by Laney Cairo
My fingers intertwined with his, and he let out a long breath. He was right; it had been a long night.
“Was I bleeding?” he asked.
“No more than expected,” I said. “No tears. Next time, though, we do that with some poppers.”
Andrew laughed and squeezed my fingers. “Babe, at least one of us in this bed is a doctor. Tizanidine is what we need, not poppers.”
I looked at Andrew with the dawning realization that he was right; my days of using illicit drugs when there was a prescription alternative available were drawing to a close.
“Tizanidine?” I retrieved my hand from his and opened the pharmacology database on the laptop.
“Short-acting,” he said. “Not a restricted drug, so no one counts them closely. Won’t fuck me over so much that I can’t work the next day. Not a benzo, so it’s not addictive.”
I was stunned. There was a whole world of substance abuse that I knew nothing about. My housemates often asked about drugs, but I’d always approached it from the angle of trying to find something that was analogous to a street drug.
This was different.
“Fuck,” I said. “What else am I missing out on?”
Andrew’s hand slid up my thigh. “Dunno,” he said. “F is the expert on misusing drugs. I just remember that last time I wrote someone up for Tizanidine, it caught my attention.
Hadn’t expected to wind up being fisted quite this quickly, though. What gave me away?”
There had been that moment of insight, wild supposition, and Andrew had been so utterly submissive that I’d been sure a moment later. “It was the gloves in the drawer. You had powderless gloves there, and there’s only one thing you absolutely have to have powderless gloves for.”
I put the laptop aside and slid down the bed to lie beside Andrew. His hand was stroking me now, coaxing me back to hardness. I closed my eyes for a moment, and he kissed me.
“Sorry, am I distracting you?” he murmured.
“Mmm, yeah. I think you’re supposed to be supportive of my studying, aren’t you?”
Andrew’s mouth was pressed against my neck now, sucking on the skin. “I guess so,” he said. “Anything I can help you with?”
“Tell me what you know about erectile dysfunction,” I said, and we both burst out laughing.
“Point taken,” he said and he let go of me. “I’ll go get some work of my own and leave you alone.”
Andrew fell asleep some time later, slumped down in the bed, photocopied documents on wrongful dismissal cases strewn across the blankets, and I didn’t disturb him. It was only the fear of impending failure that stopped me from turning the laptop and light off and going to sleep, too. I was pathetically behind with revision, there was a mountain of stuff I needed to do for my placement, and I was hopelessly short of time, too. It was an appalling time to get involved with a new lover.
Andrew woke when I finally turned off the laptop and put it away, and he stumbled sleepily to the bathroom to brush his teeth when I went to the loo. I’d never really done the whole domesticity thing before, had prided myself on avoiding romantic entanglements even when I’d been seeing someone, and was caught completely by surprise when Andrew said,
“You can leave a toothbrush and razor here if you want.”
Stunned wasn’t an adequate description of how I felt, and I guess I must have been staring at him like an idiot.
Andrew’s fingers curled around the back of my neck gently and he smiled at me, then kissed me quickly, tasting of mint.
“Hey,” he said. “You don’t have to. I am, however, amused that you cope beautifully with powderless gloves, but look like I’ve kicked you when I suggest you might actually be back here again, maybe even on a regular basis.”
“Fuck,” I managed to say, and it did nothing to help with the idiot status. “Um, yeah, that would be good.” All right, I was being less of an idiot now. Hopefully.
Andrew kissed me again, and his stubble was rough on my cheek. “And before you have a panic attack over this, I’ve got Henry staying all this weekend, so I can’t see you again until next week.”
“I wasn’t going to have an anxiety attack,” I said defensively.
“Sure,” Andrew said, and he grabbed my arse as he walked past me. “You’ll be pleased to hear that I don’t have to be at work until eight tomorrow, so the alarm is set for six thirty.”
I leaned my forehead against the mirror. “Twit,” I muttered to myself.
“I heard that,” Andrew called out from the bedroom.
Chapter Sixteen
All hell broke loose the next day.
I’d left Matthew sitting at a bus stop not far from my place and driven in.
The Troll was waiting for me, simpering, a hand full of messages, when I tried to sidle past her desk. “Dr. Seagate is here to see you.”
I filed the scraps of paper into a pocket without reading them and waved to F where he was lounging against my office door. He looked like shit.
“What’s up?” I asked, unlocking the door.
“Feces,” he said. “Diced and tossed through the air very fast.” He kicked the door shut and slumped down in my plastic garden chair. “You need to become a consultant, that way you’d have a comfortable chair for me.”
“So, the shit’s hit the fan. What in particular has gone wrong?” I ignored the jibe about being a consultant. My American medical degree just wasn’t classy enough for the British medical system; I was never going to make consultant here.
“God was waiting for me in my office this morning.”
“Yuck,” I said. God never ventured out of his office without a damn good reason; he much preferred to summon intransigent doctors to his offices.
“He asked me to resign to save the hospital the embarrassment of having to fire me.”
I was impressed. F had obviously seriously pissed someone off. “Are you going to?”
“No fucking way,” F said. “If I quit, I can’t claim wrongful dismissal. Bastards aren’t going to get rid of me that easily.”
I nodded. My thoughts had been heading down that path, too. “What are you going to do?”
F smiled, kind of like a shark would. “I’ve left a message with the BMA rep. This is war. The administration here can’t prevent me from doing my job the right way, then punish me when I do it the wrong way. It’s not actually my responsibility if their budget is fucked. Getting the best care I can for my patients is my responsibility.”
I mimed putting on a cowboy hat and spinning a six-shooter and drawled, “Them there’s fighting words, pardner.”
F laughed, making him sound kind of manic. “I’d watch that American accent of yours,” he said. “According to Lena, who is an integral part of the gossip network here, there’s some young thing in High Dependency who’s enthusing about the lovely American doctor that her housemate is shagging that saved her when she ripped her arm to bits. What have you been up to, you naughty doctor?”
I went hot, then cold, and swallowed hard.
“Ah,” F said. “In the midst of the ruination of my career, you’ve been indulging a little. I want details.”
F waggled his eyebrows at me, and I couldn’t help but smile. “I was at Matthew’s place last night and one of his drunken and/or stoned housemates shredded her arm on a glass door. I really didn’t have much choice but to ride in the bus here with her.”
“Matthew? Cute name. How is the adorable Matthew?” F asked.
“Matthew is fine. Can we change the subject?” I really didn’t want to go into how fine he was, not when my whole body was still suffused with contentment from last night.
F was grinning at me like the idiot he was, but I had no intention of elaborating on my sexual adventures. For a start, if I did, F might decide to return the confidence and tell me in excruciating detail about his sex life, too, and I really didn’t feel up to it.
F waited, and I sighed and said, “Go away F. You’re cluttering up my office, and whil
e you might be about to be fired, I’m not, and I have a batch of med students I need to keep occupied before the nurses kill them.”
“Don’t forget your private tutoring,” F said with a leer, but he did peel himself off the plastic chair and wander out of my office.
* * *
I sat down at the table, feeling tired, and glanced around at the gathered fresh-faced med students. Nevins was still cheerful, and he looked less of an idiot than usual. Lin looked studious; the blonde girl as tired as me; Matthew was as gorgeous as always, but I didn’t let myself stare at him too closely. “Okay,” I said, tossing a handful of index cards on the table. “Take one at random. This afternoon, I want to know all about the condition, what the treatment options are; the usual drill. Let’s do some work.”
I left the kids attempting to put together a trolley for an IDC insertion and answered a call from F.
I could hear the steady clunk-clunk of equipment in the background when he spoke so he must have been calling from the dialysis unit.
“Wassup?” I asked.
“BMA rep. Stop work meeting this afternoon. We’re walking off the job.”
I closed my eyes for a moment, and my stomach plummeted. So it had come to that? “Okay,” I said. “When?”
“Five p.m.. See you there.”
“Yeah,” I said, and I put my phone away.
Chapter Seventeen
Andrew was sitting at a table of doctors, all of them involved in an intense conversation, with their heads pressed close together, when I walked past at lunch time, but he looked up and smiled at me. “Blake,” he said, and he nodded at an empty chair.
I sat down, papers, empty pear tin and olive jar in my hand, and wondered if he’d recognise them as being from his cupboards. Hopefully I’d get a chance to ask him about the assignment. Evidence-based medicine struck me as something else that Andrew would have opinions on. I suspected he was actually composed almost entirely of opinions. And submission.
Everyone else ignored me and went back to their conversation, apart from Dr. Seagate, who I recognised from the BMA meeting. He stared at me for a moment, until someone in scrubs threw a marshmallow at him to get his attention.
“…wider responsibility,” the man in scrubs said. “As members of the profession, we’re looking at a question of the greater good.”
“Greater good is shit,” Andrew said. “Our primary responsibility is to our patients right this moment. Not to the ones that will come later, not to other people’s patients.”
“If this is an NHS-wide crisis, then aren’t we compelled to take action?” a woman asked.
“Given that I trained in a system where there was minimal free healthcare, I’m probably not the best person to speak on this,” Andrew said. “Hell, I can’t even vote here. In the short term we need to voice our support for F, who was after all just doing what any of us would do, and to keep caring for our patients. Long term, we need a broad-based community response. Someone who is a citizen needs to actually do something, run for parliament or seize control of their local Labour party branch.”
“Are you advocating that we don’t stop work?” the woman asked Andrew, and I could feel my jaw dropping open. They were going to strike?
“No,” Andrew said. “I think that we have to give the hospital enough notice to staff the wards with locums. I think we can quite reasonably stop non-essential work.”
“Monday?” Dr. Seagate asked.
Andrew nodded. “That should be long enough for admin to get back-ups in. It’ll cost them a fortune to staff the wards for eight hours, which will get their attention.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Doctors didn’t strike.
“Will it harm the patients?” I asked, making everyone look at me for the first time. Hell, I was going to be a doctor soon; I wanted to know about this shit.
Dr. Seagate said, “I was a medical student at the time of the Irish strike of ‘87. There was no increased morbidity or mortality from the strike, but that was only the junior doctors who were on strike that time. Registrars and consultants remained on the wards. Unlike then, we’re just one hospital; we’re not taking the entire profession out with us.”
“So we need to notify Homerton and St. Andrews. They get our emergency cases; we maintain skeleton staffing on the wards. As long as we don’t remain on strike, we can be pretty sure that the only people we’ll inconvenience will be the admin and God.”
God? Andrew was worrying about inconveniencing God?
The man in scrubs said, “Andrew, you’re confusing your med student.”
Andrew chuckled. “Relax, Blake, God is the director of medical services.”
“Are you really all going to strike? Has it happened before?” I asked, still trying to get my head around the idea.
“Looks like it,” Andrew said. “It has happened. Canadian doctors went on strike in 2002, Los Angeles doctors in ‘76.
Israel had a major countrywide strike that lasted for four months in ‘83. British doctors went on strike in the 70s.” He tapped my stack of printouts. “If you research the issue, you’ll find plenty of references to mortality and morbidity falling during a strike. The figures are crap, don’t believe them. There is a temporary drop because of no elective surgery, but as soon as surgery restarts, the figures come back up, and nobody is prepared to talk about the overall impact on quality of life of that delay.”
I nodded, and he looked at the papers in front of me.
“Hospital policy statements?” he asked, taking the stack off me, and I tried hard not to colour. It was hard to match the way he intimidated me like this with the man who had given himself so completely the night before.
“Yeah. I was, um, looking at the, um, policy of using evidence-based medicine. I went looking for journal articles and they weren’t in the database because they were anecdotal.”
Andrew was nodding approvingly when I looked up again.
“Excellent. This is instead of the presentation I asked you to prepare?”
I nodded. I was in the shit, no way around it.
“Tie it to the topic I gave you, and that’ll be fine.” He handed the printouts back to me. “I’ve got a copy of Callahan in my office if you want to borrow it now.” He checked his watch. “I’ve got a few minutes before I’m due at outpatients.”
I gathered up my papers, jar, and tin, and waited while Andrew said a round of ‘goodbyes’ to the doctors and Dr.
Seagate threw marshmallows at him, then Andrew strode past me, muttering, “I’ve got twenty minutes, think we can manage it?”
I took off after him. “No problems,” I said, pushing past the gaggle of nurses at the cafeteria entrance.
Chapter Eighteen
The Rottweiler was painting her nails at her desk as I pushed open the door to the offices, Matthew right behind me. I took the handful of messages she thrust at me, tiny slivers of red crescents marking them, and said over my shoulder to Matthew as I led him to my office, “I’m not happy about this, Blake. I hadn’t planned on spending my lunch break dealing with your crises.”
“Sorry, Dr. Maynard,” Matthew said, plaintively. “It’s a family matter…”
I unlocked my door, ignoring the beady eyes that had followed us down the hall. “In you go,” I said, holding the door for Matthew.
There was a lock on my office door, but it only worked from the outside, presumably cunningly arranged by the hospital to stop its staff from having sex on company time, but I closed my blinds, then wedged rolled up photocopies firmly under the door. Of course, if I was a consultant, my office would lock from the inside, and then I, too, could disconnect the smoke detector and smoke joints in it.
When I slid my hands around the back of Matthew’s neck and pulled him close, Matthew said, “You’re not serious about this, are you?”
“Oh, yeah,” I murmured against his ear. “Completely serious. I’m not going to see you until Monday at the earliest…” I kissed his neck, sliding my
lips across his skin, inhaling the scent of him. “Not that I wouldn’t rather be safely in bed with you, preferably at my place where there are no drunken housemates, but I’d settle for your place if I had to.”
Matthew’s hands pulled the stethoscope from around my neck and tossed it onto the floor. I made a mental note to tell him how much a Littman digital cost one day, then his hands were unbuckling my trousers, and I had to bite my lip to stifle my moan.
Fuck it. I could always buy another stethoscope.
He was hard, too, and I could feel the bead of his piercing through his trousers, then my hands were sliding inside his trousers, and he was there, rock hard in my hands.
He kissed me deep, long and hard, and I pushed his trousers and underwear down roughly, then picked him up and deposited him on top of the mess on my desk. Stuff fell off the sides, coffee cups and paper and books, and I bent down and rummaged around in my briefcase for lube and condoms.
He rolled his own condom on, easing it over the beads, then I took him into my mouth; deep, long, and hard, too, his moans muffled by his hand. This was good, more than good, and I ignored the footsteps in the hall outside and the sound of traffic coming through the window glass.
What mattered was this, and right then I would have given anything to really taste Matthew, for him to come in my mouth. I thought of platitudes, and discarded them, and eased my fingers between Matthew’s thighs, into the creases and grooves of his body. Over the acrid latex, I could smell him so clearly, his sweat thick and cloudy, and slick under my fingers.
He spread his legs, more than enough invitation for me, so I grabbed examination gloves from the box on my desk. They weren’t as good as sterile gloves, but I wasn’t planning on leaving the office to hunt some down. I cupped his balls, toyed with his raphe briefly, just a brush of a finger, then pressed fingertips against his ass.
“Fuck,” he whispered.