to do anything else, or is it okay if I carry on with Luke’s room?’
‘Please do,’ Lisa said.
Luke wasn’t ignoring her now—instead he watched as she sorted out his stuff into neat piles and put some of it into a bag.
‘Your mum can take these home to wash.’
Other stuff she put into drawers.
Then she tacked some cards to the wall. All that was messy now, Annika decided as she wiped down the surfaces in his room, was the patient and his bed.
‘Now your catheter is out it will be easier to have a shower. I can run it for you.’
He said neither yes nor no, so Annika headed down the ward and found the linen trolley, selected some towels and then found the showers. She worked out the taps and headed back to her patient, who was a bit wobbly but refused a wheelchair.
‘Take my arm, then.’
‘I can manage,’ Luke said, and he said it again when she tried to help him undress.
‘You have a drip…’
‘I’m not stupid; I’ve had a drip before.’
Okay!
So she left him to it, and she didn’t hover outside, asking if he was okay every two minutes, because that would have driven Luke insane. Instead she moved to the other end of the bathroom, so she could hear him if he called, and checked her reflection, noting the huge smudges under her eyes, which her mother would point out to her when she went there for dinner at the weekend.
She was exhausted. Annika rested her head against the mirror for a moment and just wanted to close her eyes and sleep. She was beyond exhausted, in fact, and from this morning’s assessment it seemed it had been noticed.
Heather would never believe that she was working shifts in a nursing home, and the hardest slots too—five a.m. till eight a.m. if she was on a late shift at the hospital, and seven p.m. till ten p.m. if she was on an early. Oh, and a couple of nights shifts on her days off.
She was so tired. Not just bone-tired, but tired of arguing, tired of being told to pack in nursing, to come home, to be sensible, tired of being told that she didn’t need to nurse—she was a Kolovsky.
‘Iosef is a doctor,’ Annika had pointed out.
‘Iosef is a fool,’ her mother had said, ‘and as for that slut of a wife of his…’
‘Finished.’
She was too glum thinking about her mother to smile and cheer as Luke came out, in fresh track pants and with his hair dripping wet.
‘You smell much better,’ Annika settled for instead, and the shower must have drained Luke because he let Annika thread his T-shirt through his IV.
‘What are you looking so miserable about?’ Luke asked.
‘Stuff,’ Annika said.
‘Yeah,’ Luke said, and she was rewarded with a smile from him.
‘Oh, that’s much better!’ Lisa said, popping her head into the bathroom. ‘You’re looking very handsome.’ Annika caught Luke’s eyes and had to stop herself from rolling her own. She sort of understood him—she didn’t know how, she just did. ‘Your mum’s here, by the way!’ Lisa added.
‘Great,’ Luke muttered as Annika walked him back. ‘That’s all I need. You haven’t met her yet…’
‘You haven’t met mine!’ Annika said, and they both smiled this time—a real smile.
Annika surprised herself, because rarely, if ever, did she speak about her family, and especially not to a patient. But they had a little giggle as they walked, and she was too busy concentrating on Luke and pushing his IV to notice Ross look up from the desk and watch the unlikely new friends go by.
‘Are you still here?’ Caroline frowned, quite a long time later, because, as pedantic as Ross was, consultants didn’t usually hang around all day.
‘I just thought I’d catch up on some paperwork.’
‘Haven’t you got an office to go to?’ she teased.
He did, but for once he didn’t have that much paperwork to do.
‘Annika!’ Caroline called her over from where Annika was stacking the linen trolley after returning from her supper break. ‘Come and get started on your notes. I’ll show you how we do them. It’s different to the main wards.’
He didn’t look up, but he smelt her as she came around the desk.
A heavy, musky fragrance perfumed the air, and though he wrote it maybe twenty times a day, he had misspelled diarrhoea, and Ross frowned at his spiky black handwriting, because the familiar word looked completely wrong.
‘Are you wearing perfume, Annika?’ He didn’t look up at Caroline’s stern tone.
‘A little,’ Annika said, because she’d freshened up after her break.
‘You can’t wear perfume on the children’s ward!’ Caroline’s voice had a familiar ring to it—one Ross had heard all his life.
‘What do you mean—you just didn’t want to go to school? You can’t wear an earring. You just have to, that’s all. You just don’t. You just can’t.’
‘Go and wash it off,’ Caroline said, and now Ross did look up. He saw her standing there, wary, tight-lipped, in that ridiculous apron. ‘There are children with allergies, asthma. You just can’t wear perfume, Annika—didn’t you think?’
Caroline was right, Ross conceded, there were children with allergies and, as much as he liked it, Kolovsky musk post-op might be a little bit too much, but he wanted to step in, wanted to grin at Annika and tell her she smelt divine, tell her not to wash it off, for her to tell Caroline that she wouldn’t.
And he knew that she was thinking it too!
It was a second, a mere split second, but he saw her waver—and Ross had a bizarre feeling that she was going to dive into her bag for the bottle and run around the ward, ripping off her apron and spraying perfume. The thought made him smile—at the wrong moment, though, because Annika saw him and, although Ross snapped his face to bland, she must have thought he was enjoying her discomfort.
Oh, but he wanted to correct her.
He wanted to follow her and tell her that wasn’t what he’d meant as she duly turned around and headed for the washroom.
He wanted to apologise when she came back unscented and sat at her stool while Caroline nit-picked her way through the nursing notes.
Instead he returned to his own notes.
DIAOR…He scrawled a line through it again.
Still her fragrance lingered.
He got up without a word and, unusually for Ross, closed his office door. Then he picked up his pen and forced himself to concentrate.
DIARREA.
He hurled his pen down. Who cared anyway? They knew what he meant!
He was not going to fancy her, nor, if he could help it, even talk much to her.
He was off women.
He had sworn off women.
And a student nurse on his ward—well, it couldn’t be without complications.
She was his friend’s little sister too.
No way!
Absolutely not.
He picked up his pen and resumed his notes.
‘The baby has,’ he wrote instead, ‘severe gastroenteritis.’