by Laney Cairo
Andrew’s lips slid across mine and his mouth opened and his fingers eased across my scalp, but this was different. He didn’t pull my body against his, he didn’t do that … thing he did with his tongue. This was slow and gentle and I melted completely under his mouth … his touch.
There were footsteps but he didn’t break the kiss, just kept moulding his lips gently against mine, his breath tickling across my face, his hand warm, cradling my scalp.
My chest felt tight, my hands tingled where they gripped his shoulders, and I moaned against his mouth and slid off the car bonnet and into his arms.
The tingling had slid up my arms now, and I pushed the fingers of one hand up into Andrew’s hair as a car drove past, its headlights bright red through my eyelids for a moment.
Andrew was moaning; I could feel it rumbling through us both, and I clung to him, sliding my hand under his white coat just to feel his body heat.
A car started nearby, the distant roar of a motorbike echoed through the car park, and I was lost. We could stay there forever, kissing, and I would be happy. This wasn’t about sex, even though we were both hard; this was about touching and breathing, and the feel of Andrew’s mouth on my neck, and I was hopelessly lost…
Andrew’s phone rang, and he extricated himself from my arms to answer it, keeping one arm around me still. “That’s Henry’s ring tone,” he said, lifting the phone to his ear. “Hey, kiddo. No, I haven’t left the hospital yet … The stop work meeting went well, yeah, we’re on strike on Monday.”
I could hear Henry’s voice, tinny through the phone, and Andrew chuckled. “No, you don’t need to donate your graphic novels to the strike fund, you maniac … We’ll grab some food on the way to my place. I’m just about to leave now, though I think I have to drop a friend home first … Say, thirty-five minutes.”
He smiled at me and said, “Love you, too,” to the phone.
The fluorescent tube overhead flickered one last time and died. Andrew’s eyes were on my face, lingering on my lips.
“I’m going to miss you tonight,” he whispered. “I want to hold you all night, just to feel you against me.”
The security guard walked past again, with his damn torch, and had the good grace to just keep walking and ignore us in the shadows.
“You need to go,” I said as my hand stroked the back of his neck.
He nodded and stepped back and when his attention was on the lock, I hung onto the car quickly to stop my knees from giving way.
He leaned across the car and undid the passenger door, and I found the presence of mind to walk around the car and clamber in.
We didn’t say anything in the car; he just flicked the radio on and Radio 3 played quietly. He pulled up outside my place, and the lights were on and the door stood open, but there was no music booming. Maybe everyone had gone out.
I went to open the door, and Andrew caught my hand in his. “Sunday night?” he said. “I’ll be taking Henry home Sunday evening. I could pick you up afterwards.”
I leaned across the car and pressed my lips against his.
“Please,” I said, then I got out of the car before anything unfortunate, like begging, happened.
Andrew drove off, and I skirted the pile of bulging black garbage bags on the steps and walked into someone else’s home.
The front hall had been cleared of debris and swept, the lounge room was neat and tidy, there was no bong on the coffee table; even Clive’s mattress looked neat. A middle-aged woman in jeans and T-shirt appeared in the kitchen doorway. “Hello,” she said. “I’m Angie, Heidi’s mum. Who are you?”
Ah, now the whole tidiness thing made sense. We’d been combat-mothered.
“I’m Matthew,” I said. “How’s Heidi going? I didn’t get a chance to see her today.”
Angie had hair the same dark blonde colour as Heidi’s, or at least the same colour as Heidi’s would be if she washed it.
A broad smile spread across her face. “Matthew!” she said.
“You must be the lovely medical student who lives here, who saved Heidi.” She was across the room and hugging me in an instant.
I hugged her back briefly. “It was Andrew who did it, not me,” I said.
She let go of me and smiled knowledgeably. “He’s your boyfriend, right?”
“Um, I guess so.”
She took hold of my elbow and led me into the kitchen. “I made a casserole and a nice pudding. Come and have something to eat, you must be starving.”
There was food, real food, with meat in it, and water-soluble vitamins and fibre and stuff. I hadn’t eaten so well since I’d last been at home at Christmas. Angie sat across the table from me, poured extra cream on my crumble, and said,
“Tell me about your boyfriend.”
I felt myself colouring. After the way he’d kissed me in the car park, I wasn’t sure I could talk coherently about him, but I was willing to try.
Chapter Twenty Two
Henry stared at my office.
“Um, Dad,” he said. “If my bedroom looked like this, Mom would kill me.” He wrinkled his nose. “It smells funny in here.”
I pushed enough of the runaway paperwork aside to get the door open fully, then forced the window open. It did smell funny, and I knew exactly why. “Yep. And if I don’t clear this up, someone will come along and kill me, too.” I pushed the power button on my work PC and it lurched into life, then took the rubbish bin out to the janitor’s room to empty it.
“Give me a moment to log you in, then you can cruise around online. Just, please, try not to set off the net nanny,” I said when I came back.
“’K, Dad,” Henry said, and he stepped over the mess and clambered into my office chair. “Can I print stuff out?” he asked.
“Sure.” I leaned over him to type in my password. Once he was in and typing in a url, I turned my attention to the paperbomb that had gone off in my office.
Henry was safely occupied, going through every site that might have cheats for his favourite game, and I began to sort and stack the papers. There were coffee stains on some, from yesterday, but nothing important seemed to have been ruined. I really needed to sort this whole disaster out, because if I was fired on Monday, someone would have to deal with this, and I couldn’t just drop this on whoever replaced me.
It took a long time, long enough that Henry made two raids on the snack machine in the main hall, but eventually I had seven neat piles of papers on the floor, twelve coffee cups on the desk, and I’d completely filled the recycling bin that I’d dragged to my office door.
I filed the seven piles, ignoring the issue of cleaning out my filing system, washed the coffee cups up myself rather than leaving them for a janitor, and emptied my office rubbish bin again.
It was done; they could fire me now.
Henry looked up when I came back into the office carrying the rubbish bin and said, “You’re a slob, aren’t you, Dad?”
I sat down on my plastic chair. “So I’ve been told, though I’ve seen much worse,” I said, thinking of Matthew’s house.
“You finished? Want to follow me around on a quick round? I’ll stop any of the nurses from hugging you, I promise.”
“Sure, Dad, but you have to tell me what all the machines do, even the gross ones.”
Heidi was sitting up in bed when I found her room, and a woman who could only be her mother was brushing her hair.
They both looked up as Henry and I walked in. Heidi beamed at me and said, “Mum, this is Andrew.”
I smiled at Heidi and then turned to her mother. “Hi, I’m Dr. Andrew Maynard, and this is my son, Henry. I just dropped in to see how Heidi was going.”
Heidi held up her splinted arm, showing an impressive set of sutures, and Henry said, “Wow, can I see them?”
Heidi held out her arm proudly. “Thirty-six stitches on the outside, sixty-five on the inside.” Henry’s eyes grew wide and he leaned over to peer at the sutures. Next to chest tubes, he liked sutures best, and while I kept him well supplied w
ith chest tubes, having shown him two already today, sutures were not something I had much to do with.
Heidi’s mom said, “I’m Angie. Thank you so much for what you did for Heidi. I met your nice boyfriend last night, made him a real dinner.”
Oh, fuck.
Henry almost fell off Heidi’s bed in his astonishment, so I hauled him back onto his feet. “Must rush, I’m needed on the ward. Glad Heidi’s better.” Henry towed me out into the corridor.
“Boyfriend!” he said. “You’ve got a boyfriend? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Ahh, good question,” I said. “Sorry, kiddo, I was planning on telling you. We only just got together.”
Henry looked disapproving. “You’re supposed to tell me these things, you know. Go on, I want details.”
“Not here,” I said, mindful of the nurses hovering around, including F’s bedwarmer, Lena.
She smiled knowingly at me as I strode out of the ward, Henry almost running to keep up with me.
I made Henry wait until we got into the car. “Well?” he demanded as I started the car. “What’s he like? Why didn’t you tell me? Is he another doctor?”
“He’s a medical student, one of my latest batch. His name’s Matthew. There, satisfied?”
“No way,” Henry said. I leaned out of the window and swiped my staff card through the exit gate at the car park. “I wanna know all about him. When am I going to meet him?”
“Not this weekend,” I said firmly. “Give me a chance here.”
Henry subsided into quiet glee in the front passenger seat.
I had no idea he’d be so pleased I was seeing someone. He’d hated my last boyfriend, so I’d kind of assumed that his malevolence would carry on to Matthew, but it hadn’t. Maybe he’d worked out I was lonely? I never knew what was going on in Henry’s head.
He bounced on to my bed that night, unbearably cute in his striped pajamas, suddenly young again. I looked up from the document I was scanning, highlighter pen in my mouth.
“He Hinny,” I said, then I took the pen out of my mouth and said, “Hey, Henry.”
“Dad?” Henry said. “Do you love Matthew? Because if you do, and you want him to stay here on the weekends, you could just close the bedroom door, and I wouldn’t walk in or anything.”
I smiled at him. “That’s very generous of you,” I said, touched more than I expected.
Henry bounced again, sitting cross-legged, and said,
“Well?”
I shook my head. “Give up, kiddo. I’m not going to talk to you about how I do or don’t feel about Matthew, not without talking to him first. For all I know, he’s going to run screaming from this obnoxious pre-pubescent child of mine.”
Henry chortled happily, obviously drawing conclusions of his own, and he flopped down beside me on the quilt. “I spotted his toothbrush and razor,” Henry said. “I must have been an idiot not to see them last night.” He wriggled a bit, digging into me with both a knee and an elbow at once. “You know, if he’s a med student, he’s probably not much older than me, is he?”
We both burst out laughing. “Go to bed, you little horror,”
I said.
“Good night, Dad,” he said, and he scrambled into my lap for a quick hug, crumpling all my papers.
“Good night, Henry,” I said, kissing his forehead.
He clambered off the bed and scooted out of the room. I picked up my papers, leaned back against the bed head, and closed my eyes.
I wasn’t sure how I felt. The rational bit of me was saying that I couldn’t possibly, after only a week, actually know Matthew well enough to be in love with him. But, if I turned that bit of my head off, I couldn’t think of him without a smile creeping across my face. Then there was that piece of foolscap paper, carefully stored in my wallet. It didn’t say much, just, ‘Dear Andrew, You spoke wonderfully, I was nearly in tears’. The writing trailed off part way through the next word, but it was enough that Matthew had actually tried to find me.
Then there was the way he’d kissed me.
If I wasn’t in love, it was a damn good facsimile of it.
Chapter Twenty Three
It was my usual weekend routine. I’d wake early, study for a good solid eight hours, when the house was at its quietest, then go down the pub mid-afternoon. I’d sink a few lagers, hopefully at someone else’s expense, and head back to the house to hit the books again.
It sounded pretty awful if I described it to anyone, but it worked. I could keep my marks up this way, and get enough sleep, too.
What I hadn’t expected was to find someone else sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and a paper when I went downstairs at six on Sunday morning, tea bag in my hand.
“Hi, Angie,” I said sleepily, putting the kettle on and leaning against the pantry. I could see through the laundry to the little store room that was where Heidi and Tim slept. It occurred to me that I hadn’t seen Tim for a few days. “Did you sleep in Heidi’s room?” I asked Angie.
She nodded. “I can’t afford a room anywhere, so it seemed the obvious thing to do. Guess Heidi had neglected to mention she lived with her boyfriend, so it wasn’t until I found all his stuff that I realised I’d kicked him out of the bed.”
The kettle boiled, and I took a clean mug … There were clean mugs! And plates when I opened the cupboards. In fact, the sink was empty. “Oh, wow, you washed up,” I said as I poured water onto the tea bag.
“Doesn’t anyone usually do it?” Angie asked.
“No, we all wash up what we need for ourselves each time,” I said. “I’ve got used to it. I can remember early in the year, we had some sort of roster, but it rapidly became anarchy. I keep all my food in my room. You found Heidi’s food?”
Angie nodded. “Took me a little while to work out why she had cans of baked beans in her room, and a jar of coffee.”
She smiled knowingly. “Andrew came around yesterday while I was at the hospital. He’s really rather gorgeous,” she said.
“He had his son with him, too.”
I sat down at the kitchen table with my tea. “You met Henry?” I said. “What’s he like?”
She pursed her lips for a moment. “Spoilt would be my guess. His dad obviously adores him. You’ve not met him?”
I shook my head. “I’ve only seen photos of him.”
“Gruesome little child,” Angie said. “Just like my eldest. He was obsessed with plane crashes.”
“I had a thing about bones,” I admitted. “I had shoeboxes of them, scrounged off Tile Hill, in the woods. I always hoped I’d find human remains one day. I found a dead cat once and cleaned it up and reassembled the skeleton with glue.”
Angie stared at me, and I smiled in a way that I hoped was disarming, but probably just made me look like a serial killer in training.
“Think I’ll get started on my revision,” I said, standing up again.
* * *
I didn’t hit the pub that afternoon. I had no money, and had no inclination to charm strangers until they bought me beer. It wasn’t that all I could think of was Andrew, because that wasn’t true. I was managing to think about metabolic pathways, complement cascades, classical disease presentations, and neurological anatomy quite well, but when I took my five minutes per hour break my head was full of him.
Angie brought me a plate of sandwiches at one stage, and the household remained blissfully quiet. I liked this; it made it much easier to study. Perhaps it was time to move out, borrow some more money. It was only a few months until I started earning and getting through my finals would be easier if I lived somewhere quiet.
I lay back on the mattress, Kelley open on my chest. I couldn’t help it; I couldn’t stop myself from imagining living with Andrew, in his comfortable house, in his comfortable bed. I’d never lived with anyone before, I’d never wanted to, but it would be wonderful to sleep next to Andrew every night.
Reality dumped a bucket of cold water over my fantasies.
Andrew had a son
whom he obviously adored; I couldn’t just move in on him, no matter how annoying my housemates were.
I was practicing my physical assessment techniques on Angie when Andrew arrived. She was proving to be far more obliging than any of my housemates had been, letting me run through the procedure over and over again, trying to get my time under thirty minutes.
Andrew was leaning against the doorframe, and he waited while I went through the process of checking Angie’s pedal pulses to finish up her circulatory system.
He knelt down beside me and took my index cards out of my hands and tossed them over his shoulder. “Start again,”
he said. “This time, instead of doing it in anatomical systems, start at the top and work down.”
“But…” I said, and he smiled at me and I couldn’t help but smile back at him.
I did what he said, checking Angie’s eyes, retinas, ear and teeth. Palpebral conjunctivas were pink. I did the neuro stuff, looking at nystagmus, pupil dilation and tracking, then moved down. Larynx wasn’t deviated, no lymph glands in her neck were palpable. Chest next: palpate, chest expansion was symmetrical, percuss, auscultate. Then her heart: aortic valve, pulmonic valve, Erb’s point, tricuspid, and mitral.
No Murphy’s punch for the kidneys. I remembered Andrew warning us he’d fail any medical student who used so barbaric a method of assessment. If we couldn’t pick a kidney infection by general assessment, apparently we shouldn’t be practicing medicine.
Lymph nodes under her arms. Angie lay down on the couch and I checked for her aorta pulse, listened for gut sounds, percussed, locating liver margins. No masses in her stomach.
Hands: pulses, sensation, strength, reflexes.
Lower limbs: pulses, reflexes, strength, sensation.
Andrew was smiling encouragingly at me when I looked up as I helped Angie to her feet. Balance, proprioception, gait.
I was done in twenty-nine minutes.
Angie seemed as excited as I was, bouncing up and down and hugging me, then she disappeared into the kitchen and I wrapped my arms around Andrew’s neck and kissed him quickly. “Have you eaten?” he asked me quietly.