FROM HOUSECALLS TO HUSBAND Page 14

  It was the distance between her and Mike that concerned Katie, though. Like the crack in that floe, it seemed to be growing wider by the second.

  "I don't know why we're even discussing this," she said, wishing desperately for the ease with him that she could scarcely remember. "We're talking about a situation that doesn't exist and things that don't matter."

  "You said they do now."

  "What matters is that we want different things. The rest of it would only make a difference if we were involved with each other. But we can't be. Not that way," she said, her eyes begging him to understand. She couldn't invest herself like that, then just walk away when it was over. And it would be over, too. Sooner or later. She needed more than a strained friendship and incredible sex from him. She wanted the family he didn't seem to need and the commitment he didn't want. She needed the whole package. He only wanted parts.

  He held her glance while he reached to the back of the sofa to scratch Spike behind his pointed little ears. The gesture was deceptive in its ease. As he considered what she'd said, defensiveness stole over him like a shadow.

  "You're right," he finally said, the simple phrase somehow encompassing everything she'd said. "This isn't getting us anywhere."

  He blew a breath, looking very much as if he wished he'd never raised his questions. Or, perhaps, his wish was that he hadn't pushed for the answers. "I'm sorry. About all of it. About last night, and about what happened a few weeks ago. We both know it was a mistake." Shoving his hand into his pocket for his keys, he headed across the room. "I promise, it won't happen again."

  She whirled around to follow him, the need to protect herself colliding with the need to keep him from slamming the door between them. "Mike, please. You were the one who said we should be able to figure out a way around all this. We just need to…"

  "To what?" he prodded, when her voice trailed off. "Fix it?"

  "Yes."

  "How?"

  At the demand, she went silent. Her delicate features were shadowed with the same sense of hopelessness he felt. She had no answers.

  He had only one. "I think on this particular consultation we'll have to go with your first course of treatment. The only one I could come up with nearly killed the patient."

  His dark head dipped toward the mess behind her. "I'll let you get back to your cleaning," he said, the corner of his mouth twitching in a parody of a smile. "You don't want to lose your momentum."

  Avoiding Katie's eyes, he looked back to make sure the cat stayed put and let himself out. He'd known exactly what he wanted when he'd walked up to the door. Answers. Well, he had them. In spades.

  She wasn't pregnant. There were thanks to be offered for that, he was sure. And gratitude to the patron saint of disastrous complications, whoever she was, sat high on his list at the moment. So did relief. As alienated as he and Katie were becoming, he couldn't imagine the pressure a pregnancy would put on their relationship. Yet the thought that Katie could have been carrying his child had caused him to feel something far less definable than relief or gratitude.

  Taunted by the feeling now, he deliberately blocked it. He'd wanted her in his bed, as well as in his life, but it was as clear as a specimen slide that a physical relationship with him held no interest for her at all.

  Wanting to think the hurt in his chest was only a bruised ego, he felt another bolt of self-protection kick into place. He had his paper to finish and then he had the rest of the afternoon free. He would ignore the fact that he'd wanted to spend it with Katie.

  "I knew I should have stayed in bed this morning. I can't believe I did this. He thinks I'm an idiot."

  Jan, the thirty-something nurse who'd turned the staff green with her pictures of Hawaii, peeled off her gloves, her waist-length auburn hair flying as she hurried past the nurses' station.

  "What's that all about?" Alice wondered aloud.

  From the computer behind the counter, Katie swallowed her own agitation and watched Alice's ebony eyes narrow behind her glasses. The frames were pumpkin orange today. So was her pantsuit.

  Having noticed the other nurse's distress herself, Katie cleared the screen. "I'll go see."

  Jan was headed for the med room.

  Holding the bell of her hot pink stethoscope so it wouldn't bounce, Katie jogged up behind her. "Are you okay?"

  "I've only assisted with that procedure once before," the distraught nurse stressed, still hurrying. "It's not like we have the same kind of experience up here that they do downstairs. But he made it clear he didn't want me back in there after I get him another setup. He looked at me as if I didn't have an active cell in my brain."

  "Dr. Aniston?"

  "Dr. Brennan."

  "Mike?"

  "He's in 306 putting in a central line."

  "Why's he upset with you?"

  "I contaminated his field."

  Ouch, Katie thought, rounding the corner into the med room behind Jan. "That might frustrate him a little, but Dr. Brennan doesn't get upset about—"

  "I did it twice."

  Grabbing the phone, the pretty young nurse punched the number for Central Supply and ordered another central line tray. Stat. A supply runner would have it there in two minutes, but when a surgeon was standing at a patient's bedside waiting for something that should already be there, those two minutes could feel like eternity.

  "He needs another pair of sterile gloves, too. After my hair brushed the tray, I bumped his glove with mine."

  Katie eyed the fabulous length of enviably straight hair cascading down the back of the woman's blue scrub top. Jan always wore it clipped back from her cherubic face and, usually, well out of the way. But Katie had seen it slide from her shoulder sometimes when the woman bent over, and she could easily imagine it causing a problem if the sterile field was over a hospital bed. There were reasons operating tables were narrow, just as there were reasons surgical personnel covered their hair and their bodies with caps and gowns. They didn't perform that many sterile procedures in the unit. Still, it didn't matter if only one strand had touched the corner of only one instrument. Contaminated was just that.

  "My tray should be up by the time I give him these."

  Jan headed into the hall with the gloves in her pocket and her hands twisting her heavy hair into a knot so she could drop it down the back of her top.

  From the med room door, Katie watched her disappear into the room halfway down the long hall. Fifteen seconds later, just as Katie returned to the computer to finish inputting diet changes, Jan was back out, her eyes trained on the floor as she shook her head.

  "What?" Katie asked as she hurried past her again.

  "I took him a pair of sevens."

  "He wears nines."

  "I know," she mumbled, skirting a nursing assistant before disappearing into the med room again.

  The woman looked as if she were on the verge of tears. Katie had been there herself. There were simply some days when nothing went right, and Jan seemed to be having one of them. Though Katie couldn't imagine Mike deliberately upsetting a nurse, his quiet censure could be devastating.

  She should know. She'd been on the receiving end of it herself a while ago.

  "Your tray should be here any second. I'll go check on it for you."

  The threat of tears mingled with faint hope. "Would you mind taking it in to him? All you have to do is drop it off and go. He said he could do the procedure himself."

  To Katie, it was a fair indication of Mike's frustration level—and his lack of confidence in Jan at that point—that he'd sent her packing. For a number of reasons, everything from having the extra pair of hands, to having someone available to get more supplies, a doctor always liked to have a nurse handy when he was performing such a procedure.

  No one was more aware of that at the moment than Jan, and it was painfully evident that she'd rather stand naked in a hailstorm than walk back into that room.

  Having been in that awful, awkward position herself before, too, Katie snatc
hed a tan packet marked Sterile Gloves Size 9 from a box and gave Jan's shoulder a sympathetic squeeze. She had her own reasons for not wanting to face Mike at the moment, but she murmured, "No problem," and bravely headed into the hall.

  The runner was coming through the unit's double doors with the blue cloth-wrapped tray when, seconds later, she left Jan banging her head softly against the med room wall.

  Katie truly did not want to deal with Mike just now. After he'd left her yesterday morning, she'd stood motionless in the middle of her living room while the awful ache in her chest caused her throat to burn and her eyes to sting. Had he been any other man, she'd be cutting a berth around him a mile wide. But it wasn't that simple with them. He wasn't willing to give her his heart, but she still wanted him so badly she ached. Another part of her was missing the friend he'd been, and clutching the hope that he wanted their friendship back, too.

  That hope, however, had dimmed considerably half an hour ago.

  The contact had been so brief it scarcely qualified as an encounter, but his coolness had been unmistakable. Coming out of a patient's room, she'd spotted him on a phone at the nurses' station. He'd looked straight at her as he'd spoken into the mouthpiece. Then, having held her glance long enough for her heart to take a few erratic beats, he'd simply turned away.

  The blatant rejection had frozen her in her tracks. Seconds later, she'd returned to the patient's room on the pretext of having forgotten something.

  She hadn't seen him since.

  "You can leave it and go."

  That was exactly what she planned to do. "Here are your gloves."

  Mike's head jerked around as she picked up the contaminated setup from the patient's tray table and slid the new one into place. Standing with his back to the door, he hadn't seen who'd come in. He'd just heard the squeak of soft soles on the polished floor.

  His expression cooly professional, he took the tan packet she'd set atop the covered tray and tore it open. "I thought you were that other nurse. If you're not tied up right now, I'd appreciate an assist. We're prepped for a central line."

  Nothing about his manner indicated that this was Mike talking to Katie. This was a doctor speaking to a nurse. Every bit as professional as he was, Katie put her anxiety on hold and moved to the opposite side of the bed.

  As Mike had pointed out, the patient had already been prepped. The emaciated gentleman with the tufts of silver hair surrounding the liver spots on his scalp, lay with his head to the side, his jaw hidden by a sterile blue drape that exposed his neck through a hole, and reached the covered tray table at his waist. The skin visible on his neck was stained orange from the surgical scrub used to clean it and, by now, deadened with an anesthetic.

  Mike slipped his hand into the folded cuff of the first sterile glove. Touching only the part that would touch his skin, he pulled it on. "We'll get this done now, Mr. Weineke," he said, lifting his hand so the cuff fell down, covering his wrist. Picking up the other glove with his "clean" hand, he snapped it on and offered a smile that didn't come quite as easy as usual. "I'm sure you'd like to get back to your television show."

  Katie glanced toward the silent TV mounted high on the wall. As she opened the blue cloth with a rip of tape and exposed the assortment of instruments and supplies, she couldn't help thinking that the elderly gentleman didn't care whether he got back to the game show or not. He was sick and he clearly felt terrible. From the apprehension in his rheumy eyes, she could tell he was also nervous about what the surgeon was going to do.

  Katie offered him a smile of her own as she slipped on her gloves. She would stay "dirty" so she could handle any nonsterile item the doctor might need moved, so she didn't hesitate to rest her hand on the patient's thin, wrinkled arm. The fact that his assigned nurse had just departed under less than ideal circumstances probably hadn't done a whole lot for his comfort level, either.

  "I've told Mr. Weineke this won't take long at all." Mike reached toward the tray. "He knows we're putting in this line because all his other intravenous sites are shot."

  His deep voice held a wealth of reassurance for the patient, and a verbal nudge for Katie. Some doctors didn't like unnecessary conversation when they worked. Others, like Mike, understood the value of letting certain patients know what was going on.

  "That means no more poking in your arms for a vein," she elaborated, promptly picking up the cue to focus on whatever positives she could find for the man. "And no more blood draws. We can get them out of your new line."

  "That's what the other nurse said," the man replied, his voice a rusty warble. "She's a sweet girl."

  Reminding herself to pass on the comment to Jan, she murmured, "She's very nice."

  "She didn't mean to mess up, you know."

  "I'm sure she didn't. She's an excellent nurse." She cast a careful glance at Mike. "She's just not having a very good day."

  "Neither is Mr. Weineke," Mike defended. "I'm sure he'd rather be just about anywhere else, doing something other than this." The censure in his voice was mirrored in his tight expression as he peeled open a pack he'd taken from the tray. Whether the other woman was having a bad day or not, he clearly didn't want to hear excuses. "Ready?"

  The question was for his patient. But the man didn't answer. He just looked apprehensively at Katie, who calmly met the shuttered expression in the doctor's eyes. Knowing she was not the person to go to bat for Jan, she took Mr. Weineke's hand.

  "Hold your head still," she gently reminded him, watching Mike feel for the vein. "You're doing fine."

  His features fixed in concentration, Mike deftly inserted a needle long enough to skewer a turkey. Had Mr. Weineke seen the size of it, his anxiety level would have shot through the ceiling.

  "You're halfway there already." She gave the cool, bony hand a comforting little squeeze, then waited a beat before telling him that all he needed now was a couple of stitches and he was through.

  Her quiet commentary visibly eased the man. He closed his eyes, his breath sighing out as if he'd been holding it forever. He didn't even care that the capped catheter had to be sewn in. As far as he was concerned, the worst was behind him.

  Katie wished fervently that it were so for her and the doctor wordlessly placing the neat stitches that would keep the catheter in place. But as she clipped the sutures for him, marveling at the deftness with which his long fingers tied off the delicate filaments, she had the awful feeling that, for the two of them, the rough part was only beginning.

  "Mrs. MacAllister called me yesterday afternoon," he informed her when they left the patient's room a few minutes later. Glancing down the hall to make sure no one was within earshot, he motioned her to a stop. The distance she'd sensed in him seemed to increase even as he stepped closer. "She invited us to a reception she's giving for her son."

  "Us?"

  "She specifically asked me to bring you."

  "What did you tell her?"

  "I haven't talked to her yet. She left the message on my answering machine." A muscle in his jaw twitched, his bridled tension twining around her like smoke. "I wanted you to know about it before I called her back. I thought if Dr. MacAllister happened to mention it to you and you didn't know the invitation had been extended, it might be kind of awkward. Under the circumstances, I don't think we should go. Not together, anyway."

  It seemed that Maggie MacAllister was either thinking of them as a couple already or planning to do a little nudging to see that they became one. It was also as plain as the cafeteria's custard that the last thing they needed was someone trying to push them together.

  An orderly moving an empty gurney was threading his way between laundry carts. Taking her arm, Mike nudged her back so the young woman in the blue surgical cap and booties could navigate between the wall and the portable monitor someone had left in the hall. His nearness brought the clean scent of his soap. With that same breath came disturbing memories. But his touch was deliberately businesslike, clearly intended only to get her from point A to p
oint B. The instant they were out of the way, he pulled back and pushed both his hands into the pockets of his lab coat.

  "You're right," she told him, feeding off the defensiveness she could feel radiating from him. The last thing they needed was another evening like the last one. "We probably shouldn't."

  "I thought you'd feel that way." He gave her a tight nod, his eyes deliberately avoiding hers as the accusation sunk in. "Thanks for the assist in there."

  He turned away without another word, leaving Katie to stare numbly at his retreating back. She didn't know if he was angry with her, annoyed or plain old disgusted. He'd never been any of those things with her before—except for the time she'd borrowed his car when he was home from college and she'd dented the fender, but that was light years from the coolness she sensed in him now. He was almost acting as if she were somehow at fault for the way things were falling apart.

  "I know you say you and Dr. Brennan are just friends," Alice said when Katie returned to the nurses' station after Mike had gone, "but you two sure looked intense down there."

  Thinking that the last thing she needed was Alice's good-natured nosiness, Katie picked up the list of diet changes she'd been entering in the computer earlier and tapped her ID number out on the keyboard. "We'd just finished with a patient," she hedged, dangling the possibility that they'd been talking about the procedure.

  Knowing a false lead when she was tossed one, Alice didn't bite.

  "You weren't talking about a patient, honey. When you were standing down there," she said, using the papers in her hand to indicate where Mike had stopped her, "you looked edgy as a doe cornered by a buck." She peered over the top of her orange rims. "You went to that heart thing with him Saturday night, didn't you?"

  "What's that got to do with anything?"

  "Nothing," she said, sounding dismissing despite the shrewd look in her eyes. "He's just been acting kind of strange around you for nearly a month now, and I've never seen him as short with people as he's been this morning. Now, if he was Dr. Aniston, I'd say his mood was downright pleasant. But that man," she continued, apparently meaning Mike, "isn't himself at all."