The Queen of Hearts(24)
A hand covered my mouth, and I struggled up in terror. “Ethan!” I tried to scream, but I could only manage a garbled “Eeef.”
“Shhh, it’s okay. Don’t yell,” a whispered voice instructed, and the hand on my mouth moved away to my hair.
“Who—”
“It’s me,” Dr. X said quietly. “I’m so sorry I scared you.”
“Oh, but Ethan—” I whispered.
“I took care of Ethan. He’s going to be tied up for a long time. Zadie, I hope I’m not reading you wrong. Is it okay if I’m here?”
“Oh,” I said. “Yes.”
I had a fleeting—well, very fleeting—moment of remorse that Ethan’s one pathetic hour of sleep had been stolen by his own chief for purposes so completely selfish, but then Dr. X kissed me, hyperextending my neck by pulling my hair, his other hand pinning my wrists back against the wall. I had never been so turned on in my life. The adrenaline surge from my fright and my sanity-stealing exhaustion were now fueling a monstrous lust. It was pitch-black in the room, and dead silent, and I barely recognized his whispered voice. I entertained the unpleasant idea that this could be someone else, anybody at all, even, but discarded it. Nobody else had the power to summon Ethan away without repercussion.
The proper thing to do here would have been to scream and slap him sideways, but I did not. Instead I wrenched a hand free and felt his face, realizing how much I had been longing to touch him. Not being able to see him intensified my other perceptions: surely, nothing had ever felt as good as this. I felt myself spinning in giant slow circles; my lips and fingers and toes were tingling. It was like falling in slow motion from a skyscraper: air whooshing past me, but gently, softly, currents of warm, sweet oxygen, somehow still roaring past my ears. There was this terrible urgency, too. Any second now our pagers could go off, Ethan could return, or we could make enough noise to rouse Allison Kalena or Clancy in their adjacent rooms. I grasped Dr. X’s back, feeling the broad muscles that I’d memorized in anatomy class brought to spectacular life under my fingers. I raked my hands through his hair, something I’d wanted to do since I’d first seen him, and closed my eyes against the darkness.
—
When he turned on the light, I was motionless, sprawled on the bed, rendered docile. My hair and skin were both the color of honey in the yellow glow of the little bedside lamp, my lips just parted. I was still breathing quickly. He looked at me for a moment, his expression unreadable, and then bent and kissed my forehead.
“I wish you weren’t so lovely,” he said, and walked out.
Chapter Ten
THE CAPRICIOUS WHIM OF THE TRAUMA GODS
Emma, Present Day
Another Monday on call, another day without Wyatt or Henry or sunshine. Even after years of this routine, I still enjoyed the adrenaline blast of a new case; it was missing my family and missing the outdoors I minded. It was scorching hot outside, but the hospital remained stubbornly climateless, with the same unnatural fluorescent light and the alien sensation of twenty-four-hour time, an endless clock rotating and rotating without the sweet opiate of sleep to break it up. I imagined a giant heart hidden in the mysterious center of the sprawling building, pumping away metronomically, a slave to exigency, with thousands of humans flowing through the corridors and staircases and ORs and ERs like little red blood cells circling through arteries and veins and organs. The same dramas and emergencies and life-altering catastrophes kept happening to new patients, and the same players inside kept working tirelessly to save them or patch them or at least figure out what in tarnation could be wrong with them.
I clipped my pager to my scrubs and headed for the doctors’ lounge, hoping to scrounge a bit of food before I was summoned back to the OR. It was shaping up to be the kind of day where you get thumped from beginning to end; in other words, a fairly normal day on trauma call.
I’d thought there might have been a break after we finished our last case, but just as my team of residents and medical students was sitting down to a very delayed lunch of prepackaged sushi, our pagers went off. These days we carried cell phones in addition to pagers; they’d been converted to summoning devices, thus producing the stimulus-response effect of everyone lurching in dismay at the sound of our ringtones. Mine was standard-issue Apple Marimba, which was foolish because everyone else over the age of thirty had that ringtone too, resulting in all of us reaching for our hips in synchronization whenever anyone else’s phone went off.
By contrast, all the younger doctors and medical students had overly personalized ringtones, so now a cacophony of disparate music blasted through the room, ranging from some narcissistic Kanye West song to that ominous Darth Vader riff. A glance at my screen revealed this one was a gunshot wound.
“Who’s up for the pin?” I asked the team.
We kept a giant map of Charlotte fixed to the wall at the rear of the lounge, back by the dictation booths. Whenever anyone got shot, we stuck a red-topped pin in the map at the location of the shooting, assuming the victim was coherent enough to confirm the spot. If not, we had to rely on EMTs, or, occasionally, news reports. Since this map had been in place more than fifteen years, some areas of the city were so overrun with red pins that they looked like they were hemorrhaging, appropriately enough.
“I’ve got it, Dr. Colley,” said Sanjay Patil, the fourth-year resident. He was one of my favorites, because he was so self-possessed and polite. Many of the male surgery residents made me uneasy with their aggressive joking and their incessant urges to control everything. But Sanjay always kept it professional. I bestowed a small smile on him as we hustled down to the ER.