He is exactly the kind of warmth Gabriel was just yelling at me about. He is walking, talking sunshine. And for the last two years, I have harboured a secret, fiercely guarded, and humiliating crush on him.
My chest tightens so painfully I can barely breathe. It is a reckless and uncharacteristic impulse. I am a man of science, of logic, of meticulously planned surgical routes. But right now, I am fuelled by pure exhaustion, my mentor's biting words, and the desperate need to escape my mother's plans.
I look at the phone screen. My mother is tapping her manicured fingernails against her teacup, waiting for my surrender.
“I can't marry Dev,” I blurt out, my voice slightly breathless. My gaze is wholly fixed on Casey, two floors below as he adjusts his ridiculous dinosaur-print scrubs.
“And why on earth not?” my mother demands, her exquisitely drawn eyebrows pulling together in a sharp frown.
I swallow hard. My throat is sandpaper-dry, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird. Once I say it, there is no taking it back. It will require a level of deception I am unqualified for.
“Because,” I say, my voice steadying with sudden resolve, “I'm already engaged.”
Chapter 2
The Golden Retriever Gets A Leash
Casey
There’s blood on my Stegosaurus.
I hold my left arm up under the fluorescent lights, squinting at the splatter pattern across the cartoon dinosaur on my scrub top. It's a solid arterial spray shape, very dramatic, which is wildly misleading considering it came from a nine-year-old named Brayden who flailed at exactly the wrong moment during a scalp laceration repair. Head wounds. They bleed like the kid's auditioning for a straight to Netflix horror movie, and then twenty minutes later, the little guy is sitting up asking for apple juice and a WiFi password.
“Dr. Welling? Bay six has a query fracture, and bay nine just threw up on Dr. Hutchins again.”
I catch the chart that Nurse Tamsin frisbees at me without looking up from the Dermabond I'm peeling off my knuckles. “Tell Hutchins to angle left next time. The kid in bay nine telegraphs.”
“I'll pass along your tactical analysis.”
I grin at her, shoving the chart under my arm and shouldering my way through the double doors of the paediatric ER. The afternoonshift is the screaming chaos I live for. Somewhere to my left, a toddler is howling at a pitch that could shatter plexiglass. Two nurses are wrestling with a portable X-ray that has a wheel that’s jammed and only turns in counterclockwise circles. A harried father’s trying to explain to the triage desk that yes, his daughter did actually swallow the Lego, and no, it was not a small piece; it was an entire Lego horse, and also could we please move this along before his wife gets off of work and finds out this happened?
I love this place.
I’m built for this exact brand of disaster. I'm too big, too loud, and I take up way too much space in every room I walk into. My scrubs are a size too small because the hospital doesn't stock them for guys who are six-three and spent their formative years getting body-checked into boards in Northern Ontario hockey rinks. My hair’s doing something objectively criminal right now. There’s a holographic dinosaur sticker on my stethoscope because a four-year-old named Maisie put it there this morning and told me it was “for bravery,” and I would rather die than take it off.
I check the X-ray on the fracture kid, confirm it's a clean, non-displaced buckle fracture of the distal radius (classic falling-off-the-monkey-bars job), and spend four minutes doing a magic trick with a tongue depressor to stop him crying long enough to get the splint on. I give him a T-Rex sticker. His mom cries and thanks me. I tell her he's going to be great, and I mean it. I always mean it.
I’m in the middle of charting, wedged into a nurses' station chair that is comically too small for me, writing notes with a pen that has a fuzzy purple pom-pom on the end because someone stole all the normal pens, when I feel it.
It's not a sound. It's not even a movement I consciously register. It's more like... a shift in barometric pressure. A tightening of the air. The way the atmosphere in a hockey arena changes right before the puck drops. Every nerve ending on the back of my neck stands up at full attention, and my heart does that embarrassing and involuntary thing it's been doing for two full years.
I look up.
Dr. Arjun Kapoor is standing in the doorway of the paediatric ER.
And he looks like hell.
My pen stops. My brain, which has been happily bouncing between fracture classifications and whether there are any Timbits left in the break-room, goes offline. Because Arjun Kapoor never looks like hell. Arjun Kapoor normally appears as if a slightly cruel deity hand-sculpted him, specifically intending to ruin my life. Sharp cheekbones, dark, meticulous curls, and green eyes that seem stolen from a Renaissance painting of a furious saint define him. He wears his white coat like it's ceremonial armour, and he walks through this hospital like he owns it, which, honestly, given how much grant money he pulls in, he sort of does.
But right now, the armour is cracked.
His jaw’s locked so tight I can see the muscles jumping in his cheek from thirty feet away. His hands are clasped behind his back in that thing he does, that very specific posture that he thinks hides how stressed he is and does not. His green eyes are slightly red-rimmed, his dark curls are fractionally less immaculate than usual, and there's a tension in his shoulders that I've only seen after his worst marathon surgeries.
Something’s wrong. Something’s very, very wrong.
My whole body goes on alert, shifting from ER-chaos mode to a frequency that’s solely reserved for this man. I have an internal Arjun Kapoor monitoring system and I'm not remotely sorry about it. Two years of watching him from across hallways, operating rooms, and hospital cafeterias have given me a PhD in the micro-expressions of Dr. Arjun Kapoor, and right now, every single indicator is flashing red.
He scans the ER floor. His gaze sweeps past the crying toddler, the broken X-ray machine, the Lego horse crisis, and locks directly onto me.