Terminally Ill Read online

  I nodded. Normally, the nurse will cover the patch with Tegaderm and write the time and date, because the patch is good for 72 hours. This way, they know when to change the patch.

  “No one had written it. His wife said they had changed the patch three days ago, and he said it was yesterday. He’s complaining of pain. It’s possible to draw the medication out of a patch and inject it.” Her mouth was still smiling, but her eyes were not.

  “You think his wife…”

  Dr. Huot shook her head. “I don’t accuse anyone, but we will count the number of patches and call his pharmacy to make sure he has the right amount.”

  Mr. Allain had brought his medications with him. The pharmacy had placed a sticker on the box with the dispensing time and date, about two weeks ago. Still, we counted and calculated and called the pharmacy to verify that yes, he seemed to have the right number of patches, even if they’d lost track of when to change them.

  Now it was 5:42 p.m. Dr. Huot beamed at me. “It was nice working with you, Dr. Sze. I will see you tomorrow afternoon. In the morning, you’ll be with our social worker, Catherine Brunet.”

  And I would be on call. But for now, Ryan Ryan Ryan Ryan Ryan. “Thank you, Dr. Huot. See you tomorrow.” I stood up and my pants pocket buzzed.

  I waved at Dr. Huot and beat it out of the nursing station, but paused just inside the doors to I pull the phone out of my pocket. Ryan had texted me.

  Where are you?

  I leaned against the wall near the old-fashioned X-ray light boxes and typed laboriously with the keypad, pressing each number a few times to get to the correct letter.

  Emergency room. Home in 20 min.

  Ryan burst through the emergency room doors right in front of me. “Gotcha.”

  I stared at him for a full second, not just because I was shocked out of my skull, but because sometimes I forget how Ryan’s face just does it for me. It’s not just that he’s so handsome that it feels like a gut punch. It’s more the way his eyes always look like he’s ready to smile and how I can tell he’s got long, lean muscles under his shirt. I didn’t care about the stubble on his face or the stretcher that was trying to get past us. My brain just kind of exploded with lust. All I could think was, Fuck. Fuckity Fuck fuck fuck.

  I wanted to jump his bones. Here and now. Right in front of my colleagues. Torpedo my career. Frighten the senior citizens. Appall the administrators. I didn’t care.

  Ryan’s eyes heated up. He took a step toward me.

  Before he could touch me and really sink my career battleship, I grabbed his hand and tugged him outside the emerg doors, into the corridor. All the patients lined up along the hallway and in the waiting room could still witness us, but at least then there was a door between us and the other doctors. I licked my lips. “What are you doing here?”

  “Surprising you,” he said, and kissed me.

  Chapter 18

  I kissed him right back. Those lips. That tongue already exploring my mouth. The way he smelled like cedar and wood smoke and himself. It was all I could do not to wind myself around his body and purr like a cat.

  I pulled my face away. We were at work, God damn it. I mean gosh darn it. I mean…I kissed him again and again, until we ran out of air.

  I yanked my lips backwards, out of reach, but the look on his face gave me permission to press my body against his for one hot second. I could feel his heart thumping through our clothes. And that wasn’t all I could feel.

  Then, like a child’s game, I took a giant step backwards and said, breathless, “Thank you for coming. I mean…”

  Ryan laughed. “I know what you mean.” He glanced at the patients watching us with avid eyes. Even the security guards peered in our direction. I turned crimson while Ryan said, “Could I drive you home?”

  “Yes! Oh, wait. I biked today.”

  “I can fit your bike in my trunk.”

  I know that’s not a sexy thing to say, but his calm tone, and the way he eyed me up and down while he was saying it, made my cheeks flare again. “Okay. Thanks! Let me just grab my stuff. It’s upstairs, in the residents’ lounge.”

  “I’ll come with you.”

  I licked my lips. I hadn’t seen Tucker all day. That wasn’t unusual. He was on family medicine, which meant he spent most of his time at the FMC, which was in a separate four-story building called the Annex, instead of the main hospital building. Sometimes he went to Outremont to do clinics at the CLSC, the community clinics where you actually got to see kids and young women. But he hadn’t texted me all day, which was a little more unusual, and made me wonder if he was ignoring me on purpose while he took over my case.

  It bugged me, but right now, I kept my fingers crossed that he’d stay away just long enough for me to escape with Ryan.

  I took Ryan’s left hand in my right and pointed toward the central staircase. He manoeuvred his arm around me instead, so we could press our hips together while he rested his hand on my outer hip (the iliac crest, for the anatomy geeks). His hand burned through the thin grey cloth of my dress pants. And we walked like that, hip to hip, pressed against each other. All I could think of was getting him alone. Like, into my apartment just a few minutes’ drive away.

  He could feel this, right? He wouldn’t say no. He wouldn’t invoke the church and Jesus and all that jazz. He would just bend me over.

  Even lock-stepped as we were, we managed to get to the residents’ room and back without running into Tucker, which meant the goddesses still had my back. A celestial sign that we were destined to knock boots together.

  When he drove, he draped his hand on my inner thigh like it belonged there.

  I spread my legs wider, just a fraction of an inch, but Ryan grinned at me.

  When we got to my apartment, he glanced up at the eighteen-story black glass tower and said, “This place is so much better.”

  “Yeah,” I said, even though a tiny part of me missed Mimosa Manor and its grotty Art Deco style.

  He insisted on carrying both our backpacks in and somehow still managed to keep me by his side. I nodded at the guard, hoping he wouldn’t notice that I had company.

  I was kind of hoping we could make out in the elevator. You know how Grey’s Anatomy uses the elevator for character development? But an old couple waited for the elevator with us, and they smelled like stale breath. I know that’s a terrible thing to say, and there are lots of vibrant old people out there, but these two kind of killed the buzz.

  Which just meant that I was simmering along at 3 on 10 instead of ten, but I kept glancing at Ryan in the elevator: his long, strong, brown fingers flexing by his side; the way he tossed his hair and grinned at me; how he smelled so god damned good, I could eat him up, and soon I would be.

  The elevator dinged, and the old couple shuffled off.

  I rested my hand on Ryan’s hip. He was wearing a belt, so I couldn’t feel his skin at all, but I knew he was under there, and I pressed hard.

  “Stop,” said Ryan, but he was breathing hard, and I already had my hand on him, outlining him through the fabric of his pants.

  I squeezed him lightly.

  His hips bucked.

  “Damn it, Hope,” he said, shoving my hand away and standing away from me, even though we were now alone in a steel cage for a few more minutes.

  “Hope,” he said.

  His voice was muffled. I ignored him. Can’t talk. Fucking. Make love, not talk.

  “Hope,” he said again, and this time, his voice was stronger, although strained. “Let’s go out.”

  “Out?” I said.

  “Yeah. You want something to eat?”

  I reached for his belt buckle.

  He laughed even as he knocked my hand away. “Can’t do it, Hope. You know that.”

  I could barely hear him over my breathing and my heart pounding, but I managed, “Don’t do this to me.”

  “Hope. I want to be with you. We just have to…make it official first.”

  The elevator dinged and sl
id open for my floor. No witnesses, but I barely spoke to him as I stalked down the hall toward my apartment. I threw open the door, barely caring that he followed me, because he kept a careful distance from me.

  I didn’t bother to give him the tour. I just said, “Why?” Fully aware that I sounded like some sulky jock trying to talk a cheerleader out of her panties. That just made it more humiliating.

  “Because it’s the right thing to do. Now come on. I can’t stay here without ravishing you. We’ve got to get out in public.”

  “What?” I was still two hundred steps behind.

  “It’s my Odysseus contract. You know the story of Odysseus, how he wanted to hear the sirens singing, but every sailor who did that ended up crashing his boat on the rocks and dying?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said, sidling up to him.

  Ryan pulled away from me enough that our bodies were no longer touching. “He stopped his men’s ears up with wax and had them tie him to the mast so that he could hear the sirens’ song, but they couldn’t. They kept on rowing past the island, no matter how he begged them to untie him.”

  I stroked his hair. I felt like I’d been starving for his touch, while he babbled about Greek myths. “So?”

  “So in my behavioural economics course, Dan Ariely says, Look. We’re all terrible at self control, so you have to make a deal with yourself. An Odysseus contract. I don’t have much self-control around you, but I’ll be able to keep my hands off of you in public. So we gotta go out. Now.”

  “I don’t want to go out now.” I leaned in so I could smell him.

  “Stop that,” he said under his breath. “Seriously, Hope. I’m thinking about the future, here.”

  “Me too.”

  He yanked my hand. “Look. You made me wait two years before we did it the first time.”

  “Six months.”

  “It felt like two years. So now I’m saying, Hang on a few weeks until you move to Ottawa—”

  My breath hissed out. “I don’t know if my residency program will let me go.”

  “It’ll happen. We’ll make it work. And once we’re both on the same page…”

  I covered my face with my hands. “You’re still waiting for marriage?”

  “Yup.”

  “Ryan. Please.” The word hitched in my throat. It was so goddamned humiliating, but I was willing to beg. I hadn’t been with him for years. I needed him. Not just his body, but I needed him to hold me, and tell me that I was beautiful and that he was mine and I was his. At least for one night.

  He took my face in his and kissed me so soundly, my head spun a little. My heart soared. He couldn’t kiss me like that and walk away. He—

  Ryan detached himself. “You want to grab some Indian food this time?”

  I was so pissed, I told him, “You think this is payback.”

  “What? No!”

  “Sure you do. All the times I made you wait, now you’re making me wait.”

  “Hope. I try not to talk about this stuff with you, but I’m looking out for both of us. For our souls. For eternity. That’s worth sacrificing one night, right?”

  “Fuck eternity,” I said, but the words crumbled on my lips. “Oh, Ryan, I’m sorry, but I’m so mortified and turned on right now. I really feel sorry for guys like I never did before.”

  “There’s gotta be something we can do that would take your mind off this.”

  I looked him up and down.

  “Besides that,” he said easily. “Come on. You want to eat?”

  “No, damn it,” I said, which was highly unusual for me, but it just made me so spitting mad that Ryan was here, within arms’ reach, and I couldn’t ride him until sunrise.

  “You want to watch a movie?”

  I looked him up and down. I would grope him in any movie theatre, and he knew it.

  “Yoga?” he said, desperate, but all I could picture was me lying on the ground, trying to be his sticky mat, while he contorted above me.

  “There’s just one thing,” I said finally. “You would hate it.”

  “Try me.”

  I sighed. “If only I could.” And I proceeded to call Archer to iron out the details.

  Chapter 19

  “Catch me up on this,” said Ryan, as deftly negotiated our way to UCH, swearing only when a guy cut in front of him from the right hand lane.

  “We’re going to find Hugo.”

  “Why is Hugo important?”

  “He’s just the missing link. Literally. They haven’t heard from him since Saturday night. Since Elvis thinks someone sabotaged him, and Hugo’s missing, it just makes sense to ask him a few questions.”

  Ryan glanced at me sidelong. “And if I hadn’t turned up, you would have gone alone?”

  “No, I wanted Archer there, since he actually knows the guy, and the fact that he already had plans with Lucia makes it even easier, since she’s his real pal.”

  “No one else?” Ryan’s mouth had flattened out.

  “Well, like I said, Tucker thinks he’s taken over the case.”

  Ryan said nothing. Radio silence.

  “So he might have turned up.”

  “He’s coming.” It wasn’t a question.

  “I texted him, but he didn’t answer. I haven’t seen him all day.” To tell the truth, I kind of missed Tucker bugging me, but that was definitely neither here nor there. “He might be sick or something.” I pulled out my phone. Still no answer from the Tuckster. “But for now, it’s just me and you.” I glanced at him, thinking, It could have been meandyouandmeandyouandme.

  I thought maybe his cheeks reddened, but he just shook his head. I knew I was absolutely nuts compared to Ryan. I bet he and Lisa, his in-between girlfriend, used to sing in the choir and hold hands and go on picnics, not search out missing people as a romantic date. But there you go.

  Ryan insisted on paying for hospital parking.

  “But I’ve managed to find parking on the street before,” I said. “Look, if you turn left here and circle around a bit…”

  Ryan shook his head. “The sooner we get this over with, the better. I still want to grab a bite to eat.”

  “Oh, Ryan, I’m sorry.” I bit my lip. Between my lust for his body and my killer curiosity, he wasn’t getting much of a rest after working all day.

  “No big deal,” he said, but he turned left at the parking garage, and I nearly choked to see that the daily maximum was a cool $20, and they charged you that maximum after just one hour. Even Ryan shook his head before he grabbed the ticket and said, “You’re worth it.”

  I squeezed his leg, wordless. London Health Sciences Centre would charge $14, and St. Joe’s added up at $12 a shot, but $20? It must dig into Archer’s pocketbook every day. Maybe that factored into their determination to stage a comeback

  Ryan didn’t say anything as we trolled the hospital corridors, taking the elevator up to Elvis’s room on the ninth floor, but through his eyes, I noted the flickering fluorescent lights, the rickety elevators, and the black marks on the walls from stretchers bumping into them. Believe me, it was a palace compared to St. Joe’s, but I felt self-conscious about the defects, like they reflected on me. I felt like I was wearing a holey sweatshirt over camel toe leggings instead of a perfectly presentable red ribbed shirt, grey cargo pants, ankle boots, and my UWO Meds 2011 jacket.

  I started twitching more as we walked down Elvis’s hallway because of the increasing number of signs. I’d spotted a few in the main lobby and in the elevator, but they’d given Elvis free reign over his floor, and he’d taken full advantage.

  A banner hung over the nursing station.

  ELVIS ESCAPES—AGAIN!

  UC fundraiser ~ Fri, Nov 6, 6 p.m. ~ Auditorium

  They’d blown up a newspaper article and hung it on the wall. I didn’t bother reading past the headline, ESCAPE ARTIST BENEFIT FOR UCH.

  Ryan waited until we were out of hearing range of the nursing station before he quirked a single eyebrow at me.

  I nodded griml
y.

  As we walked down the corridor, I couldn’t help but notice that on the left side, 8 1/2 x 11-inch letters spelled E-L-V-I-S. On the other side, it said L-I-V-E-S, with the website printed on the bottom right hand corner of each letter.

  “Subtle, isn’t he,” Ryan muttered, and I burst out laughing. Ryan grinned and grabbed my hand, and that was how we entered Elvis’s room.

  Elvis glanced up from his phone when he saw us. “Hi, Hope. I heard we’re going to track down Hugo. Who’s this? You dump that other guy already?”

  “This is my friend, Ryan Wu.”

  Ryan stepped forward and I watched them shake each other’s hands hard enough to make their knuckles blanch.

  Elvis grinned. “You’re all right. Anyone who’s gonna help crack this case is all right with me.”

  “Where’s Archer?” I hadn’t realized how much I counted on his moderating influence until he was gone.

  “Aw, he went to pick up Lucia. They’re in the lobby downstairs to meet up with you. He just texted me.” Elvis bounded to his feet. “All right, let’s party.”

  I put out my hand. “Hang on a second, Elvis. Did you get a day pass?”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s when your doctor writes an order that you can leave the hospital for the day.”

  Elvis shrugged. “No idea. You want to sneak down the stairs instead?”

  Ryan gave him a look like he was a few tortillas short of a fajita order, but I figured there was no point in arguing with a pit bull with a head injury. “Nah. Listen, you’ve got your big show coming up on Friday. How’s that going?”

  “All right. I’ve been practicing with the chains.” He gestured at a new black trunk in the corner across from the door, farthest from the window, and I realized that it must hold all of his equipment, even before I took in the lined coffin beside it.

  “Yikes,” I said.

  Elvis grinned. “Hey, I’ve got to have all my equipment around. It’s the best physio I could do. I showed the team on rounds today, and they gave me a standing ovation!”

  We usually round standing up anyway, but I had to admit, if I were on rounds and a patient could wrestle his way out of chains and a coffin, I would give him a standing O plus free coffee. “And permission to do the show on Friday?”