“I don’t know about that.” She smiles softly. “All the doctors at St. Peter’s are out sick. This miracle worker of yours might be feeling a little under the weather, too.”
I sit down beside her, wrapping a protective arm around her shoulders. “I thought you’d shaken that cold?” She does look a little grey, actually. Tired, perhaps. I’m not completely stupid, so I don’t tell her this, but concern squeezes at my chest. Emotions like this still surprise me. I’m not used to caring about anyone else, especially this deeply. I thought there was a limit to how much one person could care about another, but it turns out I was wrong. It turns out the depths you can love someone are boundless. I don’t think I’ll ever reach a point where I can truly say I’ve reached my capacity for caring for this woman. It makes me weak. Vulnerable. It feels dangerous most of the time, but there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m fucking addicted to her, and I wouldn’t change that for the world.
“So? You needed me?” I nuzzle my face into her hair, breathing in deeply. Nothing smells as good as she does. She’s been working twelve hours straight and a faint chemical smell clings to her, but it can’t mask the scent of her skin and her hair. I close my eyes and I can feel my dick getting hard in my pants.
Sloane knows me inside out. She knows by my inflection on the word need that my mind is already in the gutter, along with the rest of my body, where I’m coincidentally fucking her like an animal. She places one hand on my thigh, her fingertips running up and down the inside seam of my jeans.
“I’m sorry. I probably shouldn’t have text you. I’m just having a tough day.”
“Violent patient?” My mind instantly goes to these places. If any of those fuckers have been causing trouble for her, they’ll leave St Peter’s more injured and broken than they went in, I don’t give a shit who they are.
Sloane laughs. “No. Just red tape. It’s so goddamn frustrating. This little girl needs treatment and her brother’s doing his best to provide it for her, but his insurance doesn’t even come close to covering her bills. He wants to take her home. I promised him I’d have figured out a way to keep her here by the time he finished work. I have less than two hours to pull a miracle out of thin air.”
I watch her as she speaks. Lines of concern have formed between her eyebrows; her cheeks are blushed and red from her annoyance. She’s such a strong, fierce, independent person. It’s unsurprising that she’s so wound up about something so inconsequential as health insurance, or the lack thereof, and the fact that it’s preventing her from doing her job.
I plant a kiss on the side of her head, humming deeply. She pulls these reactions from me, and yet she has no fucking idea how badly she affects me. I love how committed she is to her job and to helping others. A lot of people become doctors because of the money, or because of the challenge, and invariably those are the people who end up being bad doctors. The greats, the ones people remember forever, are the ones likely working double shifts just to make sure there are doctors available to help. Just like Sloane is right now. I’d had so little experience with people who genuinely cared about the wellbeing of others that I thought it was all an act when I first met Sloane. It made me uncomfortable. Now, looking at her as she tries to overcome this bureaucratic hurdle so she can take care of a little girl, my heart aches in the strangest of ways. I could never tell her. I could never tell anyone.
Still. It aches.
I brush my hand slowly over her hair, tucking it back. I casually flick out my tongue, stroking the shell of her ear with it as I exhale. Sloane shivers against me, her own breath catching in her throat. “St. Peter’s is a big place, isn’t it? Surely there’s a secluded spot you could hide a bed?” I whisper.
“What do you mean? Hide the kid out of sight and treat her off the books?”
“Mmm. If she really needs the treatment, seems like the best option to me.”
“It’s not that simple, Zeth. The legal implications are…” She trails off as I probe her ear a little deeper with the tip of my tongue. “The legal implications are dire. I could get into so much trouble. I could…I could lose my job. Worse than that, I could be arrested. I’d have to steal from the hospital again. I—” She can’t continue any further, because I’ve started kissing and biting at her throat. We both already know this option, hiding the little girl, is a foregone conclusion. One she had already made before she even texted me. She just wanted to hear me say it.