Page 28 of The One Day You Were My Husband
“I see.” He thought about this. “But surely nobody’s going to fire you on your own birthday.”
“You’d be surprised. Medicine’s bad, but surgery’s something else. Iwas thrown out of a consultant’s operating theater last month because I was wearing perfume.”
“Was it a bad perfume?”
“I don’t know. It was the anesthetist’s medical student wearing it, not me.”
“That’s appalling!”
“That’s surgery. I have a woman there who’s kind of like my mentor, though, and she went at him like a wolf later on. He actually tracked me down and apologized.”
Johan handed me a piece of cake. “I’m glad women like that exist in your line of work.”
“There’s not many of them.”
“You’ll be like that one day. When you’re a consultant surgeon. I’ve seen you in action. There was fire in there, Carrie Cole.”
“Hmm. I hope that’s out for the foreseeable.”
“I don’t,” he said. “That fire really worked for me.”
The cake was put to one side.
—
I showered again at around six in the evening. When I came back into his kitchen he was leaning against the worktop, writing a message to someone on his phone. I felt something new, something old, fill my body as I watched him.
It was a sense of belonging, I realized after a moment. A sense of the correct order of things, and it was not something I had known in a long time.
I didn’t think I could stand it if this was a one-off, if he disappeared again.
“You’re looking intense,” Johan said, looking up. “What’s happening in there?”
“Intensity,” I admitted, and he just laughed, put his phone down. He was naked.
“About this?”
“Yes. I like you a lot,” I said simply.
“You know I feel the same.”
I couldn’t help smiling. “Well, yes. And that’s caused a lot of thinking. For me, at least.”
“For me, too,” he said quietly. “But I also think this is what happens. People meet. They like each other. And it works out.”
I nodded, hoping he was right.
“I’m going to get those two bottles of Pucko out of the fridge again,” Johan said. “It’s time. And then some beers. Do you like beer? I have other drinks too.”
“I love beer. But I’m very happy with Pucko for now.”
We drank the cold Pucko, which really was good, and then opened beers. We sat on his sofa and listened to a piano duet between a child and her father through the thin walls of Johan’s flat. He made me walk him through an appendicectomy, then asked how I dealt with the stress of opening up a human body, especially in emergency conditions.
“It’s one of the only times I feel entirely calm, actually,” I said after a pause. “I wish I could give you a dramatic,Grey’s Anatomykind of an answer. But it really is my happy place.”
“That’s unimaginable.”
“I get that. But I find it hard to imagine how anyone could be ten meters underwater with a tank on their back and not have a panic attack on the seafloor.”
