‘You certainly have a way of extracting information,’ he said through a wide smile, and I blushed.
‘I’m sorry, Ash, am I being too nosy?’
‘ “He who asks a question is a fool for a minute; he who does not remains a fool forever.” ’
I grinned at him. ‘Yikes, you’re really good a the whole wise-proverb thing; works brilliantly with your accent.’
‘I’m not sure that was my father’s intention when he battered me with them endlessly as a child,’ he replied.
‘How did he die?’ I asked without thinking, and saw the flash of pain across his face, ‘God, sorry, Ash. You don’t have to answer if it’s upsetting.’ I put my hand over his on the table, where he was distractedly twisting his muffin paper.
‘No, it’s fine, Frankie. Nobody asks me about Iraq. It feels good to talk about it for once.’ He took a deep breath. ‘My father was killed in 2008 by a car bomb as he was leaving the hospital he worked at. He was a cardiologist too. This is why my sisters and I moved to the UK. Professionals in Iraq were being targeted. The healthcare system is riddled with corruption and there is little security. I feel guilty for leaving my country when they so desperately need doctors, but if I stayed so would my sisters, and I just couldn’t take the risk.’
‘Oh, Ash,’ I breathed, my throat feeling tight. I saw someone approaching our table out of the corner of my eye and looked up. Tom was walking towards us, his gaze fixed on our hands on the table, and he looked furious. Ash snatched his hands from under mine, and pushed his chair back from the table in surprise.
‘Tom,’ he said. His voice sounded hoarse with emotion and he cleared his throat. ‘Finished in the lab already?’
Tom looked tense and I noticed a muscle ticking in his jaw.
‘Shall we go through the list?’ he asked in a tight voice. ‘I presume that, seeing as you’re having such a cosy chit-chat, you must have finished going round.’
Ash shifted in his chair. ‘I … well … we –’
‘Sorry, Dr Longley,’ I said. ‘We’ve still got a couple to go but I was starving, and I thought we’d be more productive after some caffeine.’ My smile died and my voice got smaller as he looked at me in disgust.
‘Fine,’ he clipped. ‘Where’s the list? We’ll go through the ones you’ve seen so far.’ I looked down at my list and bit my lip. Raising my eyes to his, I saw that he was now focused on my mouth, a strangely blank expression replacing the disgusted one of a moment ago.
‘Don’t you have your own printout?’ I asked. I still had a multicolour glitter pen, and had used it with gusto on my patient list. After years of being a junior doctor I had developed a complex system of different colours to denote urgency and type of job, scribbled next to each patient on the list.
Okay, so even though this was a tad weird, I thought I probably could have justified it. There was, however, no way I could explain the detailed sketch I had done in the margin. I’d managed to do it during one of Ash’s laborious and terrifying explanations to a pre-op patient using his one of his ridiculous diagrams.
No way I could explain that, not without looking like an idiot.
Again.
I suddenly felt like I was going to throw up.
Tom pulled up a chair next to mine and looked at me expectantly, holding out his hand for the list and raising an eyebrow. He could pull off a great eyebrow raise. Irritatingly, this wound me up and turned me on at the same time. I had the peculiar urge to either punch him on the nose or lick his neck. Thankfully I did neither, and just handed him the folded paper. He unfolded it, looked down and blinked.
‘You’ve bedazzled my patient list,’ he said, his lips twitching.
‘It’s an efficient colour-coding system,’ I returned.
‘And the family of pigs next to Mrs Jones’s name?’
‘Um, well … I might have sketched a design for a cake,’ I explained in a small voice. My bespoke cake business was just getting off the ground and this was an order for a christening that weekend.
‘A cake of pigs?’
‘It’s Peppa Pig with George and Mummy and Daddy Pig.’ Oh God, why was I naming all the bloody pigs? I had lost my mind.
‘Right,’ he said, having controlled the urge to smile, clearly done with this increasingly bizarre conversation. ‘Maybe we could get on with some work now, yeah?’
We went through the patients Ash and I had seen, Tom adding jobs to my already full-to-bursting printout, and ignoring my offer to grab him a coffee. The rest of the ward round passed without incident and I was breathing a sigh of relief by the end, keen to get away and get on with the crazy amount of work we had generated.
It was obvious that working with Tom was not going to be very fun. Even without the memory of what happened at uni making me uncomfortable, there was also the fact that I was still so attracted to him that it actually made me feel a little bit sick.
Other than that bizarre urge to lick his neck, I was also itching to put my hands into his thick gorgeous hair. The few times our arms had brushed or our hands had touched whilst sorting the notes and scans on the round had left me feeling hot and shaky. Tom remained formal and aloof, which I thought was a strange attitude to have as a new consultant. It was also obvious that he didn’t like me.
