Chapter Text
The attending had already been in the room for four hours.
Emma knew this the way she knew everything about Dr. Park's schedule — involuntarily, the way you learned the weather patterns of a city you couldn't afford to leave. Four hours on a posterior spinal fusion, L3 through S1, and he hadn't called for anything twice. Princess, who'd surmised who and what and be careful of Dr. Park, had told her on her third week that if Park had to ask for something twice, you were already dead. Emma had laughed. Softly, sheepishly. Looked to her right at Dana, who was slowly sipping her tea and writing something on her board, and had waited for her to join in on the light chuckle.
Dana hadn't.
That was six weeks ago. She still thought about it.
Dr. Brendon Park was thirty-eight, board certified in orthopedic surgery with a fellowship in complex spinal reconstruction, and widely considered one of the best hands in the department — possibly the hospital, though he wouldn't say that himself because he didn't need to. His outcomes spoke in the particular quiet way that good numbers did. His complication rates were low. His revision rates were lower. Attendings twice his age had referred patients to him, which was either a testament to their confidence in him or their self-preservation instincts, depending on who you asked. He was also, by most accounts, an absolute nightmare to work with — not volatile, not theatrical, nothing so manageable as a surgeon who threw instruments or raised his voice. Just cold. Precise. The kind of demanding that didn't announce itself, that simply expected, continuously, without mercy or much acknowledgment when expectations were met. The nickname had started as a joke somewhere in the resident lounge and had calcified into fact. Park the shark. It fit in the way good nicknames did — not because he was cruel, exactly, but because the water around him always felt like his.
The surgery was ninety minutes from close. Routine. Controlled. The OR had settled into the particular quiet of a procedure going exactly as it was supposed to — monitors steady, field clean, the soft percussion of instruments changing hands.
Emma was logging irrigation output when she reached across the back table and caught the cup of saline with the back of her wrist.
It hit the floor with a small, hollow, stupid plastid sound. Bounced once. The saline spread in a thin, immediate puddle across the linoleum.
Nobody moved.
"Hey."
Flat. Colorless. Every person in the room understood exactly who it was for.
Emma looked up.
"You." His eyes had not left the field. His hands had not stopped moving. "What is your name."
"I — I'm so sorry, the cup was at the—"
"I didn't ask you to explain yourself. I asked for your name." A beat, thin as a scalpel. "Is the field compromised."
"Emma. And no — no sir — doctor — sorry —"
"Instrument count."
She checked, her blood felt like it was going to pop clean out of her veins. "All accounted for, sir."
"Then clean it up and don't speak again unless I address you directly."
She moved — and that was where she made the second mistake, the worse one, the one her hands completed before her brain caught up with them, reaching instinctively to right the cup and return it to the table, the way you'd right anything that had fallen, basic muscle memory, completely thoughtless, completely wrong —
"Stop."
She stopped.
The word hadn't been loud. It was worse than loud. It had the quality of a door being shut very quietly by someone who wanted to slam it.
"Put that down."
She set the cup on the floor.
"Look at me."
She looked at him. He was looking at her now — finally, fully — and it was somehow worse than not being looked at, the steadiness of it, the complete absence of heat in it.
"Were you," he said, "about to place a contaminated instrument back on my sterile field."
"I — no. I wasn't thinking, I just—"
"You weren't thinking." He let that sit for a moment. "No. That much is evident." He looked back at the field. "If you had put that back on my table, we would have had to recount, re-drape, and add twenty minutes to a patient who has already been under for four hours. Because you weren't thinking." Another pause. "Is that something you'd like to explain to his family, or shall I."
The room was absolutely silent except for the monitors.
"No, doctor," she managed. "I'm sorry."
"Stop apologizing and start being useful. Stand there, don't touch anything, and count."
She stood. She counted. She did everything she was supposed to do for the next ninety minutes with her face arranged into whatever expression she could manage and her entire body running a separate, private catastrophe underneath it. She did not make any other sounds. She did not look at anyone. She tracked the instruments, logged the outputs, confirmed the count, and when the final suture went in she exhaled once through her nose so carefully it didn't make a sound.
Park stepped back from the table. Pulled his loupes.
He looked at her.
Not long. Not with any particular expression. Just a look, brief and assessing, the kind you'd give a problem you hadn't fully decided what to do with.
She felt it hit her like a flat palm to the sternum. Her eyes went wide — she couldn't stop them, they just went, enormous and helpless — and her chin came up in that stupid reflexive way that wasn't fooling anyone. She was twenty-three years old and she'd knocked over a cup of saline and almost contaminated his field and he had taken her apart in front of the entire room without once raising his voice and she was, she was fairly certain, approximately thirty seconds from crying in a supply closet.
He looked away. Stripped his gloves. Left.
Colin found her near the hallway looking possibly half dead and buried, and exhaled through his teeth. "Shark?" he asked.
"Yeah," Emma said. Her voice came out strange.
"You'll be fine." He didn't sound entirely convinced.
Her hands, she noticed, had been shaking since the second mistake. They showed absolutely no signs of stopping.
That evening Brendon stood in his kitchen and ate steak cooked to exactly the temperature he preferred and drank a Barolo he'd been meaning to open and did not think about the day. This was a skill, one he'd spent the better part of fifteen years building, and he was good at it. The OR stayed in the OR. It was one of the things he respected about himself.
He rinsed the plate. Refilled the glass. Stood at the window.
Her face was there.
He figured she was new — fairly new. He hadn't recalled her before, which meant she hadn't distinguished herself, not yet. He didn't make a habit of tracking the nurses by face, it wasn't his job to track them, they rotated in and out and either got competent or they didn't and that was someone else's administrative concern.
Still, though. Her face.
He sat on the couch. Turned the television on. Watched something for twenty minutes that he couldn't have named afterward.
He went to shower.
In the shower he turned the water cold, which was the sensible, physiological solution to the low, irritating pull of tension that had apparently made itself at home somewhere below his navel on the drive over and hadn't seen fit to leave. Cold water. Basic. He stood under it with the patience of a man who had made a rational decision and was waiting for his body to implement it.
It didn't implement it.
If anything — and this was genuinely, specifically annoying — the cold seemed to be making it worse, sharpening everything, pulling the tension tighter, the dirty unfulfilled weight of it settling lower, clarifying itself into something he couldn't be imprecise about anymore.
He exhaled as he let the water run down his back, then turned, let it hit his face. He felt the tension do the opposite of what usually happened after a shift — it didn't dissolve, dissipate, or even pause. It built. He realised he was getting angry again, at the whole situation as he recalled it — she'd gotten scared, nervous, which was good, it would leave a mark, she wouldn't dare be so careless during something so important again — but also. He closed his eyes, tilted his head back slightly. He'd scared her. He had. Well. Wouldn't be the first time. Park the shark, he thought, and felt the familiar dim flicker of something at the nickname. Nice ring. Garcia had a hand in it, he'd bet his career on it.
He reached for the temperature dial. Turned it colder.
Not helping.
Her face came back up to the surface. Her fucking face, swimming up unbidden, refusing to file itself away with the rest of the day. She was pretty. Cold hard fact, observed and noted. He'd caught it in those few seconds he'd waited for the nurses to pull the gown off him — she'd been removing her mask, hands not quite steady, and he'd done a single glance and registered it. Tan skin. Cheeks still too full, still carrying the particular roundness of someone who hadn't quite grown all the way into their face yet, still young, too young probably —
He scrubbed at his shoulder harder than necessary.
Dark chocolate eyes — not chocolate, he corrected immediately, irritated at his own brain, brown, ordinary brown — and the curly hair he'd surmised from the strands escaping the cap all surgery. Hadn't waited around to see the rest of it. One curl had been stuck to her cheek. He hadn't noticed that. He was noting it now, in retrospect, which was different.
He grunted. Pressed his forearm against the tile.
Fuck it, he thought, with the resignation of a man taking the bins out at midnight in his pajamas. What's one fantasy wank over a nurse who was too jittery and a wreck but also quite easy on the eyes. Who gives a shit.
He closed his eyes and let his brain do what it had apparently been building toward since the parking garage.
She was in the OR still. He put her there — in that post-surgery quiet, the room half-broken-down, overheads still bright. Not quite in scrubs, not out of uniform either. Not yet anyway. He'd step back in — in all his apparently intimidating glory, which, fine, if people wanted to put that on him he wasn't going to argue with the utility of it — and she'd look up from whatever she was doing and go still.
He'd be professional. Cold. He'd run through it the way he ran through everything — what happened, what should never happen again, each point delivered with the same flat precision he'd used in the OR — and she'd stand there and take it. She wouldn't speak. Not because she had nothing to say but because she wouldn't trust her voice not to waver or break, and he'd see that — the held jaw, the particular shine gathering in those eyes — and something would shift.
A small suspended moment of something entirely outside his usual register.
His hand finding her wrist. A soft pull. His other hand reaching up almost before the thought finished forming, pushing that one curl back from her cheek — the one that had been stuck there since halfway through the surgery, apparently living rent-free in his head ever since.
She'd look up at him.
All that brown. All those lashes. The chin doing its stubborn little lift.
He'd kiss her senseless. Hands at her hips, her lower back, pressing her back and back until she had nowhere left to go — she'd gasp, or try to, his tongue not giving her the room for it, tasting her, mint and something sweet, chocolate, fine, why not —
She'd push him away. Hands flat on his chest, confused, a little frightened even —
Then she'd melt. All at once and completely. Her soft round cheeks turning toward him as he bit into one of them, her hands curling into his scrubs, a moan coming out of her that was nothing like the professional silence she'd been performing all evening. His hand finding her hair, twisting her head toward him, his tongue finding her ear, licking into it — her whole body shivering against him —
He'd say something. Something that would undo her completely. He turned it over, almost impatiently.
I'll fucking ruin you, baby — no. What even was that.
Fuck, baby, yeah, you like that? Generic. It worked technically, but —
I'm gonna make you take it. So hard, so fucking—
Fuck —
The groan tore out of him before he could stop it, low and sharp, echoing off every tile in his large, expensive, suddenly very exposing bathroom. He came back to himself slowly — the water running, his own breathing, the cold still going uselessly over his shoulders. He watched, almost trance-like, as the milky traces of himself disappeared down the drain.
He stood there for a moment.
He was in trouble.
Not a word he used. Not a category he'd applied to himself in recent memory. But there it sat with the specific density of something true that he hadn't consented to and couldn't now unfeel.
He turned off the water. Toweled off. Went to bed.
Lay in the dark staring at the ceiling of his very large, very quiet apartment.
One nurse, he thought. One cup of saline.
Trouble.