Page 4 of Resisting You

Frey froze. “I mean…it’s kind of funny.” Because it was. Normally, Frey would have been in charge of marking the leg because God help any surgeon who took the wrong limb. And it had happened before. But there was an older woman three rooms down who was throwing up what looked like blood, so Frey asked the guy if he would mind marking his own leg.

“Make sure it’s obvious which one has to go,” he’d told the guy. Then he handed off the marker and followed the sounds of retching, crying, and cussing.

“You should be fired for this,” Renato hissed as he motioned for Celia to bring his tray closer.

“What’s happening?” the guy asked, his words slurred from the Midazolam he’d been given before being wheeled in.

Everyone looked down at him, but no one bothered answering because he wasn’t going to remember between one breath and the next.

“Just relax,” Renato said in a tone that was anything but calm.

The guy laughed. “Just relax,” he parroted.

Renato glanced up at Ajish, who was currently assessing whether or not the epidural was taking effect, and then he looked at Frey again. “Get the fuck out of my OR.”

“I didn’t do thi?—”

“Get. Out,” Renato repeated. “Or I will have you escorted out, and you do not want me to make a scene right now.”

Frey knew he could have fought him, but in the end, it was easier to just leave. He stormed into the doctors’ mess and slammed the door behind him. Thankfully, no one was napping, so he walked over to the bottom bunk and sank down before grabbing the pillow and screaming as loudly as he dared.

He was going to get fired for something he hadn’t even done, all because Renato couldn’t get over his irrational hatred for nine fucking seconds so he could listen to reason. Frey was pretty sure he’d have the chance to plead his case, and he hadn’t actually done anything wrong.

There was no protocol against allowing a patient to mark their own bodies.

But there was probably some rule saying that a nurse wasn’t allowed to draw dicks on the patient, and if the poor fucker didn’t remember whether or not he’d done it after the operation was over, Frey might be screwed.

And the fear of that stayed with him for the rest of his shift, where he could hear people whispering about him behind their hands, and all the way home. He wanted desperately to shake it off, but he wasn’t sure what he was going to do—or how the hell they were going to survive—if he lost his job to something like this.

No hospital would touch him again. Hell, he could even lose his license. How the fuck was he supposed to take care of his kid if he lost everything he’d spent his life working for?

The shower started running cold, and he felt even worse for wasting it on his current existential crisis. He quickly soaped up and had a very unsatisfying, tepid rinse before throwing on sweats and then poking his head around the corner to check on his kid.

Rex was on the couch now, his eyes closed, his hearing aids abandoned on the table.

Normally Frey didn’t let him nap this close to bedtime, but days with Oz usually took it out of him. Part of Oz’s job was to teach Rex how to navigate in the hearing world, and while Rex was still too young to be bitter about how shitty people were, it was still a lot for him.

Frey wanted nothing more than to crawl up next to his kid and cuddle. Maybe they’d both stay unconscious until morning, but he’d been too stressed to manage eating lunch after the ordeal, so he forced himself into the kitchen for a sandwich.

He was halfway through shoving a massive bite into his face when his phone lit up, and he felt a small punch of relief when he saw Lane’s name on the screen. They’d become something like best friends over the last year and a half, and while Frey had been a little terrified that he’d lose their friendship after he and Bowen became a thing, that hadn’t happened.

“Hey,” he said, his cheeks full.

“Am I interrupting something?”

Frey snorted, then almost choked on a piece of ham. “Fuck. Gah!” He hacked and coughed. “Uh, no. Just attempting to choke myself.”

“Yeah…not my thing, so…”

“On ham,” he clarified. “Though choking can be fun if you?—”

“Come on,” Lane groaned.

Frey laughed as he took another bite. “I didn’t get a chance to eat lunch today.”

“Frey,” Lane scolded. He was a chef, so part of his love language was food. And it wasn’t the first time he’d bitched Frey out for not taking care of himself that way. “We’ve talked about this.”

“Yep,” he said, then walked to the fridge for a sparkling water. “We’ve also talked about the living nightmare in the form of an Italian asshole doctor who wants to see me put in the stocks.”

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