Authors: Nina Hamilton
By this point, Kate’s breath was coming out in hard pants that reminded her that her lung capacity was still stretching back to normal. However, she had made the decision that she was ready for this kind of uber-challenging work and she was going to live up to that promise.
With that motivation and banishing Andrew’s oddity from her mind, Kate buckled the final strap and didn’t worry when she saw that it pinched his skin a little now. Standing up and locking her arms into position, Kate began the backward shuffle that would move her, and drag her patient, the full length of the course and allow her her recertification badge.
‘Well done and well within time.’ The blood was pounding hard enough through Kate’s veins that that she barely heard the words of congratulations from the tester. However, she made the effort to lift her sore arms up and smile as she returned his handshake.
‘I’m looking forward to being back at work,’ she said.
Joe, Ben, and Margo had gone for less formal embraces. For the moment, it suited her that no-one had thought to undo Andrew’s straps so he was still strapped to the ski, where she had dropped him across the line about three minutes ago.
‘Well, I think that our favourite new old member of our team might be deserving of some beers tonight,’ said Joe, as he slapped Kate on her back for a second time.
‘I might deserve them,’ Kate replied. ‘But at this point I think that the most likely outcome would be that they would make me fall over. Can I raincheck?’
‘Only until tomorrow,’ said Margo.
Kate smiled at her friend’s congratulations. The relief and warmth they felt about her return was genuine, which only made Andrew’s actions more inexplicable.
‘I suppose I should let Dr Wentworth out of his bonds then.’
The others turned around guiltily but Kate felt no such emotion. Even undoing the clasp that had gone on roughly didn’t bring the slightest flinch. There was a small graze on the back of his hand where it had made contact with the gravel and it was only after Margo had exclaimed over it Kate offered her services with the first aid kit.
‘You’d better come with me,’ she said. ‘I’ll treat it before I get changed to go home.’
If the others noticed her lack of gracious enthusiasm, it went uncommented upon. Maybe they laid it down at the feet of the inevitable exhaustion that came with the rigors of fitness testing.
Andrew and Kate made their way to the privacy of the locker room without exchanging a single word. Once there Kate’s only contribution to the conversation was ‘sit’ as she hunted up the necessary supplies to dress and cover the graze.
She thought she could do the whole procedure in professional silence but when she reached out and touched the hand he had without speaking held out, she just as quickly dropped it, and pushed against his immovable shoulder.
‘You volunteered for that,’ she said, her voice breaking a little. ‘Really?’
Andrew’s shoulders shrugged, moving under her touch, ‘I volunteered, as in they asked if I could do it, and I couldn’t think of a reason to say no.’
‘Apart from the fact that you are probably one of the bulkiest people on site today, so you could have understood that saying yes was going to make my accreditation just that much harder and make any chance of relapsing today just that little bit more likely.’
Kate kept her voice low. She would have hated anyone to overhear their conversation. As far as anyone knew, today had been a triumph.
‘Are you calling me fat?’ he asked, with a half-smile on his face.
‘A man who just tried to sabotage me during one of the most important moments of my professional career doesn’t get to make jokes and be cute.’
‘Did you ever think I might be for just one moment absolutely terrified that you were going to be back in that helicopter facing God knows what risks?’
Andrew didn’t give her a minute to answer as his obvious frustrations poured out. ‘I have supported you all the way through your recovery and just for a moment today, I had a moment, one moment of panic. So I’m sorry if I slowed you down for a second but bad luck; I might love how fearless you are but sometimes that part of you scares me.’
The tremor in Andrew’s voice shook Kate to her core but it didn’t stop her reply.
‘Well, I was terrified today that I wasn’t going to be deemed good enough to go back to the work that I loved, so we are equal on the fear front.’
However, because first aid was a reflex, beyond all emotion, Kate took his hand in hers again and began in the relatively slow process of cleaning and dressing the small graze on his wrist. It was only after she had finished this process and was packing up the kit that she heard another person entering the locker room.
Kate took a deep breath before she turned and faced the new arrival. Pete, the Base Commander, was looking chuffed.
‘I see we’ve got you back to business,’ he said, gesturing to the first aid kit in her hand. ‘I hope it is only minor and it means that we have the A team in the air again.’
‘Very minor sir,’ Kate answered.
Congratulations,’ he said, as he held his hand out towards her.
After the slightly awkward ceremonial gesture, he turned to Andrew. ‘I’ve filled in the paperwork your London office needed. I can’t pretend we won’t be sad to see you go, when your next month here is up.’
Later, Kate would wonder how that polite smile of hers remained so firmly, so resolutely in place as she realised the extent of Andrew’s betrayal. Somehow, she accepted more congratulations, turned down more offers of drinks and didn’t look Andrew in the eyes as she made her way to the car.
‘Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid.’
How had she ended up being the girl who didn’t ask the obvious questions. Like, dammit, when are you going back to your real life?
Kate realized that if she sat in the work carpark any longer, someone was going to come to her window and ask if she was OK. Or, Andrew was going to get away from the work conversation and follow behind her in his car and they were going to have to walk through the resort doing the arguing couple thing. No, she definitely didn’t want that, especially seeing she didn’t figure as any sort of a partner in his life, professionally or personally it seemed.
Half an hour later, the knock she had been dreading, and expecting, sounded. At least, here, at home, she could ignore him in private.
‘Kate, just open the door. I will stand here all night if I have to,’ Andrew called, after the fourth increasingly loud bang had gone unanswered.
‘Say your piece, but you are not coming in,’ she said, as she cracked the cedar door open halfway and crowded the entrance with her body.
He looked frustrated, but seemed to accept her dictate and stood his ground only slightly too close for comfort. ‘I wanted to say sorry for leaving you out of the loop. My plans for London were something I wanted to talk to you about myself.’
My mistake,’ she said, voice clipped. ‘I knew you were going back but I guess I didn’t realize that the dates were so set.’
Kate could feel her breath getting shallow and knew, this time, that it wasn’t broken ribs stopping oxygen from fully reaching her lungs. ‘If that is all, I have had a tiring day and I think I will enjoy a night of reality television alone.’
She stepped back, but Andrew’s large hand hitting the door stopped her from fully closing it on him.
‘How could you think that everything we have been through begins and ends with that?’ he asked, one shoulder now over the threshold.
Rather than letting him get too close, Kate gave up her tactical position. She walked away and, from the fridge, overfilled one large wineglass. If they were going to have this conversation now, she deserved fortification. Andrew deserved nothing, so she offered nothing.
Not wanting to bring back memories of the way he had had her on the marble bench top last night, Kate decided to sit on the lounge room couch and wait for him to bring the opening sally.
Andrew sat, resting his forearms along his thighs. The last time she had seen him look so agitated was the night of her accident.
‘You have to understand,’ he started. ‘The London thing is my dream job.’
Kate just took another gulp of wine. She wasn’t going to make this an easier conversation for him.
‘I put in my application weeks ago but my appointment was only confirmed three days ago. I didn’t want to add to the pressure of health and fitness checks by telling you until they were over.’
‘It was all for my own good.’ The bitterness in Kate’s laugh actually hurt her throat. ‘Don’t doctors get tired of that line? You had a lot of front today. Pretending to care desperately about my wellbeing when all that time you were waiting for your penance in Australia nowheresville to be over.’
Andrew looked for a moment as if he was going to reach for her and then thought better of it. ‘I care very deeply for you. But I can’t spend the rest of my career fixing broken legs and bandaging up scrapes. Not when I’ve trained for much of my adult life, trained with some of the best specialists in the world so I myself could specialize in operating on hearts and lungs.’
‘That’s what you think of us? That’s what you think we do?’ Kate could hear her voice rising to near hysterical levels but there was nothing in her to tone it down. Andrew had gone too far. ‘You think we just play at being pretend medical professionals who do the boring easy stuff and wait for the real doctors to come and save our patients.’
‘No. The work is important. It’s something that saves lives and it’s something that you are great at. However, most other competent doctors might be able to do as good a job as me.’ Andrew’s smile was half-reluctant, ‘Or close to as good a job. But the work I do as a surgeon is something that takes mentoring, and at that I’m as close to being one of the best at in the country. I am not going to walk away from a career I’ve been building on, even for a woman I feel so strongly for.’
Kate understood passion. She understood commitment to career but the hurt she was feeling was visceral and now all she wanted was for Andrew to get the hell out.
‘I’m tired,’ she repeated, the fight and anger gone from her voice. ‘I’m tired and I still would like to be alone, so you have a lovely villa next door that I know is very comfortable.’
Andrew rose from his seat but Kate didn’t have the energy or inclination to raise her face for his kiss. Instead, he settled for running a gentle hand through her hair. She heard rather than saw him leave and staring into the reflection of the switched off television, she tasted the saltiness as her tears reached her lips.
‘You could come to London with me?’ The unexpected offer came from the entrance. It turned out that Andrew hadn’t left, he had just stood there watching her breakdown.
Kate swiped an impatient hand across her face. ‘Are you asking me to move in with you?’
‘No. Yes. Maybe.’
‘See, that thought never even occurred to you,’ said Kate.
Andrew had come back into the room and was on the sofa next to her, colour heightened on his cheeks. ‘Just because I never thought of it doesn’t make it not a good idea.’
‘What would I do in England, have you thought of that? A city with a hospital every few blocks has very little need for a rescue paramedic with my skill set.’
‘You could study. Hell, you could do medicine.’
Kate’s overwhelming feeling was that of sadness.
‘Turns out neither of us knew each other as well as we thought. Don’t insult me by making me ask you to leave again.’
This time Andrew made no move to touch her on the way out, and Kate made no move to hide her tears. This time she also watched him actually move through the door, so her sob could escape. She couldn’t imagine how any of their relationship would survive the wasteland that the day and night had wrought.
The next day, Andrew woke up and, without thinking, felt for Kate in his bed before he remembered that last night he had made her cry. Worse, he had made her look defeated and he didn’t know how to take it back. Because, in the end, he was certainly leaving for London and it didn’t seem that she would be following him there.
He hadn’t slept well, thinking of her. He hadn’t realized how familiar the warmth of her body snuggled to his had become, and how essentially it had become tied to his sense of wellbeing. He wanted to have woken up with her this morning, slightly annoyed at the way she always put her always too cold feet against his warm thighs. He liked being the man who knew that Kate hated being dragged out of bed but passionately loved standing under the warmth of a shower.
Those mornings together looked to have stopped, maybe forever. Andrew ached in unfamiliar parts of his heart at the thought of that.
You would think he would have learnt about starting relationships with colleagues. It didn’t end well. However, he and Kate had started as some sort of friends and as far as most people knew that was how they had stayed.
Andrew waited for Kate to answer her door, ‘I know you won’t drive to work with me, but can we at least walk to our cars together?’
Without speaking, Kate left the door open and went to grab her work duffle bag.
At this point, he would have to see her not screaming or slapping him as a good start. Silence, however, did seem to be the order of the day as he accompanied her to the cars. Typically Kate had hidden any evidence of the night before in her physical appearance. Her hair was tightly braided back and her makeup was low-key but definitely present.
He was the one who seemed to be feeling unruly emotion. He wanted to stop, to get his arms around her but didn’t dare pierce her hard shell. He didn’t even dare to speak her name even as they reached their respective car parks.
Three hours later, and the call had come through that would officially be Kate’s first mission in the air again. Typical of the eccentricities of this area, it wasn’t a simple medical case.
Margo gave them the reported information. ‘Forty-five-year-old man with infected wound. One other crewmember on the boat. Yacht with motor is not registered but has been under Customs watch for the last few months. So the good news is, that in the next few minutes, our friends from the water police will be arriving and hitching a ride.’