It turns out to be a perforation in his lower intestine. Not a usual cause for so much blood, especially seeping into the chest cavity, but the damage is severe.
We resect a good portion of Alex’s lower bowel, scrambling to save every millimeter we can. Alex is a firefighter. I don’t know him, but I can guarantee he won’t want a colostomy bag.
Hours slip by. We manage to preserve enough bowel to avoid having to install a stoma right away, but only time will tell on that front. If Alex develops an infection and the tissue doesn’t heal, we may have to revisit that idea.
Oliver is swaying on his feet by the time we close his brother. I’m fine, clear-headed and alert, until we stitch Alex up and let the nurses take over. Exhaustion hits me in brick wall to the face as soon as my responsibility to my patient is over, though. I feel drunk as Oliver and I strip off our surgical gloves, masks and gowns and throw them in the HAZMAT bins.
Outside the OR, Oliver loses it. His composure abandons him as he slides down the wall and begins to cry. “Oh my god. Olly, he’s gonna be fine. You did a good job. Hey, don’t worry.” I crouch down and wrap my arms around him, holding him to me as his body shakes. I know this meltdown isn’t about fear for Alex’s safety. The guy should be okay, providing nothing awful happens. This is just shock. The pressure of having to keep himself together for so many hours has taken its toll.
“Thank you. Thank you. I wouldn’t have trusted anybody else,” Oliver says, drawing in a deep breath. “Fuck, this is stupid.” He dashes away his tears with the backs of his hands, and then heaves himself to his feet. His face reddens a little when he looks back over my shoulder. “I think I’ve monopolized enough of your time, Romera. Looks like you’re needed elsewhere.”
Zeth is leaning against the wall down the corridor, hands in his pockets, watching us. He looks down at his feet when he sees he’s been spotted.
“Yeah, I swore I’d be home for Christmas day,” I say.
“Then you should go.” Oliver gives me a gentle shove in the back.
I really should, too. Zeth has never once broken a promise he’s made to me. I aim on honoring my promises right back. “If anything happens, you know you can just call me right away,” I tell Oliver.
“I do.”
“Okay. I’ll see you in a couple of days, Ol.” I head off down the corridor, but he calls out to me, stopping me before I reach Zeth.
“Hey, Romera?”
“Yeah?”
He gives me a halfhearted, weak smile. “Merry Christmas, right?”
“Yeah. Merry Christmas, Ol.”
Zeth
She looks like she’s ready to pass the fuck out. I think I’m gonna have to catch her when she collapses against me, face pressed into my chest, but I don’t. She’s just tired and leaning on me. I fold my arms around her and hold her up anyway, because that’s what I’m here for. Always. Being there for her to lean on will be my primary job from now and until the day I die, and boy do I have a serious case of job satisfaction.
“You okay?” I breathe into her hair.
She nods, grunting something inaudible into my leather jacket. I kiss her on the top of her head, smoothing down the strands that have escaped her ponytail.
“I’m taking you home now, angry girl. You got anything to say about that?”
She looks up at me, eyes already drooping, and gives me a lazy smile. “I say thank god for that.”
She falls asleep in the car, forehead pressed up against the cold glass of the passenger window, and I can’t fucking help myself. At every available opportunity, I find myself looking at her out of the corner of my eye. I need to make sure this miraculous woman is real.
I saw it the first time at Julio’s compound when Carnie brought Alexis in and laid her out on the table. Sloane was a force of nature, unstoppable and single minded as she worked over her sister’s broken body. She’d saved Alexis’s life when she would have died otherwise, no two ways about it. Watching her then had taken my breath away. The same thing happened tonight, watching her work over the guy on the table in that operating room. She didn’t hesitate. She didn’t stop and she did not once give up. Not even when the chief of medicine, sitting next to me, had started swearing like a marine when the guy had coded not once but twice.
My angry girl is a fucking hero.
The ugly ass Hummer Rebel left behind with us in Seattle struggles to make it up the narrow, winding road to our house as we leave the city. Snow coats everything—the road, the trees, the mountains in the distance. The whole world is white under the headlights of the car as I drive us back to the warmth of home.
She’s still sleeping when I pull up outside. I don’t have the heart to wake her, so I take off my jacket and put it over her as I lift her out of the car and carry her carefully inside.
The fire’s gone out, but Ernie’s still coiled up in a ball in front of the embers. He lifts his head when we come inside, but he doesn’t bark. Terrible fucking guard dog he’d make. I think we’ve accepted the fact that Ernie’s more likely to studiously ignore an intruder than attack them.
I carry Sloane past the long forgotten arrangements I’d made to surprise her when she came home, straight up the stairs and into the bedroom. I strip her of her clothes as carefully as I can, fingertips grazing the rise and swell and of her breasts as I do—sue me, I’m not a fucking saint—and then I tuck her up under the sheets, warring with myself. I want to wake her up and fuck her. I also want her to be fully compus mentus the next time I screw her, so I manage to keep my dick in my pants. Fucking St. Peter’s Hospital. The place is determined to ruin my sex life.
Instead of accosting her in her sleep, I leave Sloane to her dreams and head back downstairs. The table is exactly how I left it, except now the food is stone cold and the candles have all guttered out. Did I cook for her? Hell fucking no. But you’d better believe I tried, and when that failed, ordered in her favorite Thai food. The Pad Thai looks like a congealed mess on the plate now. I collect everything up and toss it into the trash, kind of glad she didn’t make it back in time.
I’d been impulsive. I was going to do something rash, and now I’m a little fucking relieved things didn’t work out the way I was planning. After seeing Sloane at the hospital tonight, the last thing she needs is me acting like a lovesick teenager, making rash calls and disrupting her shit. She needs to focus. She needs to concentrate on being the best she can be at her job. I won’t stand in the way of that. Not again.
I hang up my leather jacket, removing the gift I’d planned on giving her tonight from the pocket. I close my fist around it, shaking my head, wondering what the hell I was thinking. The gift goes into the back of a drawer behind a stack of papers, and I put it out of my mind.
I tell myself that I do.
But when I go to sleep, hand lying heavy on Sloane’s hip, I have a dream. It’s not a dream about fighting in the dark, and it’s not a dream about my mother crying in the front seat of a car. It’s a dream of something much sweeter.
***
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Ella James, Sloth
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