The Unattainable Woman
It was just sex. Nadia stared at the source of her turmoil, her heart rate quickening just at the sight of Rylan sitting a row in front of her.
It was easy to hide from her when she wasn’t allowed in the OR. Nadia stayed in her lab. She worked on her research. That was it.
But Monday afternoon, she had to attend the weekly meeting of surgeons and interventional cardiologists who were forced to pretend they didn’t hate each other.
Nadia focused on the video on the large projector screen that showed a heart’s vasculature that disappeared and reappeared as contrast dye streamed through the arteries. Despite being one of the worst coronary angiograms Nadia had ever seen, her face didn’t flinch. She had long ago learned to approach such cases with acceptance. There was only so much medicine could do.
“I’m telling you if we stent the LM, the OM1, and the RCA, the patient will be as good as new.” The senior interventional cardiologist, Stefan Kowalski, stabbed his finger in the air.
Hardly. Nadia bit back a scoff. The heart was tragically trying to do its job, and it was failing. Miserably.
“You can’t be serious, Stefan. Even if you revamp all his coronaries with your metal monsters, this man will still die. He should have been on my transplant list yesterday.” Singh scowled through her glasses.
Nadia glanced at the wall clock. Only ten minutes had passed. It felt like ten hours. Interventional cardiologists and cardiac surgeons were always fighting over patients. Why the administration had decided they should be friends was beyond her.
Nadia looked at the video again. She agreed with Singh. That heart was good for nothing. A transplant was the patient’s only hope for prolonging his life.
“It won’t work, Pari,” Kowalski argued. “Why offer him something he may not survive waiting for when we can put in stents today?”
“Bypass surgery is superior to stenting in multivessel disease,” Williams said immediately.
And so it went, the same dance routine every single time. The surgeons would cry out that a triple-vessel disease warranted a bypass surgery. The cardiologists would wave some random paper as if it were the Holy Grail and argue it supported their claim for stenting. The surgeons would rebut the validity of the paper, and the cardiologists would act offended that their integrity had been questioned.
Eventually, it would escalate into an outright war where everyone pointed a finger and questioned the ethics of their colleagues, declaring that they alone cared about the good of the patient.
Nadia sat back in her chair. This discussion would take a while.
“Why don’t we try an LVAD?” The soft voice was drowned in the shouting match between Williams and Kowalski. These meetings always ended with a pissing contest between those two. The noise was getting on Nadia’s nerves.
“Shut up!”
As soon as Nadia yelled, she realized three things. One, she needed to learn to tolerate her attendings better. Two, Singh had shouted out the same words at the same time. And three, everyone was staring at Nadia.
She cleared her throat. “I believe Dr. Rylan had another suggestion.”
Nadia cringed at her own kindness. Why did she care enough to interfere? She should have let Singh defend Rylan.
“Right.” Rylan spoke a little more loudly. “Thank you, Nadezhda,” she said without making eye contact. “I suggest an LVAD while we do his transplant workup if CABG or PCI are both too little, too late.”
The discussion continued for another twenty minutes. Nadia ignored the twist in her stomach, stubbornly deciding that Rylan not looking at her for the rest of the meeting was for the best. She leaned back in her chair again and crossed her arms, reminding herself to stay quiet. The doctors forgot she was even there—except Singh, who threw the occasional baffled look at her as if she were from another planet.
Just great. Her mentor must think she was mentally unstable.
* * *
“Nadezhda, wait. We need to talk.”
Nadia kept walking. Rylan was making it impossible to keep her distance. Her outburst during yesterday’s meeting had poked holes in Nadia’s resolve to pretend that nothing had happened between them. But playing nice hurt them both. They couldn’t be together. As much as she mourned for Rylan’s touch, a relationship would never work. They were simply two women who’d had sex. Once.
Did it even count as once if they had been interrupted?
Nadia pushed down the thought. It was best to stay as far away as possible.
But Rylan hadn’t gotten the memo. She caught up with Nadia as she waited for the elevator. “I’m sorry,” she said.
The words grated. Rylan apologized too much.
Nadia said nothing. She wanted Rylan to leave before her body gave her away. The fine hairs on her arm already stood at full alert, every nerve recruited to take in Rylan’s presence.
She focused on her breathing, telling her body to stand down. There would be no encore performance. She had set clear parameters: one encounter. Anything more was dangerous.
“I’m sorry for whatever I did wrong.” Rylan persisted with her apology.
Nadia turned to face her. “Dr. Rylan, I have no idea what you’re apologizing for.”
“Call me Ashley. And I obviously did something wrong. You’re avoiding me.”
Nadia balled her hands into fists. Standing so close to Rylan made her heart race. She wanted to touch her arm and assure her she had done nothing wrong. In fact, if Nadia objectively evaluated that evening, Rylan had done things very right.
The elevator doors opened. Singh, Dan, Jason, and Li stepped back to make room, and Nadia rushed in it. To her angst, Rylan followed.
“Nadia, hi.” Dan smiled at her.
She nodded, her stoic expression unchanging.
The men exchanged pleasantries with the chief. After that, no one spoke. Nadia moved as far away from Rylan as possible in the limited space, settling next to Jason, half-hidden behind his broad shoulders.
Finally, Li said, “We’re going to see the new Da Vinci in action!”
Great. She was missing a robotic surgery case as a direct result of doing something nice. Nadia forced her face to remain expressionless as misery gripped her heart.
Rylan caught her eye. “The robot will still be here in two weeks.”
Nadia frowned. Rylan was only making things worse. She didn’t need or want her sympathy.
“So despite Keating coming to your rescue yesterday, she’s still in the doghouse?” Singh spoke to Rylan as if Nadia weren’t there.
Nadia’s jaw tightened as she refused to look away or be bothered by this conversation.
Rylan glared at Singh but didn’t say anything.
“Aren’t you going to the PR meeting?” Singh asked Rylan.
“It’s in ten minutes. But, uh, first Nadezhda asked me to approve a purchase for her research project.”
Nadia stood still, wishing she was invisible. Why did Rylan have to involve her in such a transparent lie to Singh, the only doctor in the hospital whose opinion of her mattered?
“You should go to your meeting, Dr. Rylan. I may not need that approval after all.” And you need to focus on your work and quit chasing me. “As you know, my research grant outweighs the departmental budget by twofold.” Nadia raised her chin. She had good reason to be smug. It was a true statement. Rylan could have come up with a less idiotic excuse if she wanted people to buy it.
“But you do need my approval to get clinical clearance for the use of the equipment.”
Nadia flinched with distaste. It was true. Her new device needed to be medical grade. And it was clear Rylan wasn’t going away. Might as well get the conversation over with. She held Rylan’s gaze, her lips pressed into a thin line. “Certainly, Dr. Rylan.”
The elevator reached the OR level, and Singh left for the Da Vinci surgery. The three fellows followed her like a flock of ducklings.
Without the audience, Nadia turned away, ready to ignore whatever Rylan wanted to say.
She said nothing.
Nadia snuck a glance back at her—Rylan was fidgeting with the button on one of the sleeves of her tailored navy-blue shirt. Despite Nadia’s best efforts, her gaze traveled upward. The color of Rylan’s shirt was a stark contrast to her pale skin, and she had left open the top two buttons, revealing just a hint of the swell of her breast.
What was under that shirt? How could it be that Nadia was intimately familiar with the sounds Rylan made when she orgasmed but had no idea how to answer that question?
Nadia faced forward again. It was useless. No matter how hard she fought to keep her mind off of Rylan, it rebelliously kept straying to their shared evening. Nadia had replayed it over many sleepless nights. Everything had happened too fast and with too many clothes on Rylan’s part. It had lacked some critical components, such as being able to map out Rylan’s anatomical landmarks. Instead, their time together had only created an intense longing for more, a longing she struggled to ignore constantly.
Nadia glanced over at Rylan again. She was still fidgeting with that damn button. “For God’s sake, let me do it.”
She rushed across to Rylan to help her for the sole purpose of removing her own temptation.
“You’d think a cardiothoracic surgeon would have better dexterity,” she muttered, hoping the harsh comment would somehow lessen her realization that she would much rather be helping Rylan unbutton that shirt.
Rylan sighed. “Would it kill you to do something nice without adding an insult to it?” She withdrew her arm but not before Nadia had secured the button.
The elevator finally stopped on the ninth floor, where Nadia’s lab was. She charged ahead without looking back, but Rylan followed closely on her heels. When they reached the lab, Nadia handed Rylan a document from her desk.
“What’s this?”
“You wanted to sign for a medical-grade device.”
Rylan sat down and scanned the paper, then looked up at Nadia. “And if I don’t sign?”
Nadia shrugged. “You can do what you want. I intended to ask the chair anyway. I thought you might want to do something productive since you’ve come all this way.”
Rylan looked at the paper again. “So you want to get an organ bioreactor?”
“I am getting an organ bioreactor.” Nadia punched the words with conviction. “I need it approved for clinical use.”
“You intend to grow tissue for human use?” Rylan’s brows kneaded as she tried to piece together the scant information Nadia was giving her. “Do you have research approval for that?”
“No. It’s not a clinical trial.” Nadia tried to be nonchalant. “Yet. But if it becomes one, I can use this same device.”
“You’re saving the department money?”
“You’re welcome.”
Rylan huffed. She reached to the breast pocket of her shirt, as if she had her white coat on, but her fingers grazed the smooth fabric of her shirt instead. “Got a—?”
Before she could finish the sentence, Nadia handed her a pen.
Their fingers brushed, and Nadia’s disloyal heart instantly fluttered. Ignoring it, she forced herself to focus on the paper Rylan was signing.
After it was done, Rylan faced her with a half-smile. “So there is an actual project you’ve been working on? It wasn’t an excuse to avoid me?”
The direct question prompted an internal smile that never made it to Nadia’s lips. She considered pointing out that she excelled at multitasking and could do both. Instead, she schooled her features into well-rehearsed neutrality. “Dr. Rylan, I don’t know what you did during your surgical training, but I haven’t gotten this far by pretending to do work.”
The look of hurt in Rylan’s eyes made Nadia almost regret her words, but she pushed past it. In situations of emotional distress, only a true master could maintain self-control.
“Tell me, is this passive-aggressive attitude a hardwired part of you, or is it something I can turn off?”
Nadia continued to hold her gaze, unmoved.
“And for the love of God, it’s Ashley!” She glared at her. “I didn’t come here to discuss your work performance. Why is it so hard for you to call me by my first name?”
“Because we’re not friends, Dr. Rylan.” Nadia’s mask was firmly in place. She held Rylan’s eyes with equal intensity. It was time to set clear boundaries. “You’re my boss, and I’m your student. Anything else would be an inappropriate overfamiliarity.”
“Really? That’s where you draw the line of propriety?” Rylan threw the paper on the table. “Having sex with me is allowed, but calling me by my first name is heresy?”
Why couldn’t she understand? This conversation was only hurting them both.
Nadia’s mask cracked, and her chest rose with frustration. “You told me you could handle a one-night stand. Why aren’t you handling it?”
Rylan’s mouth snapped shut. She blinked, her stubborn expression morphing into one of mere hurt that clenched Nadia’s heart. Rylan looked down at the floor. “Because, Nadezhda,” she said, her voice low and steady, “most people have emotions that cannot be turned off on demand. We can’t all be robots like you.”
Nadia’s nostrils flared. She wished she were a robot. It would be easier to not have emotions than to work so hard to hide them. “A surgeon should have a better hold on her emotions.”
Rylan looked up to meet Nadia’s gaze. She said nothing for several long seconds. “Forget it. I’m sorry I even bothered to talk to you. I’ll stay out of your way and you stay out of mine for the next two years, and everything will be just perfect!”
Nadia met the outburst with stubborn determination and a steely indifference. “Agreed.”
Rylan’s face lost its momentary scowl. “Why do you have to be so”—her voice almost faded into silence— “you?”
Nadia stared at her. She lacked the will to fire back a hurtful comment or pretend like nothing bothered her. Pushing down the urge to say something soothing or reach out, she simply stood there.
Rylan sighed softly and left the lab without saying another word.
Still frozen in her place, it occurred to Nadia that every time she spoke with Rylan lately, one of them stormed out hurt.
She shook her head as if to chase the thought away, walked over to her desk, and sat down. She stared into the black computer screen. This is a good thing, she told herself over and over, hoping she would believe it. She was finally left alone to focus on her work. It should bring her comfort.
She continued to sit rigidly in deafening silence. A nagging feeling chipped away at her consciousness. Maybe she had hurt Rylan the same way Rylan had hurt Dan. She balled her hands into fists until her short nails bit into flesh. Except I’m not the unattainable woman in this story.