|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 Posted: Sun May 30, 2010 8:52 pm
Ray Gordon had a lot of cards by his upstairs bed -- in the room with the newest monitors, away from the loudest wards, which was where Gene had gotten him transferred, owing to his "delicate condition." That wasn't actually a lie: his condition had been pretty delicate coming in. When the coma patients had first started flooding DC Memorial Gene had hit the green button on his cell phone and rung him, and then he'd rung him again: and again, and again, and texted him, and laboriously IM-from-phoned him for good measure, until the masses of patients were finally sorted by ID and he found him on a gurney downstairs.
His arm had been sliced open and he'd had a puncture wound in his leg that had nearly bled him out his femoral artery before paramedics had found him. Other doctors speculated he was someone else who'd been hit by a car, or fallen down the stairs. It had taken a bagful of blood and the ICU to bring him back from deathly white, and nothing had woken him up. So getting him a nice room was a piece of cake, really.
His nice room had a lot of cards in it. It also had a lot of visitors.
It hadn't had any visitors today, though: not little Jenny-V with her pigtails, not the skinny little girl from Meadowview with the headbands and the Dominique Swain sunglasses and the Catch-22. Not even any coworkers. Definitely not any family, but that was -- unsurprising, though a card next to his bed read, Get Well Soon -- We love you, Raymond, God bless you. It was... quiet, in Ray's room.
Gene smoothed Ray's hair and checked that his IV wasn't giving him a rash, as usual. When he pulled up the chair and sat next to him he wasn't expecting company, not outside company, anyway, not company apart from Ray. And if he had been, it certainly wouldn't have been -- the company he got.
Someone knocked on the doorframe. He looked up.
There was a tall, brown-haired woman in a pink-and-white sundress, tan, with her hair tied up in a high ponytail and a bundle of yellow flowers under her arm, a summery handbag slung over her other arm. It was a little strange to look at her for a moment or two and not think of who she could possibly be -- and then know, a moment later, irrevocably and unquestionably, who she was. Who else would she be.
It was only a matter of time, wasn't it.
It was an awkward moment, the two of them frozen staring at each other, but Gene willed it to last a little longer even so because it was sure enough to be the least awkward moment in their acquaintance -- but she broke that a moment later by nodding to him and flashing him a cursory, tired smile that wasn't really at him. A moment later she was walking over to the other chair.
"Hi," said Ray's girlfriend. She had a pretty, musical voice: probably a soprano. Probably a singer. Probably a musical theater person. Probably FHL. "Are you his doctor? I can come back some other time," she added.
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Thu Jun 03, 2010 8:08 am
The first of Ray's girlfriends that Gene had hated, really wanted to drop in a vat of boiling cooking oil and deep-fry had been Chantal Robertson, a vision of womanness whose skin showed no signs that she'd ever had a pimple in her whole indie-girl life. Definitely not the first girl Ray had gone out with since he and Gene had met, but the thing about Chantal was that she and Ray so happened to have four different classes together that semester, and she knew it.
Gene had never had any appetite for people smugly informing him about his own best friend, and every so often a girlfriend would come along who'd do exactly that. It was the ones like Chantal that were the worst -- the ones that actually knew what they were talking about. The ones that had Rhetoric II with Ray at 2:00 Tuesdays and Fridays and knew more about Ray's notetaking habits than Gene did.
Ray was, unfortunately, the sort of person everyone wanted to be around, as evidenced by the crop of Get Well cards growing on his bedside table.
I'm his best friend of twelve years, he wished he was answering, who the hell do you think you are? "I'm a friend," he found himself saying obliquely instead, "and his doctor. It's alright -- you can stay, I'm just visiting."
He wondered if he should leave. No, scratch that -- he wasn't letting Ray's latest basketball season girlfriend run him off. This was his hospital, after all. His best friend. "Ray and I went to college together."
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Thu Jun 03, 2010 3:45 pm
The new girlfriend paused next to the chair she'd pulled up. She was pretty tall, Gene would've estimated 5'8" -- proportionate, if boyish, in frame. The dress she was wearing had to be some kind of number from Anthropologie, and she had on flip-flops with cloth sunflowers between the big toe and index toe.
She held out her hand. "Stephanie Jaworski." It was a statement, a sentence unto its own, like she hadn't even considered my name is. "And I guess you're Gene, then?"
When he took her hand after a moment and gave it a firm, doctorly shake, she sat down and peered at his nametag to see if it in any way confirmed her conjecture. It took her a moment to correlate Yevgeniy with Gene, judging by her expression, but once she did she smiled brightly at him, a little too-brightly. There was something a little too-bright about her in general, like she'd foregone sleep and put on makeup to hide it. Maybe not that specifically (she didn't seem to be wearing any makeup to speak of, maybe some foundation, but enh, she was probably some kind of Lush customer, wasn't she), but something like it. Something lacquered, or a little Technicolor.
"He mentioned you before, but he never got around to calling you," she said, not quite looking at her sleeping boyfriend and not quite looking at Gene, either. "I always said -- it's easier to keep in touch with college friends if you do it sooner -- but he always said he'd do it later." She laughed, more of a social laugh than an amused one, which was good because she wasn't actually funny. "Did he get around to calling you?"
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Reply
