Page 3 of Night Shift

Turning my face from those in the room, I leaned down and grasped my knees for support. His words reverberated against my skull. Darkness fringed my vision as a memory of someone else saying those same words haunted me. I exhaled slowly, regaining a semblance of composure amid the commotion.

“I’ll be right back,” I barked at the security officers. “I need to take care of my wrist where his nails dug into my skin.” Fleeing to an adjacent room, I cleaned my wrist with an antiseptic wash. Luckily, he hadn’t broken the skin. I sure as hell didn’t want to have to report an injury incident and deal with all the medical evaluations and follow-ups.

I took a few minutes to calm down and shove his words into the locked box within my mind where I kept so many other dark memories.

No, this definitely was not a good first day.

When I returned to the drunken man’s room, we administered more medication and were finally able to subdue him enough to get him back to CT for a successful scan. This time, I accompanied the patient alongside security, carrying extra medication in case he became combative again. Some people had an extremely high tolerance for sedatives.

Once we had the monster back in his room and settled, I checked on my other patients to see how they were doing. Thankfully, their cases were less complicated. One of the patients had jammed his toe pretty badly by kicking a bedpost on his way to the bathroom. We were waiting for the X-ray results to determine if there was a fracture. The other patient had been suffering from an upset stomach since last night. We still needed to check the results of her blood work, but she would most likely receive a GI cocktail shortly. First, though, I needed to perform an oral challenge to ensure she would be able to keep it down, because she had reported three episodes of vomiting over the last twenty-four hours. Since these results were going to take some time, I notified my charge nurse that everyone was tucked in and that I would be going on break.

When I entered the break room, I was relieved to find it empty. The space was modest in size and designed for function. The walls, painted a soothing shade of pale yellow, had an eclectic mix of motivational posters and funny hand-drawn illustrations that made me laugh despite this hellish first shift. Contributions from various staff members, I guessed. In one corner of the room stood a large whiteboard filled with shift schedules and important announcements. At the bottom was a playful doodle left by someone seeking to lighten the mood.

As I milled around the well-lived-in space, I reflexively rolled my shoulders to relieve the tension that never seemed to leave. In the middle of the room sat a long, sturdy table surrounded by mismatched chairs. Along one wall there was a small kitchenette area, equipped with a microwave that had seen better days, a coffee machine that had to be the lifeline of the department, and a refrigerator stuffed with quick meals and energy drinks.

The far end of the room housed a couple of worn but comfortable-looking couches, flanked by a small bookshelf filled with an odd assortment of medical journals, outdated magazines, and a few well-thumbed novels. Sitting on top of an issue of the Journal of Hematology & Oncology was a medical romance book with a Dr. McDreamy on the cover. Only in a hospital break room would that be normal.

The silence was a welcome change, considering how this shift had started. But just as I was grabbing my food from the fridge, I heard the door open behind me. I couldn’t stop myself from letting out a soft, audible sigh. “So much for a quiet break,” I mumbled.

With my lunch bag and bottle of water in hand, I turned around and smacked right into a solid figure. The impact sent the bag tumbling from my hands. Standing before me was the same doctor who had been barking orders at me earlier. His presence dominated the small room just like it had the trauma room. His air of indifference made it even more impossible not to notice him. He didn’t even flinch or apologize; he merely straightened his coat as if I were the one who had intruded into his personal space.

“Hello,” I managed to squeak out, mustering politeness despite his rudeness. As I bent down to retrieve my lunch, I realized my face was inches away from his crotch and jumped back into a standing position, nearly launching the bag across the room.

“You must be new here,” he responded in a dismissive tone, his eyes scanning the room rather than focusing on me.

I tried my best not to be a smart-ass but couldn’t resist. “And you must have forgotten what they taught you in your manners class at doctor’s school. Normally, when you run into someone, you apologize, or if someone says hello, you say hi back,” I said, my grin a thin veil hiding my annoyance.

He shot back, “I must have missed that class in—what did you call it—doctor’s school? I think I was too busy learning lifesaving procedures to attend that one.”

“Ah, so lifesaving trumps basic human interaction? I’ll make a note of that in my Common Sense for Doctors handbook.”

He chuckled, something I imagined he rarely did. “Common Sense for Doctors? Now, that’s a book I want to read. Did you write it during your How to Survive Encounters with Arrogant Doctors nursing class?”

I laughed, raising my chin. “It’s a personal project that I’m still working on. Your type is actually discussed in Chapter One: ‘How to Identify a Doctor with an Overinflated Ego.’”

He smirked and eyed me curiously for a moment. “I’m honored to be your muse. But tell me, does Chapter Two cover ‘How to Charm Said Doctors’?”

“Only in the appendix,” I replied, spinning around in an attempt to hide my flushed face. I headed to the table. “It’s a short reference.”

I found a seat and plopped my lunch bag down onto the table, embarrassed yet oddly intrigued by the sharp exchange. As I sat there, trying to steady my rattled nerves, Dr. Thorin’s voice lingered in my ears. Deep and resonant, the timbre had flowed down my spine and into my most intimate places. It had a panty-melting quality that was impossible to ignore. I found myself thinking absurdly that he could read the dictionary aloud, and I would be utterly enraptured, hanging on every syllable. Damn, his voice alone was auditory erotica, sending a thrill through me that was both unexpected and unsettling.

Famished and flustered, I savagely rummaged through my food.

“Did you bring anything good tonight?” he asked in a muffled voice.

When I glanced back, I gulped at the sight of his muscular ass. He was bent over, with his head stuck in the fridge. And, oh my God, what a magnificent ass it was. Nearly choking as I salivated, I coughed out, “What was that?”

With a meal-prep container in hand, he pulled his head out of the fridge and asked again, “Did you bring anything good tonight?” I hadn’t noticed before, but he was tall and ruggedly handsome. When he stood upright, his head towered over the fridge, and the first thought that popped into my head was, I would climb him like a tree.

Shaking off that image, I reached into my lunch bag and pulled out an oven-roasted turkey sandwich, a bag of chips, and an apple. With a shrug, I lifted my sandwich into the air, almost as if I was offering him a bite, and said, “I have a ‘sammich,’ chips, and an apple.”

He rolled his eyes and gave me an exasperated sigh. I immediately wondered if I had said something stupid. Did he think I was actually offering him my food? Was I offering him my food? What the hell was I doing with my hands?

“What did you call it?” he asked in a tone somewhere between sarcastic and genuinely curious.

“A sam-mitch,” I pronounced, emphasizing each syllable. “It’s what my mother used to call them when I was younger. It’s just a stupid word that kind of stuck with me.”

“And your name is Sam,” he noted, more as a statement than a question.

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