The Queen of Hearts(34)
“We are controlling future trauma populations,” Dr. X said firmly. “But, ah, no need to mention this to Dr. Hollister. Okay, everybody disperse.”
I waited a beat for the dispersal to take place and then stuck out my tongue. He cocked an eyebrow at me and smirked. “Yes, Z?”
I decided not to give him the satisfaction of admitting he’d gotten me. Again. He delighted in coming up with the most preposterous things solely for the fun of messing with me. “Nothing,” I cooed. “I have a ton of work to do.”
“Zadie.”
I turned back, unable to suppress a smile tinged with triumph.
He craned his head toward me, growling directly in my ear. “I’ll help you.”
“Oooh! How nice. In exchange for what?”
“Meet me in my call room in five minutes, you little witch.” He walked off, his long white coat flapping with each lengthy stride. Even looking at the back of his head made me weak with desire. This was likely not the way the medical school had envisioned the student experience, to be sure, but it was a good . . . education.
I gave him the requested five minutes and headed for the stairs. When I opened the door to the stairwell, the hall looked empty. I bolted out and ducked into Dr. X’s room.
Inside, a desk lamp offered a pale circle of light in the windowless space. X was seated at the veneered desk, and rose at my entrance. I took a single step inside and we fell into each other, brutally kissing, tearing at our scrubs, knocking over the lamp and the books piled on his desk. He plunged his hands into my hair, roughly twisting it. My lips parted and I let my head fall back, exposing my throat. I was unaware that I was crying out until he shoved something into my mouth—a sock? an OR mask?—and murmured “Shhh” into my ear. I struggled to breathe through my nose. He turned me away from him, still holding the cloth in my mouth. His other hand was savagely gripping the curve of my hip bone. Our pagers both sounded, and I registered the sound dimly. I struggled and spat the cloth out, but Dr. X, still standing behind me, stifled me by wrapping his arm around my neck so that I could not move my head. With his other hand, he reached up to my face and, with startling gentleness, caressed my cheekbones and eyelids and lips. A drumming noise filled my ears and my head and my chest, the dominating pulse of my blood churning through my carotid arteries. I closed my eyes, my arousal nearly unbearable.
He was motionless behind me except for the fine, soft exploration of his fingers on my immobilized face. The rushing in my ears faded but—oh, no—the drumming noise continued. Grudgingly, I accepted that this must have been the blades of the hospital helicopter, pulsing some ten floors above us, but just audible enough through the ventilation system so that there was never really an escape from the sound of some incoming disaster. Our pagers beeped again.
We stood still for a moment longer, trying to regain our breath, fighting the longing to ignore the summons and give in to what was now a maddening desire. Dr. X swore. The code was doubtless starting by now. He released me and said, “You first. Run.”
I ran. My lips were chapped and swollen, my skin was flushed to an alarming pink, my hair was bunched up in a comb-proof combination of tangles and dreadlocks, and I was hyperventilating in uncontrolled gasps. There was no doubt I’d be of little use to anyone during the trauma code; I’d be lucky not to actively impede it by bursting in and passing out.
When I reached the ER, I slowed to a trot and tried to slip behind the curtain to Trauma Bay 2 as unobtrusively as possible.
This actually proved to be easy. The patient on the table had some sort of ghastly neck injury; he was spraying bright red arterial blood in staccato spurts, which had doused the ceiling, walls, and floors with the force of a fire hose. Everyone in the abattoir appeared to have sustained a direct hit, as they were all bloody to the point of being nearly unrecognizable.
“Continue CPR,” said Allison Kalena to the ER nurse, who was most directly in the line of fire.
“What are you doing?” screamed Clancy at another nurse who was holding a syringe. “Don’t give him any more fucking epinephrine!”
“His heart’s stopping,” the nurse said to Dr. Kalena, ignoring Clancy. “What do you want me to do?”
“He’s going to bleed out faster with the pressors, so hold the epi until we get some more fluid in him,” said Allison. “Where’s our O neg?”
“On the way.”
“Okay, get another quad lumen kit; I’ll add a femoral line, and you guys keep pumping it in. Ah, Zadie,” she said, catching sight of me. “Get up here.”
I obeyed. Dr. Kalena handed me a wad of sterile dressings and instructed, “Hold pressure right here. We might keep him alive long enough to get to the OR.”
“Allison, he’s toast,” Clancy argued. “He must have ripped off every branch of the external carotid. He’s stroked out by now.”
“We can ligate what we have to—he should have good posterior circulation,” she replied, deftly threading a wire through a large needle jutting out of the patient’s groin.
I couldn’t resist. “What happened?”
“Meet Lima Trauma,” Clancy answered. “Pi?ata mishap at his kid’s birthday party—he got gouged through the neck with the splintered end of a stick.”
“Hold CPR,” a voice from the back of the room called. Dr. X appeared. He surveyed the havoc briefly, and noting that the patient did have a heartbeat again—someone had hung the blood and I was still holding on, literally, for dear life—he called out, “Call the OR. We’re going in.”