Page 23 of Paging Dr. Breakup
“No. You have it bad.” Maybe the blood loss caused confusion.
“What?”
“Look, I might have been under anesthesia, but I have enough brain cells left to tell me what saw.” He pursed his lips. “You in denial about Deirdre Steen?”
His neck prickled as his stomach took a dive. “First of all, there’s nothing going on. Second of all”—he glanced toward the door where Louise hovered, ostensibly finishing up paperwork—“you have zero room to talk. Do you want me to go into detail with mylucidobservations about you making eyes at a certain EMT?”
Tuli started to cross his arms but winced at the IVs and straightened his limbs out again. His eyes went wide, then shuttered. “Yep, must be the drugs making me see and say silly things. Forget I said anything. Never mind.”
Two could play this game. “That’s what I thought.”
Exiting the trauma bay, Cal settled in front of a computer in the work area to finish his documentation and add any other orders. On his phone resting next to the monitor, he glanced at a red notification. His shoulders tightened. He had been expecting an email that could disrupt everything, whether he wanted it to or not.
As the message popped up, he blew out a breath and sank down in the seat. It was from his department chair at Harborview, checking in on his timeline for returning. Of course they needed him there, covering shifts. He knew his absence had created a hardship for the team.
What of his absence from the team here?
What about his absence from the person who made the best team with Cal? Who always had.
Scrubbing his hands over his face for what had to be the thousandth time today, Cal turned the phone facedown. He had an entire career waiting for him back in Seattle.
He had… appearances to maintain in Yukon Valley.
This work, these friends, playing pretend with Deirdre—all of it was temporary. A foundation built on melting ice.
For some reason, Calvin wasn’t prepared to sink or drown.
Chapter Nine
Aday later,on Tuesday evening and the first day of April, Deirdre took a shaky breath as Calvin pulled up in his gray mud-and-slush spattered rental sedan in front of her home. Showtime.
Tuli had been transferred to Fairbanks late this morning when the weather finally broke. He was reportedly stable and undergoing additional surgery and testing.
Before he left, Tuli apparently had recovered enough blood volume to power both brain and mouth if his social media posts were any indication. He rode a wave of renewed energy, even convening an ad hoc Breakup Festival’s hospice booth subcommittee in his ED room at morning shift change.
He and the committee members assigned jobs for the hospital leaders at the Breakup Festival. She’d known because she had attended the meeting.
When he’d dangled the possibility of Deirdre staffing a kissing booth, he and the bedside nurse had laughed a bit too long. Deirdre needed to pretend, but hello? How about some boundaries from her coworkers.
Boundaries? No.
Relentless pressure? Yes.
So, Deirdre had volunteered for the snow-pie-in-the-face booth instead.
At least she hadn’t been assigned to the ice water dunk for hospice like Calvin.
She shuddered as she gripped the back of her couch. Nothing could compel her to go into a tank of ice water. Not for a good cause. Not even in a safe, controlled environment.
A wave of air-stealing grief from her parents’ watery death hit her out of the blue.
She couldn’t breathe.
Their crashed plane through the ice. Frigid water, suffocating them.
Every part of her body dropped ten degrees.
The doorbell rang, jolting her back to reality. She rubbed her cold arms through the light pink sweater. Deirdre had barely made it home from a long day at work in time to change for tonight’sdate.
