you want me to get you something else?’
Yikes, she hadn’t been fishing for drinks. ‘No, no…’ Bridgette shook her head. ‘Jasmine would be offended. I’m fine. I was just…’ Joking, she didn’t add, trying to make conversation. Gorgeous he might be to look at but he really didn’t say very much. ‘You’re at the hospital, then?’ Bridgette asked.
‘Just as a fill-in,’ Dominic said. ‘I’ve got a consultant’s position starting in a couple of weeks in Sydney.’ He named a rather impressive hospital and that just about summed him up, Bridgette decided—rather impressive and very, very temporary.
‘Your family is there?’
‘That’s right,’ he said, but didn’t elaborate. ‘You work on Maternity?’ Dominic frowned, because he couldn’t place her.
‘I used to,’ Bridgette explained. ‘I left six months ago. I’ve been doing agency…’
‘Why?’
It was a very direct question, one she wasn’t quite expecting, one she wasn’t really sure how to answer.
‘The hours are more flexible,’ she said, ‘the money’s better…’ And it was the truth, but only a shred of it, because she missed her old job very badly. She’d just been accepted as a clinical nurse specialist when she’d left. She adored everything about midwifery, and now she went wherever the agency sent her. As she was qualified as a general nurse, she could find herself in nursing homes, on spinal units, sometimes in psych. She just worked and got on with it, but she missed doing what she loved the most.
He really didn’t need to hear it, so back on went the smile she’d been wearing all night. ‘And it means that I get to go out on a Saturday night.’ The moment she said them, she wanted those words back, wished she could retrieve them. She knew that she sounded like some sort of party girl, especially with what came next.
‘I can see it has benefits,’ Dominic said, and she swore he glanced down at the hand that was holding the glass, and for a dizzy moment she realised she was being appraised. ‘If you have a young family.’
‘Er, no.’ Oh, help, she was being appraised. He was looking at her, the same way she might look at shoes in a window and tick off her mental list of preferences—too flat, too high, nice colour, shame about the bow. Wrong girl, she wanted to say to him, I’m lace-up-shoe boring.
‘You don’t have children?’
‘No,’ she said, and something twisted inside, because if she told him about Harry she would surely burst into tears. She could just imagine Dominic’s gorgeous face sort of sliding into horrified boredom if the newly foiled, for once groomed woman beside him told him she felt as if her guts were being torn, that right now, right this very minute, she was having great difficulty not pulling out her phone to check if there had been a text or a call from Courtney. Right now she wanted to drive past where her sister was living with her friend Louise and make sure that there wasn’t a wild party raging. She scrambled for something to say, anything to say, and of course she again said the wrong thing.
‘Sorry that you had a bad day.’ She watched his jaw tighten a fraction, knew, given his job, that it was a stupid thing to say, especially when her words tumbled out in a bright and breezy voice. But the false smile she had plastered on all night seemed to be infusing her brain somehow, she was so incredibly out of practice with anything remotely social.
He gave her the same brief nod that he had given Vince, then a very brief smile and very smoothly excused himself.
‘Told you!’ Jasmine was over in a flash the minute he was gone. ‘Oh, my God, you were talking for ages.’
‘For two minutes.’
‘That’s ages for him!’ Jasmine breathed. ‘He hardly says a word to anyone.’
‘Jasmine!’ She rolled her eyes at her friend. ‘You can stop this very moment.’ Bridgette let out a small gurgle of laughter. ‘I think I’ve just been assessed as to my suitability for a one-nighter. Honestly, he’s shameless…He asked if I had children and everything. Maybe he’s worried I’ve got stretch marks and a baggy vagina.’
It was midwife-speak, and as she made Jasmine laugh, she laughed herself. The two women really laughed for the first time in a long, long time, and it was so good for Bridgette to be with her friend before she jetted off, because Jasmine had helped her through this difficult time. She didn’t want to be a misery at her friends’ leaving do, so she kept up the conversation a little. They giggled about lithe, toned bodies and the temptresses who would surely writhe on his white rug in his undoubtedly immaculate city apartment. It was a white rug, they decided, laughing, for a man like Dominic was surely far too tasteful for animal prints. And he’d make you a cocktail on arrival, for this was the first-class lounge of one-night stands, and on and on they went…Yes, it was so good to laugh.
Dominic could hear her laughter as he spoke with a colleague, as again he was offered yet more supposed consolation for a ‘bad day’. He wished that people would just say nothing, wished he could simply forget.
It had been a…He searched for the expletive to best describe his day, chose it, but knew if he voiced it he might just be asked to leave, which wouldn’t be so bad, but, no, he took a mouthful of vinegar and grimaced as it met the acid in his stomach.
He hated his job.
Was great at it.
Hated it.
Loved it.
Did it.
He played ping-pong in his mind with a ball that broke with every hit.
He wanted that hard ball tonight, one that bounced back on every smash, one that didn’t crumple if you hammered it.
He wanted to be the doctor who offered better answers.
Today he had seen the dominos falling, had scrambled to stop them, had done everything to reset them, but still they’d fallen—click, click, click—racing faster than he could halt them till he’d known absolutely what was coming and had loathed that he’d been the only one who could see it.
‘Where there’s life there’s hope’ had been offered several times.
Actually, no, he wanted to say as he’d stared at another batch of blood results and read off the poisons that had filled this tiny body.
‘There is hope, though…’ the parents had begged, and he had refused to flinch at the frantic eyes that had scanned his face as he’d delivered news.
He loved hope, he craved hope and had searched so hard for it today, but he also knew when hope was gone, said it before others would. Unlike others, he faced the inevitable—because it was either cardiac massage and all lights blazing, or a cuddle without the tubes at the end.
Yes, it came down to that.
Yes, it had been a XXXX of a day.
He had sat with the parents till ten p.m. and then entered a bar that was too bright, stood with company that was too loud and tasted wine that could dissolve an olive, and hated that he missed her. How could you miss a woman you didn’t even like? He hated that she’d ring tonight and that
