She looks different from how she did at the bar. Her face is scrubbed clean, her long brown waves twisted up into a messy bun. The hospital-blue tunic and trousers she’s wearing don’t look like they do much for anyone, honestly, but somehow she’s pulling the look off. I think she’d probably look good in anything.
‘Can I help you?’ the older woman behind the desk says, jolting me out of my trance, and I flash a sheepish smile at her. If she saw me staring at Florence, she doesn’t say anything, and I’m grateful for that.
‘I, um…’ I mumble, trying to remember what I was supposed to say here. ‘I’m here to see Florence.’ I’m not sure if this is a first name situation, but I don’t know her surname, so I don’t have a great deal of choice. ‘She’s expecting me.’
The woman gives me a long look, and I half expect her to accuse me of stalking Florence and throw me out of the place, but after a few moments, she smiles broadly, her face falling into well-worn smile lines. ‘Oh, yes,’ she says, her fingers flying across her keyboard. She’s not looking at it, though. She’s looking at me. It’s a little unnerving. ‘I’ve let her know you’re here,’ she says, with a smile, but… how? She didn’t break eye contact even for a second.
She points me to a cluster of chairs and I plop myself down, dragging the tips of my fingers over the surface of the seat, feeling the bumps. It calms me a little. Just enough that when Florence appears in front of me, I’m able to stand to my full height and flash her my most confident smile.
She smiles back but it’s all business, those whisky-coloured eyes trained on me. ‘Thanks for coming,’ she says. ‘Please follow me to one of the bays.’
My heart lurches, dread speeding its rhythm. I mask it with a cocky smile. ‘I’d follow you anywhere.’
She doesn’t reply, but I think I see the tiniest hint of a smile at the corner of her mouth, and it buoys me a little.
When we reach the blood room, she ushers me into an empty bay, pulling the curtain shut around us. My pulse is thundering in my ears, my chest tightening. I can’t move, can’t think, can’t breathe. It’s like I’m lying on the shore in a storm, waves of panic crashing over me one after the other. But when her eyes settle back on mine, it feels like a lifeline.
She guides me wordlessly to the blue pleather chair and I sink into it, swallowing back a roll of nausea. I’m building this up to be more in my head, I know I am, but I can’t make it stop.
Not until Florence starts to talk.
At first, I almost don’t register that it’s happening. I can’t. The roar of my pulse is too loud to hear much of anything else. But then I hear her voice, clear and bright through the cacophony. It soothes me a little. Just enough.
‘Hey,’ she says evenly, studying my information. ‘Your blood type’s O negative, same as mine.’ She smiles at me, and it goes someway to distracting me from the clatter of my heartbeat. ‘We’re universal donors,’ she mutters, gathering supplies. ‘Always in demand.’
Usually I’d make a joke at that. A flirty comment, at least. But in my current state it’s all I can do to smile weakly back at her.
‘Ok,’ she says, standing just beside me. ‘Let’s do this. Left or right?’
‘Right,’ I mumble, and then I feel soft fingers at my wrist. They skim the edge of my shirt cuff, deftly unbuttoning it and beginning to roll it up with a precision that blows my mind. It’s almost hypnotic, the steady way she does it. Now and then I feel the brush of her knuckles on my skin and that sends entirely different senses ricocheting through me.
By the time my sleeve is all the way up, my anxiety has already dropped a notch, and it falls further with every touch of her fingers, every softly crooned question.
‘Eyes open or closed?’
I clamp them shut. ‘Closed.’
I hear the quiet click of the tourniquet buckle, then, ‘Is this ok?’
‘Yes.’
‘Count up, count down, or neither?’
‘Count down.’
‘Ok.’ There’s a gentle touch in the crook of my elbow, cool and fleeting.
‘Three… two…’
‘One,’ I finish, but when I feel nothing and open my eyes, I can see in my periphery that the needle is already in. My eyes snap to hers and I find her perching on her chair, looking awfully pleased with herself. One hand effortlessly swaps out the vials while the other holds the needle steady.
‘Told you I was good,’ she says, those perfect pink lips curled into a smile, and it stirs up another sort of noise in my brain, something just about loud enough to drown out the worst of the fear.
‘I think I have a competence kink,’ I say, my voice still ever so slightly wobbly.
She looks at me sideways as she clicks the last vial into place. ‘From what I hear,’ she says, ‘you have aneverythingkink.’
I fake a cheeky smile, but behind it my heart sinks. I’m not surprised she thinks I’m a fuckboy. It’s not an unfair assumption. I came into adulthood with a lot of feelings and absolutely no clue how to deal with them.