Page 4 of Careless Whisper (Modern Vintage Romances #11)

I shrugged. “He’s like any other attending.”

“No, Reggie, he was…fine with me. It was you he was?—”

“Hey, look, I need to get these to Cindy.” I waved the labs I had in my hand.

Was Elias an ass to me? Yes .

Was he like some asshole attendings? Yes .

Was his assholery directed only toward me? Also, yes .

But I didn’t do the work for him; I did it for the patients.

Even as much as I could pretend, it still stung. How pathetic was I that I wanted him to pat my head and say, ‘ Good nurse ’?

I dropped the labs off with Cindy, who studied me carefully. “You handled that well.”

“Handled what?” I asked nonchalantly.

Cindy knew what was happening in her ward with her nurses anywhere in the hospital—and in great detail.

She grinned. “He going out of his way to make your life hell?”

“No. But I’m sure if we give him time, he’ll get there,” I joked, not knowing that two weeks later, I’d be living that reality.

I was assisting with a pre-op central line placement. We were mid-procedure in the sterile procedure room, with more residents observing than necessary—honestly, too many.

The patient, a young woman scheduled for a valve replacement, was groggy but conscious. Her chest had already been prepped, and I’d just finished placing the sterile drape.

I reached to adjust her oxygen tubing, and in the process, a corner of the sterile field tugged, just a tiny movement, barely an inch.

I noticed it and followed protocol.

Repositioned. Re-gowned. Re-gloved. Re-prepped.

Clean recovery. No compromise.

But Elias decided to turn a routine misstep into a case study of how little he was willing to tolerate from me.

“ Stop .” His voice cracked like a whip.

Everyone froze.

Elias stood across the room, arms crossed, surgical mask hanging loose around his neck.

“You broke the field, Reggie,” he admonished, loud enough for everyone to hear.

“I corrected it,” I replied, calm. “It didn’t touch anything critical. The drape shifted. I?—”

“You should have started over entirely,” he snapped. “What part of sterile technique is unclear to you?”

I felt heat rise to my face. “I did start over. I re-prepped, re-gloved?—”

“You took too long to notice. And you let the field stay exposed. That is unacceptable in this department. Maybe this kind of substandard behavior was fine before, but not anymore.”

I swallowed hard. “With respect, Dr. Graham?—”

“There’s a reason I decide who scrubs in and who doesn’t. If you’re careless with setup, I don’t trust you in the OR.” The resident to my left shifted uncomfortably. The patient blinked up at us, confused. “You will not be scrubbing up for me again . Now get out of my OR.”

“Yes, Dr. Graham.” I stripped off my gloves as I left the room with my head high, my stomach churning.

Back in the locker room, I changed in silence.

What hurt wasn’t the correction. I’d been in surgery long enough to know how to take criticism and learn from it. It was how he said it. The volume. The intent.

That had been a message: You don’t belong here, and I will do whatever it takes to get you kicked out of here by humiliating you as much as I can.

A part of me wanted to quit. But I wasn’t going to run again, not because of Elias Graham. I had chosen to be a nurse because I wanted to help patients and do my part to make the world a better place.

Twenty minutes later, I sat in my stationary car, staring through the windshield at the slate-gray Seattle sky, and willed myself not to cry.

Let him hate me. Let him think I was careless, dangerous, disposable. I wouldn’t let him break me. I wouldn’t.

However, the next day, when Cindy called me into her office, I came close to it.

“Dr. Graham officially filed a complaint about what happened yesterday in the OR,” she said gently.

“Now, I want you to know—everyone who was there felt he was being overly harsh. Yes, you made a mistake, but it’s the kind no other attending would dream of writing up, let alone making it official. But Dr. Graham is?—”

“Trying to get me fired,” I finished for her.

Once a complaint went through the proper channels, Cindy or anyone else could do nothing. I only needed two more legitimate write-ups, even if the infractions were minor—as long as they were documented, witnessed, and upheld—and I’d be out of a job.

Elias obviously knew that, which was probably why he’d done what he had.

God, how he must hate me to do this to me again ? Did he really believe I was a threat to the life of a patient?

“Shrug it off, Reggie, and get to work,” Cindy advised. “I’ll make sure you stay clear of him until he cools down because if he keeps at it”—she let out a long sigh—“we will have no choice.”

I gave her a tight smile. “I understand.”

“No more screw-ups, Reggie.”

I swallowed. She’d never said this to me. No one had at Harper Memorial. Elias had been here less than a month, and I was getting officially written up, my boss was saying that I should stop making mistakes.

“I understand,” I repeated, but I didn’t.

Everyone knew that the mistake I made in the OR was one everyone made—it happened so often that there were protocols for it, and yet …

I went to the nurse’s station, trying to keep my face blank and my posture steady, like a fault line hadn’t just split open inside me.

Luther, another nurse and a friend, pulled me aside almost immediately. “What the fuck is goin’ on?”

I shrugged, not wanting to get into the tragedy of my life since Elias came to Harper Memorial.

“You’ve just been taken off all surgical cases.”

I stared at him, incredulous. “What?”

He nodded grimly. “It’s on the schedule. You’ve been pulled from the next three weeks of rotations. And the new assignments you’d usually be on are all going to Delaney.”

Delaney was pushy but competent. However, she wasn’t me. She didn’t have the same experience. She’d never scrubbed into a Bentall or assisted with a triple bypass at two a.m. on a coding patient. I had.

This was deliberate and surgical. This was Elias punishing me for sins I never committed.

“It’s what it is,” I prevaricated.

“You’re being sidelined, Reggie,” he unnecessarily explained my fucked-up situation to me.

“It’s just a bump on the road,” I lied, the words tasting like rust.

“Is this about the sterile field thing?” Luther asked, incredulous. “That’s—Reggie, come on. That’s like Code Blue 101. Everyone slips. You corrected it before anything was compromised. ”

“Dr. Graham was right that it took me longer than it should have.”

I wasn’t going to bad mouth an attending, ever , not in the hospital where there were too many ears. It was one thing for me to be honest with Cindy in a closed room but never out in the open.

Luther let out a breath and ran a hand over his close-cropped hair. “I’m sorry, Reggie.”

I squared my shoulders. “It’s fine.”

He looked at me like I was nuts. “No, it’s not.”

But it had to be because there wasn’t much I could do about the situation. Once a surgeon like Elias decided you were a liability, no amount of experience, good standing, or quiet excellence mattered.

“Have you ever known me not to be fine?” I changed my tune and broke into a smile that didn’t quite reach my eyes or my heart.

Luther bought it. “You always fall on your feet, Nurse Reggie.”

“Exactly.” I patted his shoulder and escaped, happy that I was off duty.

I’d go to the gym and see if I could exhaust myself to release this awful knot inside of me.

Damn you, Elias Graham!