Georgie said, “You can’t let six-year-olds make career decisions for you. I wanted to be a professional sailor.”
“Did you?” Xan muttered to his wife. “I have a yacht. We should sail somewhere.”
Peyton’s chest flinched under Raji’s cheek.
Cadell said to Andy, “You’d still be a doctor. We need a doctor. Emily could go with us. You could monitor her for rejection. Oh, jeez. We should go to the hospital to check on her.”
Andy shook her phone at him. “Got a text ten minutes ago. She’s fine. Still sleeping.”
Raji snorted. Of course, Andy had gotten a text. She had super-momma powers or something. She cared for all her patients with a deep, maternal bond that ripped her heart out every time she lost one.
You know what? Andy should trash the hepatic transplant fellowship and go be Killer Valentine’s doctor. Raji should tell her that, but she was so sleepy and still drunk.
In the air above her, Georgie said, “Point is that Xan, here, needs an actual medical doctor to tell him he’s ripping his throat to shreds and shouldn’t be sucking on that electro-stimulation machine three times a day.”
“I don’t suck on it,” Xan said. “It goes on the outside of my neck.”
“Whatever. Having a doctor on tour would save us from having to freak out every time someone got sick enough for antibiotics or needed to talk Xan down from doing something stupid to his throat, which is daily.”
“You should hire a vocologist,” Andy said, “not a gastroenterologist.”
At least Andy still had her wits about her. Raji was pretty sure that she didn’t. Damn vodka. Vodka always fucked her up, especially when the vodka came after several red plastic cups of white wine.
“Tryp has ulcers,” Georgie said, pointing with her thumb at the band’s drummer, who was overflowing an armchair and cradling his sleeping, blond wife in his arms.
“I do not,” the guy mumbled, his black hair falling into his eyes.
“You threw up blood,” Georgie told him.
Tryp muttered, “It was a flesh wound.”
“He needs an H. pylori test,” Andy said. “That’s actually right up my alley. I finished my gastro residency before I started this surgical one.”
Georgie lifted her hand that was draped over Xan and pointed right at where Raji and Peyton were lying on the floor. “And Peyton breaks out in shingles every few years.”
“I do not,” Peyton said, his deep voice rumbling in his chest against Raji’s cheek. She giggled a little at it.
“When was the last time?” Georgie asked.
“Four years ago,” Peyton said.
“So you’re overdue,” Georgie said.
“Or maybe they’ve gone away.”
Raji peered up at him, and he hadn’t even opened his eyes to answer. Georgie shouldn’t have known that Peyton broke out in shingles every few years and was overdue for the virus to break out again if Peys had just joined the band a few months ago. Right?
Georgie said to Andy, “We grew up together. His mother was all crunchy and didn’t get him any vaccines, so he got chickenpox.”
Raji squinted at Peyton. Curiouser and curiouser.
Peyton said, “Last time, it broke out on my ass.”
Andy asked Peyton, “Any PHN?”
He crossed his arms over his chest, beside where Raji had lain her cheek, and said, “I don’t know what that is.”
Andy informed him, “Post-herpetic neuralgia. Did it hurt afterward?”
“Like the dickens.”
“We should titer you. The shingles version of the varicella vaccine would be a good option.”
Peyton opened one eye, revealing his teal iris. Wow, he was pretty. “Yeah?”
“Should prevent a reoccurrence,” Andy told him.
Raji didn’t lift her head off his chest, but she mumbled to Peyton, “She’s right. Listen to the woman.”
Peyton closed his eyes. “Xan, hire this woman, or I will.”
“Fuck you,” Xan said, still not opening his eyes. The dawn outside the windows brightened the room. “I’m hiring her. She’s my doctor now.”
That was some weird tension between the two guys, more than your average alpha-male pissing contest. Even though both of them were exhausted, they were arguing over who got to hire the doctor and pay her salary.
“I didn’t say I was going to quit my fellowship,” Andy said sleepily from where she lay in Cadell’s arms.
“Merde,” Xan said.
Raji squirmed on the carpet, turning over to look up at Andy. Maybe it was the vodka talking. Maybe it was Peyton’s little inquiries about her phone number all night long, and she needed to scare him the fuck off. Maybe it was concern for Andy, her too-tender friend.
Raji said, “You’re too soft-hearted to be a transplant surgeon. Don’t get me wrong. You can cut with the best of them, but you need a specialty with a higher survival rate than seventy-five percent to transplant and then seventy-eight at five years. I know you, pindi. We’ve been over this.”
Andy frowned at her. “The survival rate for heart transplants is almost exactly the same. You do fine.”
“I’m a cold-blooded lizard person,” Raji said. “The failures don’t bother me except as a failure and that it brings down my stats. I cut to cure, and sometimes the odds aren’t in your favor.”
“Oh, no, you don’t,” Andy said, settling herself closer to her husband.
This might be the only opportunity that Raji would ever have to talk sense into Andy and free her from her parents’ expectations for a career that she really, really wasn’t suited for.
Raji said, “I don’t cry in the on-call room pretty much every day.”
“I don’t do that,” Andy said, yawning.
Press on. Press harder. “I know you, Andal. Don’t lie to me. I can rip a guy’s chest open, cut out his heart, and sew new pieces back in him just fine. You have to be a little bit of a psychopath to do this job. Or a lot of one.”
Peyton was frowning and watching Raji through slitted eyes.
Time for the pièce de résistance and to drive the dagger home in both of them at once, to kill two heart-soft wusses with one merciful stone. Peyton had been asking for stuff like going back to his hotel with him, and Raji didn’t roll like that. Stone-cold lizard people did not get involved in cross-species relationships with warm, emotional humans.
Raji said, “You aren’t a psycho like me. You should get out, now, before this job rips you to shreds.”
Georgie opened her eyes and said, “So, you can hang around New Jersey and watch a bunch more kids die, or you can come on tour with us, see the world, hang out with royalty and celebrities, boss everybody around, and keep your new husband off of fucking heroin.”
Nice. Raji approved.
Under her cheek, Peyton shifted.
Yes, let him run away from her. Raji was not girlfriend material. She was a warrior who sliced and diced her opponent, cardiac failure, to save people from him.
And she never, ever wanted to indulge in that most fatal of deviant behaviors: marriage.
But Peyton settled down and didn’t leave.
Sleep drifted over Raji’s limbs, pinning her to the floor and Peyton.