Notorious D.O.C. (Hope Sze medical mystery) (13 page)

"Jesus!"

Ryan's voice was so sharp and angry, it
cut through the pounding of the shower and my libido. I froze. This guy did not
take the Lord's name in vain. For him, it was a worse curse than the f-word.

I rinsed off the soap and conditioner,
briskly now, my heart thumping for a different reason. Something was wrong.

I climbed back into my used clothes and
didn't bother to wrap my short hair in a towel. I threw open the door.
"Ryan?
 
What's wrong?"

He was standing in the doorway to the
kitchen, frowning by the wall-mounted phone abandoned by the previous owners.
"Hope. Sorry." Then he stopped and stared at me.

My cheeks were already flushed from the
shower, but they would have heated anyway, under his gaze, raking me from
messy, towel-dried hair to my still-intrigued breasts, right down to my
slightly damp toes. I knew exactly what he was thinking. His brow furrowed. His
nostrils flared. A muscle clenched in his jaw.

Just for a second. Then he shook himself.
"Sorry," he said again. "Finish your shower."

"I'm okay." Maybe I'd misread
his cues. I wished I'd wrapped myself in a towel instead. More classic. More
prone to slipping to the floor.

He shook his head. "No, you relax.
Really."

I cocked my head. "Ryan. What is
it?"

He sighed and walked back to the front
hall. "I knocked over your mail and found something."

He handed me a plain white piece of paper
folded in half like a flyer. I unfolded a black and white photocopy of a
picture of a tombstone. The name, prominently engraved in the rock:

HOPE.

Chapter
13

Someone had photoshopped my name on a
tombstone picture and left it in my mailbox.

I almost dropped the piece of paper.

It could have been a coincidence. It
could have been some mass mailing about the death of hope with a follow-up
about the saviour who could save us. But somehow, I didn't think so.

After the near death thing, plus Ryan's
paranoia, plus the weird phone calls, seeing my name on a tombstone made me
really glad he was staying tonight. And it made me wonder what the hell was
going on.

As Ryan pointed out, the name on my
mailbox is H. Sze, not Hope Sze. So if this was personal, someone deduced my
first name and where I lived in order to send me a picture a tombstone with my
name on it.

Who did it?

Only one way to find out. I walked to the
kitchen for a Ziploc bag.

"What's going on?" said Ryan.

"I don't know, but I'll let the
police figure it out," I said, sealing the bag. "They can check it
for fingerprints. Where did you find this?"

He ran a hand through his hair,
exasperated. "Tucked in your mail, with your phone bill and the KFC and
Pizza Hut flyers. You can look for yourself. But the weird thing is, I swear
I've seen that picture before."

I rifled through the flyers from Bell
Canada, Videotron (my Net provider), and a notice from McGill. Everything else
looked official, like it was from Canada Post, who has the contract to deliver
junk mail. I was trying to remember if I'd seen the piece of paper tucked in
with the rest when I took it out of my mailbox. I thought so, but I couldn't be
sure.

"How the hell did someone do
this?
 
Break open your mailbox?"
asked Ryan.

I sighed. "Actually..."

He snapped his head back to glare at me.
"Don't tell me."

"My mailbox doesn't latch properly.
The mailman left a note about it, but the
concièrge
didn't do anything to fix it, and I thought, well, it's just mail."

"So anyone could get into your
mail."

I didn't answer.

"This place is a disaster."

I hadn't considered it paradise, but
through Ryan's eyes, I had to admit it was appearing worse and worse. I tried
to make a joke. "You should have seen the place I didn't take, with the
two little dogs. The woman let the dogs poop on the balcony and we almost
tripped over a vegetable rolling in the middle of the hallway."

He reached for my shoulders. "Hope,
this is not a joke."

I twisted away from him before he could
make contact. "I know that!
 
But I'm
too pissed off to be scared." As soon as I said it, I realized it was
true, and anger felt a lot better than a panic attack. My heart was still
racing, but the fear was no longer crushing me. I almost smiled.

That made Ryan even madder. "What is
wrong with you? You like getting strangled and having people sending you death
threats in the mail?"

"You know I don't."

"Then, for heaven's sake, get out of
here! You can transfer to Ottawa, right?"

My head jerked up. We stared at each
other. We were both breathing hard. Somehow, I hadn't realized that was where
he was going with this.

Ryan drew himself up, watching my face
carefully. "I mean...that's home. You'd be safer around your family. And,
well, I'd like to see you."

Not exactly the world's greatest
declaration of love, but still much more than I'd expected from a random
encounter with my ex-boyfriend. I didn't know what to say.

My ancient refrigerator began to buzz,
breaking the silence. Then footsteps creaked in the apartment overhead.

Finally, I recovered my tongue.
"Ryan. It's not that simple. I actually applied to Ottawa's family med
program and didn't match there."

He waved his hand. "I bet that if
you explained the circumstances, they'd let you in."

I wasn't so sure. An inter-provincial
switch might be hard to manage. But home definitely had its appeal. My mom's
cooking. Watching movies with my dad. Hanging out with my little brother,
Kevin. And Ryan, whatever we had together. Past. Present. Future.

He touched my cheek. "You don't have
to decide now. Just think about it, okay?"

I nodded mutely, leaning into his hand.
Sometimes, I ached to be held. As if sensing this, he checked my eyes for
permission, then folded me in his arms. I breathed him in. He smelled like
sandalwood, clean laundry, and himself, that clean tang I had loved and lost. I
buried my face in the crook between his neck and shoulder and blinked back
tears. "Oh, Ryan."

"Hope." He stroked my hair, his
voice low and sad. "You don't have to do this alone. You break my
heart."

And then he kissed me. At first his lips
were gentle, but as soon as mine parted, he pulled me closer. His tongue swept
into my mouth. His arms tightened around me. I lifted myself on tip-toe to
press my hips against him and he ground back against me, one hand raising to
bury itself in my wet hair.

I lifted my left leg and hooked it around
his. He groaned and lifted me up so I could wind both legs around his waist
while we kissed and kissed and kissed, an extravagance of longing.

He pushed me against the wall. We were
kissing so hard, I felt the moisture from my skin transfer to his cheeks and
mouth, wherever we made contact. He ripped my shirt up and caressed my naked
sides. When I arched away from him, my shoulders and head toward the wall and
my pelvis
against
his, he slipped his hands around to my
stomach. He nipped my ear, sliding his tongue around it and biting it again. I
stifled a scream. "I could eat you alive," he muttered through
gritted teeth.

One of the things I'd always loved about
him was, no matter how buttoned-down and orderly and law-abiding he was on the
surface, he was an animal in the bedroom.

In answer, I slid my hand down the
neckline of his shirt, feeling his delectable brown skin and the few wiry black
hairs sprinkled across his chest.

He tensed and slowly lowered me down to
the ground, pressing every inch of his front against mine. I stared into his
dilated eyes and ground my hips against his, silently laughing at his agony,
until he shoved his hand under my bra and teased my breasts with his thumb and
forefinger until I could hardly see.

He opened my bra one-handed. It made me
laugh against his mouth, remembering how he'd practiced that move on me, until
his lips descended to my collarbones and moved south.

If anything, he was better than I
remembered. He was sublime.

Zero to one hundred in sixty seconds.

His lips moved from my left breast to my
right.

One hundred and twenty.

BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!

I collapsed against Ryan and groaned.

"What is that?" he said,
pulling me closer.

I rested my head against his shoulder.
"My pager."

"You're still on call?"

"Yeah."

He checked his watch. "I thought you
said home call usually ended after the evening shift. It's after
midnight."

"Yeah, well." I didn't go into
medicine for the lifestyle. Ryan's eyebrows drew together and his body tensed,
but not in a good way. I shifted away from him. "Once in a while, it's
just a quick Tylenol order or something."

"Is that likely?"

For a guy I hadn't seen in over a year,
he knew the system too well. Or maybe it was me he knew too well. I shrugged
and tried not to look at my backpack.

He sighed and yanked it down for me.
"Here."

"Thanks."

I don't think any other guy could have
gotten me so heated so fast. But probably no one else could have me verging on
a fight already, too.

I unzipped the front compartment and dug
out my pager without meeting Ryan's eyes. He was standing too far away, arms
crossed.

I checked the number and frowned. I'd
almost rather see another number four or a hang-up. It was a hospital
extension, but not emerg. "I'll just be a second."

I used the phone in my room after I
closed the door. "Hi, this is Dr. Hope Sze, for psychiatry. Did someone
page me?"

"This is Dr. See?" said a guy's
voice, not butchering my name too badly, but still, a bad sign.

"Yes, that's right."

"Good. I'm glad I gotcha. Case room
wants you. You got a woman in labour."

Chapter
14

It's
no fun if it's too easy. So I dropped a few hints in the next few sessions.

When
the rest of them started talking about slashing and showing off their arms,
criss-crossed with more stripes than a Bengal tiger, I made sure Dr. Laura saw
my forearms. Scar-free. Muscular. Never seen the wrong end of a razor or even a
ballpoint pen. I flexed them for her under the fluorescent light. I caught her
frown and her glance at Dr. Ven, the dude who's heading up the therapy, but he
was oblivious.

I
winked at her. She frowned some more.

When
they asked us about "abandonment issues," I listened to the rest of
them. My dad left, my mom hated me, my friends think I suck, boo-hoo. Then we
were supposed to write down all this shit and rip it up. "Take away its
power," urged Dr. Ven. "Tear it up! Rend it! You are in control
today!"

I
left a blank sheet of paper intact.

I
lingered in the hall after hours and heard her talking about me. "...not
like the others...uncertain diagnosis..."

I
smiled. You know it, darling.

Dr.
Ven sighed. His lower voice was harder to make out, but I thought I heard,
"...would probably benefit from individual therapy."

Bull's-eye.
One-on-one with Dr. Laura, coming right up.

***

"So that's it," said Ryan.

I zipped my bag closed. I'd grabbed a
change of clothes and tossed in a banana and a thermos of water, but now I was
ready to rock. "Pretty much."

"You have to go back and deliver a
baby now."

"Yeah."

"And then you have to work in the
morning?"

"Yes. Outpatient psychiatry."

"What if your patient's still in
labour?"

I'd stay with the woman until she
delivered and then I'd go back to work, but the fastest way to sum it up was,
"I cancel everything."

"Like us," he said, under his
breath, but I heard it. And, as usual, I wondered if we were ever going to make
it. Back down to zero in another sixty seconds.

I stood and faced him. "I'm
sorry."

He gave me a crooked smile that reminded
me why I loved him. "But babies are like death and taxes, right?
 
They don't wait for anyone."

"Right." I surveyed him for
another millisecond. Was he really okay with this?

"This is crazy. You get paid, like,
half of what I do. You're always running around. On top of that, you want to
solve a hit-and-run from eight years ago. And you still love it."