Back To You (A Remington Medical Contemporary Romance) Page 12

  He wanted more.

  Entering the discharge orders for the patient with the sprained wrist he’d just splinted after a trip to radiology and his (please, God) last food poisoning patient, Parker sat back at the nurses’ station and looked at the board. Technically, his shift was set to expire in about five minutes, but he’d come down from radiology a while ago to find Charlie MIA with “some trauma”, according to a helpful-as-ever Don, that she and Connor had apparently rushed upstairs for emergency surgery. She’d successfully managed four traumas—ah, make that five now—while he’d been stuck supervising rides on the vomit comet, and Parker’s frustration notched higher at the thought.

  Maybe it had been stupid, but he’d thought they’d made headway a few nights ago. He’d been honest with Charlie about why he’d come back to the program, telling her things he hadn’t even told Quinn or any of the guys at Seventeen, and she’d seemed to believe him. Okay, so he’d nearly kissed her, too, but they’d been caught up in a moment together. Or at least, Parker thought they had. Anyway, they hadn’t actually kissed, and Charlie had been the one to offer to help him in the first place. At the very least, that had felt like progress.

  When he’d come back to the program, he’d vowed to put the past in the past. But how could he do that when Charlie was right in front of him in the here and now, making him want her again every time he turned around?

  Fuck, he didn’t just want more from the program. Despite all the reasons he shouldn’t, he wanted her. Faster and hotter and more recklessly than he ever had before.

  And she’d given him the coldest of shoulders and relegated him to scut. It wasn’t so much square one as it was square none, and the whole thing was driving him bat-shit insane.

  “Forget it,” Parker muttered under his breath. He and Charlie might’ve had a personal conversation a few nights ago in the skills lab, and yeah, maybe they’d gotten a little closer than either of them had intended as a result. But she had made it wildly clear today that she wanted to remain all business. As badly as he’d wanted to kiss her, he needed to focus on what was important.

  Right now, that was clearing the last of the board so he could get home, get some sleep, and get the hell over his ex-wife, once and for all.

  “No offense, but you look like death warmed up,” came a familiar voice from beside him, and Parker cracked as much of a smile as he could work up under the circumstances.

  “Outstanding,” he said, turning to look at Young. “Then I look like I feel.”

  She winced, but followed it up with a soft laugh as she sat down beside him and grabbed a tablet from the charging station on the desk. “That good, huh?”

  “Let’s just say it’s been a long shift.”

  “Tell me about it,” Young said, tapping the electronic chart in her hands to life. “I was with Kendrick all day. That woman’s energy knows no bounds. She must’ve run like two hundred laps around the peds wing.”

  Parker shook his head. “Be glad you weren’t down here. I think I set a record for the most cases of food poisoning treated in a single shift.”

  “Ugh. You were on Becker’s service?”

  “Yep. Just call me the king of IV rehydration.”

  Young’s light brown brows winged up. “At least she let you treat the patients.”

  “Thirty-two cases of food poisoning came into the ED, plus all the other regular stuff and five traumas,” Parker pointed out by way of explanation. Not that he’d even known what the last trauma had involved, let alone been in on treating the patient. “Becker didn’t really have a choice other than to let me at least manage some of the patients.”

  “Uh, yeah she did. The ED was slammed the other day, and she still limited me to taking patient histories and only performing exams when she could watch my every move.” Young shifted back in her chair, her forehead creasing in thought. “So, wait. If you’re on Becker’s service then you were here when Dr. Michaelson was brought in.”

  Shock hit Parker in a rude burst of questions and adrenaline. “Dr. Michaelson came in? When?”

  Young looked at the clock. “Mmmm, maybe an hour ago?”

  Ah, that explained it. “I was stuck in radiology with a patient, and busy discharging the last of those gastro cases after that. I take it Dr. Michaelson is in labor.”

  He didn’t know when her exact due date was, but if she was already on leave, it had to be close, if not past tense. Tess was an even bigger workaholic than Charlie, and that was saying something.

  Young surprised him by shaking her head. “No. She came in by ambo. I guess she had a placental abruption? I overheard the labor and delivery nurses talking about it upstairs. Pretty scary stuff.”

  Parker’s heart pinballed off every last one of his ribs. Holy shit—was that the trauma Charlie and Connor had rushed upstairs when he was stuck in radiology? “Is Te—” He stopped the default short just in time. “Is Dr. Michaelson okay?”

  “I don’t know. I got caught up in a case with Kendrick and couldn’t grab an update. Last I heard, Dr. Becker had rushed her upstairs and she was having an emergency C, but that was a while ago.”

  “Thanks,” Parker said, throwing the word over his shoulder as he began to move toward the elevators. Christ, Charlie was probably worried out of her mind. A placental abruption was no joke. Tess could be at risk of bleeding out, and her baby—

  He took it back. Charlie had probably traded worry for sheer, ice-cold panic ages ago.

  “Come on, come on,” he muttered, jabbing his index finger over the elevator’s “up” button in a swift click-click-click. Finally, the doors trundled open, and Parker didn’t look, just aimed himself over the threshold…

  And crashed right into Charlie.

  “Whoa!” he said, throwing his arms out reflexively to steady himself, and her by default. Her arms had lifted, too, her fingers tightening over his doctor’s coat just below his triceps as his grasped the fabric over her forearms. Her muscles went taut, chin lifting toward his by default, and she gasped at the same time he sucked in a breath.

  Parker’s brain knew he should let go of her. Step back. Say something—anything at this point would probably do the trick. But instead, the rest of him demanded that he simply stand there, taking in Charlie’s wide, bright green stare and the way her heart-shaped mouth had parted in surprise, impulsively letting himself stay tangled up in her for a beat, then two, before the doors rolled closed with a soft thump.

  “Sorry.” Parker released her doctor’s coat and shifted back to look at her. “I just heard about Tess. Is she okay? Is she still in surgery?”

  Charlie’s lips compressed into a flat, serious line. “Dr. Michaelson is in recovery. She’s fine. Did you restock the supply closet in the ED? We went through a ton of IV kits today, and I’m sure we’re probably low.”

  What? IV kits? She couldn’t be serious. “Young said you had to rush Tess—Dr. Michaelson”—he amended when Charlie frowned—“upstairs for an emergency C-section,” he tried again.

  “I did, but she’s fine now.”

  “Okaaaaay.” Parker extended the word into enough of a question that Charlie must have realized he wouldn’t let it go until she gave him something. Blowing out a breath, she pressed the button for the first floor to reopen the elevator doors, stepping into the hallway Parker had just vacated and giving him no choice but to follow or be left behind.

  “Dr. Michaelson came in to the ED with a placental abruption,” she said, her voice perfectly even, as if she’d asked him to please pass the salt. “I stabilized her and took her upstairs so her doctor could perform an emergency Caesarian. She ended up needing a blood transfusion, but she and the baby are both fine now.”

  Relief pulsed through Parker’s chest, but it fell prey to a different brand of concern a beat later. “You’re using that word a lot,” he said, following her around the corner and into the supply closet, where—God, she had to be kidding—she cut a direct path to the shelf where they kept the IV kits.

  “She delivered a healthy, eight-pound, fourteen-ounce baby boy with an Apgar of nine,” Charlie said, shoulders set firmly around her spine. “Her vitals are stable. She’s under the care of the best OBGYN in Remington, and her prognosis is for a full recovery. I’m not sure what other word to use.”

  Parker tried a different tack. “Okay, so Tess and the baby are fine. How are you?”

  “Also fine,” Charlie said, reaching up for the large, plastic bin full of IV kits sitting on the top shelf. “Did you review wound care with the scalp lac in exam four?”

  “Kelly did it just before he was discharged. But—”

  Finally, something that snared Charlie’s attention enough to stop moving and look at him. Even if her expression did involve some pretty powerful disapproval. “You didn’t do it yourself?”

  He blinked. Replayed the question in his head. Did it again for the sake of certainty, but oh, no. No fucking way was she going to call his work ethic into question after he’d been elbow-deep in anti-emetics all shift long.

  “Kelly is more than qualified to review wound care with a patient,” Parker said quietly, so he wouldn’t scream. “And are we seriously going to split that hair right now?”

  Charlie turned back to the bin, placing IV kits into the smaller, more accessible trays they kept at eye-level. “Why wouldn’t we?”

  “First of all, because it’s a non-issue. The patient got excellent care. I know, because I did a full exam, put in all seven sutures, and made sure Kelly had all the wound care literature when I signed off on his discharge papers. And secondly, don’t you think this thing with Tess is a little more pressing?”

  “Dr. Michaelson,” Charlie clipped out. “And there is no thing. I told you, she’s—”

  “Right, fine, I
know.” Reaching out, Parker put his hand on the bin, staying her movements even though he knew he was pushing his luck. “I’m glad she’s okay, but she came in to the emergency department with a potentially life-threatening condition, and you had to save her and her unborn baby. That’s kind of a big deal.”

  “It’s my job to take care of everyone who comes in to the ED,” Charlie said, abandoning the bin to cross her arms over the front of her scrubs. “That includes people I know, whether they’ve got a paper cut or a partial amputation. Dr. Michaelson had a complication with her pregnancy, and I treated her. That’s what I do.”

  To anyone else, Charlie might’ve sounded like she always did. Calm. Professional. Completely in control. But Parker knew her. He knew what she’d been through, what her scars looked like. For Chrissake, he’d watched her receive every last one of them, and he’d watched her bury herself in work to cope with it then, too.

  So even though it gave a great, big middle finger to staying focused on work, he said, “Look, I’m not questioning your dedication, or your skill. Clearly, you have boatloads of both. But no matter how great a doctor you are, it would be completely understandable if you were rattled and needed to talk about it.”

  Charlie’s tart laugh cracked through the close quarters of the supply closet. “Dr. Michaelson is my best friend, and I had to keep her from bleeding to death with my bare hands. Of course I’m rattled. And when my work here is done, I’ll go have a stiff drink, a hot shower, and probably a good, hard cry. What I won’t do, however, is spill my guts to you.”

  Just like that, Parker’s already tenuous patience snapped. “Did I do something to piss you off?”

  “Not unless you count right now,” she said, gesturing to the fact that he was literally standing between her and the job she’d intended to do.

  Yeah, still not moving. “Is this about what happened the other night in the skills lab?”

  The words were out before his brain-to-mouth filter could kill them. But internship or not, near-kiss or not, he was done keeping quiet.

  Charlie looked at him, her eyes flashing in the shadows of the emergency lighting. She’d been so locked in on her task that she hadn’t even bothered to hit the switch for the overheads, and he’d been so locked in on her, he hadn’t, either. “Nothing happened the other night in the skills lab,” she said.

  “Is that really what you’re going with?” Parker asked, unable to keep his disbelief away from his voice. “We had a good conversation. A good, personal conversation. Damn it, Charlie, we almost kissed. That’s hardly nothing.”

  “Are you suggesting I was inappropriate with you?”

  The question arrived softly, devoid of any of the chilliness she’d been slinging around since she’d stepped off the elevator, and Parker answered without hesitation.

  “God, no. I was there, too.” Yeah, there was technically the whole temporary-teacher/student thing going on, but he’d been the one to move toward her. And he hadn’t regretted it. “I just think maybe we should talk about this.”

  “There’s nothing to talk about,” Charlie said. “If you’re going to insist on standing there, restock the IV kits before you leave. I’ve got notes to finish up for the night shift attending.”

  She turned to slip by him. But between his ass-bustlingly long shift and the high-octane frustration that had been brewing between them all day—hell, all week, all month, for six goddamned years—his patience had redlined.

  “So, what?” Parker asked, jamming his hands over his hips. “You’re going to bury all of your feelings in work, like always? Christ, Charlie! You can’t just keep all of this bottled up. For fuck’s sake, all I’m asking is for you to talk to me.”

  She froze, mid-step in the supply closet. For one long, nerve-shredding heartbeat, he was sure she was going to drag his sorry ass up to Langston’s office and demand that he be booted from the program without ceremony. But she didn’t.

  Instead, she hit back. “You really want me to lay it all out for you? Let my feelings out, wild and free? Fine. You think you know me, but you don’t. You don’t know what I always do to cope with stress, and you don’t have any right to expect me to share my feelings with you, about Tess or anything else. Yes, we were married once, and yes, we are stuck working together now. But let’s get one thing very, very straight. You’re the one who walked out the door six years ago. You. Left. Me.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Well, that got her attention. “Excuse me?” Charlie asked, lips parted in obvious shock.

  But Parker was too far in, his heart slamming way too hard and the truth burning far too hot in his mouth to pause. “That’s bullshit, and you know it.”

  “What I know is that you packed up your stuff,” she argued. “You quit the program and left town without an explanation. You had me served with divorce papers when I was halfway through a goddamned shift!”

  “And did you ever stop to wonder why I did any of that?”

  Charlie blinked, but only once. “Because you’re only in if it’s easy. As soon as things don’t go your way, or they get too hard, or messy, or tough, you run. You burn bright, then you burn out. Only you burned me on your way out the door.”

  The words sailed into him like a thousand pinpricks, sharp enough to steal his breath, and everything he’d kept to himself for the last six and a half years came ripping past his lips.

  “And you say I don’t know you? For fuck’s sake, Charlie, we were twenty-six-year-old interns and we were having a baby. Of course I knew it was going to be hard and messy and tough. I knew, and I didn’t care! I was so in love with you that it hurt.”

  She made a sound then, a barely there gasp that Parker registered in the back of his brain.

  But his brain was no longer in charge. “Then you miscarried,” he continued. “I was still as in love with you as ever, but you wouldn’t talk to me. You wouldn’t talk to Tess, or your doctor, or a therapist. All you wanted to do was work. Double shifts, night shifts, it didn’t matter. And when you weren’t working, you were here at the hospital, doing research or sleeping in an on-call room. You didn’t come home for days on end, and when you were there, it was only to sleep or shower. Never to talk.”

  “I missed over a week after my surgery,” she said, and Parker’s chest panged at the memory of those days right after the miscarriage, when nothing he could do or say would get her out of bed. “I didn’t want to fall any further behind.”

  “You didn’t want to do anything,” Parker shot back. “For six weeks, I tried to get through to you. I talked, you gave me one-word answers. I offered to listen, you told me there was nothing to say. You wouldn’t go to therapy, wouldn’t talk to Tess, and every time you looked at me, all I saw was how sad you were. I even picked fights with you, I was that desperate to get you to talk. But you wouldn’t even fight back. We barely texted, let alone saw each other face to face or—God forbid—had an actual conversation.”

  Parker’s frustration surged, crowding the words into the shadowy space between them. “You were stuck in grief you weren’t processing, and every time you looked at me, it was like reopening a wound. I wanted to help you. I tried. But I finally realized you weren’t going to let me in. I might’ve been the one to physically leave,” he said, his spine unfolding and his shoulders pulling tight. “But you checked out way before that. So do me a favor and think long and hard before you point that finger and say I left you.”

  Charlie stared at him, her eyes startled and wide. Still, she said nothing, even when the silence stretched out and offered her ample time to, and damn it. Damn it! He should’ve known this was a wasted effort.

  She hadn’t talked to him then. She sure as hell wasn’t going to do it now.

  “I apologize for standing in your way,” Parker said, stepping back to give her access to the IV kits on the shelf. “I’ll let you get back to work.”

  He turned toward the door and left.

  12

  Charleston didn’t know how long she stood in the supply closet, waiting for her heart to stop threatening to crash past her ribs and onto the floor. Parker’s words rang in her ears, elongating the silence and locking her breath in her throat.