by Kaylin Evans
“Why’s it your responsibility to take on that bully?” he asks.
I take a deep breath. Here goes nothing.
“My dad is a gambling addict,” I say. “Well, really he’s just an addict—doesn’t much matter what he’s addicted to. First it was alcohol, but it’s pretty damn hard to be a functioning alcoholic, and he was raising my sister and I alone so he managed through sheer force of will—and AA—to give it up. I have to give him credit for that.”
“It’s no small feat,” Sawyer agrees.
“But apparently he missed the part of AA where they teach you that sobriety includes avoiding other addictive and destructive behaviors. He stopped going to meetings and started gambling instead,” I go on. “There’s a casino not far from where I grew up that he just loves to blow all his money at, and he’s been known to waste a day in internet cafés like the one up the street too.”
“So it was personal,” Sawyer says.
I can feel myself getting riled up all over again, and I can’t help it. “They’re illegal. They operate in this stupid loophole that everybody knows is bullshit—‘I’m just here to buy time on the internet, oh, and you say I get a few pulls of the digital slot machine thrown in? Hell, I might as well.’”
“I’ve never been in one of those places before today,” Sawyer says. “I knew they were shady but I didn’t know that’s how they work.”
“I wish I didn’t know as much as I do about them,” I say. “I know I overreacted back there, so thanks for dragging me out before things got ugly. I just got so angry when I saw that sleazy place in this sleepy, small town. There’s nowhere on earth that people won’t try to scam and take advantage of you, is there?”
Sawyer shrugs. “I bet there are no internet cafés in Antarctica.”
I laugh—I can’t help it, and I appreciate it. Who knew Sawyer Stone, of all people, could add some levity to this situation without making the whole thing a joke?
“I don’t know,” I say. “There’s a pretty big penguin population there and they’re already wearing little tuxes. Odds are at least a few of them are Blackjack dealers.”
Sawyer gives me a sympathetic smile, then surprises me by reaching across the table to take my hand. “It’s tough when you have to be the grown-up when you’re dealing with your own parents. My mom was never around much, always working to support my brothers and me, and I never knew my dad.”
“I’m sorry. Hey, maybe it’s better that way,” I say. I’ve had more than a handful of times in my life when I wished I never knew my dad, but the moment the words are out of my mouth, they sound callous. “I didn’t mean–”
“I know what you meant,” he says. “It’s okay.”
“So,” I say, clearing my throat and intending to change the subject, “I saw that you have a Whipple on the board tomorrow. That’s a tough surgery. You ready?”
Sawyer sits back, all that hot doc energy surging back into him. “Are you kidding me? I was born to do Whipples. But if you don’t have anything going on and want to scrub in, I guess I wouldn’t mind an extra set of hands.”
By the time we leave the sub shop, something has shifted between Sawyer and me. It’s weird, like I’m seeing him as human for the first time since we met and not just as a rival who also happens to be a bit of a womanizing scumbag.
Don’t get me wrong… Sawyer Stone is still very much a womanizing scumbag. But I can see a glimmer of humanity beneath the surface—look carefully or you’ll miss it.
8
Sawyer
I walked out of Atomic Sub that afternoon thinking Alyssa and I had worked something out between us.
Her walls had come down, not entirely voluntarily, but she was real with me for the first time since we met—not the stuck-up workaholic overachiever personality that she puts on every time we’re at the hospital, but the real Alyssa. She told me about her shitty dad, I told her about my absent one. We ate subs. Life was great.
And then as I was scrubbing in to start that Whipple the next day, she breezed into the scrub room with all her walls back up and fortified more than ever. She made me recite all the steps of the surgery—and let me tell you, there are a lot—and then before we even got into the OR, she asked me twice if I really was prepared to take the lead.
On my own damn surgery.
Yeah, turns out that no matter how many meals we share, she’s still going to be going for my jugular when it comes to competing over the damn Chief of Surgery position. And that’s fine—if she wants every day to be a who can show off the most competition, I’ll bring my A game.
I kicked ass when it came to the Whipple, along with every other surgery I’ve had scheduled over the last couple of weeks, and I think everyone but Alyssa is starting to notice that I’m more than just a pretty face—I’ve actually got the skills to back up my trash talk in the OR.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t do much for me when it comes to non-surgical job duties, like the hospital-wide Valentine’s Day event that is so not my wheelhouse.
Little kids with cute Valentine’s shoe boxes?
Passing out candy from a bucket?
Yeah, not really my scene, but in October when some of the staff from pediatrics heard that parents around here aren’t too comfortable letting their kids Trick or Treat the usual way because of the surrounding forests, they talked the senior Dr. Cane into hosting a safe alternative. It was such a hit, now we’re hosting community outreach events for every holiday.
So here I am, in the OR twenty minutes after my shift ended, stringing up heart banners and string lights with a couple of nurses.
One of them is in a bubblegum pink dress that would be a hell of a lot sexier if the skirt was six inches shorter. The other is, umm…
“Cupid, Trish, really?” I tease her, holding one end of the lights while she tapes up the other.
“Don’t make fun,” she pouts. “The kids are going to love it. Anyway, where’s your festive holiday outfit?”
I look down at my standard navy scrubs and shrug. “Since when is Valentine’s Day a dress-up holiday?”
“Oh, look at the party pooper.”
I turn toward the door and find Alyssa in pink heart-covered scrubs with a pair of heart-shaped glasses that are way more sexy-librarian than they ought to be. Her mane of wavy hair pulled back into a ponytail completes the look.
“Okay, I guess I could have put in a little more effort,” I admit, and Cupid comes over and hangs a red lei around my neck that she found lord-knows-where.
“There, that’s better,” she says.
“Well, I brought candy,” Alyssa adds. “Using our surgical bowls was a hit at Halloween… think that’s too macabre for Valentine’s Day?”
“Nah, it’s on theme for a hospital event,” I point out.
She dumps the bags of candy into a couple big, stainless steel bowls and divides them evenly among the four of us, and not long after that, the kids start coming around.
There are a surprising number of them, like every kid in Hemlock Hills showed up, and a good number of their parents trail behind them, either nagging their kids to be polite and say thank you, or else deeply absorbed in their chance at some adult conversation with fellow Valentine’s Day chaperones.
For the most part, I just hang back, letting the girls handle the candy and the Valentine’s cards. They’re better at the whole kid thing than I am, anyway—I was the baby of my family and when I was growing up I spent a lot of time hanging around my older brothers and their friends instead of kids my own age.
Besides, there’s a reason I’m not a pediatrician—I don’t speak kid. Half these youngsters sound like they’re talking in code, and the under four set don’t even sound like they’re speaking English half the time.
Alyssa and the scrub nurses do a valiant job of trying to decipher every kid who comes to us for candy, and they figure it out a surprising amount of the time. Whenever they get stuck, Alyssa just says, “I love your Valentine box!”
After about ten minutes, a little girl in a purple tutu comes skipping up the hallway singing something that sounds like it’s vaguely to the tune of ‘There Was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe,’ only the words are all different.
“Here’s a cautionary tale of a boy named Billy,” she sang, stopping in front of Alyssa and holding out a tote bag with a puffy paint heart drawn on it. “Who ran off and climbed the mountain all willy-nilly. Trick or treat!”
Her mom, coming up the hall behind her, chuckles. “Say ‘happy Valentine’s Day,’ Ruby. Halloween was months ago, remember? You were a pirate.”
“Oh, right,” the girl says. “Happy Valentine’s Day!”
“Here you go,” Alyssa says, giving her some candy. “What’s that you were singing? I haven’t heard that song before.”
The little girl looks at her like she was from another planet. “You don’t know that song?”
Alyssa shakes her head. “No, did you make it up?”
“Everybody knows it,” the girl says, shrugging.
Her mom fills in the blanks. “That particular nursery rhyme never made it past the Hemlock Mountains to the general population, I guess.” She corrects her daughter, “Everybody around here knows it.”
“A cautionary tale?” I ask, intrigued now that there’s a grown-up available to act as interpreter. “Is it supposed to be an urban legend or something?”
“More like rural legend,” Trish says.
“It started as fact,” the woman tells us. “A little boy went missing here in the nineties and everyone for miles around was involved in the search. I was about eighteen at the time and I remember how frantic everybody was to find that poor boy.”
“Billy,” the little girl supplies.
“Yeah,” her mom answers. “Only they never did. He sort of grew into a folk tale over the years. I don’t know who made up the nursery rhyme, but all us locals know the words. Ruby, you want to sing the rest of it for them?”
“Okay,” she says, needing no convincing. “Here’s a cautionary tale of a boy named Billy / Who ran off and climbed the mountain all willy-nilly / Got lost and scared, all dark and chilly. / He screamed for his mama loud and shrilly / But nobody heard and they never found poor Billy.”
I look uncomfortably at Alyssa, who has her hands wrapped around her arms like she suddenly caught a chill. She says, “Creepy,” and I have to agree.
Ruby, for her part, seems unaffected. She holds out her tote bag again and asks, “Can I have another mini Snickers?”
Angela fishes one out of the bowl, then Ruby and her mom move along. The hallway is momentarily empty, and the air suddenly feels pressurized. To lighten the mood, I say, “Raise your hand if you knew you were moving to the setting of a horror film.”
“Oh, it’s not that weird,” Alyssa says. “Just a bunch of parents trying to keep their kids safe. Didn’t yours ever lie to you to get you to stay away from something dangerous?”
“Not like that,” I say.
“Poor Billy,” Angela adds.
“Yeah,” Trish says. “But you gotta admit, that song is kind of catchy. Here’s a cautionary tale of a boy named Billy–”
“Cut it out,” I say.
“Are you scared?” she asks, teasing and batting her lashes at me.
“No,” I tell her, then point up the hall. “Here come some more kids.”
I wish I could say that was the last time we heard that creepy little jingle, but it wasn’t. Apparently, it’s a pretty popular earworm around Hemlock Hills.
9
Alyssa
“I know you have an appendectomy scheduled for ten o’clock, but unless it bursts, your appy can wait. I’ve got a breast biopsy patient who’d rather not have to wait around all day to find out whether she’s got cancer.”
It’s bright and early on Monday and Sawyer and I are doing what I’ve come to think of as our morning routine—standing in front of the surgery board and bickering over assignments.
“Can’t you do the biopsy in OR 2?” he asks, sucking down an extra-large cup of coffee to fortify him for the day ahead.
“Owens has a hernia repair scheduled for OR 2,” I say, pointing to the board, where it clearly states Dr. Owens—10:15 a.m.—inguinal hernia repair. “Why don’t you just switch with me? I’ll probably be done before you even finish peeing out all that damn coffee.”
“You’re just jealous of my massive bladder,” he says. “I can’t swap my appy because I have a hysterectomy consult scheduled for the afternoon.”
“But–”
I’ve got about five more reasons why my patient needs to be the first one in the OR this morning, but before I can give them, the hospital chief, the elder Dr. Cane, suddenly appears behind us, his heavy hands coming down on our shoulders. I nearly jump out of my white coat as he lets out a sigh and says, “What are we fighting about today, doctors?”
As soon as I get over the scare, shame washes over me—bickering like a child with one of my coworkers, and within earshot of the chief, no less.
“We were just discussing the surgery board,” I say, immediately snapping into professional mode. “Trying to figure out how to make it the most efficient.”
“Fighting over ORs,” Chief Cane says. “I suppose that’s my fault for foolishly hiring more surgeons than we have operating rooms. Still, I hoped you two would have learned how to work together by now. How long has it been—six months?”
I do the math in my head, but it’s Sawyer who’s the next to speak. “Yes, sir. You’re right—we need to do better.”
Kiss-ass.
“I have an idea that might help,” Chief Cane says. “A sort of team-building exercise. Will you both be free by five o’clock?”
“I will,” I say.
“Should be,” Sawyer answers.
“Good,” Chief Cane replies. “See me in my office and I’ll fill you in. Oh, and Dr. Stone, let Dr. Grant do her biopsy—you know that procedure takes less than an hour.”
He walks off in the direction of the elevators and the only thing stopping me from doing a victory dance with excessive celebration is the fact that I’m still sort of stuck on that team-building exercise idea.
“What do you think that’s all about?” I ask as I reach for the felt eraser and start rearranging the board.
“Trust falls?” Sawyer guesses. “I don’t have a clue.”
“Well, I think we need to at least pretend we don’t hate each other’s guts while we’re at work from now on,” I say. “The last thing I want is for Chief Cane to decide I can’t handle myself with the rest of the surgical staff.”
“I don’t hate your guts,” Sawyer says. “Although I do hate that you just bumped my surgery.”
I roll my eyes. “Oh, go get your Guinness World Record-holding bladder another cup of coffee and by the time you’re back, it’ll be your turn in the OR.”
The rest of my day goes pretty smoothly—mostly because I have very little reason to bump into Sawyer and his arrogance, which takes up twice the amount of space that he does.
In fact, everything’s going so peachy that I nearly forget about Chief Cane’s request and I’m heading for the elevator at the end of my shift when Sawyer catches up to me.
“Hey,” he says. “How’d the biopsy turn out?”
I narrow my eyes at him, trying to figure out if he actually cares or if he’s just looking for a way to get under my skin. “Won’t know for another day, but I bribed the pathologist to bump my tissue sample to the head of the line.”
“Bribery?” Sawyer says, feigning shock. “Who are you?”
The elevator arrives and I step on, Sawyer trailing behind me. We both reach for the instrument panel at the same time, our fingers fumbling over each other. I reach for 1 and Sawyer beats me to it, pressing 3, and that’s when I remember the special, mysterious exercise Chief Cane has for us. I suppress a groan as the elevator begins to ascend.
“So is this biopsy patient a friend of yours or something?” he as
ks. “You’re going to an awful lot of trouble for her.”
“How would you like to have to wait a week or more to find out whether you have cancer?” I say. What I don’t add is that my mother had breast cancer… and so did my grandmother.
Sawyer just grunts. “Valid point. My surgery went well, thanks for asking.”
“I would hope so,” I say. “Any attending worth their salt should be able to do an appy blindfolded.”
“Is that a challenge?” he asks, then the elevator comes to a stop and the door slides open.
“Nope,” I say, “and let’s just pray whatever Chief Cane has in store for us is better than a blindfolded appy.”
“Giving or receiving?” Sawyer tosses back with a smirk. I ignore the double entendre, leading the way as if he didn’t just save my ass from missing a meeting with the chief.
Xander Cane is deep in concentration at his computer when we arrive, a deep furrow between his brows and about a ream’s worth of papers scattered across his desk. There’s a half-eaten sandwich sitting on it too, and Chief Cane’s suit jacket is draped over the back of a chair. He doesn’t look like he’s going home any time soon, nor does he look like he’s moved from his desk in quite a while.
When he stays absorbed in his work, not looking up, I knock softly on the door frame. “Chief?”
“Dr. Carter, how can I help you?” he says, then recognition flashes in his eyes. “Oh right, I told you to come with Dr. Stone.”
“Present and accounted for,” Sawyer says, nudging me out of the way as he steps into the doorway. I stand my ground, refusing to be cast aside even when his cologne wafts my way and softens my resolve.
“Come in,” Chief Cane says. “Both of you sit.”
He stands up and retrieves his jacket from the chair, putting it on and running a hand through his salt-and-pepper hair. I sit in the same chair that I interviewed for my job in, and with Sawyer sitting next to me, this feels like round two of a fiercely competitive hiring process.