Half an hour later, Zac watched Ava walk out the door, and to his horror, it felt as if the ground was falling away from his feet, like it had a year ago when the accident irrevocably damaged his wife. What the heck had just happened?
Guilt pushed his lips together: this infidelity after Roslyn’s death touched so many emotions. He blew out that other shaft of guilt that he had lived with since his wife had become comatose. So many, many emotions and he seemed to have lost the good ones. Like humour. Joy. Anticipation. He could barely remember when he’d last experienced those feelings, and yet in one night with Ava he’d felt them all.
Memories of the accident still made him shudder with regrets and he just wanted peace.
Peace from loss.
Peace from survivor’s guilt.
Peace from wondering what he could have done differently.
After twelve months of being suspended in a horrible limbo, he’d decided to spend a month as a locum in Alice Springs to lose himself in remote medical care. Last month, on his first posting as a fly-in, fly-out emergency doctor, those four weeks in Weipa Hospital hadn’t brought peace. Quite the opposite, in fact, but that had worked. At times frantic and crazy with emergencies, alongside challenging and stimulating chaos with the remote location and the lack of services, Weipa had at least made him feel alive.
Hopefully the next month at Alice Springs, a post his friend George had suggested as not quite so isolated, would be equally restorative and he’d be able to go back home with a fresh perspective and positive energy.
He hadn’t realised his resilience had been so badly eroded by the drawn-out nature of Roslyn’s death. And the heart-wrenching strain of sitting opposite his wife’s broken-hearted parents for so many hours at her bedside. He hoped to hell he’d never have to watch a child of his wither away and die without waking, and the thought of ever again being responsible for another person’s wellbeing in that way made him shudder.
Which was a good reason not to see Ava May again. Don’t get involved.
He’d spoken to women on flights before, had laughs even, but never, ever had he connected like he had instantly with the blue-eyed, blonde-haired Ava May. To the point of shock. And never had he invited a strange woman back to his place and rocked the earth like they had done last night. Never had he lost himself so completely in another person. And felt that joy. Ever.
Hence the guilt.
It was as if their stars had collided and their mutual gravitational forces had snapped together, despite what was in their pasts or futures. Melded, for one short night. But that was ridiculous. He’d come here to get away from emotion.
He wanted peace, remember?
To remain isolated and insulated from others.
Just a FIFO locum, using his skills to the max and forgetting about Sydney and all the trauma it held while the house sold. The plan was to shake the exhaustion that was bone-deep from twelve months of grieving.
Then Ava had happened.
Bloody hell. He really had intended just to have a meal together.
If only he hadn’t slept with her. He felt more ensnared by strands of the searing memory of last night and the almost desperate pure lust he’d let loose than he could possibly hope to deal with. It wasn’t just her strong, sweet face or her innate calmness that had captured him.
He shook his head. It was nothing. Just fascination.
As if he could seriously fall in love with this woman in one night.
That was crazier than him being here in Alice Springs to work instead of back in Sydney. This was all temporary. He and Roslyn had grown up in the same world, but even that hadn’t turned out perfectly. What hope did he and an outback midwife have to live happily ever after?
He’d stop this. Ava had gone, and despite there being a crossover of their professions, he was an emergency doctor and she an agency nurse for maternity. There wasn’t much chance they’d interact. He wouldn’t ring her number, and he had the solid belief she would wait for him to call first.
His hand reached to the back of his head and pulled the hair at the nape of his neck until it hurt. He needed to wake up. Shake it off. A one-night stand in a place thousands of kilometres from where he lived?
It wasn’t too bad.
He could handle that.
He decided to go for a run. Wear himself out and then get a couple of hours’ sleep before he started work tonight. And. Forget. Ava.
Sixteen hours later, just after midnight, Alice Springs Emergency Department looked like the floor of the stock exchange during a financial crash, with arms raised and voices loud. The dozen or so partially curtained cubicles surrounding the central office had reached capacity, the staff had doubled with call-ins, and there were trolleys bearing patients in the walkways around the central computer hub where nobody had time to sit to type or even answer one of the insistently ringing phones. The majority of the patients came from a busload of inebriated young footy players. Most had not been wearing seatbelts and had been thrown violently forward when their vehicle had ploughed into an unfortunate camel herd out of town. The impact had catapulted passengers down the bus corridor and resulted in broken bones, multiple lacerations and some magnificent bruises. They’d arrived in a convoy of ambulances to enliven the night.
Though the injured men were partially anaesthetised by their alcohol consumption, the emergency department rang with groans and muttered expletives and some not-quite-so-muttered outbursts. Zac stood to the left of the ambulance entrance, examining tipsy and torn players who were triaged his way. There weren’t enough ED staff to manage the patient flow, but help came from other wards, pulled from less frantic areas in the hospital until the rush could be contained, with an efficiency he could only wish for in his Sydney hospital. Thankfully, the emergency department had been rebuilt recently, so the layout and lighting made for effective flowthrough.
He looked up as an additional two nurses appeared from the staff entrance and he waved to direct them his way. His come-hither head signal froze as he took in the shorter blonde woman gliding towards him and his breath hitched in his chest – Ava! Recognition and a flare of something else ignited. Something he didn’t know he had inside him as he glanced around at the alcohol-infused patients that filled the room.
Ava’s delicious curves were hidden beneath the purple scrubs she wore, but he didn’t need to see them to know. Every delectable inch lay imprinted in his brain. He dragged his eyes to the taller nurse, who reached him first, and kept them on the unknown woman’s face.
‘I’m Jade and this is Ava, from maternity,’ the nurse said. ‘The nursing supervisor said you guys need extra hands down here for a while?’
Zac’s grip loosened for a second in shattered concentration, and the swollen, tattooed arm he held shifted under his fingers. The man groaned in a cloud of alcoholic fumes, and Zac muttered an apology as he focused back on stabilising the fractured humerus. When he looked up again, he had himself under control.
‘Thanks. One of you with Ruth over there.’ He nodded his head towards a tall young woman in a white coat bandaging a bloody leg. ‘And one with me would be great, thanks.’ He knew which one he wanted, but he shook that thought and focused on the task at hand.
‘I’ll stay here.’ Ava spoke crisply, and Jade nodded and moved swiftly towards the other doctor.
‘What can I do, Doctor?’ Her voice was professionally neutral and she didn’t meet his eyes. He would have loved to know what was going on inside her head because he surely didn’t know what to think. Just when he’d decided it was best he never see her again … That certainly wasn’t what he was thinking now. His emotions were cheering and whooping and totally letting him down with the delight of the moment, and he was ridiculously aware of some of the ribald comments from the footballers when Ava passed them. She completely ignored them, but he found himself wanting to growl with an unexpected silent baring of teeth in the direction of the other men.
‘Could you check with X-ray to see if they’re ready for us?’ At least his mouth was working. ‘I think this will set with stabilising, without a trip to theatre, so as soon as we have the pictures then we’ll head to the plaster room.’
He caught the glance she slanted at him and the tiny smile on her lips.
Had that sounded like a come-on? His voice had dropped. Hurriedly he added, ‘To hand this guy over to the physios for some plaster.’
She flashed him a grin and turned for the phone. He watched her go and told himself it had just been a spur-of-the-moment connection. He’d already chosen to close that door. This had no future and the attraction was too strong to save them from hurt.
When she returned, he leaned towards her and said quietly in her ear, ‘I know already that this place works like a small town. Probably better not to mention we’ve already met to avoid unnecessary gossip.’
She raised her brows at him, then inclined her head. ‘Who’s our next patient?’ she asked slowly.
He’d just asked her to lie to everyone here and she’d only looked at him and moved on. He needed to do the same. He searched the room. ‘That guy just in on the spine board.’
That was the last time they had a chance to talk about anything other than work. They were too busy dealing with a neck-injury patient who needed a collar and a CAT scan before transfer, not to mention treatment for a slew of nasty glass cuts from his rapid exit through the broken back window of the bus.
‘Dr Logan?’ Ava called out to him from where she stood by the man brought in after falling from a tree. Zac had just handed the man over to Ava to admit for observation overnight for any further developing injuries. They could do further tests on him when the others had been triaged. ‘I think there’s a difference in air entry now. On the left side,’ she said.
Zac shifted back beside her and listened with his stethoscope. He met her eyes. ‘Great pick-up. There’s a definite change in breath sounds.’ He could hear the difference himself and noted the uneven chest rise as the lung began to collapse. ‘X-ray ASAP for pneumothorax.’ Zac looked down at the man and touched his shoulder. ‘Sorry, mate. We’ve more to do yet. Feeling breathless?’
The pale, quiet guy gasped a little and nodded, and Zac walked alongside his bed, heading for a phone, as the orderly whisked the patient towards X-ray.
‘I’ll set up the underwater sealed drain down there.’ Ava’s voice carried from the other end of the stretcher where she helped the orderly push the patient swiftly away. Zac nodded and picked up the phone to warn X-ray to clear for an urgent patient before he followed.
She was good at diagnosis. He might have missed that deterioration considering his workload if she hadn’t asked his opinion. As for the treatment, he had no doubt she’d acquire the necessary equipment and be ready to assist with the decompression drain. The hidden depths of this woman he’d passed in the night continued to amaze him. He’d scored the one-woman assist team he could see the other doctors envied.
Which wasn’t helping the attraction he tried to mask with a set face. There was no denying the fact that he noticed whenever she moved his way, or that his eyes would follow her as she worked. And once, when a high-as-a-kite footballer put his hand out to fondle her backside, Zac was between the two of them in an instant, casually blocking the guy’s reach and delivering a hard stare.
‘I can manage,’ Ava had told him with a smile, ‘but thanks.’
A couple of the stroppy men had needed a firm word and a glare before they behaved for their purple-scrubbed nurse, and Zac had delivered both out of sight of their target. If he’d hesitated over something she was there with a suggestion, her knowledge of emergency treatment the adjunct to his.
‘Ava,’ a man called out. Zac looked up as a blond guy, one who seemed to know her well, put his hand out to grab her arm, but she steered around him deliberately, with an emphatic shake of her head. Something about the smirk on the man’s face made Zac want to pin him to the wall by the throat. Interestingly, the other midwife who’d arrived with Ava made a beeline for the man and towed him away before Zac could insert himself between them. Which really was out of character for him – he never lost his cool and concentration at work. He didn’t know where this caveman act was coming from.
After nearly two hours of frantic sorting, there were poignant moments in the mayhem. The older gentleman admitted for palliative end-of-life care, with his wife needing a hug from both Ava and Zac, showed such gratitude when the pain relief began to work properly and he could relax. And a three-year-old girl who’d stuck her mother’s earring into her ear canal, making Zac produce some pretty fast wheedling for permission from the small child to remove it with success.
At last, most patients had been shipped off to wards or home, the triage area began to clear, and Zac finally was able to lift his head to allow less immediate thoughts to intrude. He could see the nurses had begun the mammoth task of restocking for the next onslaught, which could come in an instant or in many hours. He stood back and watched the ED as it reverted to quiet calm with many empty, freshly made beds. Someone was missing. He scanned the empty open area again, but there was no sign of her.
Ava had gone. She’d left the emergency department without saying goodbye, and he felt jolted. Stupidly bereft. But of course she wouldn’t say goodbye. There could be no future between him, with his city practice, and the bush midwife, so why would she waste any more of her time with him? Plus, he’d been the one to mention he didn’t want to be the cause of any awkwardness for her. He’d be leaving soon, but she had to work in this community. There was no need to advertise their connection if nothing was to come of it.
‘Hey, Ruth. Did you see where Ava went?’
‘Back to maternity. She’s good, isn’t she?’ The tall woman smiled. ‘She’s one of the desert midwives and works here as a casual nurse. She spends most of her time doing outreach midwifery with the stations and remote communities between Uluru and Katherine, and she’s pretty passionate about it.’
‘I can imagine that.’ The words were more to himself than to his colleague.
Ruth hadn’t finished. ‘I guess she needs to deal if she’s the only medical person in an outreach settlement, and it makes for good intuition.’ She glanced longingly towards the staffroom. ‘I’m going for coffee. Wanna come?’
Zac followed Ruth thoughtfully. He’d been wrong to assume Ava would be here a long while and it would be his job to avoid her. She’d be disappearing to another post soon, possibly hundreds of kilometres away, and when this shift ended in the morning, it might just be his last chance to see her before she vanished into the outback.