Ugh. You could add “humiliation” to “embarrassment” with that one.
She didn’t think about it the rest of the day, or not much. The whole thing was over, and there was no point. She took Webster back home, shut him into the house, and went to breakfast—not at Dizengoff, because she didn’t need to run into them again, but at a café off Ponsonby Road called Dear Jervois. She considered the acai bowl, and ordered a latte and Eggs Benedict with bacon instead. When you were a surgeon, you ate when you got the chance, and when you were her, you ate what you wanted.
She could give up sleep. She could give up leisure. She wasn’t going to give up hollandaise sauce.
When her meal came, she cut into a yolk and released a river of bright orange, got meaty bacon and sourdough bread on her fork, swirled all of it in the creamiest possible homemade hollandaise, tasted the lemon bite of it, and thought, Forget you, Mr. Intense. I’m not here for you. I don’t need anybody in my life who tells me I need to get “in better nick.” Again.
Because, yes, Kristoff had said things like that from time to time. For instance, during a restaurant dinner with her father six months ago, when Elizabeth had ordered steak with mushrooms and creamed spinach, and her father had said, “Setting yourself up for trouble with that diet, don’t you think?”
She’d answered, as evenly as she could manage, “It’s not a diet. It’s my entrée.”
“Birdie,” he’d said, “I can see you, you know.” Her father was still as lean as ever, his face as hawklike, his thick, silver hair swept back from his high forehead, his blue eyes as penetrating. He’d never exactly told her she was too fat, but what would you call this?
“Genetics,” he said, “or possibly not,” because of course that wasn’t the end of it. “It’s fascinating how differently individuals within the same family can turn out, and the reasons why. Patients will blame their genes every time, but you can’t deny the obesity trend in this country and all the trouble it causes. You won’t know this, Kristoff, but Elizabeth’s mother was almost too slim. Even after she gave birth, she regained her figure almost immediately. Her own parents, though, were anything but, and unfortunately, Elizabeth inherited their solid build, not to mention my large frame. I did my best to redirect her dietary preferences as a child, but I never had much success. I can see you haven’t, either.”
“True,” Elizabeth said. “Fortunately, my dietary preferences haven’t actually led to obesity yet.” And ate a bite of filet mignon and sauteed mushroom. Delicious.
Seriously? Her first dinner with her father this year, and he was talking about her solid build?
Kristoff said, “They haven’t. You look great, Elizabeth, but if you ever do want a more intensive conditioning program, I’d be happy to set it up for you. It could help with your energy levels.”
“I have plenty of energy,” she said. “I always have.” Just not after work, but she got on the elliptical machine after every shift for thirty minutes, rain or shine. After which she ate something quick, usually something she’d had delivered, took a shower, and fell into bed. But she did her thirty minutes first.
Of course she was tired when she got off work. She literally held people’s lives in her hands all day long, and her day was long.
“No,” he said. “You have intensity. It’s not the same thing.”
Now, she thought, Tell me I don’t have energy when you stand for twelve hours straight while doing incredibly complex and delicate surgery. Also, I weigh the same as I always have, so if you thought I needed a conditioning program, enough to mention it in front of my father in that oh-so-tactful encouraging-the-unfit-old-ladies way, why did you ask me out in the first place? And ate another bite of bacon and egg and hollandaise. She was in New Zealand now, and things were different. She was different. Well, not yet, but she was going to be different.
Possibly. How did you get to be different when you’d always been the same?
And, yes, the hot guy she’d met today had told her she needed to get “in better nick,” so—nothing was all that different so far, was it? What was it with men and their need to pronounce judgment on your body, anyway? What gave them the right?
At least she hadn’t agreed to have coffee with the two of them. She’d had enough pride for that. She didn’t need another supremely fit man in her life, even for an hour, telling her that she was eating the wrong things and not exercising enough. She certainly didn’t need to let him see her naked and tell her that, and she had a feeling that had been the idea.
So, yes, he’d had thick, rumpled hair, a tough, unshaven jaw with a scattering of white amidst the dark stubble, lines carved into his forehead and around his deep-set brown eyes, more than a few scars, including one across his cheekbone, and the alertness of some kind of big cat. So what, though? Lots of men were attractive.
She’d have said he reminded her of a lion, except that male lions were lazy and he definitely wasn’t. And, yes, he was at least six glorious inches taller than her and had a face that tended to look crumpled and even more nose than she did, and all of it looked good on him. Also yes, he was hard from his face all the way on down, he stood and moved like toughness personified, and he generally looked like he belonged on a Greek battlefield.
He wasn’t a Greek god. He was a Greek warrior, one who had been in too many battles. So much more exciting. But she was noticing it in an aesthetic way and moving on, because she didn’t do “exciting.” Also, he was supremely unlikely to have more than a passing relationship with the medical profession, nobody other than people in medicine got what she did or the demands it made, and whatever Jordan said, reckless sex wasn’t in her DNA, even if she’d wanted it with somebody who’d already said she wasn’t in good nick.
And she didn’t know how to flirt.
And she didn’t have time.
As soon as she walked into the hospital the next morning, she felt better. More settled. She might get thrown from time to time by life outside of medicine, but here? Here, she was—well, not God, but the closest thing there was. She could solve the unsolvable and mend the broken and look inside the brain, and there was no satisfaction in the world like that.
When she was being given a tour, though, after being handed the stack of paperwork she’d expected, she got her first surprise of the day. Which was having the chief of surgery say, “You’ll be rostered for forty hours a week, but you’ll probably end up doing fifty or even sixty, fair warning. No more than seven days in a row, though, and that’s not likely to happen often, and at least four days off every fortnight. The schedulers do their best to arrange those days around the weekend and give you a real break.”
“Uh …” she said, “sixty hours?”
He glanced at her in surprise. “Yeh, could be sixty. Is that a surprise? I thought the States worked their doctors hard. The residents will be doing the hard yards, though they have the same restrictions. Things changed some years back, after they went on strike for better conditions. To be fair, a tired surgeon isn’t necessarily the best surgeon.”
“No,” she said, “I mean—that’s it? Sixty max?”