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The phone dinged and woke me. I fumbled for it, but it was under the covers and I tossed off the bedding while crawling over the mattress.
Are you alone? he texted.
What sort of question is that? Did he think I’d snuck another omega into my bed?
I wanted to make sure you weren’t out having coffee or had been called to an emergency job.
My heart sped up as I came up with all the reasons why he needed me to be alone.
Yes, I’m still in bed.
Me too, though I’m about to get up and shower. But I wanted to show you something.
Whatever it was, I was ready. Go on.
Morning wood.
Oh gods, he sent me a dick pic.
I dreamed we had sex last night, and I was so hard when I woke up. It hurt.
Maybe I should drive to Rockhill this evening and help you out.
Being in love and finding my mate had made me giddy. But what was a three-hour drive tonight if I got to be with the omega I adored?
I like the way you think. See you in twelve hours.
Chapter 13
Brett
When you go into the medical field, it’s pretty much a given that there will come a time when one of your patients will pass. It doesn’t matter what area of medicine you’re in, it’s going to be your reality. And working in the hospital, the odds increase because you’re not seeing people just coming in because they have an earache or because they need to get a refill on their suppressants.
At the emergency department, you’re seeing people who, a lot of times, are in medical crisis. Sure, sometimes it’s someone who panics over something that’s no big deal, but for the most part, it’s people who need to be seen and stat.
The thing is, even knowing that going into this profession with your eyes wide open, knowing that it’s a very real possibility you’ll be there when someone takes their last breath, nothing prepares you for it. Nothing gets you ready for the way your first patient loss tears your heart open, the way it has you questioning every decision you made, the way that memory will forever be seared upon your soul.
For me, I popped my cherry during college. I was shadowing a nurse, not even participating in much of anything yet. Aside from interacting with patients and taking their temperature, my job was to watch and learn, to discover what I was really getting into. And it did that, for sure.
I was there with Nurse Sandy for three shifts in a row. Mr. Lawson was the very first patient I met, and I genuinely liked the guy. It had been odd to call him mister. He was younger than me by a few years, barely out of high school.
He’d been hit with a baseball while watching his little brother’s championship game—it wasn’t even him playing. It was a freak accident, a foul ball popping back and smacking him straight in the temple. Everything looked like it was healing right, and that he was okay—all the scans, all the tests, all the indicators. He was talking, happy as can be. They were just keeping him for one more night, you know, to keep an eye on him, to make sure everything was fine.
Spoiler alert: Everything was not fine.
The next day, when I went in for my shift, he was gone from the floor, having crashed during the night. In a last ditch effort to save him, he was put in a medically induced coma and moved to the ICU. I didn’t find out until two days later that he’d left this world.
I’d barely known the guy. I’d never truly worked with him other than a few sentences of chitchat after my introduction, and yet meeting him left an indelible mark on my heart.
You’d think the next loss would be easier on me, and the next one after that, and so on—that I’d somehow become immune to the pain. It never happened, and seeing the people who did get numb, I was glad for that. There was a coldness to them that no patient deserved.
One of the reasons that made shifts in the ER so much more difficult than my normal shifts was knowing this was a very real possibility every shift. Sure, it was true in all shifts, but the odds were higher that someone was going to come in to be seen too late, not realizing they had had a stroke, or not recognizing the signs of a heart attack or that they’d accidentally ingested one of their allergens, or had pneumonia that had crossed over to sepsis. There were so many different scenarios in the ER, and life was so fragile.
It still sucked and hurt deeply, but over the years, I’d figured out how to handle it, how to prepare myself, how to keep my guard up at least until I got home. Patients didn’t need me at my worst. They deserved better.
At least I thought I had figured it out.
Today was different. Today, Mrs. Harrison left this world, and it hit me so much deeper than any loss I’d had in recent years. With her, I let my guard down. I let her get close. Heck, I talked to her about love and listened to her talk about her husband and their lives together. She was supposed to be going home tomorrow, and now, I guess, in a way, she was home—just not the one she’d planned to be at.
