Own the Wind(25)

Then he opened it to invite: “Talk to me.”

I grabbed the salt, started shaking it on the mound of ground beef in the bowl, took him up on his invitation, and cried, “Get this! Dr. Dickhead wrote the wrong order in the chart, which meant I administered a higher dose of medication than was warranted or even healthy. Then, when it all went down, I overheard him telling the hospital administrator that even though the dose was written down wrong in the chart, he’d verbally given me an order with the right dosage and I’d administered the wrong one, which, Shy, he… did… not.” I slammed the salt down.

The muscle in Shy’s jaw jumped, as it had a tendency to do when he was pissed, which happened often during the times I was ranting about Dr. Dickhead.

I grabbed the pepper and started shaking, ranting on, “Luckily, the error wasn’t so bad it ended in trauma, tears, lawsuits, and loss of employment, just uncomfortable explanations and me tamping down my desire to commit physicianicide, but still!”

I ended my last word on a high-pitched note, slammed the pepper down, grabbed the minced, dried garlic and resumed shaking and blathering.

“The hospital administrator knows he’s a douche. She talked to me for all of, like, five seconds before she nodded and took off. Still, it was a pain in my ass.”

“Tab—” Shy started, but I chattered on right over him.

“Don’t worry. It’s all good. Not only does the administrator know he’s a douche, everyone knows he’s a douche. Even the other doctors think he’s a douche, though they wouldn’t say it out loud. That’s how big a douche he is. And it doesn’t matter what he says, if it comes down to it, it matters what the chart says. Still, I don’t like the idea of how this could have gone bad. Okay, sure, if the dose was crazy wrong, I’d notice it and question it before I administered it so the bad would never be that bad. Still, even not that bad, like today, was no good.”

“Sugar—” Shy tried again, his eyes to the bowl but I kept babbling.

“It’s just him lying about me. That bugs me. Okay, everything about him bugs me but, today, that’s the top of the list of all the one hundred and seven thousand things about him that bug me.”

His gaze came up to mine and he said, “Baby, I want you to rant, get that shit out, process it so you can move on and have a good night, but you’re processing it while ruining our dinner. Gotta say, I prefer it when you ruin our dinner while laughin’ and smilin’, not rantin’ and ravin’.”

My eyes shot down to the bowl and I noticed a not-small mound of garlic on the beef.

Crap.

I felt the garlic taken out of my hand and tipped my head way back to find Shy close.

“Get. Sit on a stool, drink beer, and rant it out. I’ll deal with this,” he ordered gently.

I shook my head and gave him a small smile. “It’s cool, Shy, I’ll fix it.”

He got closer and his voice got gentler when he repeated, “Get.”

I buried the gentleness of his voice in my pit of denial along with how it made me feel. Grabbing my beer, I “got” and moved around him and the bar to haul my bottom up on a stool. I sucked back beer while Shy did his best to shake garlic into the sink.

“What are you gonna do about this motherf*cker?” he asked.

“Suck it up,” I answered, and his head jerked around so he could look over his shoulder at me with narrowed eyes.

I understood this reaction. We were both Chaos. It wasn’t lost on me that any member of Chaos would put up with Dr. Dickhead for about three seconds.

I smiled at him before I told him, “I can’t exactly plant a bomb in his car.”

Shy looked down at the meat, that muscle moving in his jaw, and I knew he was calling up his memory banks to ascertain precisely how to plant a bomb in Dr. Dickhead’s car.

I buried that in my pit of denial too.

“Shy,” I said quietly, and he turned from the sink. He came back to the counter in front of me as I explained, “I knew this was the gig when I took it. It isn’t a secret doctors can be dickheads. They don’t warn you in the textbooks in nursing school, but word gets around. I’m lucky, all the other doctors I work with are great, always have been, even in nursing school. It’s just him. There’s always one.”

“You don’t eat shit, baby,” he told me.

I licked my lip, his eyes dropped to my mouth, that muscle ticked in his jaw again, and I buried that instantly in my pit of denial.

“Life can be shit, Shy, so unfortunately sometimes you have to eat it,” I told him.

“Right, correction,” he returned. “You eat shit until you’re done eatin’ shit and then you find a way so you don’t eat shit anymore.”

I grinned at him. “Okay, how’s this?” I began. “I eat shit until I’m done eating shit then I go to the hospital administrator, share my concerns in an official way, and hope.”

Shy’s hands were forming patties while his eyes remained on me and, again, I knew he didn’t agree with my solution.

When he didn’t say anything, I continued, “Then, if a miracle occurs and he’s prompted to move on, life will be breezy and I’ll smile and laugh while ruining dinner rather than ranting and raving. Work for you?”

“Yeah, sugar, works for me,” he muttered, and I didn’t bury in my pit of denial how much I liked it when he called me “sugar.” This was mostly because it was too big to fit in my pit. And that pit was dug deep, not because I was burying stuff deep, but because Shy gave me so much to bury.