gave a half laugh, half snort. ‘Yes. I am. My tears aren’t important.’ This wasn’t about her. It was about a family who’d just lost everything. ‘This man’s death shouldn’t be about my grief. I don’t know what’s wrong with me tonight.’
‘I think it’s called being human.’
He smiled at her with such gentleness and insight she really, really wanted to cry. But she didn’t, she turned blind eyes back to the view, her arm brushing his. Neither said anything for long moments as they sipped at their drinks.
‘Was it trauma?’ Hamish asked.
‘Car accident.’ Lola was glad to be switching from the emotion of the death to the more practical facts of it.
‘Did he donate his organs?’
Hamish and Grace’s sister-in-law, Merridy, had undergone a kidney transplant four years ago, so Lola knew the issue meant a lot to the Gibson family.
She shook her head. ‘No.’
‘Was he not a candidate?’
Lola could hear the frown in Hamish’s voice as she shook her head, a lump thickening her throat. What the hell was wrong with her tonight? She was usually excellent at shaking this stuff off.
‘He wasn’t on the register?’
The lump blossomed and pressed against Lola’s vocal cords. She cleared her throat. ‘He was but...’
Her sentence trailed off and she could see Hamish nod in her peripheral vision as realisation dawned. It was a relief not to have to say it. That Hamish knew the cold hard facts and she didn’t have to go into them or try and explain something that made no sense to most people.
‘I hate when that happens.’ Hamish’s knuckles turned white as he gripped the railing.
‘Me too.’
‘It’s wrong that family can override the patient in situations like that.’
She couldn’t agree more but the fact of the matter was that family always had the final say in these matters, regardless of the patient’s wishes.
‘Why can’t doctors just say, too bad, this was clearly your loved one’s intention when they put their name down on the donation register?’
Lola gave a half-smile, understanding the frustration but knowing it was never as simple as that. ‘Because we don’t believe in further traumatising people who are already in the middle of their worst nightmare.’
It was difficult to explain how her role as a nurse changed in situations of impending death. How her duty of care shifted—mentally anyway—from her patient to the family. In a weird way they became her responsibility too and trying to help ease them through such a terrible time in their lives—even just a little—became paramount.
They were going to have to live on, after all, and how the hospital process was managed had a significant bearing on how they coped with their grief.
‘Loved ones don’t say no out of spite or grief or even personal belief, Hamish. They say no because they’ve never had a conversation with that person about it. And if they’ve never specifically heard that person say they want their organs donated in the event of their death. They...’ Lola shrugged ‘...err on the side of caution.’
It was such a terrible time to have to make that kind of decision when people were grappling with so much already.
‘I know, I know.’ He sighed and he sounded as heavy-hearted as she’d felt when her patient’s wife had tearfully declined to give consent for organ donation.
‘Which is why things like Herd Across the Harbour are so important.’ Lola made an effort to drag them back from the dark abyss she’d been trying to step back from all night, turning slightly to face him, the railing almost at her waist. ‘Raising awareness about people having those kinds of conversations is vital. So they know and support the wishes of their nearest and dearest if it ever comes to an end-of-life situation.’
She raised her glass towards him and Hamish smiled and tapped his beer bottle against it. ‘Amen.’
They didn’t drink, though, they just stared at each other, the blue of his eyes as mesmerising in the night as the perfect symmetry of his jaw and cheekbones and the fullness of his mouth. They were close, their thighs almost brushing, their hands a whisper apart on the railing.
Lola was conscious of his heat and his solidness and the urge to put her head on his chest and just be held was surprisingly strong.
When was the last time she’d wanted to be just held by a man?
The need echoed in the sudden thickness of her blood and the stirring deep inside her belly, although neither of them felt particularly platonic. Confused by her feelings, she pushed up onto her tippy-toes and kissed him, trapping their drinks between them.
She shouldn’t have. She really shouldn’t have.
But, oh...it was lovely. The feel of his arms coming around her, the heat of his mouth, the swipe of his tongue. The quick rush of warmth to her breasts and belly and thighs. The funny bump of her heart in her chest.
The way he groaned her name against her mouth.
But she had to stop. ‘I’m sorry.’ She broke away and took a reluctant step back. ‘I shouldn’t have done that.’
His fingers on the railing covered hers. ‘Yeah,’ he whispered. ‘You absolutely should have.’
Lola gave him a half-smile, touched by his certainty but knowing it couldn’t go anywhere. She slipped her hand out from under his, smiled again then turned away, heading straight to her room and shutting out temptation.
BUT LOLA COULDN’T SLEEP. Not after finishing her glass of wine in bed or taking a bath or one of those all-natural sleeping tablets that usually did the trick. She lay awake staring at the ceiling, the events of the shift playing over and over in her head.
Her patient’s wife saying, ‘But there’s not a scratch on him...’ and his daughter crying, ‘No, Daddy!’ and his teenage son being all stoic and brave and looking so damn stricken it still clawed at her gut. The faces and the words turned around and around, a noisy wrenching jumble inside her head, while the oppressive weight of silence in the house practically deafened her.
She felt...alone...she realised. Damn it, she never felt alone. She was often here by herself overnight if Grace was at work or at Marcus’s and it had never bothered her before. She’d never felt alone in a city. But tonight she did.
It was because Hamish was out there. She knew that. Human company—male company—was lying on the couch and she was in here, staring at the shadows on the ceiling. And because it wouldn’t be the first time she’d turned to a man to forget a bad shift, her body was restless with confusion.
Was it healthy to sex
