Chapter 4: Room Two

Roderick's POV

She came back to me at half past midnight, and she shut the door of on-call room 2 behind her before she said a word.

I had been sitting on the edge of the narrow bed for forty minutes, with my reading glasses in my hand, doing nothing.

For four years I had learned the back of her head across an operating table.

I knew how she held a retractor and how she hummed when a repair went well.

I knew she ate the same cheese sandwich every night on call at three, standing up.

I did not know what she looked like with her hair down.

Now she pulled the braid over her shoulder and worked the elastic out.

"She's at six," Ines said. "Strip's fine. The epidural goes in at one if she wants it."

She leaned on the door. "I sat at the desk and read her chart for twenty minutes."

"And?"

"She's twenty-eight, and healthy, and her blood pressure is perfect." Her voice caught.

"She's allergic to penicillin," she said. "In the box for father of the baby she wrote Bram Pollard in blue pen. She drew a little heart after it."

"Ines."

"I'm not going to cry. I want you to take your clothes off."

She stood in the middle of the little room, with light from the hall coming through the slot in the door.

Her hair fell to her shoulder blades in a heavy black sheet.

I stood up.

There are things you can say to a woman in that state, and none of them is a word.

I kissed her instead, slowly, with one hand on her jaw.

She answered with her whole body, and then she pushed me back until my knees hit the mattress and I sat down.

She stripped her top off and let it drop.

She was small and strong, in a plain white cotton bra, with a freckle under her left breast.

"Tell me what you want," I said.

"I want you to do to me what you didn't do in the stairwell," she said.

"What didn't I?"

"You didn't taste me."

My stomach dropped.

I pulled her scrub pants down her legs and tossed them behind me.

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