Lakeside Hospital Box Set

by Cara Malone

She shoved the last of her clothes into the box and went to the door.

  “Hi,” she said as she waved Ivy in. “Thanks for coming.”

  “What are study buddies for?” Ivy asked. She stepped into the living room and looked around and for a second. In the three years that they’d known each other and studied together, Ivy had never been to Chloe’s apartment thanks to her rivalry with Megan. Chloe wondered if it was strange for Ivy now, like walking into the lion’s den.

  “It’s pretty bare,” Chloe said, apologizing on behalf of the living room before she realized how silly it was. She didn’t live here anymore, or at least she wouldn’t in a few hours. She closed the door and suddenly the apartment felt smaller than it used to – it was just the two of them, more alone than they’d ever been before, and Ivy was standing just a few steps away. Chloe wanted to kiss Ivy again and at the same time, she didn’t. Making that decision, despite Ivy’s clearly stated priorities, would only lead to heartache.

  Ivy looked at Chloe, her eyes lingering just a little too long on her lips before she looked away again. Chloe swallowed hard. Then Ivy said, “That couch looks heavy. How are we supposed to move that thing by ourselves?”

  “It’s not mine,” Chloe said. “All the furniture is Megan’s – I think it belonged to her undergrad girlfriend, actually. I just have a few boxes and a couple small pieces of furniture. They’re in here.”

  She led Ivy down the hall to her bedroom, her pulse pounding the whole time. She had a very strong desire to turn around and kiss Ivy but she was just here to help Chloe move. Chloe would keep it professional as long as Ivy did and let her make the first move. They went into her bedroom, where there were about a dozen boxes, her gym bag and backpack which had been repurposed for the move, plus a desk, night table and her futon.

  “That desk looks pretty substantial,” Ivy said, sizing up its heavy oak top. “And the bed’s going, too?”

  “I borrowed the desk from Megan. It’s staying,” Chloe said. “And that’s a futon.”

  The futon, as well as the little parson’s table beside it, were the only two pieces of furniture Chloe had purchased when she moved in with Megan. She was lucky the apartment had been furnished because she couldn’t afford to ship her bedroom set from her parents’ house in Seattle, let alone purchase couches and other furniture to make the apartment into a home.

  Chloe chose the futon because it was cheap and easy to transport, but she’d planned to buy a real mattress and headboard. Medical school kept her so busy that she rarely thought about it, though, and she had no one to share the bed with so it hardly seemed to matter what she slept on. Now, she was grateful that she’d never bought a mattress or any other bulky furniture because it saved her the additional expense of hiring a moving company.

  Ivy was staring at it so Chloe said, “It’s not as uncomfortable as you’d think,” and then her cheeks immediately colored with embarrassment. She’d spoken on impulse and now she couldn’t stop imagining Ivy on the futon.

  “The frame’s aluminum,” Chloe quickly added. “I’m sure we can handle it.”

  “Sure,” Ivy said. “Let’s save it for last, though. It’s going to be a pain in the butt to get down the stairs. You ready for the first load?”

  “Yeah,” Chloe said. She grabbed Megan’s car keys from the night table and then picked up the nearest box. Ivy picked one up, too, and while they made their way down the hall, Chloe said, “Hey, thanks for helping me with this. I appreciate it.”

  “It’s not a problem,” Ivy said, but she didn’t keep up the conversation. She just kept her eye on the goal, fitting as many of the cardboard boxes as they could into Megan’s car as they walked up and down the flight of stairs from the apartment to the street three or four times.

  Then they drove the three blocks to Chloe’s new apartment and repeated the process in reverse. There was an exterior staircase leading up to the apartment over the convenience store and Ivy looked skeptically at Chloe the first time she saw it.

  “You must have been desperate to get away from Megan and her girlfriend if this place is better than living with them,” Ivy said.

  “Fiancée,” Chloe corrected. “It was just time for us all to move on, and this place isn’t so bad once you get past the stairs. Come on, I’ll show you.”

  Chloe dug her new apartment key out of her jeans pocket and then they carried their first set of boxes upstairs. They set them down in the center of the living room and Ivy looked around.

  It was undeniably shabbier than the old apartment, with exposed brick on all the exterior walls and an industrial vibe, but it wasn’t bad for a one-bedroom apartment, and it was in Chloe’s meager price range. The exterior staircase was covered by an awning so it wouldn’t get too icy in the winter and the living room was small but cozy the way Chloe liked it. There was a galley kitchen on the back wall and two more doors opposite the entrance – one led to a small, clean bathroom and another opened into the bedroom.

  “I think it has a lot of potential,” Chloe said. She wasn’t sure why it was so important to her that Ivy like the apartment, but she needed to convince her.

  “Are you sure it’s safe?” Ivy asked. “There’s a convenience store downstairs.”

  “It’s a five-minute walk from my last apartment,” Chloe pointed out. “It’s the same neighborhood and I shop at that convenience store all the time. Anyway, it was the best I could find that would allow me to lease month-to-month.”

  Ivy must have seen that Chloe was waiting for her approval because she said with a shrug, “It’s a lot better than my on-campus housing, where I have to listen to a raging kegger going on down the hall at least once a week. Should we go get the next load?”

  “Yep,” Chloe said, adding a little skip to her step as she followed Ivy back outside.

  Despite the mid-November chill to the air, Chloe and Ivy had both stripped down to t-shirts by the time they got around to the futon. It wouldn’t fit in Megan’s car, so they had to take the cushions off and drive them to the apartment, then drop off the car and carry the frame three blocks on foot. They were panting by the time they got to the base of the stairs to Chloe’s new apartment and they set the futon down to catch their breath. Even though they’d gone up and down them a dozen times already, that single flight of metal steps had never looked so daunting.

  “You sure you don’t want to sleep under the stars?” Ivy asked. Her hands were on her hips and she was looking at the stairs like they were Mount Everest, her chest rising and falling heavily as she took deep breaths.

  Chloe forced herself to look away from the thin fabric of Ivy’s t-shirt, staring at the futon instead as she said, “I thought you were concerned about my safety. Now you want me to sleep outside of a convenience store?”

  “Okay, fine,” Ivy said, rolling her eyes. “Have it your way.”

  Chloe laughed, then they picked up their ends of the futon frame. It took a couple minutes and a lot of banging and rattling as the frame hit the metal railing, but finally they got it into the apartment. They put it down in the middle of the room and tossed the cushions back on top of it, then stood back to admire their handiwork. Even with all of Chloe’s things moved, the living room still looked pretty bare – just a bed in the middle of an open space, with cardboard boxes scattered around it. It was somewhat of a focal point and Chloe felt her cheeks heating up again as the thought of Ivy on the futon resurfaced.

  Even when they’d been in the locker room and the call room together at the hospital, Chloe and Ivy had never been this alone before. Suddenly all of her concerns about getting attached to someone who only had studies on her mind melted away and Chloe looked into Ivy’s deep, dark eyes.

  “We can study here now,” she suggested.

  Ivy smiled and broke their eye contact. She said, “There’s no desk. No table, or couch… nothing except a bed.”

  “It turns into a couch,” Chloe pointed out. “That’s the beauty of a futon.”

  Ivy looked at h
er again and Chloe saw desire in her eyes, as well as more than a little hesitance. She was afraid, and if Chloe was being honest, the feeling was mutual. She took a step toward Ivy, but then Ivy stepped back. She made it seem intentional, unrelated to Chloe’s intense gaze, like she was curious about the apartment. Ivy went over to the kitchen and pulled out a few drawers, inspecting them even though they were empty.

  “I can order that pizza now if you want,” Chloe offered, worried that she’d overstepped her bounds but not wanting Ivy to leave. “If you want beer or a soda or something, I know of a convenience store nearby.”

  Ivy smiled at her joke, but she said, “I should get going. I’ll let you get unpacked.”

  “Are you sure?” Chloe asked, crestfallen.

  “Yeah,” Ivy said. “I lost a whole afternoon of studying and I still need to read up on bariatric surgery for a case I’m scrubbing in on tomorrow. I’ll call you and set up a study time soon though, okay?”

  “Okay,” Chloe said. She felt deflated as she watched Ivy head for the door. When she was sure Ivy wouldn’t turn around and stay after all, she said, “Thanks again for your help.”

  “Don’t mention it,” Ivy said. “Enjoy the new apartment.”

  Then she shut the door and Chloe listened to the stairs rattle as she went down them. She’d gotten spooked and Chloe couldn’t blame her – her own heart had been pounding all day. Chloe let out a sigh and tried to convince herself that it was for the best. They were probably better off as merely study buddies because Ivy was reserving all of her energy for surgery and Chloe had some soul-searching to do regarding her own career path. If they kept giving in to their desires, it would only mean more heartache down the road.

  She looked around the living room. With everything she owned in about a dozen small boxes, the apartment felt empty and daunting. Chloe was twenty-four years old and she’d never lived alone – she’d gone from home to the dorms, then to a sorority house full of sisters, and then to Megan’s apartment. This place was going to be a fresh start for her, and a new adventure. She needed to stop thinking about someone who was emotionally unavailable and focus on her own life instead.

  Chloe shivered, the dampness of her t-shirt in the November air finally catching up to her now that her exertions were done. She reached for her sweater on top of one of the boxes where she’d left it when she got overheated, and she found Ivy’s jacket underneath it.

  15

  Ivy

  Ivy made it to the end of the block before the crisp air started licking at her sweat-dampened t-shirt and she realized that she’d left her jacket in Chloe’s apartment. She shivered and glanced backward, where the metal staircase was just visible at the end of the block. She wanted her jacket, not only for the ten-block hike back to campus but also for her early-morning shift the next day, but it had taken every ounce of her willpower to leave the apartment the first time. She didn’t know if she’d have the strength to walk away from Chloe a second time.

  “It won’t kill you to be cold,” she reminded herself, shoving her hands into the pockets of her jeans and continuing toward campus.

  The whole day had been challenging – first being alone in Chloe’s old apartment, then watching her carry all those boxes up the stairs as Ivy followed behind and tried not to stare, and then the utter solitude of the new apartment.

  Ivy had spent the entire day in a perpetual state of internal struggle, reminding herself again and again that she was less than a year away from graduation – and about six weeks away from the medical licensing exam. Now was the time to buckle down and study harder – not allow herself to be distracted from her goal.

  She made it to the end of the next block before an icy raindrop fell down the back of her neck and Ivy let out an involuntary yelp. She looked up and the overcast clouds had grown fuller. A few more cold raindrops hit her shoulders and dampened her hair. It was that uniquely November precipitation that couldn’t decide if it was rain or snow, and it was starting to come down harder.

  “Crap,” Ivy muttered, spinning on her heels and marching back to Chloe’s apartment. She knew far too much about hypothermia to risk it simply because she was too afraid of her own desires to retrieve her jacket.

  Ivy was practically running by the time she got back to the staircase, the slushy rain making goosebumps stand up on her bare arms.

  Chloe was even pretty when she had a line of sweat running down her face.

  The thought came out of nowhere and Ivy couldn’t push it out of her head. It was true. She’d stolen a hundred glances at Chloe throughout the day – and thousands since they’d met at the orientation social hour – and she always had a smile on those plump lips, and a sparkle of curiosity in her eyes. She was the most beautiful woman Ivy had ever seen and she felt privileged to get to look at her so often.

  Then another thought popped into Ivy’s head.

  I want her.

  Ivy had never given much thought to her sexuality, and as much as she enjoyed looking at – and occasionally kissing – Chloe, it wasn’t something she’d ever thought about in any explicit way. It never used to matter very much – Ivy realized from a young age that the crushes she got weren’t the same as the ones the other girls she knew had, but she’d also never had much use for crushes. Thanks to her parents’ ambitions for her and her own deep-seated need to be an incredible surgeon to rival her father’s skills, Ivy didn’t think twice when it came to dating in high school or college. She just didn’t do it, so it didn’t matter who she would date in a purely hypothetical scenario.

  The same was true for sex. It seemed messy and complicated, with far too many emotions. She had been envious sometimes when she heard stories about the sexual awakenings of her peers, but she was striving for a higher goal. She chose mind over body, and when she’d established herself in her residency or maybe a good fellowship, then she could think about love and sex and all the distracting things that came along with them.

  There was just something about Chloe, though, that pushed Ivy’s willpower to its limit.

  She’d kept her feelings at bay for more than three years, thinking of Chloe as just a study partner, but that first kiss had unlocked something more powerful than Ivy could ever have imagined.

  I might be in love with my study partner.

  She climbed the staircase and it rattled a little bit. She wondered if Chloe could hear it or if the building’s brick walls muffled the sound. Ivy’s gut and her brain were both telling her to turn around, suck it up and deal with the bad weather. Go home and study, like she always did. Choose surgery. Choose the mind as she always had before.

  But a small part of her said, I could have both. I could be a great surgeon and love Chloe.

  She didn’t actually believe it. With every step she took up the staircase, the part of her mind that had been in the driver’s seat all through high school, college and medical school was telling her to turn around. Don’t throw all that hard work away because of a few unruly hormones. But the part that had been so long suppressed was fighting its way to the surface like a long held-in scream.

  Ivy reached the landing at the top of the stairs and raised her hand to knock, her mind a whirlwind of points and counterpoints. She had no idea what was about to happen, but the moment her knuckles hit the door, Chloe tore it open. She was looking expectantly at Ivy, as if a similar storm was raging in her own mind.

  “Hey,” Ivy said, surprised at how calm her voice sounded. “I forgot my jacket.”

  “I noticed,” Chloe said. “Come in.”

  She pulled the door open wider and went into the living room, and while Chloe’s back was turned, Ivy closed her eyes and let out a quick, steadying breath. I forgot my jacket – what a pedestrian thing to say. Chloe’s big blue eyes told her exactly what she wanted the moment she opened the door, and all Ivy could do was fall back on old habits.

  “It’s right there,” Chloe said, pointing to the cardboard box where Ivy had laid her jacket.

  �
��Thanks.”

  She picked it up but didn’t put it on. When she shivered, Chloe said, “You’re soaked. Let me find you a towel.”

  “I should go-”

  “You can’t walk home like that,” Chloe insisted, opening a few boxes and searching for her towels. “You’ll get pneumonia.”

  The comment momentarily cut through the tension and Ivy smirked, then admonished her. “Come on, Chloe. You know that’s an old wives’ tale.”

  “It’s an expression,” Chloe said, pulling a plush yellow towel out of a box. She crossed the room and handed it to Ivy, adding, “It means I’m worried about you. Now dry your hair. I’ll let you borrow a t-shirt.”

  Ivy didn’t object this time. She was shivering a lot now that she was out of the rain and her wet shirt clung to her skin. She pulled her long hair out of its neat ponytail and scrunched the towel around it, then took a bubblegum pink t-shirt that Chloe offered her and went into the bathroom to change. Her bra was soaked, too, and if she kept wearing it then she might as well not even change shirts. So after a moment of consideration, Ivy took it off and stuffed it into her jacket pocket. Then she put on the pink t-shirt and looked at herself in the mirror. It had Greek letters printed across it and her nipples were conspicuously visible through the thin cotton on account of the cold.

  “That’s not going to work,” she muttered. She did a dozen jumping jacks to try to raise her body temperature, but in the end the only way she could leave the bathroom was by putting her jacket back on and zipping it up.

  When she came back into the living room, Chloe had shoved the futon up against the wall and pulled the back up so that it was in couch form. When she saw Ivy, she said with a frown, “Are you leaving?”

  “Those medical journals aren’t going to read themselves,” Ivy said.

  “I was just about to order that pizza,” Chloe said. “Do you want to stay for just a little while? It’s dinner time and I know you haven’t eaten.”