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She signaled the bartender. She’d switched to tonic waters three drinks ago, wanting to make sure she was clear-headed enough to drive home when the time came — and, if she was honest with herself, to make sure that she was clear-headed enough not to do anything she would regret tonight.
“What do you get?” she asked Dominic.
“Why none of the other interns showed up today,” he said, spinning his glass between two hands. “I know it’s not because they’re all a bunch of underachievers.”
“Well, some of them are…” Emily grinned.
“Yeah,” he said. “Are we thinking of the same people?”
“It would be unprofessional of either one of us to mention names.”
“But I bet we are,” he said.
“Probably,” she agreed with a smile. She was sure he meant Chad.
The bartender dropped off another drink. Emily took a long swallow. She knew that she was running out of excuses to stay here, that eventually she would have to go home. But as long as Dominic seemed willing to continue the conversation, she was going to do the same thing.
“So tell me,” she said, “why didn’t anyone else show up?”
“Because of me,” he said.
“What?” She hadn’t expected that answer.
“I know everyone looks up to me,” he said. “Everyone thinks I’m a great doctor.”
“You are.”
“I know that. But they also avoid me. No one wants to spend any time around me. And it’s not as if that’s a problem for me personally — it’s just that it keeps them from doing things like this, things that would be good for their careers. I’m not sure what to do about that. I don’t want my interns to see me as a friend, but I don’t need them avoiding me, either. If they do that, how are they going to learn?”
Emily paused. “Are you actually asking me to answer this?”
“If you have an answer, I wouldn’t mind hearing it.”
“I get that you’re all about your gruff demeanor,” she said. “But it wouldn’t hurt you to be a little less severe, I think. Not everyone responds to that kind of thing. I don’t think I do, really.”
Dominic sighed. “If I wasn’t hard on myself like that, I wouldn’t have gotten to where I am today,” he said. “You point to me as a really good doctor — well, that didn’t happen by chance. It took me being incredibly exacting with myself. That’s why I treat my interns that way.”
“I get it,” Emily said. “But it’s like I said — not everyone responds to the same treatment. I’ve learned how to ignore you.”
“You don’t ignore me.”
“Well — okay, no, I don’t,” Emily agreed with a laugh. The tension seemed to rise between them. Was he saying that shedidn’t ignore him professionally — something she would have been wrong to do, if she had? Or was he making reference to the fact that she paid too much attention to him outside of work hours? Was he talking about the fact that the two of them were sitting here talking long after the conference had come to an end, long after they had any excuse to be spending time together outside of work?
Either way, he wasn’t wrong in his assessment. But if he was referring to the second situation, it was the closest either one of them had come to addressing the tension between them aloud. She really hadn’t anticipated that he would do that.
She cleared her throat. “My point was that I don’t rely on you to validate me,” she said. “When you growl at me at work, it doesn’t affect me the way it does some of the others.”
“I don’tgrowlat you.”
“Oh, sure you do.” Emily affected a gruff tone. “What are you doing talking to this patient, Dr. Swinton? I told you to do paperwork!”
“That’s what you think I sound like?”
“That absolutely is what you sound like some of the time,” Emily told him. “And if you’re talking about why the other interns might have wanted to take a day off — yeah, I don’t think it would surprise me to find that they didn’t want to be harrumphed at for one day. Sosince you asked, if you wanted to create a more pleasant learning environment for everyone, I do think it would help if you were a little more cheerful sometimes.”
“Cheerful,” Dominic groaned. “Give me a break. Interns shouldn’t need to have their hands held. They shouldn’t need their supervising physician to be their nanny.”
“There’s a middle ground, though, you know,” Emily said. “You don’t have to hold their hands through everything. I agree that’s too much. But you can treat them like people instead of like robots. I know you can, because you’ve figured out how to do it with me.”
