Bend

by Kivrin Wilson

  Huh? Now what’s his problem? Looking down at myself, I realize I’m wearing my powder-blue tee with a grungy beach-and-palm-tree image printed on it along with the word Cabo in big, fat letters. It’s a shirt I got while I was in college, when I went to Mexico for spring break.

  With Matt.

  “I’ll hand your case over to Dr. Yamada,” Jay says, his tone hard. “He’ll take care of you, and then I’ll take you home.”

  Then he’s gone.

  And I’m alone again, lying here feeling glum.

  I loved Cabo. Five days of fun. Sun, sand, frolicking in the balmy ocean, partying…and yeah, sex. A lot of it. With my boyfriend, who I thought was my forever love.

  We stayed in a hotel right on the beach with a bunch of friends, and I’m pretty sure I’ve never been as purely and deeply happy as I was that week—not before and definitely not afterward.

  Jay didn’t go. He was too busy busting his ass in school and working the jobs he needed to help pay for it. Which I guess means that he had no college savings and got no help from his parents. I asked him about that once, but he just snorted and changed the topic.

  This T-shirt, though. Several times in the past, he’s given me crap about even keeping it, let alone wearing it. Guess he thinks it should remind me too much of my asshole ex, and I should want to get rid of it?

  I don’t get what the big deal is, though. It’s just a damn shirt. And I happen to like it, so if I tossed it only because of Matt, doesn’t that give him more power over me? If anything, having kept it and not being bothered by it should tell Jay that my ex-boyfriend means nothing to me now.

  I heave a sigh. Jay clearly thought I behaved like an idiot tonight. He’s going to be some poor kids’ terrifyingly stern dad someday.

  Actually, Jay would be a great father, and his kids would be lucky to have him.

  Don’t go there.

  His wife would be lucky, too. Maybe it’ll be Brooke? She’s a beautiful, young, and possibly unattached nurse. He’s a hot, young, and definitely unattached resident. I know how this works. Straight out of college with my BSN, I worked in Labor and Delivery for a while, and yeah, I flirted with the doctors sometimes.

  More than flirted, sometimes.

  Jay and Brooke would be a nauseatingly cute couple. He’s probably slept with her already.

  Stop it.

  With a grimace, I reach for my purse so that I can get my phone and call my mom like I promised. That should be a foolproof way to distract myself from these nagging thoughts, at least for a little while.

  “I need antibiotics.”

  I clench my teeth so hard my jaw hurts. I’m standing at the foot of the stretcher where my patient is sitting upright and glaring at me, the privacy curtain pulled closed around us. A woman in her mid-thirties, she’s wearing a baby-pink velour tracksuit and a pink infantry cap with the word Diva across it. In sequins.

  She’s giving me a you’d-better-do-as-I-say look, and I’m having a harder time than usual keeping my gut reaction in check. Although I’m pretty sure I’m managing to maintain my poker face.

  “I’m sorry, but we don’t prescribe antibiotics to treat colds,” I say with deliberate, tightly controlled calm. Regretfully and compassionately, yes, but firmly.

  She scowls at me like I kicked her puppy. And she probably does have a dog, too—a Shih Tzu or some other tiny breed, and she’s named it Princess even though it’s a male, and she dresses it in pink, sequined doggie sweaters and carries it around with her everywhere. Even places where there are signs that say No Dogs Allowed.

  Yeah, she hates me. So here’s the challenge: knowing she’s going to give me a shitty survey score, I should, for the sake of ethics and my own conscience, still be polite to her. Dr. House makes for entertaining television, but in real life no one behaves like that and keeps their jobs for long.

  What I refuse to do, however, is give her what she wants.

  “Unfortunately, a cold is caused by a virus,” I explain. “Antibiotics are used to treat bacterial infections. They won’t help you feel better. And if you keep taking antibiotics needlessly, your body could build up a resistance, so when you actually need them, they might not work.”

  The diva is still looking mulish. “But a cold can turn into a bacterial infection, can’t it?”

  Oh, for the love of… Right. Time to wrap this up. I give her what I’m hoping is a convincingly empathetic nod. “It can, but right now you don’t have symptoms of a bacterial infection. You just have a bad cold, and a lot of the time those can make you feel sicker than you really are.”

  Although, in her case, she’s clearly not so under the weather that she didn’t take the time to style her hair and put on so many layers of makeup it’s a miracle she can move her face.

  Suppressing a sigh, I force myself to give her my best kindly doctor smile. “I recommend that you go home, take some Nyquil, and get some rest.”

  She gapes at me. “So you’re not going to give me a prescription for anything?”

  “No, I’m sorry. Your best bet will be over-the-counter medications,” I say, brushing aside the curtain. “Take care. Hope you feel better soon.”

  On my way back to my desk, I check in with Brooke. She tells me she’s given Mia a tetanus shot and that Yamada has examined Mia and will be stitching her up in a minute. I thank her and go to write up the report for the diva. It’ll only take a few minutes. I’ve managed to stay ahead today—mostly because the trauma pager I have strapped to my waistband has stayed unusually silent—and I should be able to actually leave when my shift is over in about an hour.

  At my desk adjacent to the nurses’ station, a mostly uncluttered workspace that’s dominated by a computer keyboard and a large monitor, I take a moment to close my eyes and rest my forehead on my clenched hand, replaying my conversation with my last patient in my mind.

  Pretty sure I handled it just fine, but I don’t normally have such a hard time remaining composed. With a few exceptions, it’s not that difficult to make sure patients are happy with their care even when they think they know better than me what’s wrong with them and how it should be treated. I have no idea why I almost dropped the ball just now.

  Actually, I do. The reason is lying in Treatment 4 with a sliced-open-to-the-bone hand that I have to leave to my colleague to patch up.

  I shouldn’t have gone to her room in the first place. But when Brooke flagged me down as I was checking the patient list on the computer tablet and told me Mia was here and why, I temporarily lost my grip on reason. I didn’t stop to question if I should go to her, why I was doing it, or how seeing her would be helpful when I’d have to afterward ask Yamada to take over, annoying him in the process.

  I just did it. And then found her so miserable, crying and shaking, and I wanted nothing more than to help her. To make her feel better.

  It’s not that I meant to give her a hard time about how she cut herself. I just found myself doing it without really knowing why. Now I get it, though. Now it’s easy enough to see that along with the worry for her and the need to fix things for her and the urge to tell her she’s been on my mind constantly since the last time I saw her, I also got annoyed at her carelessness.

  And just like at the park on Sunday morning, when I couldn’t seem to stop getting pissed off at her, that’s the emotion I latched on to. Because the alternative scared the shit out of me.

  Is Yamada stitching her up right now? I want to go find out. Hold her other hand, maybe push stray strands of hair out of her face. She doesn’t seem to be aware of just how resilient she is, and seeing those beautiful green eyes of hers go all liquid with relief when I stepped into her room earlier was more gratifying than it should’ve been. I enjoy it when she needs me.

  Guess I chose the right profession. It’s more than that, though.

  I enjoy being needed by her.

  So Mia saying she’s attracted to me and wants to have sex with me? It’s like giving a person with peanut allergies a free p
ass to a banquet-hall-sized buffet of only dishes containing peanuts.

  A person who fucking loves peanuts.

  A person who’s been thinking about nothing but peanuts for the past three days.

  Well, I don’t get paid to sit and agonize over something that most guys probably wouldn’t even think was a problem. Clicking the computer mouse to get rid of the screen saver, I start typing up the report. I should make a fill-in-the-blanks template for reports on patients who come in with viral URIs, wanting antibiotics. Would save some time. Still, I’m done with this one in under five minutes.

  I look at my watch and see I’ve got forty-five minutes to go. Should be able to take care of at least three, maybe four more patients before I’m done for the day. That’s an average pace, and it’s what’s expected when you work in the ER.

  Sometimes this can start to feel like working at an assembly line. The patients pour in one after the other, and I’m supposed to figure out what’s wrong as quickly as possible before moving on to the next case.

  And somehow, in the middle of that frenetic race against the clock, I have to find a way to hang on to my humanity. To find a way to truly see and truly listen to the people in front of me. Because to me they can too easily become just a name and a list of symptoms to puzzle out, but to them, I’m the person they’re trusting to figure out what’s wrong and to know how to fix it.

  It’s a responsibility I don’t take lightly. But no matter how difficult it gets, and no matter the moments that I question my sanity for willingly choosing this career, I know I was made for this. I’m doing what I’m meant to be doing. Or at least, I’m on the path to it, and I don’t plan on letting anything lead me astray.

  Not even Mia, regardless of how much she seems to need me. Like when she almost cuts off her thumb and has no one else to take her home from the hospital. Which I will do with no grumbling and no resentment.

  Because it’s Mia. And because that’s what I do.

  My head feels like a brick, and my eyelids might literally be glued together for how incapable I am of opening them. I can hear the familiar whirring-and-clicking sound of my ceiling fan above me, and my pillow and blankets are definitely my own.

  So I’m in my bedroom. Beyond that I have no idea what’s going on.

  There’s a dull ache in my left hand, and I’m catching a faint, sour whiff of vomit. Last night’s events flash in my brain like a series of disjointed snapshots. I remember leaving the hospital with Jay, who then took me to the pharmacy. The minute they handed over that little orange bottle, I swallowed one of the horse pills of hydrocodone that Jay’s irrepressibly cheerful third-year-resident colleague Yamada prescribed me, because the local anesthetic he had used had worked so well that I was dreading that numbness wearing off.

  Next Jay went through a fast-food drive-thru, and I was so hungry at that point that I scarfed down three soft tacos along with a whole bottle of water in just a couple of minutes while he steered his truck down the streetlamp-lit roads toward my apartment.

  After we got there is when things get kind of fuzzy. I vaguely recall feeling like I got hit by a train. Did Jay really carry me up the stairs to my apartment? Or am I confusing a daydream for a real memory? I can still feel him scooping me up into his arms and not once faltering or slowing down as he climbs the steps. I remember resting my head on his shoulder and wanting to press my face against his neck.

  If that was just a fantasy, it’s the most vivid one I’ve ever conjured.

  I’m not sure what happened after that. Clearly I made it to bed somehow.

  I turn over on my side and pry open my eyes, which start stinging as I’m squinting and blinking against the sunlight. There on my nightstand next to a bottle of water sits my small orange, white-lidded pill container. I reach out and grab it.

  Then I roll over onto my back and study the label. Looks like the standard dosage of hydrocodone with acetaminophen. Which was apparently still too much for me to handle? I never would’ve expected to have that kind of reaction to it, but I suppose there wouldn’t be a warning about those kinds of side effects if it didn’t happen to someone.

  “You should eat something before you take one of those,” comes a deep baritone next to me.

  My heart jumps into my throat, and a yelp escapes me. The bottle drops down onto my comforter as I spin my head toward the voice.

  It’s Jay. In my bed. He’s lying underneath the blankets wearing a white T-shirt, his head on a pillow, and his hair is sleep-rumpled. While I’m gawking at him, he rubs his eyes with his thumb and index finger.

  “What are you doing?” I squeak out. Jay is in my bed. But why? What happened last night? Am I wearing clothes? Yeah, I’ve got underwear and a T-shirt on. The same stuff I wore last night. So only my yoga pants were removed. Did he take them off? Why the fuck can’t I remember?

  He throws out his hands, like he’s saying, Isn’t it obvious? “Waking up?”

  My mind goes blank with confusion. “What are you doing in my bed?”

  “You asked me— No, you begged me to stay.”

  “I did?” I swallow hard. My mouth feels parched, and I don’t know what to say. I can’t believe Jay spent the night in my bed, and I don’t remember a thing.

  “You were high as a kite,” he explains, “and I had to carry you to the bathroom so you could throw up before I carried you to your bed, where you latched on to my arm and were sobbing and begging me not to leave you.”

  Oh, God. A wildfire of embarrassment shoots up my neck and into my cheeks. I kind of remember that, I guess, but it’s a jumbled memory that doesn’t feel quite real. I suppose that explains the smell of vomit, though. Is it in my hair? I think it’s in my hair. I slept all night on my vomit-splattered hair. So gross.

  “I’m sorry,” I say weakly. Then I add, “Why didn’t you just sleep on the couch?”

  “I thought about it.” He brushes aside the blankets and starts getting out of bed. “But I decided I needed to actually get some sleep.”

  I open my mouth to respond, but the words die before they reach my vocal cords as I watch him picking his scrub bottoms off the floor and pulling them on. He does it quickly, but I still catch a glimpse of his underwear—black boxer briefs that hug his ass and thighs and take my breath away. I love boxer briefs when they fit the guy well, and they fit Jay perfectly.

  He is perfect. And totally off-limits, for reasons I can’t quite wrap my head around. I’m still kind of lust-stunned as he walks out of the room.

  With a grunt, I roll out of bed and go to the bathroom. I’m groggy and acutely in need of a shower. What time is it? I don’t have a clock on my nightstand, so I have no idea. I always use the alarm on my phone.

  Wait. What day is it? Thursday? I’m supposed to be at work. Shit. I need to call them, but I don’t even know where my phone is.

  Back in the bedroom, I find my yoga pants folded and draped over the armchair in the corner. Jay must’ve done that. After he pulled them off of me. And I can’t remember it. Heat curls in my stomach while I awkwardly manage to pull the pants on one-handed.

  “Hey, where’s my phone?” I ask Jay as I burst out of the bedroom. He’s in the kitchen, plucking a pair of bowls out of a cabinet, and he answers my question with a nod at a white plastic hospital bag sitting on the breakfast bar.

  I go to the counter and am fiddling with the drawstring on the bag when Jay says, “I called your office manager last night and left a message. Told her you wouldn’t be coming in today.”

  He did what? I stand there blinking at him while he pulls a cereal box out of my tiny corner pantry. “How did you know who to call?”

  Shrugging, he dumps cereal into both of the bowls. “You’ve talked about her, and she’s the only Diane in your contacts.”

  Oh, okay. That makes sense. Though I’m not sure how thrilled I am at the idea that he was going through my phone. Guess that’s what I get for not keeping my passcode a secret from him.

  But this is Jay. He
wouldn’t be snooping…right? I don’t need to worry that he might have checked out my browser history and found search result pages for stuff like “how to seduce your best friend”?

  Right?

  “Thank you,” I say numbly, watching him get milk from the fridge and pour it on top of the cereal.

  “Mhmm,” is his response.

  Grandma. I need to find out how she’s doing, so I pluck my phone out of the hospital bag and fire off a quick text message as Jay grabs a pair of spoons from my utensil drawer and brings both bowls to my round, counter-height kitchen table.

  “Sit down,” he commands. “Eat. Then you can take some of that hydrocodone if you need it.”

  I shake my head, because I’m pretty sure I don’t want any more of that stuff. Without a word, I plunk down across from him, and then we’re sitting there together, eating breakfast. Munching on cereal and avoiding the other’s eyes.

  This is so bizarre. Totally uncharted territory. Is he still angry at me about last weekend? It’s hard to tell. He’s always been difficult to read.

  Jay stops chewing long enough to ask, “So did you have any idea the drugs would affect you the way they did last night?”

  “No,” I reply after giving it some thought. “I’ve never taken it before.”

  “Okay.” He shovels another spoonful in his mouth, chews, and swallows. “You should probably ask for non-narcotic pain medication in the future.”

  Well, hopefully that won’t ever be necessary, but I give a nod and keep eating. He just can’t help it, can he? Taking care of people isn’t a choice for him. He just does it.

  My phone chimes, and I pick it up and see my grandmother’s response. She says she’s doing fine and is ready to leave the hospital as soon as they’ll let her. Tapping quickly on the screen, I tell her I hope she gets out soon and that I love her.

  Jay finishes his cereal first and takes the bowl to the sink to rinse it out. I follow him not long after, and he takes the dish from me, washes it, and puts them both on the drying rack. Staying there by him, I lean against the counter and look down at the floor.