by Penny Wylder
For once, for tonight, I can forget about all the ifs ands or buts. I can just be with him, here and now. I can just be his.
And for this one night, it’s enough.
10
A few days after our sleepover—one I explained away to my parents by pretending that one of my friends had come back from her trip to South Africa with little notice—I still can’t get Russ out of my head. We spent the whole night barely sleeping, waking up again and again just to touch each other, as if both checking we were still there. And then those touches would turn into more, with him slowly exploring me, his hand slipping between my thighs and stroking me over and over, sliding inside me to find my G-spot, until I came undone with a cry.
By the morning, I was aching and sore, especially since we woke up only for him to roll me on top of him, letting me ride him slow and steady until we both came at nearly the same moment.
But now, it’s been four days since, and I’m dying to touch him again. I want to have nights like that more often. Hell, I want all my nights to be like that, safe at his side. Knowing I can reach out and touch him whenever I want to, and that he can do the same to me. I want him to whisper commands in my ear the way he loves doing, telling me exactly what to do, where to bend, how to move against him.
I want him to teach me everything he knows about my body, and I want to explore every inch of his too. But we can’t. That beautiful one night together is fading behind us, and we’re back in reality. Back in the daily grind of desperate kisses when we can steal them, and longing stares when we can’t.
Hell, for the past four days we haven’t even been able to steal enough time together for a quickie in the stairwell or to make each other come in the break room. I feel antsy, jittery. It’s like Russ is a drug I never knew existed, and now that I’ve tried a few hits—and then some, really—I can’t go without it. I’m addicted to him, I’m pretty sure. I’ve always read about how chemical attraction can be as addictive as some drugs, but I’ve never believed it until now. With guys I’ve dated in the past, I enjoyed the hookups, but I never craved seeing them again. I never missed them every second we spent apart.
My phone is filled with texts from Russ, some just asking about my day, others explicit and dirty, dirty enough that when he texted me this morning I had to duck into the bathroom in the nurse’s area and lock myself in a stall for some alone time.
But it looks like any alone time I’d be able to steal has come to an end. Because when I step out of the bathroom, somehow still jittery and anxious even in spite of the fact that I just fingered myself to orgasm thinking about Russ’s hands on my body, the whole wing is in an uproar. I stop one of the passing nurses—Lionel, who’s still angry at me, I think, but at least he speaks to me on occasion now.
“What’s going on?” I ask. Without thinking about it, I start to follow him, automatically, toward where everyone else seems to be rushing.
“Emergency,” he manages. “There was some kind of train accident a few blocks away. They’re bringing about two dozen patients in now with smoke inhalation damage, blunt trauma, all kinds of stuff.”
My face pales. Shit.
Lionel is jogging now, and I keep pace with him. When we reach the main area where our nursing staff director passes out assignments, it’s flooded with people. Everyone on-call or not already attending to patients who require immediate attention seem to be here. Our boss starts to bark out assignments. When my name is called, I dart out to receive a clipboard and my assignments.
For once, I’m given just as much work as anyone else. It doesn’t feel good, this time, though. Because right now, so many people are hurting. But I’ll do whatever I can to help save as many as we can.
I spend the next few hours on high alert, rushing between patients and rooms. The hospital is flooded—normally we don’t have this much room for people, but we make do, the way we’ve been trained to in events like this. I don’t envy Russ right now. Down in the OR, he’ll be dealing with a lot of the more grievous injuries. Up here in pediatrics, we don’t get as many of the life-or-death cases. A lot of the kids with smoke inhalation damage, though, who need stabilization, and families with broken limbs and minor concussions. Things they still need to be treated but that won’t kill them, as long as we do our jobs.
My adrenaline runs high all day, throughout the chaos. It helps keep me focused, working through everyone in my roster in a steady rotation. It feels like my on call beeper buzzes every other second, though, as patients request everything from more painkillers or medical attention to waters and toothbrushes. By the time the early evening rolls around, the balls of my feet actually throb with every step I take. I’m pretty sure if I checked my phone, it would tell me I’d run the equivalent steps to a marathon around these halls today.
I’m swinging back through the central nurses’ hub to pick up a chart for a doctor visiting a young couple when I run smack dab into my father. He looks grim, but then again, we all do today. It’s one of those days.
“I need you with me up on the top floor,” he says.
My face blanches. The top floor is where the private rooms are, an area that people have to pay a huge chunk of change to be treated in. “Is it bad?” I ask, reaching around him for the clipboard I’d been after in the first place.
“Just some scrapes and bruises. But it’s one of our board members herself. I need you to make sure she’s comfortable. I talked to your supervisor already. They’ll let you go early from here to handle her.”
I scowl and cross my arms. “You can’t be serious. Dad, we need all hands on deck down here.”
“I need someone I can trust to watch over her.”
My chest tightens. He trusts me? But that’s not enough. It can’t be. “If you trust me, Dad, then listen to me right now. I am needed right where I am.”
Dad takes another step closer to me, and leans in to whisper something where the rest of the nurses flooding around us won’t be able to overhear. “Maggie, most of these people don’t even have healthcare. You need to focus on the people who matter, the ones who can further your place in the world. How else are you going to get your name out there? I’m trying to help you here, to ensure that the right people notice the hard work you’re doing.”
I take a step back from him, anger rising inside me. Russ is right. I can’t let my father dictate my life for me anymore. I need to stand up for what I believe in.
I need to stop making excuses.
“Everyone is important, Dad. There are no right people, there are just people. Some we can save, and others we may not be able to, but we can try. Right now, the ones I can do the most good helping are right here on this floor.”
“You’re being naive if you think any of this matters in the grand scheme of things,” my father snaps.
“Of course it matters!” I yell, not caring who hears me. “People’s lives matter. Not just money or status.” Other nurses have stopped to stare. Lionel straight up gapes at me.
My father glances around at them all, his face going red. “Keep your voice down. It’s unseemly to behave this way in public.”
“Screw behaving,” I reply. “Get out of my way. I’m going to do my job. Unless you’d care to fire me?” I crook an eyebrow at him.
Someone, I can’t tell who, actually cheers. My father looks around again, his expression shifting into worry. But I know him. He’s not actually worried about what any of these people think about him. He’s just worried that our fight might somehow impact his bottom line here. Wealth and status, that’s all he cares about.
I realize it wasn’t just Russ hiding his homelessness from my father in med school. My father had to have willfully ignored how much his friend was suffering. You don’t just not notice something like that. Not unless you’re completely self-absorbed and oblivious to the reality of life for everyone around you.
But when I storm off, he doesn’t intercept me or try to stop me. Maybe he really will fire me later, who knows. I’m beyon
d caring at this point. If he lets me go, fine. In the meantime, I’m going to help as many people as I can.
Before I even leave the wing, though, someone claps me on my shoulder. Lionel, I realize with a start when I look up. He’s grinning. “Good to know the whole family isn’t completely heartless,” he comments.
“Guess it’s not a genetic thing,” I reply, a smile forming on my face too. Then we part ways, both of us back to our own jobs.
I think Dad will finally give up. That this will be the end of him trying to control me. But a few minutes later, I emerge from another call room to find him crossing the hall toward me once more, a furious look on his face.
“If you think you can just talk to me like that,” he starts. But he doesn’t finish. Because a moment later, a familiar voice interrupts from a nearby room.
“John? That you?” Russ emerges from a patient’s room. He must have taken a break from the OR to come visit one of this post-operative patients up here on our floor. It happens every now and then.
One glance at Russ and my heart squeezes in sympathy. His face is drawn, lines forming around his mouth and across his forehead from the stress. His forehead shines with sweat, and his hair is a mess, sticking almost all the way into his eyes. I resist a crazy urge to reach up and brush it back from his face. That would be the last thing I need right now, for Dad to suddenly realize what’s going on between Russ and me, when he’s already in a furious mood.
I avert my gaze, and force my breathing to calm, my heart rate to steady. I can’t afford to give away anything I’m feeling. Like the way my body is already tilting toward Russ, drawn into his gravitational pull almost against my will.
“Russ. Perhaps you can help me talk some sense into this girl.” My father crosses his arms and continues to glare in my direction.
I shoot Russ a guilty glance and look away again quickly. Shit. The last thing I want is to get into it right now. Or to mess up Russ’s life, if he defends me. “Just let it go, Dad,” I try, but Dad’s already talking over me, clearly not content to let sleeping dogs lie.
“I was just telling Maggie that she needs to get her priorities straight. Jane Showman is up on the top floor in her usual private suite, and she has some scrapes that need tended to. It’s something a nurse can handle on their own. That nurse ought to be my own daughter, to demonstrate how seriously this hospital takes it when one of our own board members is injured. But Maggie is insisting she can’t be bothered—”
“That is not what I meant, Dad, and you know it. I’m needed here. With the people who have actual emergencies right now.”
“We have a huge staff who are more than capable of treating a few wounded poor people on their own—”
“Let me stop you right there, John,” Russ says, before I can get another word in edgewise. I stop bothering to try and avert my gaze. I straight up shoot pointed stares at Russ now, all but waving my hands at him.
Stop, I want to yell, but I don’t dare. Don’t do this. Not now, not here. The last thing I want is to get Russ into trouble. Especially over me. Especially when Russ is the one who told me I need to stand up to my father for myself. It should be me arguing this point right now. Me getting into trouble potentially.
But it’s too late. One look at Russ’s face tells me I’m not going to be able to stop him now. He looks angrier than I’ve ever seen him. Like he could punch my father right now.
I’ve never even seen the two of them fight before.
My father looks equally shocked at Russ’s expression, and that’s before Russ even gets a word in.
“Your priorities have been out of line for far too long. You’re better than this, John.” Russ takes a step toward him, and my dad actually flinches, before he gets himself back under control, his emotions under wraps. “Do you remember why we both went to medical school in the first place? Our first year, the year we met, you told me why you were there. What did you say?”
My father’s jaw creaks, he’s gritting his teeth so hard. But he gets the words out. “To make a difference in the world.”
My eyebrows shoot upward. Almost exactly the same reason I went. But I’m nothing like my father.
Am I?
Dad’s already talking, explaining. “But don’t you see, Russ? The way we make the most difference, the most change, is by treating the important people first. The ones who can create a real difference in the world, the ones who can make bigger, more expansive changes than we ever could on our own. We have to play the game in order to win it, I always tell you that.”
“Yeah, well. Maybe I should have disagreed with you sooner,” Russ says, his own expression hard. “This isn’t the way, John. Letting innocent people die to cater to some rich woman with a papercut is not changing the world, and deep down, I think you know that too. Let Maggie do the job she came to this hospital to do.”
My jaw drops.
So does Dad’s. Neither of us have ever heard Russ disagree with him this vehemently. Normally Russ is all polite talk-arounds. But I guess both of us are changing, these days.
“You heard the man,” I say, with a brief smile for Russ.
He flashes me a broad one, not seeming to care if my father notices it, or the way his gaze briefly sweeps over me, before Russ stands aside and gestures for me to pass.
My shoulders tense. I almost expect my father to follow me again. But I stride past, on my way to my next room, and Russ joins me. By the time we emerge again from checking up on that patient, a few minutes later, the hallway is empty, and my father is nowhere to be seen.
11
We make it through the worst of the night. I wind up staying overtime, as do most of the other staff members. I hadn’t noticed before now how isolating it felt to have most of my nursing staff against me, until they weren’t anymore. Now I trade smiles with Heather, a joke here and there with Lionel. A few people bring me coffees throughout the night, and wave me off when I offer to pay them.
“I just never thought I’d live to see the day someone stood up to John Owens like that,” cackled Magda, one of the older nurses on staff, who insisted on buying me an entire donut from the caf. “Made my year, I can tell you.”
But the brief respite Russ and I got from my father doesn’t last for long. A few hours later, as the worst of the emergency rush starts to wind down, a page goes off. Not just a local one, but one throughout the entire hospital. “Margaret Owens. Russell Marks. Report to the director’s office immediately.”
My stomach sinks all the way through my feet and into the floor. Here it comes. The fallout of our decision.
But as nervous as I am to face the music, I don’t regret anything. We made the right decision. No matter what happens now, I’m proud of the work we did here tonight. We helped people, we saved lives. We’re making a difference.
I meet Russ in the stairwell up toward the floor where my father works. He reaches out to catch my hand and squeezes it gently, just once. I squeeze back, and let go before we reach the exit doors.
At Dad’s office, I let Russ knock. I’m too busy wrapping my arms around my midsection, trying not to freak out. I have very rarely ever disobeyed my father in my life. The few times I have dared to stand out in my memory as some of the worst days of my life. I just hope tonight isn’t going to be another of them. I’m so wired on caffeine and adrenaline, shaky from hours upon hours of overtime work, that all I can handle right now is to faceplant headfirst into bed.
You can do this, I tell myself, as Dad calls for us to come in. You can handle him.
I’m surprised, actually, that Dad is still here. Normally by this hour on a weeknight, no matter what was going on in the hospital, emergency or no, he’d already be headed home. I guess he made a special exception so he could be here to murder us when we got off instead.
The office is dark, the only light a desk lamp and the glow of my father’s computer. He’s sitting at his desk, ramrod straight, his hands folded on top of the desktop. He looks calm. Bad sign. The wor
st blowups I’ve ever had with my father have always come when he’s calm.
“Please, shut the door behind you,” he says.
Russ obeys. As for me, I stride over to the nearest chair and practically collapse into it. I know I should probably stay standing, to try and intimidate him or whatnot. But I can barely keep myself upright for another second. I’m exhausted, physically and mentally. Whatever’s coming now, I just want to get it over with.
Russ sinks into the chair beside mine. As for him, despite the bags under his eyes and the tired lines on his face, he looks every bit as stern and unyielding as my father. “You paged us, John?”
“I did.” My father looks from Russ to me, slowly. “You realize I could fire you for what you did earlier, Maggie? Ignoring a direct order from me.”
My mouth goes dry. My fists curl atop my knees. But I keep my chin firm, and nod slowly. “I realize that.”
“And Russ.” His gaze shifts back to his friend’s. “I could say the same for you. Trying to countermand my orders? What were you thinking?”
“Don’t blame him for trying to help me,” I interject. “It’s my fault. I’m the one who ignored your orders.”
“Maggie, it’s fine,” Russ murmurs beside me, but I shake my head.
“No. You shouldn’t have to risk your job for me. I can handle this on my own.” I raise my chin and stare back at my father. “You’re the one who was wrong tonight, Dad. If you want to fire me for having the guts to tell you that to your face, fine, do it. But don’t believe for one second it makes you right somehow.”
My father couldn’t have looked more gob smacked if he’d tried.
Beside me, Russ shoots me an unmistakable smile. A proud one. Like he admires me. And I realize, I admire that part of myself too. I’d finally found the strength I never knew I had or needed before.