Page 105 of False Start

My chest tightened, but my mind was too wired to decode the admission. Maybe he just wanted sex, or maybehe really missed me, or maybe he was bored and didn’t know what else to do.

“I should take a shower.”

He nodded, trailing me into my room.

I pulled my scrubs over my head, placing them in the “work clothes” laundry bag.

Trent itched the back of his neck, eyes darting around the room as if he didn’t spend half his time here. “Do you want me to go?”

I kicked off my pants, eyeing my arms and legs for any splash of body fluids that weren’t mine. “No, but I need to shower first.”

Trent sat on my bed while I retreated to the bathroom, taking off the rest of my clothes without shutting the door.

“So, what happened?” he called over the roar of the shower.

I dropped my head, letting the hot water fall over my face. “Someone took a turn on the table. Surgery. I don’t know the details, but they needed a lot of blood.”

Soaking a loofah in body soap, I scrubbed every inch of skin. Twice for good measure.

“Did they make it?” Concern tinged Trent’s voice.

I winced. “I don’t know. The nurses stopped coming for blood, and I meant to call to find out, but one of our students dropped a unit right in the middle of the blood bank.”

“Oh, god.”

“It bounced. Five hundred milliliters of blood hit the floor and splattered all over the place. On the walls, the refrigerators, the ceiling.” And all over the back of my clothes, which is why I came home in surgery scrubs, still paranoid over whether blood had gotten in my hair.

I shampooed my hair a second time and muttered, “It sucked.”

I held back tears under the rush of water, inhaling shakily. Derek knew to just leave me alone after days like today. My job was ninety percent monotony. But when things went bad, they went really bad. And today had gone really bad.

“Have you eaten?” His voice startled me, no longer booming from the bedroom but in the bathroom, standing just on the other side of the shower. “I didn’t mean to tease you. Well, I did, but I shouldn’t have. You had a bad day. I’m really sorry.”

“It’s fine,” I lied, choking on a sob. “It was just really stressful and a little scary. At least in the operating room, you know what happens. I just hand out blood and hope for the best.”

I’d call in the morning. I’d ring up the operating room nurse, who I at least had a passing relationship with, and ask whether the patient had survived. And then I’d wait for another emergency.

“It usually doesn’t bother me,” I lied.

I’d applied to the medical technology program because I didn’t want to be around patients. I didn’t want to get my heart broken day after day, but somehow, even in the further recesses of the lab, I still felt involved somehow. Responsible.

“Of course it bothers you,” Trent huffed.

It shouldn’t bother me. I wasn’t in the room. Beyond name, birthday, and blood type, I knew nothing about the person.

“How about I order us dinner? You can decompress on the couch. We’ll watch a movie.”

“You don’t need to stay,” I said, already feeling better. Less morose anyway. “You’ve probably got plans.”

He scoffed. “Chinese or pizza?”

“Chinese, please.” I rested my head against the cool tile as hot water slid down my back, my hair cleaned twice over.

“I’ll order. You think of the most obnoxious movie that you love and you’re sure I’ll hate.”

I settled on Pitch Perfect, not the least bit bothered when Trent revealed that he actually liked musicals. Which led us down a slippery slope of increasingly more terrible musicals that crescendoed in Trent putting on Repo! A Genetic Opera, which I’d never seen, but he claimed was his sister’s favorite movie.

“Yourlittlesister was obsessed with Paris Hilton?”

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