Authors: Michelle Woodward
Oh wait. We’re still at work.
I never connected much with medical students ever since I dropped out to join the rehabilitation professionals, but I know that I want to know this guy’s name. And exactly what he looks like under those scrubs. He’s glancing at me from the corner of his eye as well, and I can tell that he’s confused by my lack of scrubs, and isn’t sure who Elisa or I am. There’s a lull between patients, and Dr. Hahn and Elisa step out of the room. I decide to just go for it.
“So, you’re all going into plastics, then? That’s why you’re shadowing here at hand surgery?” I ask, but Red and I both know the question is really for him.
There are answering murmurs of dissent all around, and I realize that I’m not the only person who’s nervous about being in a surgeon’s office. Medical or not, they’re all students, just like me.
“Actually, I’m interested hand surgery,” Red suddenly speaks up.
“Oh yeah? What school are you from?”
“Lutheran Saint.”
“Get outta here! Me too!” I cry, and I’m not going to lie, I’m pretty thrilled. Another point of connection for the ginge and I.
“Really? So you must be in the year above me, then,” he says, an adorable wrinkle creasing his brow.
“No, actually, I’m in OT.”
There are blank stares all around as the medical students shoot questioning looks at each other. I realize nobody has any idea what it is I just said.
“OT? Occupational therapy. Quality of life care,” I begin and launch into my little therapy tirade. By the time I’m done, they’re all asking me questions, and even Red looks sufficiently impressed.
“Nice. So you guys are going to try to give that guy a chance to use his hand again, yeah?” he asks me, referring to the patient I blanked out on.
“Yeah. Surgery’s not a good option for him because he’d probably scar over—“
“And he’d never get full hand functionality back,” jumps in Red in a moment of perfect synchronicity.
“Yeah,” I glow, and for a moment, the entire room seems to skip a beat. “Thanks for your help out there, by the way,” I tell him.
He smiles, and I can tell there’s no pretentiousness about him, he just a genuinely nice guy. “No worries. I know what it’s like to blank out in a moment of pressure.”
I chuckle. “Well, you think almost like an OT, with your little functionality comment.”
“Ouch,” says Red, but he’s smiling wide.
“Nah,” I assure him, “Where I come from, that’s a compliment.”
That’s when I realize the whole room is watching us, as much caught up in our exchange as we are. They’re watching us, faces twitching with millions of little mircoexpressions, and even they can tell there’s chemistry between us. I clear my throat as Elisa and Dr. Hahn step back into the room, and step back into my professional mode.
As the weeks go by, I’m caught up in everything I’m learning. How to make atrophied muscles twitch using electrical stimulation. How to make pain in arthritic hands go away with sensory tapping. How to throw every single thing out and disinfect everything else and then run away from the room when it turns out that your patient who works at a meat processing plant has fungus on each of his middle fingers.
Seriously.
At home, I’m furiously typing up long-term goals and researching activities for my clients. How do I manage to find an activity for my tendon repair patient to make him use his ring finger and have him not snore at the same time? I’ve started seeing patients in my sleep. But there’s someone else there, too.
Because still, my favorite part of each week is when Elisa and I go into the hand surgery clinic and I get to see Red.
For the most part, Elisa Ahmed makes me feel stressed. It’s as if every single moment is another potential one to get fired from this internship. And when you’re working straight through lunch and focusing on how to get all your mountains of paperwork done before the day is out, you hardly notice how much you’re absorbing. Because seriously, I’m working my ass off.
So yes, it comes as a surprise to me when I know the answers the medical students don’t.
Here’s the thing. Most medical students on rotation don’t know jack squat about the specialty they’ve been assigned to shadow. Unless they’re interested in going into it. So the fact that Red is interested in becoming a hand surgeon gives him an edge when it comes to answering the few questions Dr. Hahn decides to throw out at us students. When he asks these questions, even Elisa Ahmed keeps quiet; sometimes it’s because she doesn’t know the answer, but sometimes, it’s to prove to me that neither do the medical students.
So the day Dr. Hahn asks why the patient’s distal fingertip is dropping and he’s unable to pick it up and the medical students all scramble around their heads searching for the answer, I find that it’s somehow my voice saying, “Mallet finger.”
Dr. Hahn shakes his head at me. “No!” he cries, but I can tell he’s amused. “I know
you
know,” he says to me, “But I want to see if these lumber heads knew anything.” The medical students all flush at the derogatory term, but I suppose they’re used to it—that’s how many medical practitioners decide to teach students, after all. Dr. Hahn eyes Red. “Not even you?” he asks, and I cringe, expecting Red to be embarrassed, which is so not what I want him to associate with me. Instead, Red gives a wry little grin, glances at me with absolute warmth in his eyes, shakes his head and shrugs at the hand surgeon.
“Sorry, doctor,” he says, “We haven’t covered that yet.”
Dr. Hahn shakes his head. “I thought you were my guy.”
“Not yet. But I will be, soon.”
Dr. Hahn sighs. “Well, can someone tell me
why
the patient can’t lift his fingertip?”
Silence all around. And yet, somehow, Red’s amusement has managed to infect the room. Dr. Hahn grumbles rather agreeably at me, “Go ahead.”
“The extensor tendon is cut. Until it heals, the patient’s fingertip will be useless.”
Dr. Hahn nods along. “You could all stand to learn a little something from the occupational therapist,” he tells the medical students. Red winks at me, and it’s as if the world’s suddenly been turned upside down in the best possible way.
Red’s fingers are in my hair, grasping my skull, the pressure making me moan aloud. I can feel the hardness of his body, the firm knead of his muscles underneath his scrubs, the bones of his hips solid underneath my hands. When I slide his scrub top off, I see that he has hair on his slim chest, that it’s rust-colored and that his nipples are the color of chocolate. When I press my mouth against his chapped lips, he tastes like cool water. He puts his hands on me, and we back up, kissing, making out, until I’m hopping up on the medical examination chair and wrapping my legs around his waist.
Yikes. Things had escalated quickly.
Red had come up to me at the end of the day and stared at me. Literally just stared, those blue-green eyes of his burning with excitement.
“You’re staring at me,” I finally said.
He grinned. “I’m staring at you.”
I was packing up my things in the rehab gym; how had he even found me here? “Why are you staring at me?” I asked him.
He was bouncing on his heels, happy as a little boy. “You knew the answer.”
“So?”
“So, I’m pretty damn impressed with you, woman.”
We went for coffee. Talked about his dreams of becoming the best hand surgeon in the state. We talked about how I had gotten into occupational therapy, about how quality of life care was everything to me. I’ve never truly been into the high-impact, high-energy, dealing-with-a-matter-of-days kind of thing. And the whole time, I felt this charge, as if Red was rubbing me with something electrical, and the atrophied muscles of my heart were beginning to twitch again, just like my patient’s.
Of course, it didn’t hurt that he was playing footsie with me under the table.
Seriously. I haven’t played footsie with anybody since I was a teenager, and I’ll be damned if I’ve forgotten how good it feels. The whole time, he’s looking at me with all that ginger stubble on his pointy little chin, those light eyes of his highlighted by his scrubs, and I don’t care that the hospital coffee tastes more like water than anything else. He’s making me feel like I can say anything to him, like I can say the good things that have happened to me and he won’t think I’m bragging, he’ll actually be happy for me. It’s like the world’s longest foreplay.
Oxytocin’s one hell of a drug, let me tell you.
By the time Red has walked me back to Dr. Hahn’s office for the notebook I’ve forgotten, it’s all I can do to keep my hands off him. We’ve got this rapport going, the kind of buildup where all our words are bouncing seamlessly off each other, and everything is bouncing around together—the happy floating feeling in my chest, our sharp, witty banter, and how cute his butt looks in his scrubs. That’s why all it takes is me dropping my notebook, and our fingers brushing as he reaches down to help me pick it up.
Suddenly, we’re scrambling around each other’s bodies, my notebook all but forgotten on the floor.
I’ve got his shirt up over his head, and he’s pushing up my skirt and grasping my thighs as if they’re life rafts and he can barely hold on. His entire face and mouth is so warm that I can hardly believe it, all that life warmth on such a skinny boy, and the taste of him is so utterly excited and male that it’s all I can do to keep from trying to climb inside his skin.
I’m flat on my back in the medical examination chair, and I love the way he looks above me, all bones and knobs in his joints. I love the wiry muscles in his arms and the long ropes of them in his thighs. I love the way he gasps a little when I finally show him my breasts, as if it’s the best present he’s ever gotten. And I love the honesty of his penis, the round, ruddy heady of it that feels no need to make excuses for itself.
We’re even better in bed than we are out of it. How is that even possible? I don’t know and I don’t care. All that electricity in our skin, and the way he feels inside me is completely different. It’s as if I’m being lifted up, somewhere safe, and from the look in his face as he enters me, he feels the same way. His skinny hips buck against me and when I dig my nails into his shoulders from the wild feeling building inside me, I’m afraid I’ll hurt him, but he doesn’t even notice. When he comes, gasping against me, hot breath on my neck, I feel this great wave of tenderness and stroke his hair. He lays against my chest, and I run my fingers through Red’s red, the look of his eyelashes casting shadows on his cheekbones is unbelievably vulnerable. He feels what I feel; that together, we’re somehow protected.
I’d like to say everything spirals out of control, but the opposite is true. When I’m with Red, I feel more in control of my life than before. We study together, and I teach him more about the hand. I teach him about what it is I do, and sometimes, when we’re done with all our textbooks, we talk about opening our own office. His eyelashes casting shadows on his cheekbones is unbelievably vulnerable. He feels what I feel; that together, we’re somehow protected.
I’d like to say everything spirals out of control, but the opposite is true. When I’m with Red, I feel more in control of my life than before. We study together, and I teach him more about the hand. I teach him about what it is I do, and sometimes, when we’re done with all our textbooks, we talk about opening our own office someday and working together the way Elisa and Dr. Hahn do.
“I’ll do the surgeries and then send them off to you,” he whispers against my ear as he nuzzles me, tickling the fine hairs on my neck. “Just remember to dial the right number, okay?”
I laugh and give him a playful shove. “Fine, but you remember to fix the right tendon.”
And so it goes. We’re going to sleep together and waking up together. When we see each other in Dr. Hahn’s clinic, we try to keep it as professional as possible, but even Elisa notices that I’m much more relaxed than I was before. And even though I know she knows it’s not her place to comment, she tells me that she hopes I’m teaching him about the benefits of rehabilitation. I assure her that Red is learning much more about the benefits of occupational therapy than he ever expected to.