Page 11 of A Million Times, Yes

An internal desire that spoke to me loud and clear.

“Sweat it out? But I was the one who asked you the question. Not the other way around. It’s more likeI’vehad to sweat it out.”

“Have you?” As though she realized how much of her chest I could see, she covered it with her arms.

It was a damn shame too.

“Nah.” I smiled. “Things are all good over here.”

She laughed. “God, you’re full of yourself.” She took her time glancing at her feet, her breathing still coming in fast and hard. “How do you do that?” She finally looked up at me. The smile was gone, but there was a redness in her cheeks and her eyes were different. There was emotion behind them, when seconds ago they’d been filled with longing.

“Do what?”

“Make the shittiest thoughts in my head completely disappear so I’m only focused on you. The run here didn’t have the power to do that. Yet you show up, and those thoughts are gone.”

I searched her eyes, and when I didn’t get what I was looking for, I said, “What happened, Maya?”

She glanced off into the distance. “I’m sure you don’t want to hear about it—and I didn’t bring it up to drown you in my life. I just can’t get over the power you have. Power you don’t even realize you have. Or maybe you do.” Her voice got softer with each word.

“What if I do want to hear about it?” When she didn’t say anything, I pointed toward the sidewalk, catching her attention, and added, “Come on. We’ll get in a mile, and you can get it off your chest.”

Even though she seemed surprised by my response, she started jogging, staying right by my side. It took about a hundred yards before she said, “I lost a patient yesterday. I’d been working on her for a few weeks. She came in with an amputation and was doing so well. I’ll spare you the details of wound care—I’ll just say I stayed on top of what she needed.” She became quiet. “The infection came out of nowhere and spread.”

“When you say ‘lost,’ what does that mean?”

“She went into sepsis. At her age and with her underlying conditions, there was nothing that could be done except keep her comfortable. She passed within a few hours.”

We turned at the upcoming street. “It sounds like you did everything you could to help her.”

“It wasn’t enough.”

I watched her while I ran. “Your effort counts for something.”

“When you have to call a patient’s family to deliver that kind of news, your effort counts for nothing.”

“Fuck,” I groaned. “That is shitty.”

“I came home after work and claimed the bathroom for the night and guzzled beers in the bathtub.”

“What do you mean you ‘claimed the bathroom’? Isn’t it yours?”

She smiled. “I share it with three other people.”

“That’s quite an entourage.”

She laughed. “More like roommates. Without them, I’d never be able to afford to live there. The rent in this city is obscene. The only way I’m ever going to have my own bathroom is if I move to the suburbs, and the commute would be as painful as what I pay here in rent.”

I was keeping a mental tab of things I wasn’t going to mention during this run, starting with my Porsche collection and the fact thatI never took the bus or the T, followed by the six bathrooms I had in my penthouse condo.

“How’d that bath feel?” I asked.

“With an ice-cold Sam Adams, it was heavenly.”

“What do you do while you’re in there?”

We stopped at a crosswalk, and she jogged in place. “I relax.”

“So you just lay in the water and do nothing aside from sip beer?”