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A nurse was a nurse, and some facts were unchanging. Cigarettes had never seemed appealing to Emma. Dirty air. Tarry, like a cough stuck in the back of a throat when you were not quite sick but not quite well yet. At eleven or so, she had heard that smoking could make her tongue hairy, and that had been it for her. Many years later, when she fully understood what that meant, she attempted to smoke for the first time in a last ditch attempt to stop her hands shaking, and had come away from the experience with a dizzy headache and the phantom feeling of thickness across the skin of her mouth.
But a nurse was a nurse, and some facts were unchanging, and so Emma stood outside the Pitt a good distance from the ER doors, vaping in long pulls.
Disposables suited her best because she kept misplacing them, always 5% if she could help it, but she was beginning to think she looked childish as she stood there, breathing in air that tasted like strawberries and cream out of a little pink tube. Undermined her professional authority — if she had any. Joy thought she did, but Joy was sitting on the curb outside her place of work.
Joy had, admittedly, been a little surprised to find out that she had anything approaching a vice. A little more surprised when after about thirty seconds of watching her try to muster the willpower not to throw herself under an ambulance, Emma had cautiously asked her if she wanted a puff, and if not, why she was actually outside in the unofficial smoke-break area, contemplating the asphalt?
“Just told them I needed a minute, and no one said ‘no’,” she replied simply. Everything was all very simple: she was doing a rotation she hated, with coworkers who laughed at her jibes and a white guy who thought that God would suck him off if he asked, and the coworkers who laughed were just cool enough to mock him but probably not cool enough to ever chastise him. Simple. Normal. That much, she could handle. She tried not to think too hard about the actual work, instead looking up at Emma who was looking down at her — and Jesus, she had a face like some sort of kind fairytale character. “I think they're being soft on me because I might have caught a deadly illness.”
A frown line appeared between her eyebrows despite her not being overly concerned, marring the perfect smoothness of her skin. One of her arms crossed over her torso, holding her waist, and her other elbow rested there to support the vape against her lips. It was all very casual. Very practiced.
“HIV is highly manageable,” she refuted in her brisk nurse’s register. God, Emma wished she could have sounded that calm at any point when she’d been interacting with patients that morning. Or with anyone.
Vaguely charmed, Joy laughed. Not a full laugh — because those were rare — but an airy scoff in the back of her throat that made both of their lips touch upwards at the corners. The expression was far more comfortably worn on one than the other.
“Let a bitch be dramatic.”
Emma hovered for a second in an affectionate haze, hesitating, never knowing how to let silence sit. Her heart was like a rabbit's heart, skittering out of control. It was just the nicotine. She told herself it was just the nicotine.
Crouching down on the curb beside Joy, she made an ineffectual swipe at the gravel before sitting. Much, much hand sanitiser was going to be required even just to get through the ER doors and to a sink for a proper clean, but she didn’t mind. Joy pressed her lips together, wry, suppressing a smile, and nodded in a single tight motion.
“So…” Not for the first time that day, Emma felt like she was going to jitter out of her skin. She took another puff, then wrapped her arms around her knees. “Any plans tonight?”
“Not really,” Joy replied, face melting into a frown. It wasn’t an especially unhappy expression: more the frown of somebody whose face fell that way naturally. With a sigh, she raised her glasses slightly and rubbed hard with two fingers where the bridge sat. If she pressed hard enough, maybe some of that tension under her skin would be forced out from her pores. “First day on shift, back in tomorrow morning, might have got some blood borne pathogens — my roommates are going to be away all night, so I thought I might capitalize on that by passing the fuck out. Why?”
Weirdly, Emma hadn’t realised how tired she looked until she mentioned it. With a feeling of camaraderie suddenly sinking in, she knew she could hardly fault her. They had scarcely passed the half way mark, but already it felt like the day had dragged on forever. Mostly it was getting worse, but there were brief moments of respite when she could blink the fuzziness out of her tired body and remind it that the brain was still wide awake. Joy was the same. Had to be, or she wouldn’t have gotten this far in her medical education.
“Oh, you know.” She tried to sound casual. Emma Nolan rarely achieved casual. “Just thought that — I mean I’ll probably need a few hours for the rush of all this to wear off anyway — so I just thought that if you were feeling the same, we could maybe hang? The girl I live with is having her boyfriend over, so I doubt I’ll sleep much anyways, but this family that lives upstairs had a big birthday party on the roof last weekend and powerwashed the whole place, and I have a picnic blanket and most of a bottle of wine so—”
“Are you asking me out?” Joy cut her off with a budding sense of, what, incredulity? No, it could hardly be that: she remembered the energy in the room when Emma had taken her blood. Surprise, maybe, at the speed at which she had addressed it. Recalibrating her perception as new information was introduced. Nicotine. Boldness. She studied Emma, who licked her lips, then bit them, then realised how that might come across, and took another toke instead. When she exhaled, it was forcibly slow, and she was acutely aware that Joy was still looking at her with her head cocked and a slight teasing grin coloring her open mouth.
“I’m asking you to watch fireworks with me,” she corrected.
“On a blanket, on your roof, with some booze.”
Joy was fully smiling, now, like the cat who got the cream. ‘Bored’ and ‘mean’ were pretty much staples in her catalogue of facial expressions, but she could pull out ‘smug’ and ‘pleased’ when the situation called for it. She was feeling pretty pleased with herself. Pretty smug at having the game to make somebody want her. And somebody did want her, after about ten minutes tops of conversation over the course of a day.
“I… guess? I’m sorry, this was dumb, or course you’ll want to rest—”
And God, she wanted Emma too.
“Okay.”
Emma’s eyes widened. Perhaps they didn’t know each other all too well, but the other woman didn’t seem like she was kidding. The confidence which had faltered began to stir and return to her.
“Really?” she asked, unable to help herself.
“Sure,” Joy confirmed. “Romantic evening under the open air? What’s not to love.” She leaned into her space, knocking their shoulders together. Conspiratorially, suggestively, she added in a whisper: “But remember, I can be a hard stick.”
When Emma didn’t immediately reply, wordlessly opening and closing her mouth, Joy tore herself back with a foreboding sense that — not for the first time in her life — she’d fucked everything up in her overeagerness.
“Sorry,” she said lamely. “Sex joke.”
Emma blinked, then laughed. She tried to remember if she’d heard her laugh before, or if this was the first time.
“No, I know,” she said, practically chirping. Joy looked sort of like she wished she’d just taken the ambulance option earlier, and so allowing an impulse to overtake her, Emma took her chin with a guiding hand until they were looking each other square in the eyes. “I was just trying to come up with something flirty to say back, but I’ve got nothing,” she admitted with a light shrug. “I think you just hit factory reset on my brain a little bit.”
“Right.” Joy was taken aback by the hand, but made no move to bat it off. It was a warm hand, even in the summer heat — dry, as might be expected from the amount of times a day she cleaned them — and it held her softly. “Well. No rush, I guess.”
For a long moment, it felt like they could not separate. Their bodies had forgotten how. Skin craved skin. It had never been this easy before.
With the hand that wasn't holding Joy, she raised the little pink tube to her mouth and took a long breath in. Joy’s eyes were still fixed to hers as she exhaled forcefully, fluttering, but never fully closed as the vapour filled the space between them. Her lips were still parted, and her tongue curled around a wisp of burnt synthetic sweetness — the flavour unidentifiable second hand, without the benefit of the name on the package. The taste of it quickly thinned and dissipated in the air around them. Factory reset.
Emma was warm under the skin in a way that could not be blamed on the weather when she started to laugh. Then Joy began to laugh too, both of them incredulous and bewildered, and Emma could feel some of her heat beneath her hand. This time, it was a real laugh: shoulder-shaking and breathless. Uncontrollable relief from something unnameable.
“I don't know why I just did that,” she admitted, shaking her head slightly as the laughter tapered off. She took her hand away, using it to brush some non-existent loose hairs back behind her ears. Maybe that should have felt like loss to Joy, but it didn’t. There was no sense of yearning, no phantom feeling of touch on her face — just Emma sitting beside her, on the curb, in the sun.
“Zyns are a lot easier at work, in my experience,” she said, just because she felt like it. “Or anything like that: I'm not a brand snob.”
Emma hummed, still a little breathless.
“Maybe,” she conceded. “I wouldn’t ever get to take a moment for myself, though.” That she would never again be able to do what she just did went unsaid. Almost-shotgunning pretty almost-doctors hadn’t previously been high on her list of concerns, but she felt now that it was a given. “Either way, please don’t tell anyone I do this until I switch to reusables –- I'm pretty sure like three people have already called me some variant of ‘kid’, and I don't think I could take any more of that.”
“You have my word,” Joy agreed, voice dropped in sincerity as she crossed her heart. The sight made Emma smile, wide and toothy. It was her go-to when she was nervous, but this time it was far more genuine.
“Speaking of people, I should really get back. Coming?”
She shook her head, lips pressed together. “Nah. I came out a minute after you; I’m wringing this for everything I can get.”
Emma didn’t press it. Didn’t even acknowledge Joy’s mood as something needing to be pressed, despite clearly not being stupid. She stood, wiping grit and dust off of her ass while Joy pointedly didn’t look, instead going through the motions of drying her already spotless glasses on her sleeve — an attempt to show just how chill and respectful she could actually be when she wasn’t making ill-advised jokes, which was thwarted when Emma asked her to confirm that her scrubs were clean. They were.
The lack of goodbyes and niceties felt somehow correct. Like something well-worn and aged; a quiet surety that they would see each other again very soon, and then again after that, and later as well. Addresses and after-work meeting places did not need to be confirmed, because they would speak many times before then.
When she was halfway back to the door, vape hidden in the depths of her pockets and generally appearing as collected and non-flustered as Joy had seen her all shift, Emma called her name. She hummed and glanced her way, raising her chin in question.
“You be a hard stick for most people, but I’ve been well taught. I got you easy enough earlier, didn’t I?”
And then she winked, and walked the rest of the way back inside. Behind her, Joy barked a singular laugh of surprise.