Kenzi takes off in the morning. Jason and I throw on clothes and walk her back to her car. It all happens in such a rush, I don’t have time to digest last night.
And maybe that’s a good thing.
I have about enough time to wash my mouth and change my clothes before I have to go to work.
“Carpool?” Jason asks, so I oblige.
I fill up a thermos of coffee. We take my car.
I turn on my car and, immediately, we’re blasted with scream-o. I dial my music down to a low, demonic rumble.
“How can you still hear anything?” Jason asks.
“What?” I reply.
“I said, how can you still hear—?”
I arch my eyebrows at Jason.
“Oh. I get it.”
“At least you’re pretty,” I tell him.
The radiator rattles as it tries hard to complete with the thirty degree weather outside. I have to blast the vents open to clear the frost haze from the window.
I keep the music on so he doesn’t try to talk to me. It’s too early in the morning, I haven’t had coffee yet, and I’m certain we both smell like sex.
I feel hungover. Not drunk hungover—emotionally hungover. Like last night was a bizarre dream. Like I didn’t spend all night with Kenzi moaning in my ear and Jason swearing in my bed.
It seems too insane to be real.
We split at the hospital, and I work off the feeling. A couple of hours in, one of the nurses lets me know that Otto Stratton is waiting for me in Room 122. I go in—in doctor mode now—and greet the family. Kenzi has brushed up; she’s washed her face, combed her hair, and thrown on some clean clothes. She also avoids eye contact, which I think has something to do with the fact that Pearl is watching her like a hawk. Pearl isn’t an idiot, and probably has suspicions about what her daughter was up to all night.
I turn my attention to the one person I can control: my patient. Otto has warmed up a little to me today. He’s a sweet kid, and smart, capable of talking me through all of his symptoms. His accent is funny—some American-English hybrid—but I like it. Strange is my language.
I do have a hard time ignoring the fact that there’s something naggingly familiar about Otto. But I push it aside for now.
We go through the standard checkup before I order a round of blood tests and an MRI so we can get to work.
Then I leave them to it. I spend most of my day in the critical care wing, visiting with patients, going over labs, training my residents. I have to coax one of my residents down when she nearly stabs a patient through trying to draw blood.
White-coat life isn’t always glamorous.
Jason has surgery at two, and golden child isn’t answering my texts, so I have to hunt for him.
I find him in an empty, dark exam room, slumped forward in the chair, lips parted. “Resting” his eyes.
We both were up all night fucking. We’re both exhausted. I get it. But that doesn’t mean that I have to put up with it.
I flick on the light and kick him in the shin. It wakes him with a start.
“You have surgery soon,” I tell him and toss the file into his lap. “Drink some coffee.”
“No can do,” he says as he starts to thumb through the file. “Stimulants make my hands shake.”
“Yeah, well, I’m pretty sure falling asleep on the operating table is bad for the patient, too.”
He glances up at me and flashes me a grin. “Just getting a little REM, baby. I’m bright-eyed and bushy-tailed now.”
Things I hate about Jason King: he’s right. He does look bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Brighter than me, if I’m being honest, and I’m already on my third cup of coffee of the day.
Jason King is not made for hospitals. He wants to be saving the world like Indiana fucking Jones. He’d be happy joining the Peace Corps or Doctors Without Borders and jetting off to some third-world country. He’s said as much—multiple times.
But when your father owns an incredibly lucrative medical center, you don’t have much of a choice in the matter. It’s his legacy to work here until his father retires, at which point, he’ll fill the old man’s shoes.
Circle of life and nepotism. Some of us are born with golden spoons. That’s just the way the world works, and I’ve lived with that chip my whole life.
Doesn’t mean I have to stand for his laziness, while the world just falls into his lap.
He looks at me in a way I can tell that there’s something brewing behind those blue eyes. Finally, he says, “So…last night was pretty wild, huh?”
My belt buzzes. Thank God. I’m not ready to have this conversation with him.
I lift the pager. “I’ve got to take this.”
“Sure,” he says, “we can talk later.”
Or never, I think. We can talk never.
