Page 34 of Christmas On Call
MAX
Max woke at six in the morning to gray light filtering through her bedroom curtains and the immediate, crushing weight of remembering.
For maybe three seconds—that brief, merciful window between sleep and consciousness—she forgot. Then it all came rushing back: Asha’s apartment, the hollow look in her eyes, the wordsmaybe we should end this, and the way Max had walked out knowing she was leaving part of herself behind. She was fed up with being Asha’s emotional punching bag. She knew she deserved better.
She lay in bed staring at the ceiling, her pillow still damp from the crying she’d done before finally falling asleep around four. Her cat, Miso, was curled against her side, purring with oblivious contentment. Max envied her that—the ability to exist without the constant weight of human emotion.
Her phone sat on the nightstand, dark and silent. No messages. No calls. Nothing.
Part of her—the part that had spent three weeks being patient and understanding and endlessly accommodating—wanted to text Asha. To check if she was okay, to soften the blow, to make it easier somehow.
But underneath the grief, something else was stirring. Something harder.
Anger.
Max sat up, dislodging Miso, who meowed in protest. She grabbed her phone and scrolled through the message history with Asha—weeks of careful, coded texts, nothing too revealing in case someone saw, always maintaining plausible deniability. Even their I love yous had been abbreviated, sanitized, safe. But she knew it was real.
She’d made herself so small for Asha. Had hidden what they were, had swallowed her own needs, had convinced herself that patience was the same as love.
Max threw off the covers and headed for the shower. The water was scalding, but she didn’t adjust it. Let it burn. Let it scour away the feeling of Asha’s hands, the memory of her voice breaking onI don’t know what I mean anymore.
By the time she got out, her skin was red and raw, but something had crystallized inside her. She had a shift tonight—her first time seeing Asha since walking out—and she refused to fall apart.
She would be professional. She would do her job. She would not let Asha Patel see how completely she’d been shattered.
The time stretched painfully.
Max tried to keep busy—cleaned her already-clean apartment, did laundry, reorganized her bookshelf by color then by author then back to color again. She found one of Asha’s hair ties on her nightstand, black and simple and forgotten.
Then she got angry at herself for crying and threw the hair tie in her junk drawer.
Then she retrieved it five minutes later and put it in her pocket.
She drafted texts to Asha throughout the afternoon:
Are you okay?
Delete.
We need to talk.
Delete.
I love you, but I can’t keep doing this.
Delete.
Fuck you for making me feel like I’m not enough.
Delete, delete, delete.
By the time she needed to leave for her shift, she was exhausted from the emotional whiplash, but grimly determined. She pulled on her scrubs—the navy ones, not the ones she’d been wearing Tuesday night when everything fell apart—and pulled her hair back into a messy bun with mechanical precision.
Her reflection in the mirror looked tired but intact. Good enough.
She drove to Oakridge through late traffic, hands steady on the wheel, heart a bruised thing behind her ribs. The hospital came into view, all concrete and glass and the promise of routine, and Max felt something in her settle.
This, at least, she knew how to do. The babies didn’t care about her broken heart. They just needed her to show up and do the work.
