#im pasting pictures in my journal+scribbling around them

[graveyardxghoul]

My poor boy.

I am sorry, I am so sorry.

It is I am sorry. I presented you an impossible dilemma. You did only what you thought honorable, I am sure. I kiss you for it.

[argylemnwrites]

Night Float

Pairing: Bryce Lahela x MC (Cassie Vanderfield)

Book: Open Heart

Word Count: ~2200

Rating: PG

Summary: When Bryce and Cassie are both working nights, they find a little downtime to have an important conversation.

Author’s Note: Whoever said nothing good happens after 2 am never had the joys of working night float.

Cassie flopped onto the resident lounge’s lumpy old couch and pulled a coffee-stained blanket over her lap. God, she hated night float. This was the first time she’d been able to sit down since getting signout from the day team at 8 pm. It was now after 2 am. She knew she should be working on her notes from the three admissions she’d already done, but she just wanted to catch her breath for 15 minutes.

Her patients were not sick enough for the night to be this busy. But Mr. Lindel’s son had come in and downloaded the MyChart app on his father’s phone, so she spent over an hour in 410 going over the meaning of every lab test he’d had this admission. At no other point in the night had her pager been silent for more than 10 minutes, but of course when she could have used an excuse to leave a room, none came. Then, as she was finally leaving his room, the nurse for 402 grabbed her. Apparently, there were some concerns about his diet order for the next afternoon, even though he was NPO overnight for his endoscopy tomorrow morning. Cassie was pretty sure she was due for some 3 am pages after dismissing their concerns as a “day team problem.” After that, she’d been paged about inadequate pain control on the kidney stone patient that had been punted to their team by urology because of the patient’s heart failure. Heart failure that was well controlled, but of course the patient had ended up on their service. The admissions had been overly chatty, too. During the daytime, Cassie loved talking to her patients, but after 10 pm, she just wanted to get through her history and physical.

She dug through the stacks of New England Journals and finally found the remote, flipping on the TV in hopes of landing on some mindless sitcom to watch. All she could find was infomercial after infomercial. What she really wanted was someone to talk to. Walking over to the computer stations, she logged on to Amion to see who else was working tonight. An emergency rotator, a family med rotator, and Aurora. Well, that was just perfect.

“You know he’s working tonight, too,” a little voice pestered in the back of her head. The surgical interns didn’t have months of night float like the IM interns, but Bryce was working nights on the gen surg floor this week. Cassie hesitated to text him, though. She wasn’t really sure where they stood. Sure, they’d been hooking up for several weeks, but they’d never really talked about what they were. Was it friends with benefits? Casual dating? Heading towards a relationship? At first, it had been a lot of fun, but now, Cassie wanted a clearer picture of what was going on between them. But she was nervous to be “that girl,” the one who made things awkward when she pushed for a “relationship talk” too early.

Truth be told, she’d been avoiding Bryce a little bit over the past couple of weeks. Things had just felt… unsettled between them since he’d cancelled what she thought was supposed to be their first actual date. Sure, they’d hung out before, but it was always a spur of the moment thing or the two of them breaking off from the group. But just over two weeks ago, they had made actual plans to go to out for dinner at The Salty Pig. However, at the very last minute, just as Cassie had been about to head out the door, he had texted her, saying he was in the OR and would not be able to make it. He’d sent another apology text later, but hadn’t made any move to reschedule. The whole thing left Cassie wondering if he had gotten cold feet about actually going on a date with her, and the OR just served as a convenient excuse, so she’d backed off texting him quite a bit. She didn’t want to come across as clingy if the thought of one dinner with her sent him running for the hills.

Resigning herself to a frustrating rest of her shift, she opened up the chart of her first admit and starting typing up her note, trying to discern what she had scribbled about when dyspnea began, but her thoughts kept drifting back to Bryce. She didn’t like that things had gotten awkward. Even if he didn’t want to date her, she liked spending time with him. He was one of the few surgeons who didn’t walk around with a permanent scowl etched into his face, and he was genuinely funny. She just wished that she knew what he was thinking when it came to the two of them.

Just then, the door to the resident lounge swung open, the man in question striding through, surgical cap on and holding a coffee in his hand, looking all too pleased with himself. He smiled brightly when he saw her.

“Hey, I was hoping I’d run into you. How’s your night been?”

“Not as good as yours, I’m guessing. What has you so chipper?”

“Emergency lap appy. And Palmer’s the attending on, so guess who got to run the show?”

“Did you just come here to brag? Some of us have work to do.”

“Wow, that bad of a night, huh?”

“Not even that bad, just… annoying, I guess.”

Bryce leaned over to look at her computer screen and what she was working on. “H&P? Come on, that can wait. Let’s go.”

“Where?”

“To do something that will put you in a better mood,” he whispered, dropping his lips right against her ear.

“Bryce, I am not having sex in a call room.”

Bryce leaned back, his eyes comically wide as he looked at her with an air of innocence he had no right to have. “Hey, I was just talking about getting some food. You have a dirty mind if that’s what you jumped to. I’m appalled, Dr. Vanderfield, that you would-”

Cassie slapped her hand over his mouth, effectively cutting off his teasing. “Let me just finish up this note.”

Bryce shook his head as he smiled. “Not an option. One, you are clearly all sorts of hangry right now, so we’re correcting that,” Cassie opened her mouth to challenge that statement, but Bryce kept going, “And two, the cafeteria shuts down the grill at 3, so unless you want day-old sandwiches or cold cereal, we better go now.”

Cassie bit her lip, glancing between her half finished admission note and Bryce. She could probably wrap this note up in 20 minutes or so, but that would be calling it tight with the cafeteria hours. Plus, as much as she hated to admit it, Bryce was right. She was starving, having only eaten a granola bar since the start of her shift. He seemed to sense that she was caving, because he reached over and grabbed the mouse, saved her note as incomplete, and logged her out of the computer. He then offered his hand to her. “Come on, you know you want to.”

Cassie sighed and rolled her eyes before grabbing his hand, allowing him to tug her out of her chair. “Fine, fine. We’ll have to swing by my workroom, though. I need to grab my wallet.”

“Nah, it’s my treat. Or rather, the surgical program’s treat,” he said with a smile, flashing a meal card from the front pocket of his scrubs as they left the resident lounge and walked toward the employee elevators.

“Ohhhh, big spender.”

“Hey, what can I say? I know how to treat a lady. Plus, I do kind of owe you after I cancelled on you.”

This was her in. He had brought up their dinner. As Bryce pushed the elevator call button, Cassie finally asked the question that had been bugging her for weeks, “Why didn’t you try to reschedule?”

“I was with Madhani starting the next day, and she’s notorious for kicking you out of the OR if you can’t answer a question, so I kinda needed to have my nights free to review my cases, and then you went to night float.”

“I guess that’s fair.”

“Plus… ah, nevermind,” Bryce trailed off as they entered the elevator, pressing the button for the basement.

“No way, you don’t get to start that thought and not finish it.”

Bryce smiled sheepishly, “I thought some of the other surgical residents might have been giving you a hard time about it.”

“About you canceling?”

“No, about us going to dinner at all.”

“How would they have known?”

“I was in the OR when I realized I wasn’t going to make it. How do you think I texted you?”

Cassie’s eyes widened as she realized that if he was scrubbed into a case, he would not have been able to access his phone, which meant…

“Who texted me to cancel?” she asked as they exited the elevator and turned to the right, passing a pair of OBGYN residents on their way back from the cafeteria.

“The circulating nurse. Chou was my attending, and he found it hilarious when she asked me how I wanted to phrase it. He tried to convince her to page you instead of texting. I thought it would just be some light ribbing from him, but it turns out the anesthesiology resident who was in that case is a giant gossip. By the next morning, about half the surgical residents already knew. I’m shocked none of them have said anything to you.”

“No one’s said a thing.”

“Well, that’s good. I just thought they probably would have and that it made you feel weird that they all knew. I thought maybe you didn’t want anyone to know.”

“Know what? What exactly is there to know, Bryce?”

He turned to face her briefly. “Alright, we can do this now,” he replied before stepping up to the employee at the grill station, “One grilled chicken sandwich, thanks.”

As the cafeteria worker threw a chicken breast on the grill, Cassie stepped up next to Bryce, looking at him out of the corner of her eye, “What are we doing, Bryce?”

“Right now, we’re ordering food.” He gestured to the employee, who was staring at her expectantly.

“I’ll have a chicken quesadilla,” Cassie said before turning to face Bryce, “I’m serious, Bryce. We’ve never really talked about what’s going on between us.”

“I thought things between us were good. It seemed like we’re both enjoying ourselves.”

“So, that’s all this is? We’re just having fun?”

“Hey, I never said we were just having fun, only that I thought things were going well.”

“Okay, if this isn’t just fooling around, then what are we doing?”

“Cassie, I don’t know. I like spending time with you. I asked you out to dinner. I don’t really care what you want to call it.”

“I guess I kind of wondered if there were other people you were asking out to dinner.”

It really was the biggest question on her mind when it came to her relationship with Bryce. He was just so flirty, she couldn’t help but wonder if he was sleeping with other people. And in the beginning, it didn’t bother her, but now it had been long enough that she just didn’t feel great about being one of several casual hook ups.

Bryce gave her a little smirk before he answered, “Cassie, I am at the hospital more than 80 hours a week. Where do you think I have all this time to have a string of casual flings?”

“So, you aren’t seeing anyone else?”

“No. Are you?”

“No.”

“Well, then that’s settled; are we good here?”

Cassie nodded and smiled. She didn’t need him to vow some heavy commitment. She just wanted to make sure they were on the same page.

“Okay, good. Otherwise waiting around for our food was about to get real awkward.”

Cassie laughed, feeling much lighter than she had the rest of the night. “So, is this our makeup date, then?”

“Come on, you have to think I have better game than the hospital cafeteria!” he said, nudging her playfully.

“I don’t know. I’ve yet to see ‘date Bryce’ in action.”

“I’ll tell you what. You come out with me for breakfast after sign out, and I’ll let you be the judge of ‘date Bryce’ in all his glory.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Cassie said, but before she could say any more, her pager went off.

“Come: Pt in 429 with 10/10 pain, PRN tylenol already given”

Letting out a groan, her eyes rolled over to the grill. Her quesadilla was nowhere near ready.

“Go,” said Bryce, “I’ll bring it up to the res lounge for you.”

“Will you be there with it?”

“Sure, barring a medical emergency... so probably not,” he said with a laugh before adding, “Seriously though, if I’m not there when you get back, let’s meet there after sign out. I wasn’t joking about grabbing some breakfast together.”

Cassie winked at him and nodded before taking off back toward the staff elevators. Maybe night float wasn’t such a bad thing after all.