Secret Santa (7 page)

Collision on 550

By Doug Brown

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters,
places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or
are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any
resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons,
living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright© 2008 Doug Brown

All rights reserved. No part of this book may
be used or reproduced electronically or in print without written
permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in
reviews.

Doug Brown is a writer who works as a
programmer in South Carolina. He is in the fiction certificate
program at Gotham Writers' Workshop and is married to his high
school sweetheart. You can learn more at
doug-brown.net

Gavin hurried down the hall, the present
knocking his ankles in the overly large department store bag. The
woman at the desk told him it was all they had, Christmas time was
good for that sort of thing, and put his size small box in a sack
big enough to park a car in. Now he was cursing himself for not
depositing it in the trash outside of the mall.

The hospital was buzzing. Visitors sulked
through the halls and bumped elbows with over-caffeinated nurses
and techs. Gavin looked like one of them, his wrinkled scrubs
clinging to a muscular frame he earned playing college football
before breaking his knee in three places. Now it was a shell of the
pro athlete he was going to be, not the OR assistant he was. His
cheeks were peppered with wiry stubble, his hair a thick black
shock atop a charming face.

One of the administrators came up with the
ridiculous idea of throwing the entire hospital’s staff into the
pot for secret santa drawings. There was a new face in the upper
echelon, and they unanimously agreed it was a great way for the
staff to get to know each other cross-department. He got an e-mail
with an attached form, filled out with a nameless female’s favorite
favorites. He wanted to vomit. Instead, he waited until the day
before he was supposed to drop his gift off on the fifth floor to
go shopping.

The elevators opened on a bustling fifth,
filled with more zombie visitors. He pushed through a pack that was
motioning to ask him something, the giant bag and present almost
getting stuck, and propped himself on the nurses’ station.

“Hey, where do we drop these off?”

A plump woman with bloodshot eyes and a
crooked nose looked up from her chart, narrowing on him. “You got a
secret santa gift?”

He paused, took a quick breath, and nodded.
Stupid questions ranked pretty high on his pet peeve list.

“On the 560 hall.” She blurted, going back to
her chart immediately.

Gavin nodded and gathered the sack for a
better grip. He turned to read the hall numbers and the woman from
the pack of visitors flagged him. He pointed her to the nurses’
station, feigned a terribly busy look, and scurried toward the
560’s.

He was almost there, crossing the 550’s, when
the blur of a woman in a jog collided with his right side. The pro
athlete Gavin would’ve instinctively rolled away and prepared for a
long pass. The OR tech Gavin hit the floor tangled in the bag, the
woman, and whatever she was carrying.

They stood and smoothed their clothes. Gavin
bent to retrieve her neatly wrapped gift he nearly fell on and
straightened to hand it back to her. When he stood his chest
locked, his face flushed, and he suddenly forgot where he was
headed. Standing before him was Kelly Riker, his girlfriend of
three years. He hadn’t seen her since pro athlete Gavin went in to
the hospital.

“Gavin?” Her eyes widened, and he recognized
them instantly. They were deep blue in the center, iced on the
edges. He saw the way they looked at him back then. He saw late
nights in the theater parking lot. He saw a dark green prom dress
that fit her like a glove.

“Kelly! Wow…” He could feel the blood in his
cheeks, the back of his neck was on fire. His throat felt like
sandpaper. He tried to think of something to say, his mouth moved a
few times. Nothing came out.

“How long have you been working here?” She
smiled when she said it.

His mind was a blank. Her hair was pulled
back but still blonde. Her frame had widened, but he thought it was
an improvement. He tried to look for her left hand, but it was
under the present. The question finally hit him.

“A year or two. Since, well, since I came in
for my knee I guess. Couldn’t stay away.” His lips formed a weak
smile. He was warming, but not as quickly as athlete Gavin
would’ve. “What about you?”

“I started last month. On the tenth.”

The eleventh was their anniversary. He
couldn’t believe he remembered, but when he did it hit him like a
ton of bricks. Somehow he had managed to block her out, forget that
part of his life and focus on school and therapy. Now it was like a
flood, feelings pouring out he hadn’t felt in ages. His gut
tingled, his mind raced.

“The tenth? Wow. How was the first
month?”

“Good. This is my floor actually.”

“Really?” He glanced around. “Cardiac?”

“Pulmonary.”

“Right, I knew that.” He fumbled with his
hands, then bent to pick up the bag he’d forgotten all about.

“So what floor are you on?”

He gathered the bag, rolled it in hands a few
times to hide the excess, and stood.

“Me, I’m on third. OR tech.”

“Gavin King, saving lives. I never would’ve
thought.” She winked as she said it, her eyes dancing even in the
fluorescent light. She looked younger then, like she did when he
met her.

In high school, during Gavin’s senior year,
he had a small locker on the English hall. Directly below it was
one of a lighter color, belonging to a junior he didn’t know. Each
day during the changing of classes he passed a pretty blonde haired
girl in the crowd waiting to get to the locker wall. He wanted to
speak to her, but the crowd was always pushing and shoving and he
never had much time to track her down. Besides, he didn’t have much
trouble with finding a girl back then. Every Friday night the
stands were full of scouts, and his backseat held the cheerleader
flavor of the week.

One day, when he got to his locker, a neatly
folded note sat on top of his textbooks. His name was printed on
the front, a heart where the dot on his ‘i’ would go. There was no
name on the note, but somehow he knew it was from her. Three more
followed, and the next week he stopped in the crowd and took hold
of her hand. He asked if she would go to dinner with him, and her
face lit up like the lights on a football field.

They were inseparable until he broke his
knee. His sophomore year in college the pro scouts had their eyes
on him, but he skipped practice more than a few times to visit
Kelly at the Community College back home. The day before a blitzing
linebacker ruined his life, he was out shopping for an engagement
ring.

Athlete Gavin blamed the injury on himself
and the object of his focus. He hardly spoke to her in the
hospital, watched her leave crying more times than he could count.
Disappointment and resentment made him cold and lonely. When he
went home with a huge brace and a set of crutches her visits
dwindled to once a week, and then stopped altogether. The pain
medicine made it all easy to take, easy to forget. She left a note
and his class ring on the table the last night she was there. He
never read it.

A different Gavin stood before her now,
confronted with the feelings of athlete Gavin for the first time in
years.

“Well, it’s good to see you. I need to go
turn this in-” She started to go around him, down the main hall,
and he sidestepped to stop her. The action was involuntary, and her
look of surprise mirrored his.

“Kelly, listen. I…I feel terrible about what
happened.”

Her eyes went to the gift, then behind him,
then to the floor. Everywhere but him.

“I don’t know what happened to us.” He didn’t
know where that came from, but it made his eyes burn. A knot formed
in his throat.

“You don’t know what happened?
You
happened Gavin. You and your inability to deal with your knee!” She
looked at him then, her stare reddening and her face stern. “Three
years and now you want to talk about what happened? Now you want to
apologize?”

She tried to go around him again. He stuck
his arm out, held her shoulder. He could feel her choppy
breathing.

“You don’t understand Kelly. That wasn’t me.
I don’t know who that was, but I know it wasn’t me.” He dropped the
hand from her shoulder slowly. She wiped a tear from her left eye
before it could fall. He saw she wasn’t wearing a ring and felt
immense relief. Her face reddened, her lip twitched.

“I never wanted to hurt you.”

“Gavin, don’t. Don’t do this. I’m dropping
this off and I’m heading back to my desk. I’m not going through
this with you again, one time was enough.” She took a step back
then, her glare communicating more than her words, and went around
him.

He stood, looking at the floor, thinking
about what she said. He had no idea these feelings could be so
strong, that he even still had them. Now he couldn’t get away from
them, everything he had said to run her down and make her come
back. Make her understand. He turned, but she was just out of
reach. Ten, fifteen steps away.

“I never dated anyone else. I never wanted
to.” He had to say it loud for her to hear, turning a few passing
heads. She stopped for a moment, but didn’t look. He waited,
counted every second, but she kept going. She turned the corner on
the 560 hall and was gone.

He hung his head, the knot in his throat
trying to move up. He wouldn’t let it, choked it down by gritting
his teeth and trying his best to push the thoughts away. He’d done
it before, he could do it again. He looked at the bag and tried to
remember where to take it.

When he looked up, she was standing in the
middle of the hall with a tear streaking down her cheek. He was
there in an instant, wrapping his arms around her as she shook. He
lowered his head and took a breath of her, the same smell she
always had, and let his own tears finally fall.

A faint clapping sound hit them, and when he
turned he saw the plump woman at the nurses’ station and the woman
that tried to flag him down giving them twp thumbs up. He smiled,
turning back to her and pulling her in tight.

When they finally pulled apart, he looked at
her and gave her a sly grin. It looked like something athlete Gavin
might have used, but it wasn’t quite his.

“How’d you like to have dinner with me
tonight?”

Her eyes, still puffy, only wavered for a
moment.

“I’d love to, but I’m not sure I can take
another break.”

“That’s ok, I know this great place on the
first floor. Cold burgers under a lamp, dry chicken and gummy
vegetables. The patients say it’s fantastic.”

“Your patients must be ordering out then.”
She smiled and found his hand with hers, lacing her fingers in
slowly.

They walked down the 560 hall, hand-in-hand,
like athlete Gavin and Junior Prom Queen Kelly. He felt as new as a
peeled apple, as happy as he could ever remember. She still sniffed
a few times, wiped at her eyes, but he was sure she felt the same
way. After dropping the presents off, they took an elevator down to
the cafeteria and ate in the corner of the large room alone. They
talked about old times and new, about work and life. Mostly they
just laughed and smiled, filling the gap between them faster than
water fills a channel.

The next day, the day before Christmas Eve,
the secret santa gifts were passed out. Gavin got his at the
station on his floor, Kelly did the same. When he picked it up he
checked twice to make sure it was his because he recognized it
immediately. It was the one Kelly was carrying, the one he nearly
flattened when they ran in to each other.

He went to his desk and dialed her extension,
she answered excitedly.

“You'll never guess who my secret santa is!”
Her smile was so evident it could've been a video call.

He smiled, thinking of the minuscule
possibility that they found each other even before they collided in
the hallway. They were paired in the random drawing, a Christmas
miracle on the grandest scale.

“Can't be as good as mine. I got a present
from this gorgeous woman on fifth. I'm planning on asking her
out.”

There was a pause, then “Well you better act
fast, because I heard she was falling for an amazing guy from the
OR.”

He laughed out loud, leaning back in his
chair. Outside, snow was starting to stick to the windows. By the
time they both left, it would be covering the ground in a white
sheet. She giggled and wished him a merry christmas, a supervisor
in the background asking her about a chart so loudly he could
hear.

“Merry Christmas baby. I think this is the
best one yet.”