All of Me Read online

  “I think so, but I’m biased. Shit, is that really the time? I have to get dressed.”

  Rowan found herself roaming Galen’s body with her glance, suddenly too aware of her near-nakedness. “Right.” She watched as Galen’s towel dropped just enough to expose the crest of her breasts, forcing herself to leave.

  * * *

  “Good morning, everyone.” Galen’s favorite attending, Dr. Jay Peterson, entered the OR, holding his hands just in front of his chest. “Burgey. What’s shakin’, kid?”

  “Ready to get going, Boss.” With Jay at the helm, it was going to be a good day. He often let Galen do the majority of the surgery, even leaving the room to let her finish the procedure on her own. Working with him was nothing like working with her father. She didn’t live in perpetual fear of fucking up, or not fucking up but being yelled at regardless.

  “Aren’t you always? And you must be one of the new interns.” Jay turned his attention to Rowan, who’d been standing patiently near the patient’s head, careful not to ruin the sterile field.

  “Yes, sir. I’m Rowan Duncan.” Galen watched as Rowan started to reach out to shake his hand but quickly seemed to realize her error and brought it back close to her body.

  “Don’t give me that ‘sir’ bullshit. Who do you think I am, Henry Burgess? No offense, Galen.”

  Galen chuckled. Why couldn’t Jay be her father instead? Jesus, life would be so much easier.

  “Okay, Dr. Peterson.”

  “Jay. Please. If you call me Dr. Peterson, I’ll kick you right out of my OR.”

  Galen could see the smile on his face even in spite of his mask.

  “Jay. I’ve got it.”

  Galen warmed at the exchange. Rowan was likable, she had to admit. So many of the new residents were like petulant children with no social skills. They couldn’t hold a conversation, never mind make a joke. Rowan was charming. She thought back to an hour earlier, in the locker room. Galen had known exactly what she was doing. She was already in the shower when she heard Rowan’s voice nearby. It didn’t take long for her to figure out she was on the phone, likely with this Brian doofus.

  Everything Galen did with a woman was calculated, meticulous, from her words down to her shoes. It was no accident that she chose that moment to leave the shower, making sure to let her towel fall just enough to gauge the look in Rowan’s eyes. The shaking in her voice, the color of her cheeks—it all served to confirm what Galen was sure she’d seen earlier in the day. Girls broke out in hives around her for two reasons—they wanted to fuck her, or they were allergic to her cologne. And Galen hadn’t been wearing any cologne.

  Chapter Five

  In a few months, a 24-hour call shift would probably feel as welcome as a tooth extraction. But for now, Rowan was thrilled. It was only twenty minutes past seven in the morning, and she was already pulsating with the feeling that absolutely anything could happen. Besides, nighttime in a hospital is different: a sort of controlled chaos supersedes the darkness. Because fewer staff are around, first-years like Rowan had more opportunities. And it didn’t hurt that her first call shift was with Galen.

  Her mind once again skipped back to the morning before. Galen had been nearly naked in the locker room, and for whatever reason, Rowan had been extremely uncomfortable. She’d been around naked women before, of course—in the sauna at her gym, in her girlfriends’ bedrooms at high-school sleepovers. Hell, there was even that time in college when her roommate convinced her to watch porn (admittedly not her thing). But she’d never felt so innately awkward as she did with Galen standing there, her towel barely covering her wet skin, her damp hair framing her confident smile. Oh God! Had it finally happened? Had she finally succumbed to her years of homophobic inbreeding? Was she uncomfortable around Galen because she was a lesbian?

  No. That wasn’t it. One of Rowan’s best friends at Dartmouth was gay. They’d shared a bed on a weekend road trip. They’d hugged and had dinners. And never once was Rowan suspicious that she wanted to sleep with her just because she liked women. She certainly didn’t think Galen wanted to get into her panties because she was a lesbian. So what the hell was her problem, then?

  “Duncan. Heads up.” The voice that had been so clearly resonating in her head all day erupted in full stereo as a small, black object the size of a deck of cards barreled toward her face.

  “What?” She hardly had time to duck to keep the pager from taking off the tip of her nose.

  “Your pager. You’re on call with me tonight, right?” Galen grinned so quickly she almost appeared to wink. Was she winking? Was she flirting with Rowan again? Oh God, stop it, stop it, stop it.

  “Yes. I mean, I am. With you. Tonight.”

  “Good. Then keep this on. I expect you to respond within five minutes.”

  Rowan thought it sounded like an “or else” should have been at the end of her sentence, but Galen was already gone before she could ask. It was 6:45 pm, and the hum of the hospital was starting to deteriorate with the impending evening. For the first time since she’d been there, Rowan turned to find herself alone in the hallway by the cafeteria. The buzz of a floor polisher echoed in the distance, and an elderly man waited in a wheelchair by the lobby doors. With an entire fifteen minutes left before her call shift started, she decided to pick up something to eat. After all, she could never tell when she’d have another chance. She purchased a sandwich from the cafeteria, sat at an empty table next to the window looking out onto the street, and unwrapped her dinner.

  A piercing ring she didn’t recognize came from under the table. It took several seconds before she realized what it was, picked the pager off her scrub pants, and groaned.

  “Well, that was short-lived,” she mumbled to herself. She thought about rewrapping the sandwich and putting it in her locker, but what was the point? She probably wouldn’t see food for the next twenty-four hours, and besides, she wasn’t particularly hungry. Her nerves were getting more than the best of her—first night on call, first night under Galen’s thumb.

  See patient J. Kensington in ED. 17 M, question appy.

  The Emergency Department was just down the stairs from the cafeteria, in the basement. It was one of the few places she’d learned how to access since she arrived at Boston City. Rowan took one last look at her sandwich, tossed it into the trash, and jogged down the stairs.

  “Hi. Dr. Duncan, from surgery, here to see Kensington?” She hoped the secretary behind the desk didn’t notice the sweat forming just under her bangs.

  “Room four. But someone from surgery is already in there.”

  Rowan’s heart lurched as she raced around the corner.

  “Um, four is the other way, dear,” the secretary shouted.

  “Right. Thanks.”

  Galen was already standing at the patient’s bedside, her face stone as she stared at her watch.

  “Dr. Burgess…I’m sorry…I…”

  “Two minutes, twenty-eight seconds. Not bad.” Galen’s expression melted into her charming smile, and Rowan felt the hives once again pop up around her collar. “I’m playing with you, Duncan. This is Jeff. Mid-epigastric pain for two days radiating to the right lower quadrant today. Positive rebounding. Fever to 100.8. Leukocytosis of 14. CT showed thickening of the appendix with positive fat stranding.”

  “Hi, Jeff. I’m Dr. Duncan. I work with Dr. Burgess.”

  “What’s all that mean? What she said?” The tall, lanky boy in the bed was pale, and his pupils were pinpoints from various doses of morphine.

  “That’s just big-shot talk for your appendix needs to come out.” She glanced at Galen to make sure she was still smiling. She was.

  “Bread and butter,” Galen said once they’d stepped out of Jeff’s room.

  “Excuse me?”

  “This is your bread and butter. A laproscopic appendectomy. It doesn’t get a whole lot more basic than that. Good case for a newbie.”

  Rowan’s excitement suddenly overtook her nerves. “I can’t wait.”
>
  “That’s what I like to hear. So, what do you want to do now?”

  “Now?” She forced herself to slow down and think. Her answers tonight would set the precedent for how Galen saw her. They would determine whether she would trust her. “Now, I want to call the OR team and get a room prepped. I want to get him started on IV cipro and flagyl and review all his labs for pre-op. Then I want to page Dr. Morgan and let him know we’ll need him at the bedside, although I’m sure you’ll be doing most of the heavy lifting.” She swore she saw a rare shade of pink touch Galen’s cheeks.

  “You were doing well there for a while.”

  Rowan’s composure suddenly felt weakened and frail. “What did I miss?”

  “How many lap appys did you assist in as a fourth-year?”

  “Well, I did four extra months in general surgery at UT Austin, so I’d wager probably somewhere around twenty to thirty?”

  “Great.” Galen smiled. “Then you were wrong about one thing. You’ll be the one doing most of the heavy lifting.”

  “I…really?”

  “Yes, Duncan. Listen.” She put a firm hand on Rowan’s shoulder. “When I was an intern, Jay Peterson was the first attending I was ever on call with. I was so terrified I nearly peed my scrubs in the OR.”

  Rowan laughed. “I find that difficult to believe.”

  “It’s true. I didn’t eat for a solid fifteen hours before that case. And when I finally got in there, Jay put Lynyrd Skynyrd on his iPod, smiled at me, and handed me a scalpel. And you know what he said to me?”

  “No…what?”

  “He said ‘Burgy. You’re up, kid. You’ve got this.’”

  “Then what happened?”

  “Then he asked me to identify the anatomical landmarks where I needed to make my trocar sites. I did. And then he told me to cut. Just like that. Like I’d been doing it all my life.”

  “That’s an insane amount of trust for a new intern.”

  “It sure is. And that’s the level of trust I’m instilling in you. I learned more in that first case with him than I did most of the remainder of the year. And now, I’m a firm believer in the old see one, do one, teach one method. My father and a lot of the others seem to have forgotten how well that can work. You’re here because you’re good, Rowan, because you beat out twelve thousand other applicants who wanted to be surgeons. Now, you’re going to take the scalpel.”

  Rowan’s hands were tingling. She wasn’t sure if it was from fear, or elation, or just another strange somatic effect of being in Galen’s presence. Regardless, her chief did have an incredible way with words. Everything that came out of her mouth was either seductive and charming, or engaging and inspirational. Jesus. No wonder women couldn’t keep their panties on around her.

  * * *

  Galen was pretty sure her pre-op pep talk had worked. She could tell Rowan was scared. And she was glad. Fear was healthy in the OR. It was necessary—as long as it was controlled. And Rowan seemed to have a healthy control of her terror that Galen felt would make her a meticulous surgeon. That, combined with her apparent work ethic and clear intelligence, left Galen feeling certain she could let Rowan take the reins, with her standing in close range. Responsibility as a brand-new intern wasn’t exactly the same as responsibility as a fifth-year chief resident. It was more about giving the new surgeon the feeling of having a patient’s life in their hands. When push came to shove, Galen would be right behind her. And, if that failed, Dr. James Morgan would be standing right behind her. She didn’t anticipate Rowan needing much from either of them.

  They still had some time before the surgery could begin. She left Rowan in the consult room to review Jeff Kensington’s labs, his medical history, his family history. The other specialties think surgeons only cut. But there’s so much more involved than that. If Rowan were to miss just one hint of someone in the Kensington family reacting poorly to anesthesia in the past, Jeff could end up with malignant hyperthermia and die on the table. Odds were it would never come to that. But Galen liked to think she was more than just good with a knife.

  For whatever reason, Galen thought back to her frustrating encounter with Rowan from the night before. Maybe she hadn’t ever really stopped contemplating it? Was Rowan going to think she was letting her do so much so she could fuck her? As if she’d ever put a patient’s life in jeopardy just to get some. The concept pissed her off all over again, but she took a deep breath, told herself she was being irrational, and put it aside. Instead, she walked briskly off toward the OR suites, wondering why, exactly, she cared so much what Dr. Rowan Duncan thought about her.

  * * *

  Rowan could do only so much more preparation. She’d read and reread Jeff Kensington’s medical, family, and social history about twelve times. His maternal great-aunt had a small stroke at eighty-four, and he’d spent a year in France during high school. He’d smoked approximately four cigarettes a week for six months when he was seventeen. He was nervous about the surgery, but ready—not altogether different from Rowan, actually. She could rattle off his complete blood count, including manual differential, partially thanks to her eidetic memory. And almost as important, she knew exactly where she needed to make her incisions to insert the laparoscopic instruments.

  Of course, not a single one of those things kept her inevitable heart palpitations and sweating under control as she made her way to the scrub sink outside OR 4 and ran her hands under the warm water. She took several deep breaths, counting to four on the way in and again on the way out, like she’d done when her nerves got the best of her in medical school. But it wasn’t until Galen approached that her anxiety dissipated into the sterile air around her.

  “I’d ask if you’re ready, but I already know the answer.” Galen’s kind, supportive smile reminded Rowan of the South, and her heart rate settled down to its usual steady pace.

  * * *

  The high coming out of the OR was like nothing Rowan had ever experienced. Her heart pounded, and she felt like laughing and crying and screaming, all while simultaneously running for miles on end without stopping. Energy seemed boundless and the world was hers. Fuck, yes. It was hers, and it was Galen’s, and together they could…

  Okay, so maybe the endorphins had gotten a bit out of hand. No “Galen and her” existed. Galen—her chief resident and her boss—was likely the biggest playboy of all time. And Rowan—lowly first-year resident from Hicksville, Texas—scratch that. Lowly straight first-year resident from Hicksville, Texas. She wasn’t sure why the straight part was so important to her yet again, but it was. Slow, rhythmic clapping interrupted her thoughts.

  “Dr. Duncan. Nicely done.” Rowan wasn’t sure why she was surprised to find Galen behind her. She seemed to be just short of flanking her all night. Not that Rowan minded. It was nice to have the support and all of that.

  “Thank you.” Rowan’s instinct was to bow, or throw her arms around Galen, or something equally as inappropriate and ridiculous. But she didn’t. She just smiled and continued to ride the wave of serotonin and dopamine that she imagined could only be derived from two things in life—a successful surgery, complete with the feel of your hands on someone’s pulsating organs, and sex. She’d had sex before. Probably a hundred times at least with Brian. And she’d slept with one other boyfriend before him in high school. But Rowan could say with absolute certainty that no sex she’d ever had compared to being in that OR with Galen just now. Like a hormone-laden twelve-year-old boy who finds himself getting erections during church, her mind once again settled back into the dream she’d had that morning.

  As she inadvertently remembered the feeling of Galen’s breath on her neck and her hands running up the back of her shirt, her face once again flushed, and she began to itch profusely. Stop being turned on. Stop being turned on. Baseball. Grandma June’s knitting club. Dehisced surgical wounds…Brian… The record scratched, and the music came to an abrupt stop. She had successfully squelched all sexual desire that had built inside her.

&nbs
p; “Come on. I want to show you something.” Galen moved close enough to place a hand gently on the small of her back, which was now hopelessly damp, and the high resurfaced.

  “What? Where?”

  “I’m your boss. Don’t ask questions.” Galen smiled, and Rowan couldn’t bring herself to give a shit about anything other than how good that moment felt.

  They took the elevator as far as it would go, until Galen led her out and down the hall. Darkened offices and conference rooms slowly turned to storage closets and broken medical equipment. IV poles and heart monitors that looked like something out of the eighties littered the corners, but Galen kept walking, Rowan in step next to her.

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “Not to try to get you naked.”

  “Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of kidnapping, murdering…that sort of thing.”

  “So I’ve gone from a playboy who wants to fuck you to a killer? Jesus, Duncan. You don’t think particularly highly of me, do you?”

  “I…Galen, I was kidding. I’m sorry.”

  Galen’s laugh was laced with a heaviness Rowan wasn’t familiar with—one that made her uneasy.

  “Just through here.” Galen pushed open a heavy metal door plastered with a strict warning not to enter. She thought about questioning her, but somehow, Galen didn’t seem like anyone who needed second-guessing.

  They walked up one flight of stairs and through another door that threatened to release a fire alarm if provoked. “Relax. It’s just a sticker. I’ve done this a million times.”

  Sprawled in front of them was the city of Boston, lit up from the Charles River to the Prudential Building. Rowan had grown up in a town of just over a thousand, with more vets than physicians and three cows for every resident. This was like being dropped on an alien planet. She’d never seen anything like it, and she wondered if she’d ever go back home.