PAGING DOCTORS BONDEVIK AND KOHLER

Follow-Up

"I'd kiss you right now if you were closer."

The words echoed in the air and followed Lukas around wherever he went. He tried to ignore them, to pretend they weren't there, but he couldn't. He felt like other people could see them, could hear what had been said.

"You okay, doctor?" Even the reception staff seemed to sense something was different. Was it tattooed across his forehead? He waved away the concern, giving a curt nod in response.

What a terribly unprofessional thing to say to someone.

Lukas had worked with Mathias for many years. Mathias, despite his department being on a totally different floor, seemed to everywhere. Lukas would turn around, and he'd be leaning on the counter in reception, chatting up the staff, or coming down the hall with a giant, goofy grin, or suddenly sitting next to Lukas with his lunch in hand.

"I'd kiss you right now if you were closer."

Mathias developed the terrible habit of delighting in catching Lukas off guard. He'd exit a room after checking on a patient and-

"BONDEVIK!" Lukas would nearly jump out of his skin, clutch at his chest, and struggle to contain a flurry of blasphemous words from spilling out of his mouth in surprise.

"Dr. Kohler, what do you want?" he'd finally choke out once he was sure he wasn't going to drop dead of a heart-attack. Mathias would grin like an idiot and scratch the back of his head, feigning innocence.

"Ahh, nothin'. I just like watching your face when you're surprised," he'd laugh, "you're just so cute."

"Well, stop it." Lukas would spin on his heel and march away. Did he want Mathias to follow him or leave him alone? He could never quite decide.

"I'd kiss you right now if you were closer."

He would often ask how on earth he found himself in the viewing gallery of Mathias' surgeries any chance he got. He didn't particularly like surgery, and he was even less interested in ruptured appendixes or stab wounds to the abdomen. Emergency medicine is so messy. And yet... Mathias was a genius with a scalpel – perhaps not the best of combinations. He was fascinating to watch, though. All manner of machines and monitors could be screaming away at him, nurses in a frenzied panic, and he'd keep his wits about him. He could calmly assess even the most grim of circumstances and make practical decisions. He was a magician.

How many times now had Lukas seen someone on that cold, stainless steel stable and wondered if there was no more hope for the poor patient. Then, Mathias would swoop in, all laughter and giant smiles, in and preform a miracle.

"I'd kiss you right now if you were closer."

"How did you do it?" Lukas asked Mathias one day. He had been waiting for Mathias to scrub out of the operating room.

"Pardon?"

"That man," Lukas nodded through the small window of the OR door to the patient getting prepped for recovery. "I saw him when he came in to the ER. His arm was obliterated."

"Oh, that!" Mathias clapped a hand on Lukas' shoulder and gave a friendly squeeze, "when you're buds with an orthopedic specialist like Dr. Braginsky, things like that don't seem so scary." Mathias would praise the entire surgical team, insisting that it was a group-effort to achieve whatever magic he performed.

"I'd kiss you right now if you were closer."

Mathias was like a puppy, constantly nipping at Lukas' ankles.

"Surely you have your own work to accomplish."

"Nah, why do you think I have a pager? They'll call if they need me." His entire face split in to a grin. He seemed to shower Lukas in smiles all day long. He would have found it implausibly annoying if he wasn't so damn cute. Lukas did his best to ignore the flutter in his chest and focus on the x-ray image of an arm in front of him. He sighed. "That there is a greenstick fracture," Mathias nodded at the image, swinging his feet while sitting on the top of Lukas' desk.

"Thank you, Captain Obvious." He meant only to shoot him a warning look, but was distracted by the goofy smile, then a sudden idea. "Williams. He's in room 103."

"What?" The grin slid from Mathias' face.

"The kid, Matthew Williams," he ripped the image from the lighted wall and popped it in to the chart in his arms before handing the whole thing over to Mathias. "He will need a cast. If you insist on hanging around all day long, and have none of your own work, I will find things to keep you out of my hair." He waved at Mathias to hurry along. "103."

"I'd kiss you right now if you were closer."

That fateful night.

He had lost patients before, he wasn't sure why this one hit him so much harder than normal. Maybe it was because he'd already been working for 10 hours, maybe it was because of the circumstances surrounding the accident.

He had known the moment he laid eyes on her that there was nothing to be done. She had likely already been dead at the scene. He wasn't sure what colour her pajamas had been originally, but now they were stained a dark red-brown.

"What happened?" he asked, running over to a group of paramedics switching out on chest compressions.

"Brutal car accident, across the whole highway. They were coming back from vacation, I think. Hoping to push through to home instead of stopping in a motel." His eyes roamed over the girl's face; she was so small. "It was a massive pile up. They must'a been rear-ended, slid under a semi that had gone over. She was thrown from the car in the process."

"Was she not belted in?" The paramedic shook his head and shrugged.

The next moments were a blur as Lukas tried to find where all she was injured and how. Her heart was still not beating without help, she was only breathing because of tubes, a bag, and a tired-looking paramedic. He wiped at the sweat on his brow as more teams of paramedics burst through the emergency doors. He could hear a woman screaming for her children. "My baby! Please! You have to help her!" Lukas urged himself to try. Maybe, just maybe, he could fix this.

He looked up and caught Mathias' eye as he ran past with his own small patient. It felt like time slowed down as he watched him run, their eyes locking, the cardiac monitor screaming flat-line in Lukas' ear.

"Page me when you're conscious. I'll take you to get some real food before you starve to death"

Mathias did not page Lukas that day, or even the next. Three days went by before one morning, on Lukas' day off, his pager began to sound, a phone number flashing across the screen. Lukas called the number and Mathias picked up.

"You still going to take me for some real food?" Lukas stopped breathing. "I know I'm a few days late, but I wanted to make sure we wouldn't be interrupted by work." With a sigh he agreed, he glanced at his watch and suggested later that evening, then they arranged where to meet.

He didn't know why he felt so uneasy. Nervous. He had had lunch with Mathias several times before this. The only difference was that this time Lukas had initiated and Mathias hadn't simply turned up out of the blue, food in hand.

They also weren't on the hospital grounds.

And Mathias was walking towards him, and easy smile on his face, hair neatly styled. He was dressed in pressed, black slacks and a deep crimson dress shirt, a dark sport coat was draped over one of his arms. Lukas was furious at the way his heart-rate sped up when he saw him.

"Dr. Bondevik, is this a date?" Mathias chuckled as he slid in to the chair opposite Lukas. Lukas fidgeted.

"What has given you that impression, Dr. Kohler?" He felt hot under his own collar and suspected a blush was creeping its way in to his cheeks.

"Because you look nervous and you told me to dress nice."

"This is a nice restaurant."

"That was point number three," he plopped his elbow on the table, rattling the cutlery, and rest his chin on the palm of his hand. "You look very handsome today, Lukas." If there wasn't a blush in his cheeks earlier, one was certainly blooming now.

"Shut up and look at your menu."

To be continued...