by Hawke, Jessa
“I’m sorry,” came that soft voice of hers, putting a balm on the situation. “He did a bad thing. But if you come to us, we’ll do the best we can to get your hand up and running again.” And with that, the surgeon scribbled something on the patient’s white card and held it out.
Take the white card, I remembered. Schedule the patient’s appointment. I was so caught up in the enormity of this individual situation that my awareness of the space around me narrowed down to just my own. Elisa Ahmed was going to do great things for this guy, she was going to rehabilitate his life. I had totally made the right decision, all the other fired interns be damned. I remembered only the next step, to schedule this patient’s appointment with us, and that the phone I was supposed to use was just around the bend of the office. As I rushed out of the office, leaving Elisa discussing the case with Dr. Hahn, I barely noticed bumping into a whole bunch of people who seemed to be lining up with military precision outside of the office.
And that’s when disaster struck.
The patient with the medically butchered hand standing right behind me, I grasped the phone with one hand and stared at the keypad in front of me. I was drawing a total blank. I could not remember for the life of me what number I had to call or any of the things I was supposed to do to arrange an appointment for this patient. Five seconds ticked by, and ten, and I knew I had to do something unless I wanted Elisa Ahmed to come outside and find me staring like a slow-witted donkey at a bunch of numbers with a patient behind me. I had to move as fast as she did, or I would get sacked just as fast as the other interns.
Basically, my whole future hung on my ability to complete this phone call.
God damn it. Maybe I’d make a good burger-flipper instead?
“Eight four, eight four,” a male voice behind me said. “It’s the number of the outpatient unit.”
I glance back. Well, hello ginger, I think, and then my brain is overtaken by the immediacy of my potential workplace situation. I dial the number and somehow, haltingly, and with a million mistakes, make the appointment.
And bless everything I hold sacred that the patient does not know why I’m slumped against the countertop in relief.
The seconds tick by as my heartbeat slows to an acceptable rhythm. Medically stable, one might say. My weak little joke cheers me up and the wobble disappears from my knees. I can go back in and face Elisa. I can do this. But first, I need to thank that cute little ginger boy who saved me. I look around, but there’s nothing but nurses’ assistance running around in blue and maroon scrubs. I guess the ginger ran off before I could thank him. Oh well. There’ll be more good-looking guys around here, anyway.
When I get back into Dr. Hahn’s office, it’s as if the space has shrunk. More accurately, it’s now populated by the surgeon, Elisa, me, and about four medical students. One of them is a tall, skinny blond girl with equally skinny curls who I dismiss instantly—no competition here. There is a short, round jocky girl there, kind of cute in a dirty sexy way, and there are two guys. One is a tall, pot-bellied fellow I’d bet dollars to doughnuts is going to get diabetes any day now, and the other is my ginger savior.
Hey there, hot stuff.
He’s tall, skinny as a reed, and has these great sunken cheekbones that you could cut butter with. His hair looks like he got out of the shower maybe half an hour ago, and the green scrubs he’s wearing set off his eyes. There’s a splash of freckles on his upturned little nose that are just begging to be counted by someone’s tongue, and I don’t see any reason why it should be mine.
Oh wait. We’re still at work.
I never connected much with medical students ever since I dropped out to join the rehabilitation professionals, but I know that I want to know this guy’s name. And exactly what he looks like under those scrubs. He’s glancing at me from the corner of his eye as well, and I can tell that he’s confused by my lack of scrubs, and isn’t sure who Elisa or I am. There’s a lull between patients, and Dr. Hahn and Elisa step out of the room. I decide to just go for it.
“So, you’re all going into plastics, then? That’s why you’re shadowing here at hand surgery?” I ask, but Red and I both know the question is really for him.
There are answering murmurs of dissent all around, and I realize that I’m not the only person who’s nervous about being in a surgeon’s office. Medical or not, they’re all students, just like me.
“Actually, I’m interested hand surgery,” Red suddenly speaks up.
“Oh yeah? What school are you from?”
“Lutheran Saint.”
“Get outta here! Me too!” I cry, and I’m not going to lie, I’m pretty thrilled. Another point of connection for the ginge and I.
“Really? So you must be in the year above me, then,” he says, an adorable wrinkle creasing his brow.
“No, actually, I’m in OT.”
There are blank stares all around as the medical students shoot questioning looks at each other. I realize nobody has any idea what it is I just said.
“OT? Occupational therapy. Quality of life care,” I begin and launch into my little therapy tirade. By the time I’m done, they’re all asking me questions, and even Red looks sufficiently impressed.
“Nice. So you guys are going to try to give that guy a chance to use his hand again, yeah?” he asks me, referring to the patient I blanked out on.
“Yeah. Surgery’s not a good option for him because he’d probably scar over—“
“And he’d never get full hand functionality back,” jumps in Red in a moment of perfect synchronicity.
“Yeah,” I glow, and for a moment, the entire room seems to skip a beat. “Thanks for your help out there, by the way,” I tell him.
He smiles, and I can tell there’s no pretentiousness about him, he just a genuinely nice guy. “No worries. I know what it’s like to blank out in a moment of pressure.”
I chuckle. “Well, you think almost like an OT, with your little functionality comment.”
“Ouch,” says Red, but he’s smiling wide.
“Nah,” I assure him, “Where I come from, that’s a compliment.”
That’s when I realize the whole room is watching us, as much caught up in our exchange as we are. They’re watching us, faces twitching with millions of little mircoexpressions, and even they can tell there’s chemistry between us. I clear my throat as Elisa and Dr. Hahn step back into the room, and step back into my professional mode.
As the weeks go by, I’m caught up in everything I’m learning. How to make atrophied muscles twitch using electrical stimulation. How to make pain in arthritic hands go away with sensory tapping. How to throw every single thing out and disinfect everything else and then run away from the room when it turns out that your patient who works at a meat processing plant has fungus on each of his middle fingers.
Seriously.
At home, I’m furiously typing up long-term goals and researching activities for my clients. How do I manage to find an activity for my tendon repair patient to make him use his ring finger and have him not snore at the same time? I’ve started seeing patients in my sleep. But there’s someone else there, too.
Because still, my favorite part of each week is when Elisa and I go into the hand surgery clinic and I get to see Red.
For the most part, Elisa Ahmed makes me feel stressed. It’s as if every single moment is another potential one to get fired from this internship. And when you’re working straight through lunch and focusing on how to get all your mountains of paperwork done before the day is out, you hardly notice how much you’re absorbing. Because seriously, I’m working my ass off.
So yes, it comes as a surprise to me when I know the answers the medical students don’t.
Here’s the thing. Most medical students on rotation don’t know jack squat about the specialty they’ve been assigned to shadow. Unless they’re interested in going into it. So the fact that Red is interested in becoming a hand surgeon gives him an edge when it comes to answering the few ques
tions Dr. Hahn decides to throw out at us students. When he asks these questions, even Elisa Ahmed keeps quiet; sometimes it’s because she doesn’t know the answer, but sometimes, it’s to prove to me that neither do the medical students.
So the day Dr. Hahn asks why the patient’s distal fingertip is dropping and he’s unable to pick it up and the medical students all scramble around their heads searching for the answer, I find that it’s somehow my voice saying, “Mallet finger.”
Dr. Hahn shakes his head at me. “No!” he cries, but I can tell he’s amused. “I know you know,” he says to me, “But I want to see if these lumber heads knew anything.” The medical students all flush at the derogatory term, but I suppose they’re used to it—that’s how many medical practitioners decide to teach students, after all. Dr. Hahn eyes Red. “Not even you?” he asks, and I cringe, expecting Red to be embarrassed, which is so not what I want him to associate with me. Instead, Red gives a wry little grin, glances at me with absolute warmth in his eyes, shakes his head and shrugs at the hand surgeon.
“Sorry, doctor,” he says, “We haven’t covered that yet.”
Dr. Hahn shakes his head. “I thought you were my guy.”
“Not yet. But I will be, soon.”
Dr. Hahn sighs. “Well, can someone tell me why the patient can’t lift his fingertip?”
Silence all around. And yet, somehow, Red’s amusement has managed to infect the room. Dr. Hahn grumbles rather agreeably at me, “Go ahead.”
“The extensor tendon is cut. Until it heals, the patient’s fingertip will be useless.”
Dr. Hahn nods along. “You could all stand to learn a little something from the occupational therapist,” he tells the medical students. Red winks at me, and it’s as if the world’s suddenly been turned upside down in the best possible way.
Red’s fingers are in my hair, grasping my skull, the pressure making me moan aloud. I can feel the hardness of his body, the firm knead of his muscles underneath his scrubs, the bones of his hips solid underneath my hands. When I slide his scrub top off, I see that he has hair on his slim chest, that it’s rust-colored and that his nipples are the color of chocolate. When I press my mouth against his chapped lips, he tastes like cool water. He puts his hands on me, and we back up, kissing, making out, until I’m hopping up on the medical examination chair and wrapping my legs around his waist.
Yikes. Things had escalated quickly.
Red had come up to me at the end of the day and stared at me. Literally just stared, those blue-green eyes of his burning with excitement.
“You’re staring at me,” I finally said.
He grinned. “I’m staring at you.”
I was packing up my things in the rehab gym; how had he even found me here? “Why are you staring at me?” I asked him.
He was bouncing on his heels, happy as a little boy. “You knew the answer.”
“So?”
“So, I’m pretty damn impressed with you, woman.”
We went for coffee. Talked about his dreams of becoming the best hand surgeon in the state. We talked about how I had gotten into occupational therapy, about how quality of life care was everything to me. I’ve never truly been into the high-impact, high-energy, dealing-with-a-matter-of-days kind of thing. And the whole time, I felt this charge, as if Red was rubbing me with something electrical, and the atrophied muscles of my heart were beginning to twitch again, just like my patient’s.
Of course, it didn’t hurt that he was playing footsie with me under the table.
Seriously. I haven’t played footsie with anybody since I was a teenager, and I’ll be damned if I’ve forgotten how good it feels. The whole time, he’s looking at me with all that ginger stubble on his pointy little chin, those light eyes of his highlighted by his scrubs, and I don’t care that the hospital coffee tastes more like water than anything else. He’s making me feel like I can say anything to him, like I can say the good things that have happened to me and he won’t think I’m bragging, he’ll actually be happy for me. It’s like the world’s longest foreplay.
Oxytocin’s one hell of a drug, let me tell you.
By the time Red has walked me back to Dr. Hahn’s office for the notebook I’ve forgotten, it’s all I can do to keep my hands off him. We’ve got this rapport going, the kind of buildup where all our words are bouncing seamlessly off each other, and everything is bouncing around together—the happy floating feeling in my chest, our sharp, witty banter, and how cute his butt looks in his scrubs. That’s why all it takes is me dropping my notebook, and our fingers brushing as he reaches down to help me pick it up.
Suddenly, we’re scrambling around each other’s bodies, my notebook all but forgotten on the floor.
I’ve got his shirt up over his head, and he’s pushing up my skirt and grasping my thighs as if they’re life rafts and he can barely hold on. His entire face and mouth is so warm that I can hardly believe it, all that life warmth on such a skinny boy, and the taste of him is so utterly excited and male that it’s all I can do to keep from trying to climb inside his skin.
I’m flat on my back in the medical examination chair, and I love the way he looks above me, all bones and knobs in his joints. I love the wiry muscles in his arms and the long ropes of them in his thighs. I love the way he gasps a little when I finally show him my breasts, as if it’s the best present he’s ever gotten. And I love the honesty of his penis, the round, ruddy heady of it that feels no need to make excuses for itself.
We’re even better in bed than we are out of it. How is that even possible? I don’t know and I don’t care. All that electricity in our skin, and the way he feels inside me is completely different. It’s as if I’m being lifted up, somewhere safe, and from the look in his face as he enters me, he feels the same way. His skinny hips buck against me and when I dig my nails into his shoulders from the wild feeling building inside me, I’m afraid I’ll hurt him, but he doesn’t even notice. When he comes, gasping against me, hot breath on my neck, I feel this great wave of tenderness and stroke his hair. He lays against my chest, and I run my fingers through Red’s red, the look of his eyelashes casting shadows on his cheekbones is unbelievably vulnerable. He feels what I feel; that together, we’re somehow protected.
I’d like to say everything spirals out of control, but the opposite is true. When I’m with Red, I feel more in control of my life than before. We study together, and I teach him more about the hand. I teach him about what it is I do, and sometimes, when we’re done with all our textbooks, we talk about opening our own office. His eyelashes casting shadows on his cheekbones is unbelievably vulnerable. He feels what I feel; that together, we’re somehow protected.
I’d like to say everything spirals out of control, but the opposite is true. When I’m with Red, I feel more in control of my life than before. We study together, and I teach him more about the hand. I teach him about what it is I do, and sometimes, when we’re done with all our textbooks, we talk about opening our own office someday and working together the way Elisa and Dr. Hahn do.
“I’ll do the surgeries and then send them off to you,” he whispers against my ear as he nuzzles me, tickling the fine hairs on my neck. “Just remember to dial the right number, okay?”
I laugh and give him a playful shove. “Fine, but you remember to fix the right tendon.”
And so it goes. We’re going to sleep together and waking up together. When we see each other in Dr. Hahn’s clinic, we try to keep it as professional as possible, but even Elisa notices that I’m much more relaxed than I was before. And even though I know she knows it’s not her place to comment, she tells me that she hopes I’m teaching him about the benefits of rehabilitation. I assure her that Red is learning much more about the benefits of occupational therapy than he ever expected to.
Such as, sex truly can be a field we’re quite knowledgeable in.
How we slide into unfamiliar territory, I’ll never know. I suppose, at the time, we were both blinded by the happy hormones of b
eing together with someone who feels so right. Which is why I don’t realize that Red gets his fellowship acceptances about a week or so before my internship is set to end at Middleton.
Elisa Ahmed has already told me that she’d like to hire me after I graduate. How I did it, I don’t know, but somewhere along the line, I managed to impress the Lady of Steel. Maybe it was the day I brought a new splint into the clinic; I overheard her saying to one of the other therapists she manages that I had brought over knowledge from school and applied it in a new setting. All I know is that for the entire time, I have worked my butt off, and the thing is, I’ve learned more than I ever expected.
So during my final review, when Elisa Ahmed tells me that Middleton would be happy to hire me and have me on site with a mentor for more complex tendon repairs, I’m stunned. Because what this means is what she has also just written inside of the evaluation form—that I am to be trusted to treat carpal tunnel syndrome, single-tendon repairs, and even simple neuro cases entirely on my own.
I gape a little at her.
“Are you sure?” I can’t help but ask.
As usual, her baby doll voice fills the room. But now, the emotion in it is real. “Why wouldn’t we hire you? You progressed better than any other intern I’ve ever had, and I’ve been doing this for over twenty years.”
Twenty years? Damn, she looks good.
“Besides, you see the big picture. A tendon repair isn’t just a set of muscles to you—you manage to see how that fits into a person’s life roles, and that’s not something every therapist gets.”
“Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do?” I ask her, and my feigned innocence is only there to hide my furiously thumping heart.
“You’d be surprised at how narrow some people’s field of view is,” she tells me, and that’s when I know that I respect the living hell out of this woman, little girl’s voice and all.
When I tell Red about all this, my voice spills over with emotion, and I wait to hear his soft words, to dissolve in them in sheer happiness. But he is silent. Something is wrong. Red won’t look me in the eyes, and that’s not like him at all.