A shrug. “It’s a bit . . .” He trailed off.
“Stuffy?” she filled in.
“If stuffy means filled with arrogant assholes, then yes.”
She snorted. Their department was pretty good, but Jet’s point wasn’t inaccurate. There were a lot of egos on the physician side of the ED. “So you decided to slum it with the rest of the staff?”
“I prefer to quote-unquote”—he did air quotes here and instead of being ridiculous or douchy, they made her smile—“slum it with the people doing the real work.”
Trix smiled. “Laying it on thick, Hansen.”
He lifted a brow, reaching in front of her to hold open the door to the break room. “That’s Dr. Hansen to you,” he said, tapping his chest self-importantly.
Pausing in the doorway, she stared at him for a long moment.
But then he made a goofy face and danced the slashes of his dark brown brows across his forehead. Between the eyebrow waggling, the banter, and the silly expression, she was reminded of exactly how it used to be between them. She broke out into laughter and he followed suit, still holding the door open. His body was close to hers, close enough his scent inundated her nose, made her thighs clench. Abruptly, her laughter cut off, the heat of him seeping through the thin layers of her scrubs, making her nipples bead against the soft fabric of her bra.
Jet went quiet, eyes flicking down to her chest, and she knew he saw her nipples standing out in sharp relief by the way every muscle in his body went taut, his hands clenching into fists at his sides.
“Trix,” he murmured, voice raspy and scraping its way along her skin.
Not in a bad way.
Rather, it set every one of her nerves on high alert, raised goose bumps on her arms, the hairs on the back of her neck.
And his expression?
That was pure heat, threatening to incinerate her from the inside out.
“Baby,” he murmured.
She leaned in, close enough that her nipples brushed his chest. He smelled so good and she knew he would feel good against her, those slightly roughened hands brushing up and down her arms, mouth dragging across her jaw until his lips found hers with a firm, but confident pressure, the wet heat of his tongue sliding against hers.
Jet bent slightly and she felt the hot, damp air of his breath against her ear. “Trix,” he whispered and fuck how she wanted to turn her head, to allow his mouth to meet hers, to kiss and hold and touch him like she used to.
For him to wind his fingers into her hair, tilt her head, taste her deeply.
For the fingers to slide down and slip beneath the hem of her shirt, to drift across the skin of her stomach, to flutter up to her breasts—
A monitor alarmed and they jumped apart.
“Help!” someone yelled.
A millisecond later, a Code Blue—a patient’s heart stopping—was called.
Trix hit her head against the door frame, hard enough to see stars, but that didn’t stop her from lurching into the break room and throwing her stuff into her locker. Jet was right behind her, dropping his stuff before they both sprinted out of the room. A man was standing in the hallway, holding a woman who was covered in blood in his arms.
He wavered as Trix closed the distance between them, and she lunged the final few feet and stuck her shoulder beneath the man’s, preventing them from crashing to the ground. A second later, Jet was there, grabbing the woman from the man’s arms and barking out orders.
Half the department was in with the coding patient, and the rest sprinted out into the hall.
Two gurneys appeared and they hefted the patients onto them, calling out stats and injuries they saw as they rolled them into rooms. She and Jet ended up separated. He stayed with the woman while she got to work on the man with Dr. Harding. Her patient had a large laceration on his scalp, and what appeared to be a knife wound in his abdomen. He passed out in the middle of answering a question about what had happened but had at least told them his name was Ben and he was thirty-two. They kept working, addressing the injuries they could see, packing wounds, applying pressure, while she started an IV and began pushing fluids, stabilizing him enough to get him down to CT.
Trix knew the same was going on next door, and she also knew that somewhere in another room, her coworkers were also addressing the code that had been called, trying to restart the patient’s heart while also doing their best to manage the pressing needs of their other patients.
It didn’t matter that it was a shift change, that people might technically be off the clock. They banded together, worked efficiently and quickly to treat the patients in front of them.
Later, it would be time to breathe, to change their bloodied scrubs for clean, to splash some water on their faces, to suck in some air, shore up their spines, and go home or continue on with their shift.
In her room, they got the bleeding under control and moved Ben off to a CT.
She took the time to peel off her gloves and poke her head in next door. Jet’s patient was awake now, but pale, answering questions as the team worked on her.
Trix moved to the next desk, made sure everything was under control.
Mostly everything was fine, but they were still trying to resuscitate the patient who’d coded, and it was nearing the time where they were going to have to call it.
Damn.
She stifled a sigh, tucked down the sadness. This was the way of life in the ED, in health care. Patients came, the staff did their utmost to help them, and even after they did everything they could . . . sometimes the patient didn’t make it.
Trix spent a few minutes clocking in then walking down to the break room and making sure her and Jet’s belongings had actually made it into their lockers with locks that were actually locked. Then realized her cell was still in her pocket, and so she disinfected it then stowed that away.
By the time she left the break room and made it back to the nurse’s station, Susan was emerging from a patient room. Based on the expression on her face, Trix assumed it was where they’d had the code.
Susan tossed her gloves in the bin and came over.
“You okay?” Trix asked.
Susan nodded. “Yeah. Just sucks. He’d just been discharged yesterday.”
“Oh? From where?”
“Here. He’d had a heart attack last week, a couple of stints were put in, but the prognosis was good.”
Trix’s breath caught.
“Was his name Tom?”
Susan’s eyes met hers, and she nodded. “Yeah. Did you work on him last week?”
Trix nodded.
“Sucks.”
Another nod. “Yeah, it does.”
They stood together in silence for a few moments, knowing exactly what the other person was feeling—sadness because someone was gone, failure because there were always the “what if’s,” the “should have’s,” the “could have’s,” but also disappointment and fury and a teeth-clenching mix of all of those.
Because sometimes medicine didn’t win.
Sometimes people died.
But as sad as that was, as heartbreaking, they still had a job to do.
Later, they could cry.
Trix sucked in a breath and released it slowly. “What else do we have?”
Susan was quiet for a beat longer then visibly shook herself and began rattling off the remainder of her patients and what needed to happen on Trix’s shift. They discussed everything, got sorted, and then Trix made the rounds while Susan went home.