Page 9 of Scorched Hearts

“Wanna know the truth?” Maya sighed. Her salmon didn’t look particularly appetizing.

Fleur nodded, encouraging. She was thirsty for any drop of drama, not having many friends in the city.

“Three days ago, I had a very unpleasant encounter. with an ex of mine.” Maya thought about disclosing Elle’s identity but decided that would stir too much drama, knowing the hospital often got called to assist Elle’s department. Rumors fly round fast in this town, that’s for sure. She scoffed. “She thinks she still could have a chance.”

Fleur smiled. “Could she?”

Maya immediately flushed. “No. What? She made an idiot out of me. She may have impressed me when I was twenty, but I’m too old and wise for women like her now.”

“What kind of a person is she?”

Maya opened her mouth to answer, but an ER medic burst in.

“Dr. Monroe? We have a major incident, we need all trauma surgeons on board right now. We’re sending you out to the scene.” And he was gone.

Maya immediately rose to her feet and ran to the ambulances being dispatched. The paramedics and surgeons swarmed around the cars, getting in as fast as humanly possible.

A MAJOR CAR PILE UP ON HIGHWAY 65A, 15 MILES IN welcomed her as she quickly got ready to depart. The driver adjusted her seat, and at once they were on their way.

The usual adrenaline rush while speeding through the city with sirens ringing around her head caused Maya’s thoughts to run at three times the speed as fast as usual. Images and fragments of conversations marched onto the fast beating of her heart, and she couldn’t stop herself from wondering whether she’d see Elle on the scene. The thought grew so itchy that she couldn’t even tell whether she’d like the idea or not. Elle’s charming smile and seductive dark green eyes like a dark and mysterious forest flashed into her mind. I wouldn’t, she kept telling herself while feeling it wasn’t entirely true. Her stomach twisted and tied knots around her confidence, shaking the belief held for years that she was entirely over Elle.

“Hey, Maya.” The surgeon in charge of her team patted her shoulder. “I don’t know what you’re thinking about, but remember not to bring it to the scene, all right? We have a lot of shit to do there.” he nodded, seeking a yes.

“Yes, of course.” Maya straightened up on her seat, prepared to cast aside any personal feelings and plunge straight into action. They were approaching the scene.

The massacred cars piling up on the asphalt made Maya’s blood run cold. The ambulances already in action had nothing to spare in time or staff. Crowds of firefighters lifted cars up and pulled people crashed beneath them in terrifying numbers.

The team got out, running up to the nearest firefighter chief as they sought to coordinate efforts. They positioned themselves nearby a cluster of cars and received the first victims.

Maya quickly received a victim of blunt force trauma and began working on saving his life. Whenever she laid her hands on an injured person, everything around her quieted down. She became completely engrossed in the task at hand no matter how loud or chaotic the surroundings. When the victim’s condition was stabilized and he’d been driven off to the hospital, she received another one, and in the brief moment in between, she watched all her colleagues doing the same — fighting the widely spread threat of death amidst the wreckage of cars. She felt the familiar sense of flow and dove right back to work.

Maya thrived in these situations, calm in a crisis, talented with her hands, highly skilled, and a natural problem solver.

It was a shame she seemed unable to apply any of her talents to her love life.

After a few more patients, she received instructions to collaborate more closely with the firefighters who were working on freeing a large group from a crashed van. She and her colleague took their medical bags and ran up to the team.

The firefighter standing at the forefront of the efforts to leverage the van wore a jacket that clearly read RODRIGUEZ, but Maya had no time to think about her grudges with Elle. There were lives to save beneath that van, and she stood ready to give the best assistance she could to save the stuck people. With a deep groan, Elle and her colleagues managed to lift the van and remove the family from the treacherous metal grasp.

Maya’s heart sank, seeing two little children covered in blood. They quickly placed everyone on stretchers and the group of medics ran back close to the ambulance, ready to operate. She had to call a pediatric surgeon for support. The boys couldn’t be older than three years old, and the anatomy and physiology of a small child was wildly out of Maya’s field.

They managed to send everyone to the hospital still breathing. Maya went around the ambulances to check whether they needed help, and of course, they did. A few victims died and had to be removed from the stretchers to make space for the living.

The groups of firefighters and medical teams pulsed around the scene in a harmonized effort resembling that of a living organism. Maya knew her place and responsibility within it just as well as Elle, and they kept the rescue going like a pair of blood cells travelling within veins to and from the beating heart. Sometimes, their respective efforts would bring them closer to each other as if on a tidal wave, and Maya, seeing the jacket RODRIGUEZ somewhere in her peripheral view, grew more secure. Whatever Elle was in her romantic life had no impact on her skills as a firefighter. She remained stone-calm under any amount of pressure and took care to infect her entire team with it, engaging whatever hell they were facing with a collected and sharp mind.

After an exhausting fight with death, Maya was replaced by another surgeon as her shift came to an end. She’d been on the scene for more than ten hours, and her mind felt like a buzzing swarm of needles ready to tear apart her skull.

Her colleagues drove her and a bunch of other nearly passing out doctors back to the hospital so they could collect their cars and get home. Maya was desperate for a shower and some food.

In the parking lot, Maya realized she was in no state to drive home. She approached one of the taxis waiting next to the hospital and requested a ride home. On the passenger seat, watching the city’s landscape blur with the car’s increasing speed, her mind drifted toward the solid work she’d done. Elle’s presence hadn’t impacted her own work, at least, but her mind still felt so screwed up by the day as a whole.

For Maya, it took more time to get used to the constant hurricane of tragedy. She’d become a surgeon because she cared deeply about helping people, and her precise memory coupled with razor-sharp focus made her a truly perfect surgeon. Whenever she had a human body under her scalpel, she stopped seeing them as a human being, and she became a surgeon. She was only the pair of hands steadily wielding the tools and her knowledge of anatomy, whatever she was operating was just that, a tangle of nerve endings, bones, joints, skin, something she knew how to fix, how to make functional again, or at least prevent from collapsing.

But especially at the beginning, as soon as she looked around, she saw the true face of tragedy. Bodies dragged around on the pavement, patients dying on her hands, buildings burning, and cars crashed to pieces with entire families inside of them. Emergency workers grow used to it, but never entirely. Otherwise they’d lose their humanity.

Elle was made to be an emergency worker, and Maya had always admired her mental strength. Or at least, what she saw as mental strength. Ever since high, school Elle had been fearless. Nonchalant and slightly distant in her daily life, during emergencies she behaved as if no amount of emotional charge could deter her from seeing things crystal clear.

Despite that, she never patronized Maya for her emotions at the beginning of their professional journeys. She was the most supportive person in Maya’s surroundings. In fact, on her free days, she’d stayed up until late hours to welcome her home, listen to her stories, and hear about the pain she’d witnessed. Elle’s training rarely required her to witness real disasters. At first she’d been called to minor incidents and mainly stayed at the station training. For Maya, as a surgeon, it had been very different. She saw death and the threat of it day in, day out, and nearing the end of her second year of practice, she was as close as ever to burning out.

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