Love On Call

The board was full all morning and Mari ran from cubicle to cubicle seeing patients, checking on the students, and tracking down Abby or another ER doc for final sign-off on her own and the students’ cases. They were good students, responsible and caring, but they were still students. They had no idea what they didn’t know and were flush with coming out of the classroom where they thought they had learned everything there was to know. She’d felt the same way her first few days on her clinical rotations. Around eleven thirty, a quick wave of dizziness when she stood up after spending a precious fifteen minutes at a table in the little break room with a cup of tea while charting her last discharge notes reminded her she hadn’t had anything to eat since the croissant and coffee at six in the morning. She really did need to pay more attention to eating. She couldn’t do much about fretful sleeping or her frenetic pace in the ER—that was the job, after all—but she could at least try to eat. Her appetite still was nothing like it used to be, and some flavors and smells had gone off for her completely. Thank God, she still loved pizza.

Thinking about pizza made her think of Glenn, and she got that odd little twinge of heat in the center of her chest that seemed to be happening every time she thought of her or heard her voice in the hall outside a curtained room or caught a glance of her, leaning a shoulder casually against the wall while conferring with Abby or one of the students. She always looked so confident, so focused, so…sexy. Oh, hell. She had no time for out-of-the-blue thoughts like that, and no place for what they might lead to. Not for a long, long time.

Lunch. Then back to work. Just as she dropped the chart into the outbox at the nurses’ station, Antonelli stormed around the corner as if leading an assault on some enemy encampment, his usual pace, and flagged her down. She wasn’t actually assigned to him as a supervisor, but for whatever reason, he’d decided she was his go-to person. She didn’t mind, she liked teaching.

He loomed over her, two hundred twenty pounds of barely constrained muscle and testosterone to her one twenty. “Hey, Mari, I’ve got a hot appy that needs to go up to the OR. I’m going to call the surgeon, okay?”

“Whoa, take five there, soldier.”

“Marine.” His tone suggested high insult.

“Okay, marine.” Mari gestured to an out-of-the-way corner where they could talk without patients overhearing them. “Run it down for me.”

He looked annoyed, his dark brows lowering for an instant, but he followed her out of the way of hall traffic. Although he was impatient and cocky, he respected the chain of command, and she respected him for that. He was smart, maybe the smartest of the bunch, but he was quick on the draw, a result undoubtedly of his military experience. She refrained from reminding him this wasn’t the battlefield, and every decision didn’t have to be made between one heartbeat and the next. She didn’t discount his field experience and what he had learned from it, but a civilian ER was a different kind of battlefield, and sometimes, careful surveillance and planning was just as important as the ability to rapidly assess and respond.

“It’s textbook,” Antonelli said in his usual confident and moderately dismissive voice as soon as they were alone. “Twenty-five-year-old female, twelve hours of progressively increasing right lower-quadrant pain, nausea, low-grade temp.”

“White count?” Mari asked.

“Ten point five.”

“Just mildly elevated,” Mari pointed out.

He lifted a shoulder. “It’ll be a lot higher in a few hours if she doesn’t get that out.”

“Pregnancy test?”

“Pending.”

“Heterosexual, sexually active?”

“Yeah. Straight, no chance she can be pregnant.”

“Not sexually active, then?”

“No…I mean, yeah, she is,” Antonelli said, his tone suggesting this line of questioning was annoying at best, “but she had a period a month ago, and they always use a happy hat…condom.”

“Normal?”

“Huh?”

Mari almost smiled. One thing the military didn’t teach medics particularly well was female healthcare. Female troops on the front lines lived with men, fought with men, and were considered one of guys in almost all ways—but they were still biologically unique. “Was her period typical for her—timing, duration, amount? Did you ask?”

“No, she said—”

“Come on, let’s go ask her.”

“Listen, can’t we call surgery and at least get them down—”

“Why don’t we make sure we have the full story so we get the right person down here.”