She hadn't considered him before. In that way. Inside his male skin. Hadn't thought of him in any way outside the rigid lines of boss, chief, surgeon, soldier. But now those lines had blurred and when she looked at him, out of the corners of her eyes, surreptiously, slyly, for long stolen moments, she saw the masculine height and breadth of him, the ginger flavour of his flesh, the freckles, the hair curling around the bent edges of his ears, the pink orange tint of his lips and the eyes reminiscent of forget me nots. Virile manful light blue petals.
She became obsessed with his hands, the long-fingered square hands of the surgeon. The dusting of freckles, the riotous gold hairs on the backs, teasingly disappearing into the sleeves of his lab coat, the manicured nailbeds, the masculine splay and the spread of his fingers as he talked, charted, gestured. She would walk over bleeding bodies, push aside frozen interns, to scrub in with him. To stand and gulp air, watch him wash his hands beneath the running water until she was gorged. She wanted to be the water, wanted to suck his fingers dry. She fed on a fantasy that she was his scrub nurse gloving him.
She was a resident, in his employ, a student, but more she was a girl, a young woman just beginning the climb, the ascent to womanhood. With a body defined by curves and the soft heaviness that some woman possess in the way that only certain rock formations will yield a vein of gold. But he preferred Cristina, the small, neat compact frame. The birdlike fragility that was really a tease because she had bones of steel and the strength of fierce intellect, the brawn of brains. And when he would wake from a sweaty heated dreaming hold on the feminine ripe body of another woman, he would pull Cristina to him and force her to break him on her wheel. And some nights he would split an Unisom and though he still dreamt of picking fruit from off the laden tree he could not wake himself and in the mornings a cold shower and hot coffee disintegrated the memories.
She wanted to be taken from behind, wanted to feel the full length of a man with his arms around her, seeking fingers, pressed against, into, the sharp edge of the counter in Alex's kitchen, bruising her hip bones. And she began to move herself backwards towards men, any man, in the bar, the OR, the rush of the Emergency Room, a paramedic, a male nurse, the brother of a gunshot victim. Flustered apologies, scarlet blushing and her lungs on fire from the touch of palms on her hips, the surprised embrace that nearly always welcomed her body in motion. She wanted more, she longed for completion.
At the nurse's station in the ER, she was charting, biting her lip, methodical and she felt the energy shift, a hormonal change within and without, her body abandoning her brain. He was standing beside her, long fingered hands spread on the countertop, leaning towards her shoulder and she gasped.
Immediately his hands rose in startled supplication. "Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I…need…is that….whose chart, is that Mr. Reinhart's….." His words were jumbling out of his mouth. She wanted to slant herself sideways and push her ear against his lips.
He had backed out of her space and she could breathe. "Yes, it is. I'm almost finished, yes, here. Here." She slid the heavy binder across to him and he reached for it, pulling it away. Turning from her and walking one, two, three deliberate steps. She fled.
That night he took a whole sleeping tablet and woke sleep drunk. Still dizzy from the dreaming. They were standing at the nurse's station on the cardio floor and he was behind her, his hands on the smooth skin, counting ribs with his fingertips, pressing his thumbs into the long well of her spine, his mouth on the nape of her neck.
She wanted to speak out loud his name, sketch his portrait in words, wanted to make real what was unreal. Careful observation led her to a Scottish nurse in OB who was blissfully unaware of Dr. Yang, or who just didn't care, and who watched him with such open longing that the young doctor was surprised to be the only one who seemed to notice it. She sought her out, womanly asides, raised eyebrows, cocky tone. The two of them could whisper hot and giggle about the Chief, regale one another with playful yearngings for red-headed men, speak of the taste of freckled flesh, and taunt one another with the thought of taut thighs and blackwatch kilts. It was a guilty addiction, but she could not stop. Didn't want to.
He dreamt she was his patient. Lying on a stone table. And he was trepanning her. One hand holding her head, the shape of her skull imprinting into his palm, the other working a primitive drilling instrument. Her eyes were closed and in the dream he knew she was dreaming. Of him.
He was intimately familiar with the horror show of PTSD, had worked harder than he had ever worked at anything in his life to wrench the fangs out of the monsters hiding under his bed, in his closet, behind his closed eyelids. He knew how mere seconds could be stretched out to long moments that could. Not. Be. Forgotten. The overwhelming claustrophobia of being trapped inside a memory as it looped and looped and looped until it reduced him to a mewling mass curled on the floor. Begging for it to stop.
The body memory of his hands on her played out in his mind over and over. Split seconds, too short to even let a body bleed out, but somehow he'd been injured. Still he returned to it, licking and licking at the wounding.
She had little experience with being seized by a moment, a possibility promised but not delivered, the unfulfilled dream, the aching that could not be soothed, the burning that would not be cooled. She drank, she fucked, she worked herself to exhaustion. And still she found herself again and again at that small moment and she feasted on it, a ferocious feeding that left her ravenous.