Love Gone Mad Read Free Page B

Yale—it’s the core processer of the nursing profession. And neonatal nursing—top-shelf credentials, right up there with OR and ICU work. It’s the most technical and demanding nursing work around.
    His stomach grumbles; he realizes he’s starved.
    “It’s much better in this little pond than the ocean at Yale,” she says.
    “Yes,” he says, wondering if some upheaval drove her from Yale. Something personal, meaning marital trouble—separation or divorce.
    Like what happened to half the people in this cafeteria, a congregation of troubled souls, each with a personal tragedy .
    “You live here in Eastport?” he asks.
    “Yes. I’ve rented a condo.”
    Near the hospital. And she used “I,” not “we .”
    Adrian realizes he’s sifting through her every word, each nuance, making inferences. It’s fucking Sherlockian.
    “And you?” she asks, those hazel eyes questioning him. God, how he could stare at them forever and how he wishes time could slow so this conversation could last longer.
    “I have a rental too … in Simpson.”
    “Simpson?”
    “Yes.”
    Adrian’s certain she knows Simpson’s a bedroom community; so, maybe she thinks he’s married, just game-playing. She may feel he’s doing the big flirt, that he’s ready for a casual fling, a fuck-buddy thing, nothing more.
    “The rental market in Eastport’s impossible,” he adds quickly. “I took a place in Simpson so I didn’t have to buy a condo.” He purposely used “I,” hinting at his single status.
    She nods, and he wonders what she’s thinking.
    The conversation shifts—comfortably for Adrian—to their work. She loves the neonatal ICU and working with newborns. The only shame is when a crack baby is born. The nurses know its mothering will be awful. “It’s terrible when a mother doesn’t want a child,” she says, a tinge of sadness in her voice.
    Staring into those eyes, Adrian knows he can’t get enough of her.
    “But then a fragile little preemie comes along. If we save the baby, it’s great, because we know the parents want this child more than anything else.”
    “So it’s more than just a job?”
    “Yes, much more. And I imagine it’s the same feeling for you with surgery.”
    “Absolutely. It makes my day.”
    There’s a pause in the conversation. The cafeteria hum seems louder in his ears.
    Then she says with a smile, “Now your soup’s really cold.”
    “And you’ve taken only one bite of your sandwich.”
    They laugh. He notices how her lips spread into a smile and the way her eyes brighten and become lively. The sadness he saw is gone, evaporated. He feels somehow they’ve shared something as inconsequential as a brief, self-conscious laugh amid the din of this cafeteria, and he feels close to her in a way he doesn’t quite understand. It’s very strange, and Adrian wonders if she can possibly know he’s insanely glad he couldn’t find a seat and finally plopped down at this table.
    He wonders, too, if Megan Haggarty has any idea—even a seminal notion—of the effect she has on him. Can she tell that he’s hanging over the table, edging closer to her? He realizes he’s engrossed by her. He’s looking into her luminous eyes, making intimate and earnest contact, and it feels so terribly comfortable. It occurs to Adrian that if another surgeon could take over his afternoon surgeries, he’d stay right here with Megan Haggarty.
    He asks himself if she can even imagine—with the tumult of sound and patina of lights—that years from now he’ll try desperately to recapture the memory of the moment he first saw her, surrounded by an ocean of doctors and nurses and aides and hospital workers and porters and cafeteria workers, amid hospital greens and white coats and hairnets and name tags and stethoscopes and the smells and sights and sounds of this stadium-sized cafeteria in Eastport Hospital, and all the while, she was completely oblivious to his existence.
    Adrian thinks there’s something