“Come,” Monsieur continued, gesturing toward the table. “Let us take a seat.” I followed after him and, as if on cue, all the other Patrons started doing the same. In less than half a minute almost all the seats at the table had been filled, the only vacant ones belonging to the group Alex was talking to. It seemed the young man was interesting enough to make the Patrons distracted.
“Time for the usual speech,” Monsieur confided, pushing his chair back and standing up. With one glass in his hand, he sucked in a deep breath, and—
The sound of glass exploding cut through the air like gunfire, and every head in the room turned to see where the noise had come from. In one of the corners of the room, just before the service door from where waiters had been waltzing in and out, a man had collapsed. Broken glasses lay all around him, an overturned silver tray pinned between the floor and his body.
I was still processing what happened when Alex took charge. Ditching the Patrons he was talking to, he quickly rushed to the unconscious man on the floor. He went down on one knee and, with movements as careful as they were strong, he quickly turned the man over so that he was lying on his back.
Then he looked up and glanced around the room.
He stopped when his eyes met mine.
“Dr. Macdonough!” he called. Surprisingly, the first thought that crossed my mind didn’t have to do with the unconscious man. Instead, I simply noted the way he pronounced my name, each syllable of it sounding just right on his mouth. “A little help?”
When I finally came to my senses, I quickly followed Alex’s lead and joined him by the man’s side. The man was one of the waiters and, despite my initial impression, wasn’t unconscious. Still, his vacant stare didn’t seem like good news. Acting on instinct, I pressed the back of my hand against the man’s forehead and pursed my lips.
“He’s burning up,” I said. “Let’s take him someplace where he can lie down.” We hoisted the man to his feet easily, Alex’s strong frame certainly playing a part in that, and half-dragged, half-led the man out of the lounge.
“There’s a small infirmary there,” Alex offered, leading the three of us through the service corridor and stopping before a door the end of it. Holding the man with just one arm, he fished a set of keys from his pocket and opened the door.
“Christ,” I muttered under my breath, already feeling beads of sweat pooling on my forehead. When we finally laid the man on the small leather couch that lined a wall of the infirmary, I couldn’t help but groan. It seemed that replacing my night sessions at the gym with late-night surgeries had finally started to take its toll on me.
“Do you know where you are?” I finally asked the man. Grabbing a metal chair hidden underneath the desk facing the couch, I sat down. The man’s eyelids fluttered open and he sighed heavily.
“Yes, the club,” he croaked, hesitantly looking from Alex to me. “I…I’m very sorry. I’ve had the flu for a few days now, but I didn’t want to call in sick.”
“C’mon, Anderson,” Alex sighed. “We talked about this. It’s fine if you can’t make it. The place will still be here, even if none of us show up for a week straight. Your health comes first.”
“He’s right,” I added, already back on my feet and rummaging through the drawers on the cabinet to the side. When I finally found what I was looking for, a box of the old but reliable ibuprofen, I pushed two small pills and a glass of water into the man’s hands. “Drink this. It’ll help.”
“Ibuprofen?” Alex asked, finally looking away from the man. His gaze was different from Monsieur’s—more fire than patience in there—but I noticed the same kind of intelligence shone in his eyes. “That’s what we need to save the day, huh? Thank God there’s a doctor in the house. Isn’t there more we can do?”
“Right now? Not really,” I replied, unsure as to how to deal with him. “Not much in those drawers besides ibuprofen and acetaminophen. Which, by the way, is exactly what he needs. That, rest, and hydration. If you’re thinking antibiotics, those won’t do him any good. They—”
“Treat bacterial infections,” he cut me short, finishing my sentence. “And the flu is a virus.”
“Exactly,” I said, barely hiding my surprise. While it wasn’t an obscure thing to know, I really didn’t expect to have someone like Alex to act this impatiently toward me. “Usually I’d just stick to the ibuprofen…but a virulent strain of the flu has been making the rounds.”
“Yes,” the waiter, Anderson, mumbled. “Louis and Pedro…they think they have it too.”
“Not a good sign. This thing has been spreading like wildfire,” I said, shaking my head. “I think that—”
“Just prescribe him some antivirals,” Alex cut me short. Then he turned his back to me and started mopping the sweat off the waiter’s forehead. “ You’ll have to take it easy for a few days, Anderson.”
Pushing a pillow under the man’s head, Alex glanced back at me over his shoulder. He said nothing as he stared me down, almost as if he was expecting me to pull a prescription pad out of my pocket right then and there.
“You’re right. An antiviral is the way to go. But I wouldn’t stop at giving your man a couple of days off,” I finally said “If he’s right and more people are showing symptoms…you might have a problem in your hands. I’ve been hearing a lot about a particularly vicious strand of the flu, and some of my colleagues working in the ER have their hands full with it. If some of the staff shows symptoms, you have to send them home. If you don’t, you risk everyone coming down with the flu.”
“You think?” he said, letting out a frustrated sigh. Even though Monsieur would never let any cracks show, Alex didn’t seem to be above showing a little humanity…and all the frustration that came with it. “Right,” he continued in a low tone, composing himself in a fraction of a second. Looking up at me, he cleared his throat and forced a smile onto his lips. “Well, thank you for the help, Dr. Macdonough. I won’t take any more of your time.” Even though his tone was polite, it was also sharp and dismissive.
“Not a problem,” I finally said, instinctively reaching for his hand. I took it in mine, enjoying the way his fingers brushed against the skin on my palm, and shook it. “It was good seeing you, Alex,” I couldn’t resist to add.
It had been months since the last time I had seen him, and that had been just a casual sighting. Truth be told, Alex Hughes usually kept to himself, seemingly preferring the shadows than to mingle with the Patrons. This was, in fact, the first time I had really talked to him.
“And it was good to see you, Doctor,” he offered as a reply, making a concerted effort to return to his more polite self. I didn’t like it. I preferred for him to be a real person than just some faceless club representative.
“Please,” I smiled. “It’s Neil.”
“Neil, sure,” he repeated and, once more, I couldn’t help but enjoy the way my name rolled off his tongue. More than that, his uninterested tone hit me hard. It left me vaguely uncomfortable—I wasn’t used to having someone treat me like Alex had—but at the same time it piqued my interest. Just like I couldn’t stop myself from obsessing over impossible medical enigmas, I could already feel myself being drawn by the Alex Hughes equation. His lack of interest was like a problem I had to solve, a wrong I had to fix. After having people fawn over my success for so long, Alex was like a breath of fresh hair.