Page 54 of Unworthy
“I’ve told you to call me Heath,” I said, my voice tight with the anger I was trying to suppress. I took a step closer to Yaz, positioning myself between her and Josh enough to force him to take a small step back. Despite this, he seemed oblivious to my rapidly deteriorating mood.
“Right, yes – that’s what we were just talking about,” he said, his eyes wide and earnest. “I’vegotto try and find that inner confidence so that I can believe I deserve to be on a first name basis with a man like you.”
My eyebrows went up. “A man likeme? What are you on about?”
“It’s not just that you’re my boss, it’s this whole alpha vibe – it throws me off. Yaz was just telling me how to dig deep and believe in myself enough to hold my own.” He took a deep breath in and then let it out slowly.
“Tell him, Josh,” Yaz encouraged. “Remember: Superman pose. You are your own man.” She put both of her hands on her hips and threw her shoulders back in the manner of a superhero, and Josh followed her lead. It was enough for some humour to leak through my anger, and I found myself having to suppress a smile. When he turned back to me, his voice was clearer, with even a little of steel behind it – unheard of for Josh.
“Working in emergency medicine gives me massive anxiety.”
I blinked. A conversation about Josh’s career was not what I had envisaged when I made my way over here. But the man had a point.
“No shit.”
“Exactly! You know how stressed I get. I hate it. I can’t stand the unpredictability, the risk, the uncertainty, the level of patient contact.”
He looked on the verge of tears. My anger fell away, and Josh went from being a man who’d been touching the most important woman in the world to me, to being my trainee again. I put my hand on his shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “Hey, that’s okay, Josh. It’s not for everyone. Maybe you can–”
“I’m going to be a pathologist. There’s no point doing something just because I want to be George Clooney. The ED just isn’t for me.”
“Josh, did you join that training scheme so you could be like George Clooney?”
He shrugged. “Maybe. And I thought it might push me to be… oh, I don’t know – to be more like you.”
“Likeme?”
“Well, you or someone similar. Someone a bit more alpha. More confident. But Yaz thinks I should just be myself. She says that’s good enough.”
“Not just good enough, Josh,” Yaz put in, stepping around me to lay her hand on his arm. “You’re fan-bloody-tastic. You just have to believe in yourself.”
Josh gave her a small smile. “That means such a lot to me. I just… I can’t tell you how much…” his voice became too choked to continue, and he launched himself back at Yaz, who of course allowed herself to be hugged,again. Okay, so the man was having some sort of mental breakthrough, but did he have to do it with his paws all over Yaz?
“That’s great, Josh,” I said through my teeth, clapping him a little too hard on the back and then pulling him back from Yaz by the back of his coat, so that he was quite rapidly a good three feet away from her. He looked a little bewildered by the sudden extrication, but I gave his shoulder a couple of hard pats to distract him and forced a smile.
“I’m sorry if I’ve disappointed you,” he said in a small voice, and I felt the anger drain away again, but did take the opportunity to block his path to another Yaz hug.
“Josh, you are a great registrar. To be honest, over-confidence is way more of a problem than under confidence in medicine. But Yaz is right – you’ve got to do what makes you happy. You’ve got another thirty years at least left of this crap – you don’t want to be miserable for decades. You need to be in the right speciality for you.”
“Thanks, Heath,” Josh said, using my first name unprompted for the first time. He looked lighter somehow, as though a weight had been lifted from his shoulders.
“Go for what you want, Josh,” Yaz said, widening her eyes at him for some reason and then jerking her head to the side. Josh looked over her shoulder and squared his shoulders.
“Right,” he said, his voice full of the kind of determination I didn’t think I’d ever heard from him before. “Bloody right I will.”
With that, he walked straight through Yaz and me, not sparing either of us a second glance. When I clocked his direction of travel, I almost sprang forward to halt his progress. He was headed straight towards Mel, one of the pharmacists who worked in our department. I did not fancy his chances. But then after a couple of awkward moments where Mel gave him her polite but slightly forced smile, he said something to surprise a genuine laugh out of her, and the conversation seemed to flow from there. I was shocked. I would never have imagined he’d get up the courage to approach her.
While I was distracted by the miracle of a confident Josh, my arsehole colleagues had closed in on Yaz. Ruben had brought her a fresh glass of champagne and Tim stopped one of the servers so that Yaz could grab a canapé – when he realised Yaz couldn’t eat any of them as they were all beef, Tim went off and found one of the few trays of mini quinoa crackers, presenting it to her like he’d hunted a buffalo for her, not just sourced some vegan snacks from the buffet table.
When they asked what she did, and she told them she about the well-being centre and that she was a yoga and water sports instructor, their mouths collectively dropped open.
“So, you uh…” Ruben swallowed before continuing, “spend a fair amount of your working day in a wetsuit, then?”
Yaz laughed.
“Well, I don’t swan off down the harbour like this, that’s for sure.”
“I might be interested in learning to–”
