In Too Deep(76)

After two hours, the clinic closed down for lunch, and I headed back over to the ER after a ten-minute break where I exchanged a few text messages with Mark. I planned on taking my lunch after my shift was over, so I wanted to see if I could tag along with Dr. Morrison on any more cases. Instead, almost as soon as I waved to Cassandra, I heard the voice I was not looking forward to in the least. "Well well, back from baby butt duty, Pure-D?"

I hated Dr. Green's nickname for me. He's a good doctor, a clinical genius in a lot of ways, and one of the best in the entire state at what the ER docs jokingly called "meatball surgery," stabilizing patients and keeping them alive long enough for the other surgeons to take over.

I'd seen him take a teenage gunshot victim and in the middle of the ER, crack her sternum open, pinching the woman's pulmonary vein closed by hand while applying what amounted to super glue to hold it closed before she bled out. The girl ended up with a seven-inch scar that I'm sure would make her want to wear high necked shirts for the rest of her life, but she was at least alive.

Still, Dr. Green was an * with a juvenile sense of humor. My second shift in the ER, after mistakenly leaving my bra behind in one of the staff changing rooms, he had settled on my nickname. Dredging the back alleys of his mind, he tied in my bra size with my last name, and then some old movie or another he watched where a character uses the phrase "Pure-D white." And so my nickname was born. Since then, I've never taken off any of my underwear in the staff changing rooms.

At least I wasn't Dr. Green's only target of harassment. Almost every intern, volunteer, or doctor who couldn't threaten his position as an ER institution had something about them he could comment on. His list of complaints in HR was a mile long, and the one time I had gone up to talk to them, the woman who took my complaint just nodded. "Let me give you some advice," she told me after reading over my carefully handwritten form. "Glen Green is never going to get himself fired from this hospital unless you can find pictures of him with his dick out around the underage candy stripers. He's too damn good, and he's happy down there in the ER. The administration deals with him because he's pulled more miracles out of his ass in the past two years than most doctors do in an entire career. So they put up with him, and he knows he's never going to be promoted past head attending physician of the ER."

"It's still not right," I said, sighing. "This isn't some stupid medical TV show. What's next, he walks around limping with a cane and popping drugs, whacking people in the gut or back of the knee whenever he feels like it?"

The HR woman snorted and balled up my report. Before I could say anything, she tossed it in the trash. "I just saved your career, Miss White. Dr. Green is a total jackass, yes. But if this goes in his file, he's going to make your life a living hell until you complete your PA studies, and then he's going to torpedo your chances anywhere within a three state radius by slipping a very unflattering note into your student files right before you graduate. I've seen him do it before. So keep your head down, put up with his shit, and tell yourself that in about two years you can be done with him."

So I put up with it, Pure-D and all. "Clinic duty was fine, Dr. Green," I replied in my best professional voice. "I just wanted to get some more observations and work done around here until the end of my shift in two hours."

"So you can go get a bunch of micks drunk and give the evening shift work to do," Green replied, grabbing another chart and tossing it to me after glancing it over. "There, go pull your weight. Even a student could handle this one."

I didn't even reply, catching the chart on the fly and turning around. It was easier that way.





* * *



Mark





After Sophie left for work, I headed back to my apartment in the Park District to change clothes. As I drove, I found myself thinking about her, a small smile on my face. Besides being smart, she was more beautiful than she realized, with long brown hair and green eyes that grew darker when she was aroused. And the sex......

Distracted by the memories of the night before, I almost hit the truck in front of me, slamming on the brakes on my Mercedes just in time. The racing wheels reacted quickly, and I stopped just a few inches from the rear end of an F-150, the driver even opening his door to stick his head out and check there was nothing wrong. "My fault," I said, sticking my head out the window. "Gathering wool."

"Be careful, man!" the driver yelled back, slamming his door and stomping on his accelerator when the light turned green. I just let him go, he wasn't worth my trouble. Still, I drove the rest of the way back to my apartment carefully, parking inside the covered garage before taking the elevator up to the eighteenth floor. It wasn't the penthouse, but my condominium overlooking the Park was nice, and most of my neighbors worked in businesses far different from mine.

The guy above me was a venture capitalist, while the woman down the hall was a local television personality, who'd held a two person "welcoming party" in my condo with me about two days after I moved in. We barely spoke to each other now. After about the fourth time I turned her down for a repeat performance, she finally got the message. She wasn't angry or anything about it, although I could tell she was a bit peeved that I wasn't more star struck. Still, she had a steady stream of bed partners when she wanted them, and I had the same. She just wasn't my type.