Authors: Nina Hamilton
‘So glad you guys were here,’ said Patrice as she joined them, her sincerity evident.
‘With the training in this place, Mr Rafferty would still have been fine without us,’ Andrew replied. ‘He was more lucky that the ambos were able to respond so quickly.’
‘That might be,’ said Patrice. ‘However, the panic level that we weren’t doing the right thing would have been unfortunate and I doubt I would be feeling so calm now. Do you think he’ll be alright?’
‘Could be a difficult few days,’ replied Andrew. ‘But the quick onset of his symptoms and how quickly he got treated here should count in his favour. The damage to his heart could end up being very minimal.’
‘Yeah well, probably lucky it didn’t happen at home. He is alone there during the day and, being such a stubborn old coot, he might have tried to ignore his symptoms.’ Patrice turned to Kate and offered her a hug. ‘Ben told me that you guys were in the middle of night shifts so you really need to get out of here.’
‘I suppose I can hear my bed calling,’ said Kate, as she gave Patrice’s arm an affectionate squeeze.
‘Now I want you two to come to a club BBQ,’ Patrice insisted, as they walked to the car park. ‘So Kate, I’m relying on you to update me on both your schedules so we don’t end up with a work conflict.’
Once they were left alone, Kate spoke. ‘See, if you join the SES you can save more lives.’
‘If I hung out at a retirement home I could do the same thing,’ Andrew replied sardonically, as he hopped into his four-wheel-drive.
Climbing into her own car, shaking her head, Kate couldn’t resist a smile that quirked the corners of her mouth.
Midnight hit and Kate was yawning in front of her work computer. Today, buzzing after their emergency at the community hall, she hadn’t managed to grab her full quota of sleep. However, she was loathe to grab her rest in the on-call room knowing exactly who her room-mate was going to be.
So far, she hadn’t had to share the on-call room with Andrew, keeping to her sometime practice of grabbing her needed sleep during the day. This week she would have preferred to keep it that way. She was stuck with Andrew because of an unspoken boundary she had maintained with the married rescue men on the team. The married men got to share with each other and she kept to the room next door, co-existing with whomever the short-term doctor was. Up until now that had remained a non-issue. There had been no doctor who would have dared to put his hands on her mid-shift, and no doctor who she would have feared rebuffing. It wasn’t even that she thought anything would happen between her and Andrew. There was just an unspoken tension and heat that she didn’t want to do anything to inflame.
Telling herself this was the kind of cowardly avoidance that she loathed, Kate got up from her computer. Walking out in the hallway, she started slightly at the sight of Andrew sitting on the corridor floor, his laptop in his hands.
‘That doesn’t look particularly comfortable,’ she observed, looking down at him.
‘I got sick of the lounge about forty-five minutes ago. So this seemed like a good change,’ Andrew replied, as he pulled his earphones out.
Kate couldn’t resist the impulse to join him, sliding down the wall to sit beside him. ‘We might get called out at three, so it is probably not the world’s worst idea to catch some sleep.’
As she settled beside him, she could smell the hint of sandalwood that was the last of his aftershave.
‘I could sleep down here in the lounge,’ Andrew offered.
‘No, sorry,’ Kate replied. ‘You are six-foot two, and too tall for that damn couch. Apart from that you need your sleep and you wouldn’t be making that offer if I wasn’t a woman. This is a place of work, not a nineteenth century English drawing room. Gallantry just isn’t needed or, quite frankly, appreciated. And I don’t want to be forced to offer to do the same when there are perfectly comfortable, well perfectly serviceable, trundle beds upstairs.’
Andrew ran his hand in a tired looking gesture across his dark eyes. ‘I guess some sleep wouldn’t be a bad idea.’
‘Considering you are the doctor among us, I think we could count it as being necessary.’
Andrew got to his feet and, turning to her, offered his hand. ‘Give me just a hint of being gallant,’ he said, when she failed to take it. ‘It will soothe that old-fashioned part of my soul.’
Kate touched her palm to his, trying not to feel an awareness of the slight roughness of his fingers. That roughness probably hadn’t existed a month ago, before he had started here. With a soft heat in her belly, she released her hand from his grasp as soon as she got to her feet. Moving forward, she even managed to get two steps in front of him when she made her way up the stairs, cutting down on any implied intimacy.
Opening the door to on-call room Number Two, she could feel a lack of coordination in her movements, which she tried to replace with a busy efficiency. The flimsy room had only two trundle beds in hospital green surrounds. Probably management had decided that making things too comfortable would hurt productivity.
‘Two pillows,’ she said, as she reached down to arrange her blankets. ‘If you want anything softer than these, you’ll have to bring them in from home.’
‘I don’t know why you seem to think that I’m a prima donna who needs those luxuries, I did use to sleep on rocky outcrops,’ Andrew complained.
‘Sorry,’ Kate said, aware she sounded anything but. ‘I guess I just think of you as a surgeon who expects that extra consideration.’
‘You think of me as a whinging Englishman more likely,’ said Andrew.
‘Well yes.’
Andrew had experienced women dressing up in skimpy underwear specifically purchased from Victoria’s Secret for the purpose of seducing him. However, none of that had been quite as arousing as the sight of Kate’s uniform top hitting the floor next to her trundle bed.
The room was barely illuminated by the sliver of light that appeared under the doorway, but Andrew’s active imagination had no trouble imagining her curves, admittedly covered by a t-shirt, under that blanket.
After fifteen minutes of occasional twisting and turning in the bed four feet away, Kate had obviously made a decision in favour of comfort. Unfortunately, she had sacrificed his comfort as the bulge pressing against his pants zipper could attest to.
‘OK, this is crap,’ Kate declared, once again pushing herself on her elbow to reshape her pillow. ‘This is why I sleep during the day while I’m on night shift weeks. What is the point of not having kids or roommates if you can’t do that?’
Andrew smiled against his own pillow; she sounded genuinely aggrieved. ‘I’ll call Mr Rafferty,’ he said. ‘I’m sure he’ll send his condolences if I tell him how much his heart attack interfered with your circadian rhythms.’
‘Minor heart attack,’ Kate corrected him. ‘And as I’ve already accepted his lack of culpability in the day’s events, that doesn’t mean I don’t get to complain. I’m tired, I’m bored and I don’t think I’m about to freaking sleep in this uncomfortable place.’
There was an intimacy in the conversation, pitched quiet, for their ears only.
‘Where is the pragmatic, go-anywhere, sleep on rocky coals paramedic that I first met?’ Andrew asked
‘That girl hates night shift so I replace her this week,’ said Kate.
Andrew sat up and settled his back against the hard wall. He couldn’t help liking this more human side of her. ‘I guess I’ll have to keep you company then until you want to go to sleep. But anymore of that girly whining and I’m bedding down in the macho boys’ room where there is only snoring.’
For one long moment, Andrew was afraid he had pushed the sensitive Kate too far. Instead, she laughed, a sound full of pure amusement.
‘It would serve you right if I gave you a swag and sent you in to do just that,’ she replied, as she mirrored his movements and sat up, leaning against the wall.
In her earlier impatience, some of her hair had been pulled out of its neat plait. Seeing her look a little undone made it hard for Andrew to keep his mind on where they were.
‘What would you be doing if it was just you, no work, no commitments?’ Andrew asked.
He tried not to be too distracted by the way she tilted back her head, closed her eyes and considered. ‘Well sometimes Lucy and I go dancing,’ she said.
‘Dancing where?’ asked Andrew, keeping the exclamation out of his voice, not to wake the sleeping men next door.
‘There is a backpacker bar in Cairns that plays bad pop music and lets you dance on the tables.’
‘Very girls gone wild,’ Andrew observed dryly. ‘Do you pick up men on these dancing excursions?’ He was trying to suppress another rush of blood prompted by the idea of his too attractive colleague dancing on a raised platform.
‘No…’ Kate protested softly. ‘The boys in the backpacker bars are babies. Seriously, sometimes I feel like carding them myself to make sure that they are allowed to be there without adult supervision. We go, we dance, we laugh and we go home alone.’
Andrew wasn’t sure if he truly believed her. He had seen the young tribes of shirtless backpackers wandering around Cairns. They were young, tanned, and brimming with entitled confidence and he could imagine how ruthlessly they would pursue the very pretty woman sitting to his left. Although he had to say, he didn’t know who exactly was her type.
‘Do any of your boyfriends protest about this dancing habit of yours?’ he asked, hating how conservative he sounded even as the words left his lips.
The note of exasperated derision in her reply was probably what he deserved. ‘Bloody hell, Andrew, it isn’t as if I’m dancing for men who put money in my G-string. I go to a bar rarely and let off some steam with my best friend.’
‘Really,’ Andrew replied. ‘It just sounded like something that the man in your life might be jealous of.’
‘Firstly, what man in my life?’ Kate said, indignantly. ‘Secondly, I’m not a party girl. I dance like I jog or I would sing if I could. I work really hard for my living and I deserve to take a break that helps me forget about the really hard aspects of our job.’
Something inside Andrew’s chest eased at her admission of singleness. He hadn’t realized until now that he had been fishing for that information. The rescue crew had said she hadn’t a partner and Kate had carried herself as such, but the damn woman was so private that he wouldn’t put it past her to have a secret boyfriend.
‘Enough about me,’ Kate said. ‘You are a doctor, which means that you drink to socialize, right?’ She paused long enough to allow him to nod. ‘So do you like elaborate nightclubs or cosy London pubs?’
‘I’m not a secret house music fan or anything, I just like a pub where you can play pool or go to a live music gig. Unfortunately, working towards heading a department at a leading teaching hospital means eighty hour work weeks and a lot of networking instead of socializing.’
‘So you are left with naughty nurses to bathe that hard-working furrowed brow,’ Kate quipped, hardly overflowing with sympathy.
Andrew realized how freeing it was to talk to someone who didn’t know the sordid truth about his failed engagement. There was no sly glance in his direction as she tried to work out what he had done that had caused a charming, normal and beautiful occupational therapist to betray him so publicly. Kate just assumed he was single and maybe not too discriminating in his choice of sexual partners. Given the last six months he had had, that was good news.
‘As a medical professional,’ Andrew said. ‘All I can say is I have always espoused the view that the nursing profession is one made up of women who are unstinting in their generosity towards patient care.’
Kate snorted, actually snorted, with the sound coming from her perfect straight nose. ‘Bloody surgeons,’ she muttered, but Andrew couldn’t hear any bitterness in her tone. ‘I suppose we should try the whole sleeping thing again before we tempt fate and get called out for the night.’
Andrew lowered himself back down onto the mattress that somehow managed to be both uncomfortably hard yet squishy around the edges. ‘Good night again then,’ he said.
‘You were good today. I guess chest pains are your speciality,’ Kate said, even as she settled herself down too.
‘Yeah, chest pains are my thing,’ Andrew repeated, smiling into the dark. ‘With all the complexities that come with delicate operations on the wonderful organ that is the heart, next time someone asks me for a job description I’ll have to save that one up.’
Andrew woke up to the faint sound of movement outside the door. He checked his watch: O600. An hour and a half before change of shift, so he may as well get up and join the boys. As Andrew stretched out his tight legs and back, he looked over to where Kate was curled up on her side sleeping. During the night, she had wrapped her arms around her pillow and was clutching it tightly to her chest. Closed dark lashes made her high cheekbones seem less fierce and her full lips had a gentle softness in repose.
Andrew shook his head, trying to jerk his preoccupation with Kate out of it. Watching a woman while she slept was a slippery slope towards affection. Andrew certainly didn’t need or want any of that.
‘Wheels up thirty seconds,’ announced the message through their radios as Andrew and Kate jogged towards the waiting helicopter. On this, their last night of the seven-night roster, they had been called to a life threatening emergency out to sea.
Andrew stood back, letting Kate into the helicopter cabin before him. Her eyes gleamed with adrenaline as she stowed her med bag opposite her.
‘Let’s hope that poor sailor is going to hold on until we get there,’ said Kate. ‘Internal bleeding isn’t the best scenario out there on a bulkhead carrier with minimal crew.’
‘He’d better be properly sick,’ Joe remarked sardonically, as he took the chopper up into the air. ‘I’ll be really pissed if we are flying into this weather because the ship’s cook hadn’t frozen their meat properly.’
Andrew couldn’t help but share that sentiment as the helicopter shook slightly even under Joe’s expert hands. The wind had been gusting earlier and even as the most novice member of the rescue team, Andrew knew the conditions were not ideal.