Keeping that line intact would probably be the only way to save his relationship with Josie, already tenuous. He had no inclination to put any of his shit on her right now.
Suck it up, dude, he told himself. A deep breath, inhaling the scent of lavender and coffee that clung to Josie like a second skin, rejuvenated him. He pulled back from the embrace and kissed her softly.
“You read my mind.”
“You were thinking about Thai?”
“I was thinking about you.”
“Clearly you weren’t thinking about your shirt.” She snickered, breaking the embrace and dishing up some noodles. He looked down. Damn it. He’d been in the shower when she’d buzzed and his clothes were thrown on hastily.
Maybe they’d be yanked off just as hastily in the next few minutes. The thought should have excited him, but it only made him feel stunted. Inadequate. As if he’d failed her somehow by not being the centered man she expected him to be, by having his judgment questioned at work. Could it bleed into his personal life? Lately, the stress had.
What else should he question? You had to have at least a touch—even the tiniest taste—of a God complex to become a physician. Especially a surgeon. Alex’s entire life had been built one one major premise: education and hard work will set you free. His compass was that simple, from watching his mother make her way through teen motherhood and poverty to a clinical psychologist’s license and building her own practice through his own educational journey as the child of a poor teen mother.
For the first time in his life he wasn’t being interrogated about his knowledge, or his skills, but rather how he assessed a situation and then acted.
And it sucked.
Sinking himself into Josie was what he needed most. Skin to skin, rolling in bed, making love until his last gasp was her name and all the stress and horror of his internal self-flagellation was gone. Drained. Depleted.
That was what he needed.
Thank God she’d appeared.
Josie reached out to touch Alex’s elbow. Saying this was important—she wanted to get it out of the way so it wouldn’t weigh on her this evening A fun evening of food, movies and sex—lots of sex—shouldn’t be marred by her worry. He turned his shining eyes on her, focused completely on whatever she was about to say.
“I did the paperwork on your grandfather’s most recent eval, and he’s…he’s definitely deteriorating,” she said quietly.
Alex closed his eyes and nodded slowly, letting out a long exhale. “I’m not surprised,” he said. “That matches what my mom and aunts have been telling me.”
“Alex, I…I want to be careful here, because I don’t want to cross any ethical lines…”
His face went hard, suddenly, like granite, a look she’d never seen on his face. “Then don’t.” The two words hung in the air, suspended by a tone of judgment.
“Then don’t—what?” she countered, her voice taking on the same hard edge. Perhaps she shouldn’t have brought it up. Their plates sat in front of them, ignored, and her stomach clenched.
“Don’t do anything that would violate your professional ethics, or anyone else’s.”
“What would make you think I would do that?” she hissed back. This was not the conversation she had expected. What the hell had just happened?
“If you’re going to try to tell me,” he said, standing and leaning forward, eyes angry, “that you are at all tempted to find out whether my grandfather is in the control group or is receiving the medication, then we need to stop this conversation, right here, right now.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” she protested, hands up, palms facing him, standing up herself. She nearly took a step backwards, simply to give herself distance from the near vitriol in his voice, his disdainful face, the puffed-out chest and the balled-up hands. “I wasn’t implying that I would do anything like that,” she said, her body mimicking his. If she could have stepped up on a stool and been face to face, eye to eye with him, she would have. As it was, she had to look up, craning her neck, and stand up, stand tall, as straight as possible to get her point across. A forcefield of fury buzzed between the two of them, seeming to come out of nowhere.
“You just said that you’re worried that my grandfather’s failing, and that he might…”
“He might what?”
“You were the one who was about to say it,” he answered after a long pause.
“I was about to say that you might want to get a second opinion, or a third opinion, or a whatever opinion,” she said, snarkily, “because Ed is falling apart, and I can’t imagine that he’s going to be safe living independently for much longer. Whether he’s in the control group or not is not something that I’m privy to know, I’m just trying to tell you, as a friend—”
“Friend?”
The acid in his tone made her throat well up with salty tears. Her anger, still there, but now replaced with an ever-increasing layer of hurt.
“Is that what we are, Josie? Friends? ’Cause”—he leaned in, hot breath against her ear—“cause I don’t f**k my friends by the side of the river. I don’t invite my friends over, and make them dinner, and sleep with them. I don’t let them fall asleep in my lap, and cuddle with them, and stroke their hair, and marvel at them. I don’t know what kind of friendsyou have, but I don’t do that with my friends.” He pulled back.
There was a look of such hurt, and confusion, and anger, and frustration, and about 217 other emotions that she couldn’t identify as her own brain raced, trying to process the implications of this conversation. “Fine, then.” She lowered her shoulders, straightened up her neck, and looked him in the eye again. “I’m telling you, as someone who has just interacted with Ed on a professional andpersonal level, that for whatever reason you and your mother and her sisters may want to consider getting more opinions on how you can slow down the deterioration that he’s experiencing.”
“And that’s your professional opinion, doctor?” he said, a nasty sneer twisting his face. Who the hell had he become?
Oh, no, he didn’t.
“You went there? Really? You…went there?” she seethed. This was going to be about pulling rank? She was always going to be the cute little nurse, and he was always going to be the big, bad doctor? It was her turn to stick her finger in his face. “I may not be a doctor, and I may not have prescription powers, or have suffered through all the years of med school, internship, residency, and all the other shit that you guys go through, but I can tell you one thing. I can tell with reasonable accuracy, based solely on symptoms, which people are in the control group and which are not. Now, I’m never going to cross a line that would jeopardize a multimillion-dollar National Institutes of Health-funded research project. This isn’t Grey’s Anatomy, and I’m not that Meredith chick.”