Broken Heart Syndrome, page 15
‘She’s not shy,’ Tom cut her off and Lou started shaking her head, ‘She’s not Lou. I see her with you guys, with Ash, even with the goddamn porters. She’s not loud but she bloody well isn’t shy. She’s friendly, affectionate, she laughs and smiles all the time, except when she’s with me.’
‘For God’s sake why are you both so unbelievably thick,’ Lou clipped. ‘She is shy, but she’s managed to overcome it most of the time for the people she likes.’ Tom’s jaw clenched in anger and Lou caught it, laying her hand on his arm, her eyes pleading with him to understand.
‘The problem with you is that she likes you too much. She’s never been able to relax around guys she’s attracted to and with you… well I think that with you she finds it especially difficult.’ Tom’s eyes flashed at this and Lou continued, ‘And I’m sorry Tom, but you haven’t helped the situation by being an arrogant, demanding bellend for the last three months.’
He hung his head and his gut clenched. Christ, he’d really buggered this up.
‘I had no idea she was shy or about any of this Lou,’ he muttered to his shoes, shame at his behaviour washing over him. ‘I just thought she was cold and aloof, and that she didn’t even remember me from Uni.’
Lou snorted and he looked back into her disbelieving face. ‘Not remember you?’ Bizarrely she was now smiling. ‘Believe me Weasel - she remembers you.’
‘What’s that suppose to mean?’ He narrowed his eyes at her and she giggled.
‘I think I’ll let Frankie tell you that one as well.’
‘Goddamn it Lou,’ Tom clipped, losing patience. ‘How can I proceed blind?’
‘Look Weasel, all I can tell you is to proceed. Don’t give up on her.’ He rolled his eyes and she stepped closer to him again, her expression suddenly serious.
‘She’s worth it you know,’ she said softly.
‘I know that Lou. I’ve got eyes.’
‘No I mean she’s worth it, really worth it. Worth any effort. You break through her shields and you’ll see.’
Tom softened his tone, ‘I know Lou, I promise.’
‘Good, cause I’ll rip your dingaling off and shove it where the sun don’t shine if you break her heart.’
Well, that image would stay with him for a while. He smiled.
‘You’re a good friend.’
‘I know, so is she.’
They both looked round as the door to the office opened and Dylan stepped through followed by Rich. Dylan looked between Tom and Lou who were standing close and narrowed his eyes, ‘What’s going on out here?’
‘Just catching up on old times Dylan. Seems like you and me need to go over some old times as well,’ Tom said, and watched as Dylan flinched slightly, his face paling.
There it was.
An admission of guilt as far as Tom was concerned.
Yup, he needed to talk to Dylan as a priority.
And he needed to find out what Frankie was hiding.
But most of all he needed to spend time with her, try to get through to her, and then maybe finally, finally he could be the recipient of her warm smiles and her quiet laughter. Maybe he could finally have his hands in her thick, shiny hair, and his mouth on hers.
Even with his gut still feeling tight at all he had heard from Lou, he still smiled as he walked away from them down the corridor. He smiled because he remembered how Frankie had stopped breathing when he was close, and he smiled because Lou had practically ordered him to proceed.
It was time to stop pissing about and proceed.
Chapter 18
carefully balanced ecosystem
Today had been one of the rare good days of the last few months. This was because I didn’t have to spend it doing boring ward grunt work like I had been doing for the last three months. As part of an apology from the department for the confusion with Rosie, I’d been given the odd extra study day to spend with the palliative care team, which would help make my transition in January smoother. It also helped that I could see the light at the end of the tunnel.
My cake business was going well - too well. I needed to start thinking about training someone to help. At the moment I had to turn down orders. Part of this was because I worked full time, but it was also about manpower (or more likely woman power, I couldn’t see a man being interested in decorating cakes although there were exceptions to this rule – Jean Paul the gay patisserie chef I studied with last year being one of them).
The advantage of the business getting busy was that I didn’t have much free time. This made the avoiding Tom plan a lot easier to put into action. At work it was tricky. I saw him in meetings and in the conference room, but I could usually slip out quickly to avoid him seeing as I was always positioned near the back, and he was invariably stuck sitting with the other consultants at the front.
Unfortunately, I’d bonded with Ash whilst I worked with him and so couldn’t ignore him, and he was often with Tom. So Tom had opportunities to talk to me and he took them. He wanted to know when I’d be free, asked me out to this and that, but I always demurred and got the heck out of there. Luckily my excuses weren’t that difficult to come up with because they were true; I was busy.
Still I knew he could see through them, and I knew this by the way his eyes would flash and his jaw would clench when I gave them. I didn’t know why he was persisting, or what had sparked his interest in the first place, but I was guessing that not a lot of women said no to Thomas G Longley and maybe he saw me now as some sort of challenge. I didn’t want to give him the chance to best that challenge and find out that I definitely wasn’t worth the effort in the first place. So I was avoiding him, and giving him excuses, and so far it was working.
Lou had made it her mission to try and convince me to go out with him. Our conversations about it went round in circles, and were pointless seeing as I was as stubborn as she was. I was learning to shut these down early and put up with her unhappy expressions.
Dylan had also been bugging me since the ‘night of scary drunken Frankie’. He seemed like he had something to tell me and would start trying to say it, only to stop midsentence, which was driving me up the wall. He also kept reminding me of times gone by in a weird way, as if he was trying to make me remember how good of a friend he’d been over the years.
He reminisced about how he had covered for me in dissection when it was the day we opened the pelvis up and had to wash the legs out in the sink (I’d vomited into my mouth, managed to expel the rest in the toilets, and Dylan had made sure our leg was cleaned out and prepped).
What he had conveniently forgotten was that I was already feeling queasy that day, but the straw that broke the camel’s back was when he had reached into the cadaver’s chest cavity, and eaten a piece of flesh. The flesh was actually some dodgy beef that he had secreted up his sleeve earlier at lunch, and which looked surprisingly like formaldehyde soaked muscle tissue (such was the standard of our canteen). I can still taste bile in my mouth when I remember watching him slip that meat into his mouth, thinking it was preserved dead human flesh.
So it was nice to have a break from them all and spend the morning in the hospice. You might think that hospices are depressing and that palliative care is a grim choice of specialty, but in my opinion they are the exact opposite. Hospices are in general friendly and have great, warm atmospheres. The staff there has usually chosen to be there because they are passionate about end of life care, as the career choice is not one you make lightly.
It is not a dark dank place with the grim reaper hovering over every bed, and rows of people breathing their last. It’s generally bright and cheery, a lot nicer than the hospital. And the patients aren’t all on the edge of death. Most just need some help with pain control or any other troublesome symptoms. The whole aim is to make people feel better, to improve their quality of life. Often treatments in other areas of medicine aren’t geared towards making people feel better at all, sometimes they even make them feel worse.
The consultant I was working with looked and acted like Doc from ‘Back to the Future’, so much so that the staff and patients actually called him that. He was scarily enthusiastic and was the type of person to use his whole body to express himself. I thought he was the cat’s pyjamas. I especially thought this after he gave one of the patients with end stage prostate cancer some dexamphetamine (essentially speed) to give him some extra energy to attend his daughter’s wedding. The joy on the man’s face when Doc suggested the plan gave me such a buzz that I didn’t think anything could bring me down that day.
Turned out I was wrong.
After the morning in the hospice we went over to the main hospital to review palliative patients on the ward, which meant I got to see Bill again. Doc had been impressed with my management plan and Bill had been pleased to see me. I didn’t think the day could get any better.
As we left the room we ran into Tom, Ash and Rosie on their ward round and on their way to see Bill. Tom smiled when he saw me. Tom always smiled when he saw me. Rosie and Ash were also looking pretty cheerful.
In the last week Tom had not in any way hidden his pursuit of me, and it was obvious that they both thought the situation hilarious. Rosie thought I was outright crazy, and had even gently told me that nobody would judge me if I was a lesbian in this day and age, and I should just come right out and tell everybody.
I had managed to convince her that I was not, in fact, a lesbian, but refused to talk about why I was avoiding Tom. Firstly, she didn’t know my background. She didn’t know why the likes of me was not for the likes of him. Secondly, in my experience people who cared about you tended to believe that you were more attractive and interesting than you actually were, and would try to convince you of it. Why people were driven to do this I would never know. It seemed to me that if you aimed higher than you should it only led to heartbreak. Although Chris had been a complete tool, he had at least been an attractive one, and I should have know that no good would come from being with him. I would not make the same mistake twice.
‘Hey Doc,’ Tom greeted, still grinning like a mad man. ‘Thanks for reviewing Bill for us.’
‘Don’t thank me son, Frankie here had done all the work,’ he boomed (he didn’t really seem to have any other volume). ‘She’s a little gem isn’t she?’
He slapped me on the back with a little too much force, putting me off balance and causing me to go forward on one foot. Tom, who was close already (as was his current wont and form of torture), shot out his hand to steady me before I fell flat on my face.
‘Yeah Doc, she’s one of the best juniors we’ve had in the department,’ he lied smoothly and I glared up at him. Unfortunately my retinal laser beams did not incinerate him on the spot. If anything his grin grew wider, his hand kept a firm grip on my elbow. ‘You mind if I borrow her a minute Doc? I just need her to sign some paperwork; it won’t take long. Could she catch you up?’
Doc looked at Tom’s hand on my elbow, and then between Tom and I, and started smiling like a lunatic. ‘Yes, yes of course. Just trot on up to Brecon ward when you’re done Frankie.’ As they turned and bustled down the corridor I wrenched my arm out of his grip. Rosie was looking at me with wide disbelieving eyes and Ash was smiling his standard smug smile. Tom gestured for me to precede him and I flashed Ash a killing glare as I reluctantly shuffled towards Tom’s office.
Once inside his office I looked around in search of any paperwork. This would have been an impossible task considering the state of his office anyway, but I thought it was worth a go in the interests of moving things along. I turned back to Tom and raised my eyebrows. He was leaning against the door grinning, looking like he had all the time in the world to wind me up.
‘So?’ I asked, seeking patience.
‘So,’ he said, not moving from the door.
I sighed, ‘So, was it one of my DOPS?’ (DOPS stands for direct observed procedures sign off).
His grin faltered and confusion flashed across his beautiful face, ‘What?’
‘The paperwork,’ I said tightly, and with what I considered to be extreme patience. His expression cleared and his continued grinning.
‘Right, well I …’ he looked around the office for a moment frowning, then snatched up a piece of paper, thrusting it into my hands triumphantly.
‘There.’
I looked down at the crumpled paper and saw that it was one of my old lists with an elaborate sketch of a tree house cake I had done for a christening when I was working for him.
‘I thought you might need it for something,’ he was back to grinning again, totally unrepentant about wasting my time. I rolled my eyes and clenched my teeth.
‘You’re ridiculous.’
‘Go out with me.’
‘No.’ He moved towards me and I took a small step back, but I came up against his desk.
‘Why not?’ he asked, his eyes scanning my face.
‘Because I don’t want to,’ I spat out, in full panic mode now that he was close. I itched to touch his hair again. I literally had to force my arms to stay straight down at my sides, my hands balled into tights fists. ‘Why don’t you just …just…jog on!’ He was pressing his lips together, giving the impression that he was attempting to contain his amusement.
‘Jog on?’ he asked.
‘Yes. Just bloody jog on.’
‘Jog on?’ he said, his voice shaking slightly with silent laughter. ‘I’m guessing that’s about as strong as it gets with you.’ I narrowed my eyes at him.
‘What’s that suppose to mean?’
He ignored my question, ‘Go out with me, just one night.’
‘Ugh! You’re impossible,’ I threw up my hands.
‘I know you’re into me,’ he declared with supreme arrogance. I sucked in a horrified breath and stared at him.
‘I am not into you,’ I shook my head fervently. ‘I am not.’ Shame washed over me. When had I given that away? When had he noticed my obsession? Panicking now, I pushed against his hard warm chest. Embarrassingly, he didn’t even sway despite my grunt of effort. Thankfully the loud piercing sound of my bleep cut through the charged atmosphere and I sighed in relief. Glancing up at the clock on the wall I saw it was past five and my evening on call had started. I looked around and all I could see were piles of papers.
‘Where’s your phone?’ I asked him. Tom was looking at my bleep and I had the distinct impression that he wanted to smash it to pieces. He scratched his head and looked around the desk. Giving me a sheepish grin, he reached into his pocket and got out his mobile.
‘This is usually quicker,’ he explained as his desk started ringing. After removing a mountain of paperwork underneath a dirty plate, with what looked suspiciously like the remnants of my shortbread spread over it, I finally managed to extract the landline. I punched in the extension and raised my eyebrows at Tom whilst I waited for them to pick up.
He shrugged. ‘It’s like a carefully balanced ecosystem,’ he explained. ‘A kind of natural selection, only the most important letters survive.’ It was on the tip of my tongue to offer to sort the whole office out. It was actually causing me physical pain, but I held myself back.
‘Cioa chica,’ Lizzy’s voice came through the extension.
‘Cioa, what have you got?’
‘Really sorry and I promise to give you all my red fruit pastilles.’
‘I like green,’ I said flatly, knowing what was coming.
‘Who on earth prefers the green ones?’
‘Just tell me Lizzy.’
‘Scary Glenda.’
Chapter 19
Only a matter of time
As I walked up to the door of the flat I felt strangely numb. I couldn’t really even remember cycling home, but I knew I must have done because I was wearing my lycra and reflective gear, and my backpack was slung over one shoulder.
I was tired. I was so tired I could actually feel the fatigue seeping into my bones. All I wanted to do was lie on the sofa, watch crap telly, and forget that this day had ever happened. It had started so brilliantly and deteriorated so rapidly that my head was spinning.
As I was rummaging for my keys I could here male voices from inside. I couldn’t tell what was being said, but I could tell that they were angry. Great. Absolutely the last thing I needed. When I finally managed to locate my keys and open the door I could hear the voices more clearly.
‘Look, I’ve said I’m sorry,’ Dylan was saying urgently. ‘I’ll do whatever I can to help now. Just please, please don’t tell her.’
‘Why shouldn’t I?’ My heart sank as I recognized Tom’s impatient voice coming from the kitchen.
‘She’s important to me Tom…please.’ Dylan’s voice was breaking slightly with emotion and I became alarmed. Dylan was not an emotional guy.
I heard Tom sigh heavily. ‘I thought you were a mate,’ he said in a softer tone.
‘I was, I am. I was just blind to everything else but…’ Dylan stopped abruptly as I slammed to door closed.
I wanted to ask what they were talking about, but to be honest I didn’t have the energy to go through another of Dylan’s romantic dramas into which he had evidently somehow dragged Tom.
As I came round the corner all eyes were turned to me. Dylan and Tom were facing each other on stools by the kitchen counter, a beer in front of each of them. Bizarrely Lou was standing next to Dylan with her hand on his shoulder. She looked almost protective of him, like she was lending her support for the confrontation.
I didn’t want to know what was going on.
I was numb.
Ignoring all of them I made my way to the sofa, dumped my bag, and fell heavily onto it.
‘Frankie?’ Lou called to me and I could hear her approaching, but I remained staring up at the ceiling. I felt my mind shutting down and I welcomed the blankness. All I could hear was a vague roaring in my eyes. ‘You okay sweets?’ I felt the sofa depress next to me. A warm hand took mine and gave it a squeeze. ‘Jesus you’re freezing and soaking wet. Why didn’t you wear your waterproof?’ Fingers were pushing the hair back from my face and I heard a sharply indrawn breath. ‘Shit, Frankie you’re bleeding! What –?’
