𝙓𝙇𝙄𝙄𝙄.
A HARD DAYS NIGHT
──────
NEW YORK
"How would you die?"
The conversation came out of thin air.
It startled me, causing me to look up so quickly that my glasses almost slipped off of my nose. Across from me, a surgical intern, a colleague, was staring off into nothingness, coming down off of her 48-hour shift.
She'd spoken without even realising it, face void of any emotion. I wasn't alone in my alarm, the others we were sat with all exchanged looks as if this was the day that Ashley snapped. The surgical intern in question blinked very suddenly as if rejoining the room. I half expected her to play it off as some sort of exhaustion-induced statement but she didn't.
Instead, Ashley turned to face us, gaze intense.
"I mean... if you choose... how would you die?"
My brow furrowed and I stared at Ashley, caught off-guard. We were at the end, sat in the locker room and cooling down after our shift. Out of everyone, Ashley had had it worse.
She'd been assigned to a bad trauma today: A man turned into a pancake by a semi outside of Brooklyn. She'd assisted in a surgery that had taken 11 hours to put him back together. He'd flatlined 10 hours and fifty-five minutes in and she'd sat in the corner of the locker room for the last few minutes and sobbed.
Her eyes were still red-rimmed, her mouth was still curved downwards at the edges and she inhaled the phlegm that had built up in her nose, a choking sound emitting from her. It was mid-morning outside and the next shift of interns were already arriving, getting dress and beginning their day.
Between the medical journal on my lap, the apple in my hand and my intense need to pass out— I wasn't sure whether I was capable of thinking about dying.
All I could think about was sleep.
"I guess a semi wouldn't be my choice..."
One of the interns in our group replied to her as he stuck his head into his t-shirt, changing out of the same scrubs he'd worn for the past 26 hours straight. Isaac didn't strike me as the sort of guy who was optimistic. I'd barely spoken to him as he was just slightly stand-offish.
He had a miffed look on his face as he reappeared.
"I'd like to say growing old and dying in my sleep would be how I go," He said, but then he shrugged, "Working here has really made me think that there's a slim chance of that happening–"
To be fair, he had a point.
I didn't think I'd ever realised how many ways to die there are until I started working at ManWest. Last night, I'd worked on incoming traumas and read a report about a woman who'd died after being struck by lightning. It was one of the ways of dying you always thought was a myth until you were faced with a body on a stretcher— I took a bite of my apple and averted my eyes from Ashley over towards the next intern to speak.
"Don't say that," Faith was rooting through her bag while shaking her head at Isaac. Her eyes darkened as she watched Isaac open a can of pop. A scoff fell through her lips and she rolled her eyes. "It's perfectly reasonably to die from old age. You just have to respect your body and your limits and live fairly. Sugary soda and junk food isn't going to achieve that."
"And that vegan crap is?" His reply caused her to huff, "Go on, princess, how would you go?"
"Well..."
She paused as if she hadn't given it much thought at all. Her voice grew quiet. I knew Faith's type. She was ambitious but had tumbled into the surgical internship despite not having the stomach for gore.
She brushed her dark hair over her shoulder and winced at the image in her head. I knew the image, we'd all been envisioning it over the past 14 hours: a semi-truck driving straight at you. Ashley whimpered in the background.
"Definitely not something violent—"
"When I was a kid, I was obsessed with the whole 'all guns blazing'," Liam appeared from the restroom, running his hands through his hair as he hauled his gym bag onto a bench beside Faith. He let out a very miffed laugh. Out of everyone, he and Ashley were the only people who had bothered to really talk to me. "Always thought it was cool to go out with a bang—"
"Where are you expecting that to happen?" Challenged Isaac, raising his eyebrows at Liam's childhood fantasy. I took another bite of my apple but the sound was too loud, it caused Ashley to flinch as she stared at all of us with watery eyes. "Ain't going to be time for that or room for that at Manhattan West."
Isaac reminded me of the sort of rednecks you saw on television, he reminded me of Joe Exotic sometimes in the way that he'd slip into his southern drawl when the slightest bit confrontational and a lack of engagement with reality— which, with Isaac, was all the time.
Compared to him, Liam was a frat boy, the sort of guy you'd expect to only exist on college campuses and turn to dust when the sun came up and the underage drinking stopped. Although, Liam Carmichael was smart (too smart, he was leaving us all in the dust) and was 30, not 20.
I kept quiet as Liam and Isaac bantered back and forth, Isaac always taking conversations a little too seriously. Ever so often, I would check on Ashley out of the corner of my eye; she was brushing her hair in the mirror, blinking back more tears.
I felt my heartache for her but refrained from going to comfort her. What I'd learnt about Ashley was that she didn't like the attention, she preferred to just emote in peace. She was still listening to the conversation but did so half-heartedly as if she'd never wanted to ask the question anyway.
"You never know what's going to happen," Liam claimed, holding his hands up as I tuned back into their squabble. I couldn't believe my ears sometimes— two fully grown men fighting over the way to die? Imagine that. "One day, you're minding your business and boom, there's a psycho shooting up your hospital—"
"Don't joke about that," Faith interjected, eyes flashing. "That's terrible to joke about— people die from stuff like that every day—"
"People die from old age too... but it's okay to joke and talk about that— right?"
Forever the pessimist, Isaac found it within himself to round on Faith, suddenly defending the same guy he'd been fighting with. She just sighed loudly. If it'd been me, I would've flipped him off. Instead, Faith, despite barely having spoken to me during the last three months of our internship, shot me a look as if to ask me to help her.
She did that often: 'help,' it said, 'you, me and Ashley are the only girls out of the 25 surgical interns in this hospital, we need to stick together.'
I pretended that I missed it.
"Fine, I hope you get shot in a hospital mass shooting and die," She bit back with commendable venom and Isaac blinked at her, visibly taken aback.
Her words caused my hairs to rise and the other interns in the room to all fall silent. Eyes were all cast on her but she didn't seem to care. Faith stood up and slammed her gym bag back down onto the bench.
"You happy, Cochran?" She chipped back in Isaac's direction.
"Never been happier," Isaac retorted back to her once he'd recovered. Then suddenly, he looked over towards Ashley. "What are you thinking, Tran? How would you die?"
Our heads all turned towards the pale girl in the corner. She blanched under our attention and quickly wiped her eyes with the back of her palm.
Ashley Tran was the quiet type but extremely bright, if it wasn't for her empathy and lack of fear, she would have been blazing ahead. I supposed that's what the trauma attending had seen in her, the potential when he'd asked her to stand in on the gruelling surgery.
Apparently she'd just stood there and accounted for the body parts that the orthopaedic surgeon had to piece back together like a jigsaw puzzle. Now, it was as if she was the one in tiny little pieces. Ashley was silent and unmoving and we all just watched.
"I, uh," She cleared her throat. "I haven't given it much thought—"
"I have."
I decided, at that moment to help her in the only way I knew she would appreciate. My voice was cracked from the hours I'd spent talking to people in the trauma department. I turned away from Ashley, attention fell onto me and, out of the corner of my eye, I saw her reinflate like a little balloon.
My first role of business was to send Liam a very tepid look. "A hospital shooting? That sounds like a terrible plotline in a medical drama on tv— Not to be dramatic but not even ER would stoop so low. I don't think George Clooney would let himself get shot."
"It happened to my brother," Liam shrugged, but I could tell that it was heavy. "His clinic in Detroit got gunned up in a gang fight. They lost five members of staff and three patients."
I didn't know what to say to that so I just shrugged, my chest feeling very tight. He rolled his eyes, uncomfortable with the sudden silence.
"Look," Liam sighed, "like I said, you've got to live every day like there's no tomorrow, you really can't live with fear—"
"It's easy for an old-money Connecticut boy like you to say," Isaac scoffed. I pressed my lips together and just pretended that I wasn't here. But Isaac set his little beady eyes on me and I felt my skin grow prickly. In the background, Liam shrugged on his jacket half-heartedly. "C'mon Montgomery, pick your poison—"
"Poison, actually, wouldn't be half bad," I commented absently, resuming my flicking through the medical journal.
If these people only knew what sort of stuff I put into my body on the weekends they would've known that something like cyanide wouldn't even give me a cough.
"Nah, poison is too tricky," He shook his head side to side. "Too much room to go wrong."
"What is this conversation?" Faith muttered, stabbing hoop earrings into her earlobes, "It's like you're excited about all of us dying— God Isaac, you're such a creep—"
"I didn't even start this conversation," He had a point but he said it very defensively. So defensively that it made me wonder whether he did really have a thing for death. Quickly, Isaac jabbed his thumb in Ashley's direction. "It's not my fault she's having an existential crisis because she couldn't handle a big surgery. She bit off more than she could chew. Honestly, it's annoying me because I would have literally killed for it."
"It's decided then," Liam announced, swaying towards the doorway as the bruises under his eyes betrayed how tired he was. "We're all going to get murdered by Cochran because he's jealous we're the attendings first choice and he's not... and let's leave it at that."
He saluted us and made his exit, leaving Isaac to stew away.
"Don't be an asshole," Faith said rather sharply.
Ashley was still quiet.
She was fully dressed now and she seemed to rush to get everything in her bag. I watched outright now, watching as she packed everything away and hurried out, a magazine stuffed under her arm.
I offered her a meek smile as she went but she didn't meet my eye.
She didn't meet anyone's eye— she was out in a flash. We all watched her go, our hearts heavy. Well, other than Isaac who just glared at the side of Faith's head.
She continued, unaffected by his gaze.
"Ashley had a long surgery today," I said, mostly to Isaac than to anyone else. I said it plainly and simply, in case his empathy had clocked out before he had, "She's tired and she's drained and she's getting crap for being human."
"Yeah," Faith's voice rose as she finished typing her laces. She shot another dirty look over her shoulder at Isaac. "It's like some of us get some weird kick out of pushing other people down—"
"Look, it's not my fault that she can't cope—" He paused, huffing. "I'm not going even to bother arguing with you two, gang up on the guy— okay, I get your little schtick."
I shook my head in disbelief, miffed by the ignorance of the guy in front of me. He stared between the two of us, face contorted into a look of aggravation.
I was slowly understanding that Isaac was quite possibly one of the most incomparable douchebags I'd ever met. Faith shot me a look and this time I returned it. There was something very off about that guy and we both seemed to sense it.
I sighed, looking back down at my medical journal and continued to try and soak in as much information as I could.
"You still going, Montgomery?" Faith raised her perfectly shaped eyebrows at me, her mouth twisting when she realised that I wasn't even out of my scrubs. She frowned, watching as I just shrugged, pulling my legs closer to my chest. "You got a big surgery or something?"
Honestly, I was surprised that people had noticed. For weeks now I'd done exactly the same thing: I'd sat in the middle of the changing room, chewed on an apple and flicked through a medical journal, before going down into the ER for an extra few hours work. No one had even raised an eyebrow at me, but I'd been hauling ass while they all went home and slept. Was it technically against hospital policy?
Yes.
But I liked to tell the ER department that I had an hour nap in between finishing my surgical shift and beginning work at the downstairs non-emergent clinic. Faith's suspicions were well placed but I definitely was not hiding a big career-boosting surgery, more like my excessive brown-nosing of the head of trauma.
"Just waiting for the shower to be free." I jerked my head in the direction of the girls restroom but Faith didn't seem convinced.
Neither did Isaac, for that matter. The glare he gave the two of us as he left was murderous.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Faith blow him a sarcastic kiss as she slammed her locker door shut.
"Jackass," She muttered once she was sure he was gone, "Is it just me or has he got more issues than Vogue."
"I'd disagree," I replied nonchalantly, turning the page in my medical journal. "He's got one issue and it's being an insensitive asshole."
That actually caused her to laugh. I had a feeling that conversation would have continued if it wasn't for the appearance of one of Faith's friends. A bright-eyed surgical intern from the next shift bounced across the locker room, bringing the energy that we collectively lacked.
I glanced upwards at the two of them, not particularly interested in their conversation but eavesdropping anyway. Faith's friend spoke loudly anyway, it wasn't as if I had to try hard. From what I gathered, she was talking excitedly about some of the new staff they'd recently taken on.
It was the big gossip of the hospital. Our sister hospital, Manhattan East had just closed due to a lawsuit that due to legal reasons no one could talk about it. One day ManEast was there and suddenly one day it wasn't.
We weren't allowed to talk about it but apparently some staff members had been arrested and the whole hospital had gone up in a smoke of financial turmoil and staff resignations. What was even controversial was that ManWest hadn't merged with the resources of ManEast, no, everything had gone across the country in some quick-fire money scheme as the board tried to regain the billions it'd lost.
What we did manage to gain was staff members, some old ManEast and some new doctors and nurses from other hospitals.
Apparently some of them were hot, at least, according to Faith's friend. I almost choked on my apple at that. Sometimes, I wasn't sure what went through my colleague's heads.
From the way she said it, you would've thought that she'd spent all that money on tuition to just marry a rich surgeon and become a trophy wife. I binned my apple core and chuckled to myself as I left the locker room; honestly, if it enabled me to have a stable sleeping pattern, it didn't sound like a half-bad idea.
"Doctor Montgomery, lovely for you to bless us with your presence," the nurse in the clinic greeted me with a knowing smile as I appeared for my second shift of the day. She handed me the chart of my next patient. "Was beginning to wonder whether you fell asleep standing up in the elevator again."
I chuckled, flicking through the notes.
"Wouldn't dream of it, Wanda."
I'd met Wanda a year and a half ago when I'd started my work experience in this same department. She seemed to be the only person who'd caught onto me juggling my internship and extra work. Honestly, it made me question how this hospital was still standing: it appeared that their contracts were all over the place.
Naturally, I was going to use this to my benefit.
"Yeah yeah," She shook her head, scoffing slightly under her breath and looking over her glasses at me, hands on her hips.
I shot her my perfectly practised 'people smile' and swung around into the clinic, passing beds full of grim-looking non-emergent cases. Normally, this clinic would cause a surgical intern to be filled with disappointment.
It was a room full of non-surgical patients, all varied amounts of grumpy from the long wait it'd taken for them to get seen by a doctor. I could almost imagine what Isaac would've said, he would've branded the whole thing a waste of time, maybe Faith would too. I, on the other hand, saw it as an opportunity to boost my skills.
"Hi, Andrea?" I pulled back the curtain of the bed I'd been assigned to, meeting the earnest face of an elderly woman. A ginger nod was angled in my direction and I smiled warmly in response. "Sorry for the wait. I'm Doctor Montgomery and I'm here to have a look at your head."
A week ago, Andrea had fallen over in her home and caused quite a nasty laceration on her chin. According to her chart, she'd had to have some deep sutures that might have split over the past few days. Minimal bleeding but her wound needed to be cleaned out and glued. I explained this to her as I slapped on my gloves, pulling the suture kits that had already been set out for me.
Immediately, she told me not to worry about the wait, apparently, she'd been holding off coming to the hospital for a while and for her to pop up during a busy spell was on her. I smiled at that— "Don't worry, we'll get you all sorted now." She was nervous, wincing when I examined the laceration. I was full of apologies but she just chuckled.
"Don't worry about that, honey," She was full of warmth despite her anxiety, "Just like me to get a cut on an awkward part of me—"
After a few moments of me trying to figure out how to close the laceration without causing more damage, I decided that it would be best for me to contact the department who had originally handled her: Plastics. Wanda processed the request with a knowing look in her eye, secretly impressed that I didn't just throw caution to the wind and go ahead with it anyway.
I rolled my eyes as I took my next patient and left to fill Andrea in with what was happening.
Sometimes, if an intern really pissed off our resident (mine was a middle-aged man with what I suspected was alcoholism and bad B.O) we'd get sent to the doghouse: aka, this department. Isaac had been in here last week.
I suspected that some really awful sutures had come out of those doors. Wanda seemed to be appreciative that I hadn't opted to ruin someone's face for the sake of my ego.
Instead, I moved along to the next bed: a kid who was going through a nasty case of tonsillitis. I sat with the parents, examined him and proceeded to write out the prescription. Wanda looked over it before I handed it over, as she had taken to while I was on placement and gave me a nod.
I watched her type away on her computer once they'd been dismissed, writing in the kids chart and checking my watch.
"How long you been up for now?" I'd lost count of how many hours. I just shrugged over at her and it was her turn to roll her eyes. "If you kill one of my patients you're gonna be stuck on this ward until the end of time, bye-bye internship. That resident of yours is going to condemn you to tonsillitis and bedpans for the rest of time."
"I'm sure you'd love that," I signed the bottom of the chart and exchanged it for my next patient, "C'mon, I'm clearly your favourite intern..."
It wasn't as if she had much of a pool to choose from. Apparently, when Faith had been assigned down here for the first week, she'd gotten very prissy over a patient who'd projectile vomited over her. Isaac, well, he wasn't quite a ray of sunshine and neither Liam or Ashley had been assigned the 'dead weight shift'.
I could only imagine them calling me crazy if they found out I did it willingly.
"Uh-huh, sure."
"You'd be lost without me, Wanda."
My next patient was an old man who needed his ears syringing. I did so with slightly less enthusiasm, old man earwax wasn't exactly my idea of a party. I was three beds down for Andrea, curtains up and warm water practically all over myself.
It took ten minutes and I arrived back to Wanda with chunks of earwax on a paper towel and wet scrubs. She wrinkled her nose and told me that she'd had to put up with much worse in all of her years of nursing. I tossed it into the medical waste a little too happily.
"Has that plastics request come down for bed seven yet?" I asked as I finished the second chart, scribbling not very fun words like 'flush' and 'build-up' and 'ear canal'.
Wanda nodded. "He's in there now."
I thanked her, telling her that I was going to go check in quickly to see if they needed any extra supplies. She replied with a very disinterested 'yeah, yeah' as she handled medication requests and shooed me off of her desk.
I stopped only to grab some extra gauze and sanitation wipes and, on arriving at the bed, pulled back the curtain carefully.
"Hey Andrea, just wanted to see how it was going..."
In the span of the half-hour it'd taken me to get through two other patients, Andrea was completely sealed up. Her laceration had been expectedly glued and finished up. She smiled at me from her place on her bed, looking considerably more relaxed. I returned the smile, setting the gauze down beside her bed and turning towards the doctor who had come down to help her.
"I see you've been sorted— thank you, Doctor..."
I froze.
"Doctor Sloan."
For some reason I couldn't comprehend, Mark was stood at the side of Andrea's bed in mid disposal of his surgical gloves.
Much like I was, he seemed alarmed at the sight of me.
His eyes went wide when he saw me stood there, dressed in surgical scrubs and with a staff badge clipped to my pocket. A prolonged pause played out between us; the patient looked between the two of us, momentarily bewildered.
The two of us stared at each other, both trying to get our footing.
We had a very quick conversation with our eyes. I was mostly asking questions like: Why the hell are you here? and Why the hell are you wearing ManWest scrubs?
"Doctor Montgomery," He sounded as caught off-guard as I was.
My boyfriend even had the audacity to frown as if he wasn't sure why I was here. Forgetting Andrea was here, I raised my eyebrows, tempted to just flat out ask him what the fuck he was doing in my place of work— especially in staff clothing.
Ever the perfect professional, Mark turned towards the patient and gave her a charming smile, "If you just give me and Doctor Montgomery a moment—"
Without waiting for Andrea to reply, I exited the bed. It took me everything in me not to drag Mark across the clinic and into the empty staff stairwell but I really didn't want to rouse any attention. The journey to the door was longer than I wanted it to be— Mark ran a hand through his hair and shoved it open, holding it for me as our footsteps echoed up the hospital floors.
As soon as the door closed, I rounded towards him.
"Doctor Sloan... I—"
I couldn't quite process what was going on.
Mark, on the other hand, chuckled, cocking his head to the side. "Doctor Sloan? For the last few years it's been Mark. A few nights ago it was—"
I stared at him as he was cut off by a door closing a couple of floors overhead. He paused as the sound of footsteps and faint chatter swum around us. Meanwhile, I just stared and stared, incredulousness seeping from every pore.
Mark was looking upwards as if he could see the staff wandering up and down the stairs above us. Eventually, the noise fell away, a door slamming reverbed off of the walls and I was able to find coherence in my thoughts.
"What the hell are you doing here?"
"I could say the same to you," He said, gesturing to my scrubs as if he couldn't understand why I was here in staff uniform. I blinked at him, my confusion welling into frustration that buzzed at the back of my head like an angry wasp. "Why are you here? I thought you're supposed to at lunch with Margot?"
"I-"
I broke off the beginning of my sentence. I had told him that I was going to lunch with Margot. It'd been my perfect excuse to cover up my extra shifts at the clinic. He'd never chase it up and he would've given me hell alongside Derek if they found out I was working 52-hour shifts.
I shook my head.
"Mark, I mean it— why are you here?"
"Isn't it obvious?" Mark looked momentarily worried that I'd suddenly become very dumb. "I work here."
Oh crap.
"You what?" I hoped that I'd heard him wrong.
"I work here." He repeated, gesturing to the surgical department badge that was identical to mine.
Well, all other than the word 'attending' that was printed in big letters on the top. I stared at it, my eyes widening as I realised that my boyfriend was now working at ManWest and at my brother's clinic like he had been for the last few months following Petunia's detonation of his surgical career.
After a few moments of my silence, Mark frowned. "It's my first day— look, I was going to tell you at dinner tonight I just—"
"Mark," my lips were numb. "I work here."
For such a brilliant surgeon, I'd never met someone so slow.
His face went pale. "I thought you worked at ManEast."
I met his eyes and saw an 'Oh Crap' buried in the same blue that had worked its way into my heart. Silently, I shook my head. He pressed a palm to his forehead, realising that he'd made a big mistake.
"Fuck."
I'd made it very clear to everyone in my personal life that it was very important to me that ManWest was mine. I had gone through hell to find a hospital that wasn't associated with any of my family or friends— I'd rejected a job offer from Bellevue, for fuck's sake.
I'd turned down a job interview from Lincoln for Mark and here he was. Not only was he now working at my hospital he was an Attending. He had professional authority over me and we were in a now very inappropriate relationship. I pressed my lips together and exhaled very sharply.
"Do you want me to resign?" The question was said hesitantly.
I shook my head.
"Don't be stupid."
He'd had a hard time getting anyone to hire him and he was probably one of the best surgeons I'd ever met alongside Derek and Addison. Petunia had really done a number on him. I wasn't going to throw him back into the unemployed pool and besides, I'm sure Archer had already filled his position.
As much as I loved my brother, he definitely didn't love Mark— hence why I definitely had not told him that I was dating said Mark.
"I wouldn't make you do that I just—" I let out a miffed laugh. "Do you listen to anything I say to you?"
"I don't—"
Again, he was cut off by another door opening. It was closer this time, the one above us. We both tensed, listening as voices mingled with the sound of feet against concrete. As we stood, anxious with the knowledge that our relationship was violating a handful of different hospital policies that would both get us severely told off and possibly dismissed, I realised that it probably wasn't the time to argue about this.
Like Mark had said before, we had dinner later to have these sort of conversations. Then it'd get resolved with some very angry sex and we wouldn't have to stew in our aggravation for the next eight hours.
As soon as the door closed above us, I felt my shoulders fall and a sigh slip through my lips.
"When they find out that we're—"
"They don't have to?"
"That's risky—"
"Damn, and here I was looking forwards to call room hookups." Mark's face contorted in disappointment and I actually laughed, loudly.
The sound of it seemed to ease the tension in Mark's body. He liked making me laugh. I rolled my eyes at him, feeling my annoyance dissipated: this was going to be okay, we can work at the same hospital, it'll be okay— just god forbid we break up and things get awkward.
"Look, not to make things weird," He said, "But I've been with colleagues before and it's worked out okay—"
I shook my head at him. "I can't believe you even—" I paused. "We're not just hooking up."
"I know that... but I'm not planning on breaking up with you anytime soon? Are you?"
I shrugged. "Well, now you mention it—"
It didn't work. He rolled his eyes at me and struck off on an optimistic note. "This can work."
I watched the conviction in his face, the belief in his voice. He was convinced that it was going to be okay. Softly, with his hands pressed on my upper arms, he moved towards me, sensing my stress. I nodded, trying to convince myself too. This will work. This will work.
This will work. Sure, the consequences of a secret relationship between staff members (especially with staff who were in positions to grant opportunities unfairly to their significant others) were hefty but Mark needed this job. I could tell from the look in his eye that he was excited by the prospect of working here. I'd heard for weeks that they were looking to put a lot of money into the plastics department.
"Are they funding your project?"
His face broke out into a heart-stopping smile."So many zeroes I damn near needed a resus."
I searched his eyes and saw a hopeful, beautiful man who'd been given a once in a lifetime opportunity. It seemed as though the board wasn't as financially crippled as I'd thought. I couldn't help it, by the sheer power of the look on his face, I smiled. The expression seemed to put wind under his wings.
He squeezed my arms. "We're gonna make this hospital our bitch—"
I laughed. What a way to kill the mood.
"Are there any security cameras in here?"
I shook my head in response to his question and, before I could register anything, Mark was kissing me. There was enthusiasm behind it, the fire of a man who'd nearly died from the amount of zeroes on his research funding cheque. When it ended, I was shaking my head; smiling but screaming on the inside––
"We can't do that." I said, patting down my hair, "That didn't just happen."
"Do what?" He said, with a little wink. "Maybe we should have a cover story."
"A cover story?"
"Yeah, if someone catches onto our sexual tension," I leant against the wall, raising my eyebrows as Mark indulged some of the more adventurous thoughts that seemed to always roam through his head. "We should come up with something to set them off the scent— like that we just hooked up once at a bar. You were just a girl in a bar... I was just a guy— it was a one-time thing and it happened before I started here."
Honestly, it didn't seem like a bad idea.
"Obviously, I was drunk, vulnerable and disastrously good looking and you pounced on me—"
"Hang on," I laughed, interrupting his little daydream. "If we're going to make this believable... I'll probably be the drunk one and you're not that good looking."
I was teasing him and he knew it. Mark pouted, squaring his shoulders and drifting towards me. I narrowed my eyes challenging.
"You're really going to deny the power of me in that black muscle tee that I wore the other night? If I remember rightly you seemed to like it a lot?" He was very close to me and the room was suddenly very hot. I felt very clammy. I placed a palm on his chest and pushed him backwards, glancing towards the door. Also to let me breathe. He rolled his eyes. "Admit it, last night I was very good-looking. I had my black shirt on, my good-looking shirt, you took advantage."
"Last night?" I raised an eyebrow, dodging a way to just boost his ego. I couldn't deny it. His black shirt was almost blasphemous.
"We've got to put a time frame on it. It makes it seem more realistic," Mark shrugged. He paused and then, as if a thought dawned on him, he smirked. "How about we act it out?"
Another roll of the eyes but a twitch in the corner of my mouth.
"I've been here since Tuesday, no one will believe that." Mark cocked an eyebrow and I realised that I'd made a mistake. Yet another contract breach. I'd just admitted to working beyond the hospital maximum shift hour limit. He opened his mouth to speak but I cut him short before he could even begin. "Don't tell Addie— I've been working overtime and she'll murder me if she finds out that I've been working a lot—" He went to speak again and again, I felt the need to jump in. "I swear if you lecture me-"
"Are you okay?"
I frowned. "Of course."
"Are you flatlining?"
"No."
"Then I'm not mad," His shrug was looser this time and I was caught off guard by his support. "I remember what my internship was like. I would have probably made the same call— although not in the non-emergent clinic. Just make sure you don't tire yourself out, okay? Promise me you'll take it easy."
I searched his eyes, a slow grin blooming across my face. Mark appeared genuinely concerned. It was nice. He wasn't aggressively concerned, babying me like Addison would've.
Knowing her, she would've even gone the extra length of phoning up the Chief of Surgery and dogging me in to him directly.
Instead, Mark just looked satisfied when I softly said "I promise". It made me feel very warm and gooey inside: had it really been that long since I'd had someone support me instead of pummelling me to smithereens?
"We're going to have to set out guidelines..." I began causing Mark to look a little less satisfied.
We were going to have sacrifice if we wanted to work together. We were going to have to be professional.
He seemed to zone out as I spoke, listing off precautions that we were going to need to take: referring to each other by our titles, coming to work and leaving individually, going to staff events separately, avoiding PDA. When I finished vocalising my thoughts, I realised that Mark hadn't listened to any of it. Instead, he'd been staring at me the whole time in a way that made my cheeks burn.
"Stop that."
He blinked. "Stop what?'
He spoke as if he didn't even realise he'd been doing it. I exhaled loudly in irritation.
"You can't look at me like that."
"Like what?"
I massaged my forehead, feeling dirty by saying it out loud. "Like you've seen me naked."
Mark seemed to debate replying for a few moments. I waited in anticipation for the snide comment that I knew was coming— I waited and waited but it never came. I turned to face him. My boyfriend had opted for a very wide and suggestive smirk.
The sight of it made me blush again but I forced out a laugh framed with disbelief.
God— this is going to be a shit show, what am I thinking?
"What?" He said innocently, he held up his hands, looking at the ceiling. Mark had never been a particularly stellar actor. He was no Leonardo DiCaprio. "I have never seen you—"
"Shit, this is so inappropriate,"
Reality was setting in now. My brain was screaming at me. When I'd joined this hospital I'd had to disclose whether I was in a relationship with an existing member of staff. Of course, I'd said no.
I was sure that Mark had had to disclose his too. Without knowing it, he'd lied to the board already. It definitely didn't bode well about how this was going to go.
"You're an attending. And I'm your intern."
"Look, this is a shock but— I've never done the whole power play kink thing before but I'm definitely not against it—"
"I'm doomed," I muttered to myself. I'm dating an attending. "We're fucking doomed, Mark."
I could only imagine what people would say if they found out.
Oh, you heard about Montgomery and Sloan? Yeah, they've been sleeping together this whole time— she really tried to sleep to the top huh? Bet he was really making her work for those surgical cases.
I wasn't cut out for being mass circulated gossip. Mark, on the other hand, lived for scandalous rendezvous like these. I could see it in his eyes: he loved a sense of danger in a relationship and he wasn't scared of facing the consequences, although I'm sure that his consequences would be a lot more financially damning than mine.
My reputation, on the other hand, would be irreparable. Mark's was already riddled with one night stands and scorned ex-lovers.
"We're not doomed." Mark denied, shaking his head.
He'd fully convinced himself that this was going to be fine. I stared at him, wishing that I felt so sure. When he noticed the disbelief on my face, he reached out for my hand; it flinched away from him, terrified that someone might see. Mark frowned but was relentless nonetheless. He trapped my fingers in his, forcing my hands to stop squirming.
"This'll work out," Mark said, a little too convinced, "I told you that I'd make an effort for this relationship and I'm going to make an effort for this, okay?"
His gentle tone struck something inside of me.
A very small voice appeared from inside of me:
"Okay."
Mark went up the stairs, after asking me to sign off on the chart he'd left, and I went back into the clinic, ready to burn through the last few hours of my shift. When I arrived back at Andreas bed, the space had been repurposed, a new patient in her place. I frowned, looking around for any sign of the patient that neither Mark nor I had dismissed—
I ambled towards Wanda at the front desk with a concerned urgency in my step, squatting beside her to check the medical files alphabetised in the cabinet.
"You looking for bed seven?"
Wanda was staring at her computer screen, refusing to even look at me as I nodded, rather worriedly saying 'yeah'. She paused as if to prolong my suffering and then clicked at something very loudly on her desktop.
"I dismissed your patient and got Claire to sign off on your chart— you can thank me with a coffee from the vending machine on the Oncology floor."
I looked up at her, watching her face. I'd been out of the clinic for longer than I'd thought and something in her tone indicated that she knew something was up. Sometimes, I wasn't sure whether Wanda liked me much. She was a storm personified, the Head Nurse of a clinic that was powered with only a resident, two interns and a handful of nurses.
She ran this clinic on her own and saw everything that happened within these four walls. You would have never thought it from someone who appeared so unassuming, but she could rain hellfire on top of anyone who put a toe out of line.
After a very pregnant pause, Wanda huffed. "What the hell you doing down there— haven't you got a patient to treat?"
Immediately, I jumped to my feet, grabbing my next chart and preparing to hightail it in the direction of the patient bed. I was stopped short by Wanda as she called my name in mid-flight.
"Oh! And Doctor Montgomery," I turned to face her. She smirked, a knowing look in her eye. "Extend my thanks to that handsome Plastics doctor, won't you? Doctor Sloan, wasn't it?"