of coffee and when I stepped off the elevator, I saw Jamieson over at the coffee station.
“Hey, how’s your patient?”
“Dead,” I spoke.
“I’m sorry. Do you have a few minutes so we can sit down and talk?” he asked. “This seems like the only place we can do that.”
“Talk about what, Jamieson?” I sighed.
“I think I might have found a way to help Justin walk again with the electrode implants.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“No. Can we please sit down?”
“Yes, of course.”
We took a seat at one of the tables and Jamieson explained to me his plan.
“Now, I’m going to need you to insert the electrode into the spine while I insert one in his brain. We have to do it at the exact same time. If we’re even off by a second, it’s not going to work. We need to put our personal differences aside and work as a team on this.”
“Of course. Thank you.” I smiled as I placed my hand on top of his. “Thank you, Jamieson. I knew you would figure it out.”
“Don’t thank me yet, Grace. There is still a chance it won’t work, and we need to prepare Justin for that possibility.”
“I know,” I spoke as my pager went off. “I’m needed in the ER. We’ll talk later?”
“Sure.” He nodded with a small smile.
As soon as I got down to the ER, Jackie told me the patient in room three was asking for me.
“Justine, what’s going on?” I asked as I stepped inside the room.
“Dr. Harper, I haven’t been feeling so good lately.”
Justine Kent was a patient I had treated two months ago. She came in when she was brutally beaten by her boyfriend.
“What symptoms are you experiencing?” I asked.
“I’ve been having severe headaches and —”
She stopped speaking and went into a full-blown seizure.
“She’s seizing,” I spoke as I quickly turned her on her side. “Push five milligrams of diazepam and page Dr. Finn stat!”
I held her down, as her seizure wasn’t stopping.
“Dr. Harper, she’s going into V-fib,” Sara spoke.
“Damn it. If we shock her during the seizure, it could kill her.”
“How long has she been seizing?” Jamieson asked as he rushed into the room.
“Over five minutes,” I spoke.
“How much diazepam did you give?”
“Five milligrams.”
“Push another five,” he spoke as he checked her eyes.
Suddenly, her seizure stopped, and all her stats started to come back to normal. I let out a deep breath.
“Isn’t this the patient who was beaten by her boyfriend a couple months ago?” he asked.
“Yes. Before she started seizing, she said she was having severe headaches.”
Suddenly, there was an overwhelming amount of commotion going on in the ER.
“What is going on out there?” I asked as I looked at Jamieson.
“I don’t know. I’ll go check, but we need to get her to CT. Wait here for a minute.”
“What’s going on out there?” Justine asked.
“I’m not sure. But don’t worry.” I placed my hand on her arm. “We’re going to take you up for a CT scan.”
I waited for Jamieson, but he didn’t come back. I looked at my watch and I was starting to get pissed.
“Come on,” I spoke to Sara. “Let’s take her up.”
We started wheeling her out of the room and Jackie stared at me with a frightened look on her face.
“What’s going on? Who is yelling?” I asked as I walked out of the room.
Suddenly, I looked over and saw a man standing there pointing a gun and telling everyone not to move. I froze as my heart rapidly beat. I knew him. He and his mom were brought in last week after they were involved in a car accident. I was the attending doctor.
“You!” His eyes locked on mine. “You were there that night. I remember you. You were the one
who told me that my mom was dead.”
I swallowed hard. Everyone was standing perfectly still like statues, too scared to move for fear that he’d shoot them. Memories started to flood my mind and I was taken back to the night of my tenth birthday. It was as if it was happening all over again. I saw myself standing there outside the room where my father was and then outside the room where my mother was with tears stinging my eyes. I was frightened and alone. I snapped back to reality as I saw Jamieson standing there, his eyes wide as the man pointed his gun at me.
“You’re right, and I’m sorry, Mr. Samson. We did everything we could to save her,” I calmly spoke.
“You didn’t!” he screamed as he waved his gun at me. “You could have done more! She was all I had and now someone has to pay.”
I stood there for a moment while my heart pounded out of my chest, and suddenly, something fell over me that I couldn’t explain.
“Go ahead then, shoot me. Why not?” I smiled as tears filled my eyes. “Maybe this is the reason I came back here to Los Angeles, to this very hospital. Maybe now it’s my turn to die here.”
“Grace!” Jamieson shouted.
“What the hell are you talking about?” the man asked.
“Twenty years ago, I was in a car accident with my parents and we were brought to this hospital. I stood outside each of their rooms as the doctors called time of death for each one of them. I was ten years old and they were all I had too. Maybe this is how my life is supposed to end, here in this hospital, just like I wished it had twenty years ago. Hell, I’ve made some piss poor choices since then anyway. I dated a man for over a year that I didn’t know was married. I quit my job in New York, moved here, took a job at the place where I watched my parents die, and I married a man in Vegas I barely know.” I laughed. “You’re not the crazy one here, Mr. Samson. I am. So just do me the favor and end it.”
“You’re a doctor. You’re supposed to save lives,” he spoke. “You were supposed to save her.”
“I do save lives and I also lose lives. Sometimes, the injuries are so bad, they can’t be fixed, no matter how hard we try. Like with your mom and my parents. Mr. Samson, you don’t want to do this. You don’t want to hurt anyone, and your mother certainly wouldn’t want you to. You feel guilty because you were the one driving the car. It’s easier to blame someone else to lessen our own pain and guilt.”
“You’re either really brave or really stupid,” he spoke. “But you’re right, it was my fault she died. She kept telling me to stop texting and I told her not to worry about it.” He gently put the gun on the floor and security rushed over and grabbed him.
I let out a deep breath as I looked over at Jamieson, who was staring at me with fear in his eyes.
“Sara, get Justine to CT for a head scan,” I spoke as I turned and walked away.
Chapter 33
Grace
I opened the door to the supply room and stepped inside. Tears streamed down my face as I sat down on the floor and brought my knees up to my chest. My heart was still rapidly pounding, and I felt like I couldn’t catch my breath. The door opened, and when I looked up, I saw Jamieson standing there. He didn’t say a word. He walked over, sat down, and wrapped his arms around me, pulling me into him.
“Why, Grace? Why did you do that? He could have killed you.”
“He didn’t want to hurt anyone.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do know that.”
I pulled away from him, wiped my eyes, and stood up.
“We need to go figure out what’s going on with Justine. Are you coming?” I held out my hand to him.
“Grace, I don’t think you—”
“Are you coming?” I asked in a harsh tone.
He placed his hand in mine and I helped him up. We went to the CT room and carefully watched the monitors as pictures of Justine’s brain loaded.
“She has a serious brain bleed,” he spoke.
“And that’s what caused the grand mal seizure?” I asked.
“Yeah. It’s bad.” He picked up the phone on the desk and called the OR. “This is Dr. Finn. I need an OR prepped now. I’m bringing up a patient with a serious brain bleed.”
“Let’s get her out of there and get her prepped.”
“Could it have been going on for the past couple of months?” I asked.
“It’s very likely it started off extremely slow.”
“But her last scans didn’t show a brain bleed,” I spoke.
“Sometimes if the bleed is small enough, it won’t show up, which I believe happened here. There’s no way we could have known this was going to happen.”
“I want to scrub in.”
“No. What I need is for you to go home. You need to go home, Grace.”
“What I need is to be in surgery,” I spoke in an angry tone.
He stood there for a moment and stared in my eyes with a disapproving look.
“Fine. You can scrub in on one condition.”
“And what’s that?” I cocked my head.
“After Justine’s surgery, I’m driving you home. I don’t want you driving. Deal?”
“Fine.” I rolled my eyes.
Jamieson and I were in the middle of stopping Justine’s brain bleed, when one of my residents walked into the OR.
“Excuse me, Dr. Harper. Dr. Sinclair wants to see you the minute you’re done with your surgery.”
“Tell her that I’ll talk to her first thing tomorrow morning.”
“She told me that you’d probably say that, and she said you are to be in her office the second you get out of surgery.”
I sighed, and Jamieson glanced over at me.
“Don’t mess with Mama Bear. I’m almost finished. You can go now.”
“No. I can help you finish.”
“Dr. Harper, I’m going to put this as nicely as I can. Get out of my OR. Go talk to Renata and then we’ll go home.”
I scrubbed out and headed to Renata’s office.
“You wanted to see me?”
“You’re damn right I do. What the hell were you thinking, Grace?” she spoke in a stern voice. “What would have happened if that man would have shot you?”
“But he didn’t.”
“But he could have!” she shouted. “You are to see Dr. Parker first thing tomorrow morning. I already called and told him you’d be coming.”
“Renata—”
“No, Grace.” She pointed her finger at me. “It is not up for discussion. You know the protocol. You are not to see or treat any patients until you talk to him.”
“Fine. I’ll see him in the morning. May I leave now?”
“You better be going home. In fact, I’m sending you home.”
“I am going home.”
She walked over and hugged me.
“Don’t ever do that again. That was a foolish stunt.”
I walked out of her office and found Jamieson standing outside the door, holding my things.
“I went to your locker and grabbed your things. Are you ready?”
“Yeah. I’m ready. And if you don’t mind, I don’t want to talk.”
“Okay,” he spoke.
Jamieson
As I stood there in the middle of the ER and listened to Grace tell that man to shoot her, a feeling like I’d never felt before washed over me. My first instinct was to protect her, but I couldn’t. That man was unstable. One wrong move, and he could have shot her. Everything she said to him hit me hard. It all made sense now. Every goddamn thing about her and moving back to Los Angeles now made sense.
I glanced over at her as I drove us home. She was tired and sad but still as beautiful as ever. After the incident, I understood why she needed to be a part of my surgery. It was her comfort zone. A place where she could forget about everyone and everything except the patient. I did the same thing. As surgeons, the OR is our escape, our safe haven, our drug and our high. A place where we can clean up the messes of other people’s lives just to forget ho
w fucked up ours were.
I pulled into the driveway and Grace climbed out of the car. I inserted my key into the lock and opened the door. While I was disarming the alarm, Grace walked upstairs without so much as a word. I was worried about her. She needed to talk about what happened, but she wanted her space. And no matter how much I didn’t want to give it to her, I had no choice. My phone rang, and it was my resident giving me an update on two of my patients. After I was done with the call, I poured myself a scotch and took it up to the rooftop. It was a cooler than usual night, and when I looked out onto the beach, I saw Grace sitting in the sand. Fuck it. I went to my bedroom, grabbed a blanket, and took it down to her.
“Hey,” I softly spoke as I wrapped the blanket around her. “It’s a little chilly out here.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. I’m going to go back inside.”
“Good idea,” she spoke as she stared at the ocean.
I began to walk away and then stopped. Clenching my fist, I tried to control the anger I felt inside, but I couldn’t.
“No! It’s not a good idea. What you did was stupid! You told a man to shoot you! What the fuck, Grace? Do you have any idea how scared I was that he was going to take you up on your offer? Damn it!” I ran my hands through my hair as I stared at her. “You had a gun pointed at you. You’re not okay!”
Chapter 34
Grace
The night air was cool as I walked down to the beach and nestled myself in the sand. The ocean roared as the waves crashed against the shore. Silver sequin stars scattered themselves across the sky and the low waning moon shined brightly amongst them. I was thankful for the blanket Jamieson brought me as I held it tightly around me. As I sat there and listened to him rant about the incident at the hospital, a part of me wanted to scream at him to go away, but the other part of me realized that he cared enough to voice his opinion.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?” he yelled.
“I will once you calm yourself down,” I softly spoke. “Just sit down, shut up, and I’ll talk.”
He sat down in the sand next to me and brought his knees up to his chest.