Page 45

Eric

T here was a red rose on Eric’s front doorstep.

He paused where he stood, still in his hospital scrubs, keys in hand, breath frosting in a soft fog in front of him.

Had someone left it there on accident? Maybe let it fall out of a bouquet before they’d realized they’d gotten the wrong address for whatever heartfelt message they were sending?

But it looked so…deliberate. It had been placed front and center on his doormat. Bloodred, perfectly shaped, thorns left intact on the stem.

Eric bent over and picked it up with thumb and forefinger, careful not to prick himself.

Huh. He’d never been given flowers before.

And definitely not such a dramatic, singular red rose like this.

It should be filling him with some kind of warmth, right?

An unexpected romantic gesture at his literal doorstep.

But what he felt instead was a strange chill running down his spine.

But, then again, that could just be because it was fucking freezing out, the night air heavy with the threat of snow.

Eric unlocked his front door with his free hand, looking over his shoulder as he did so.

He wasn’t sure if he was thinking he’d catch his admirer in the act or what (and how dumb would that be, them just standing there in the wintery night, waiting for him to arrive?), but the street behind him was empty.

He stepped inside quickly anyway, throwing his keys on the hallway table as he did so, and tried to think who it could have been.

Cindy? But they’d fucked like, two months ago, and she hadn’t seemed too eager to repeat the experience.

Philip? Except he’d told Eric just last week that he’d found a steady boyfriend and was “done hooking up on the sly.” Neither seemed on the verge of courting him with floral arrangements.

Someone entirely new? That would definitely be a change of pace; Eric had never been wooed before; that was for sure.

He was always the one doing the approaching, and he struck out more often than not lately, despite the fact that he was tall, blond, and built—and not that rough in the face either, in his own humble opinion.

People in this town could sense his desperation, he was pretty sure.

Smell his need to be touched on him or something.

And he didn’t quite care enough to hide it.

Because what did it matter if he was desperate, or cheesy, or smarmy? Getting rejected 80 percent of the time was better than never getting accepted at all, right? It wasn’t like anyone was going to want to keep him, even if he did come off sincere.

He hadn’t realized, moving to Hyde Park, just how much small towns talked.

Ever since his first tentative grope at sixteen, he’d always used sex as a form of release.

And it had never been a problem in the bigger cities; there was always someone looking for a good time.

But it had taken less than six months for the population of Hyde Park to unanimously declare him a man-whore.

Sleazy. Silly. Not worth anyone’s serious consideration.

He couldn’t even be mad about it. It wasn’t like they were wrong.

Eric set the rose on the kitchen counter, thinking maybe he’d put it in a little glass with water later. First, he needed a beer. Or a shower. A beer in the shower, perhaps?

Before he could decide, his phone’s ringtone cut through the silence. He didn’t recognize the number. He debated leaving it to voice mail, but it could be one of the nurses, trying to track him down after he fucked up some order or another.

“Monroe,” he answered.

Nothing.

“This is Dr. Monroe,” he repeated, wondering if there was a lag on the other line.

Still nothing.

Well, fine. He hit the end call button, tossing his phone on the counter next to his flower, only for it to ring again immediately.

He answered it without looking, his tone overly jovial to hide his irritation. “Dr. Monroe here. How can I help you?”

“Well, isn’t that a pretentious way to answer the phone.”

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. If he’d known who was on the other line, he would have had his shower beer (or three, or four) before answering. Eric pressed fingers to his forehead, hard as he could manage. “Mom. Sorry, I thought you were one of the nurses.”

“What, you don’t have your own mother saved on your phone?”

“No, I—”

“And why would the nurses be calling your personal phone, anyway? What have you been getting up to?” His mother’s tone was laced with suspicion. As if a nurse calling him on his cell was the clue she’d been looking for that he was some black market doctor / drug dealer.

Eric kept his tone light. “I’m not up to anything, Mom. Just a mix-up. What’s going on?”

“I can’t call you and see how you are?”

How was this conversation going so wrong so fast? Why was it always like this? “You can. Of course you can. It’s just— It’s Friday. You and Dad don’t have plans?”

“You don’t want to talk.” He could actually hear the pout through the phone.

“I do!” He really didn’t. A headache was already forming between his brows, growing stronger with every second he remained on the line. But he kept his voice as carefree as he could. She could sense irritation like a shark sensing blood in the water. “How are you, Mom?”

“I could be better.”

Of course she could. And Eric listened as she told him all the many ways she could be better.

If his father weren’t such a flirt (“But that’s just how you men are, isn’t?

Certainly didn’t skip a generation, now did it?

”). If her health were better (“Not that you ever ask”).

If her so-called friends weren’t such duds (“Can hardly hold a conversation. Reminds me of you as a teenager. Head full of air”).

He made the appropriate noises. He laughed when he felt she expected it. And just when he was considering upping his shower beer to a shower whiskey, she brought it back to his least favorite subject.

“How’s work?”

“It’s good,” Eric lied, like he always did. “Really good. The other day, I had this patient—”

She cut him off. “Have they asked you to stay as an attending yet?”

The headache was now a stabbing sensation, like a knife had gotten stuck behind one of his eyeballs. “It doesn’t really work that way.”

“If only you hadn’t taken those gap years.

” By gap years, she meant the years between undergrad and med school he’d been working as a grunt in a research lab specializing in lung cancer treatment.

A waste of good training years , she’d told him.

“Nancy’s son, he was barely a year into his fellowship when the hospital told him they were dying to keep him. ”

“Tom’s in a totally different specialty, Mom,” Eric pointed out, unable to keep the chipper edge to his voice anymore.

For once, she didn’t seem to notice. “Well, it’s not like you’re a neurosurgeon. You’re a—what do they call it?—a hospitalist?”

“Intensivist, Mom. I cover the ICU. The most critical patients.”

“Certainly not operating on anyone.”

“No,” Eric sighed, well and truly defeated by the conversation. “Certainly not that.”

There was a muffled voice on the other end, and his mother’s tone switched immediately to one of carelessness. “Oh, that’s your father. I have to go. You’ll call me this weekend? And don’t forget to up the monthly deposit. We want to redo the guest bathroom.”

“Sure, Mom.”

Eric hung up the phone, infinitely more drained than he’d been at the end of his twelve-hour. That was some gift she had. Fucking energy vampire.

His eyes landed again on the mysterious rose, intensely red against the white of the marble kitchen counter. With a bitter laugh, he swept it into the trash. He’d been right before; probably someone selling door-to-door had dropped it. It wasn’t meant for him.

Because why the fuck would it be meant for him?

It was only when the harsh spray of the shower had him hissing, his pointer finger stinging hotly, that Eric realized he’d cut himself on the thorns after all.

Chugging his third coffee of the day—taking advantage of the one whole minute of silence where his work phone wasn’t ringing like crazy—Eric reminded himself he only had three more hours left of his shift.

That was only…one hundred and eighty minutes to go.

And look, now it was 4:01. Only one hundred and seventy- nine minutes to go. He was practically done already.

His phone’s ringer cut through the blessed silence then, because of course it did.

“Monroe,” Eric answered, somehow managing to speak midswallow.

“Sup, man. It’s Brent with emergency.” The emergency docs always spoke like they were chill climbing bros. Which was accurate, actually. Half of them were exactly that. “We’ve got one for you.”

“Sure thing.” Eric forced an equal amount of friendly enthusiasm into his own voice. “On my way.”

Two minutes later, his coffee was drained and he was trudging down to the ER, taking the stairs this time because he had to get in the exercise when he could these days.

Sitting on his ass was harder to get away with after hitting thirty-seven; that was for sure.

He could just imagine his mother at the next holiday, poking his stomach and asking when he’d added the spare tire.

She’d do it too.

So stairs it was.

He found Chloe, the night charge, at the nurse’s station. Eric did a little double-take at the sight of her, wondering for just a second if he’d gotten confused and it was actually four in the morning instead of four in the afternoon. “What are you doing here in daylight hours?”

Chloe sighed dramatically, her eyes on the computer. “They begged me to come in early, and I caved. Don’t remind me. But anyway—” She pointed to a bay, still not looking at him. “Tag, you’re it.”

Monroe rested his elbows on the counter and leaned in, delaying the inevitable in his very favorite way: mindless flirting. They hadn’t called a code, so he probably had the time. “Chloe, darling. Have you left that husband of yours yet?”

“As if I would ever ,” she scoffed, typing furiously.