For just a heartbeat, Dani thought Ren was actually going to hold her hand. But that was crazy, wasn’t it? First of all, that just wasn’t Ren—she wasn’t going to get personal, not here in the hall, even if they were alone. Not anywhere in the hospital, and from every indication she’d given upstairs in the OR lounge earlier, not anywhere. If Dani’d had half a working brain cell, she wouldn’t have touched her, not even a casual glancing brush of a hand on Ren’s arm, but she couldn’t seem to help herself. Whenever Ren was near, every fiber in her body seemed drawn to her, like a stem bending toward the sun. That wasn’t her either.
“Sorry,” Dani muttered. If she’d had pockets, she would’ve shoved her hands into them, but all she had on was the stupid yellow cover gown over her scrubs.
Ren looked at her oddly. “For what?”
“I shouldn’t have, you know…” She held up her hand helplessly. “Reached out.”
Ren frowned at her for an instant, then her eyes widened. “Oh. That’s okay. I mean, I didn’t mind. I mean…” She gave a helpless shrug, looking a little frustrated and a little unsure.
Just great. Way to make Ren even more uncomfortable. Dani contemplated headbanging, but that probably wasn’t going to make Ren feel any better.
“I didn’t mean to make you think something like that would bother me,” Ren said.
“You didn’t. It’s me. I’m not right.”
Ren cocked her head. “You aren’t? Are you…upset about last night?”
“What? No! Of course not!” Dani checked the hall. Still alone. She moved closer, ruthlessly stamped out the urge to touch her. “I’m so totally not upset about last night. It was—you were—just great, okay? Don’t even think anything else.”
“I don’t really want to think about it at all,” Ren said. “But I am, and I really don’t have any space in my head to do that.”
“Look, I know. I do. We ought to talk, and I get now’s not a good time.”
Ren relieved. “I know. Thank you. I should go. I have—”
“Nope, we’re going to get some air.” Dani smiled. “I promise, nothing heavy. And you’ll be five minutes from anyplace in the hospital. Just a few minutes, Ren.”
Ren gave her a slightly wary look, but she smiled, and that smile—well, Dani would probably do anything for that. “All right. Just five minutes.”
“Stairs or elevator?” Dani said, leading the way down the hall.
“Um, stairs?” Ren said, making it sound like a question.
“Stairs it is.” Dani realized she probably wasn’t making a lot of sense or even speaking in complete sentences, but that was the best she could do. She just wanted to keep Ren from changing her mind and disappearing.
They climbed up three flights before Ren said, “Dani?”
“Yeah?”
“Where are we going?”
“Two more flights.”
Ren followed silently for another thirty seconds before blurting, “But that’s the—”
“Yep.” Dani pushed open the door at the top of the stairwell and held it open so Ren could walk out past her. “The roof.”
Across the flat expanse of gray concrete, several wide, white swaths of paint denoted several circles within a square. Red flags on slender metal poles at the corners designated the landing area for the medevac helicopters. None of the helos from Starvac and Airmed were housed at PMC. Their home bases and flight crews flew out of two of the other trauma centers across the river in Center City, but all the level-one trauma centers in the city received patients as needed from both air transport systems. Presently the rooftop was empty of everything except the breeze rippling the LZ flags and the midday sun.
“Over here.” Dani held out her hand automatically, and before she could take it back, Ren grasped it. When she didn’t let go, Dani lightly tugged her across the roof to the chest-high wall facing the four-thousand-plus acres of Fairmont Park, the Schuylkill River bordered by the river drives, and beyond that, Center City, Philadelphia. Cars silently whizzed by on the expressway, just visible beyond the tops of the trees along Lincoln Drive. Up on the roof of the hospital, in the heart of the Mt. Airy residential section, they were far enough from the city that none of the sounds or the scents of an urban metropolis reached them. Instead, the breeze coming across the river through the trees almost tasted like mountain air, fresh and clean in the bright sunlight.
“Oh,” Ren said, letting out a surprised breath. “This is beautiful.”
“Yeah, I’ve always thought so. I discovered it a couple days after I started here. Well, I knew about it because I came up for a trauma, but I was looking for someplace to get away for a few seconds, you know? And I thought of here.”
“I’ve been up here when a trauma has come in,” Ren said, leaning her forearms on the top of the wall, “but I never looked out. Not really.” She turned her head to study Dani. “I think I have a very narrow field of vision.”
The way she said it sounded as if she’d just discovered something about herself she didn’t like.
“Maybe,” Dani said, “that’s just because you can focus so well on what you’re doing.”
Ren pressed her lips together in an almost-smile. “There you go, finding the good side of things. Even if they aren’t really there.”
“They’re there, where you’re concerned.” Dani chuckled and shook her head. “Believe me, I don’t always. That’s what got me up here in the first place—those first few weeks after coming over from Franklin, I wasn’t finding much to be happy about.”
“Was it tough, starting in a new place like that, when you were almost finished with your training?” Before Dani could answer, Ren grimaced, as if catching an unwanted thought in midsentence. “Well, that was a dumb question. Of course it was. I imagine it was a nightmare.”
“Not quite that bad—Quinn made the transition as smooth as anyone could. Still, none of us expected it, so we were pretty much in shock. And yeah, it was scary, but…” She shrugged. “Not much scarier than anything else we’ve had to do—all of us. Right? First night on call, first emergency room consult, first of a million first procedures. You do what you have to do.” She grinned. “Besides, you can do anything for a month.”
Ren smiled at the universal mantra of medical and surgical residents worldwide. Rotations usually lasted a month, or two or three months, but somehow it all got distilled down to a month for the purposes of survival. No matter how bad it got, how grueling the assignment, they could all do anything one month at a time.
“I’m sorry that Franklin’s program got defunded—that was terrible for all of you,” Ren said, catching Dani’s gaze. “But I’m glad you’re here.”
“Me too.”
“I would—” Ren caught her breath. “I would be very sorry if we’d never met.”
“Ren,” Dani said softly, wondering if it was possible for a feeling to grow so large, so intense, she really would drown in it.
When Ren leaned closer, Dani held her breath and stood very, very still. If this moment, fragile as crystal, was to shatter, it would not be her doing. Ren’s lips brushed over hers, incredibly soft and somehow even warmer than the sunlight on her face. She kept her eyes open, watching Ren’s pupils widen as her lids fluttered, as delicate as a hummingbird’s wings above a petal. She ached to reach out, to glide her fingertips down Ren’s cheek to rest on the pulse leaping beneath the creamy expanse of her throat. She held back, lest Ren pull away and break the spell.
Ren murmured Dani’s name and wrapped her arms around Dani’s neck, pressing against her. Dani backed against the wall and gripped Ren’s hips, her body aflame wherever they touched. Ren’s mouth slanted against hers, and the tip of Ren’s tongue darted teasingly over hers. Dani drank in the sensation, her heart beating fast and hard in her chest, her breath not moving at all. Ren eased away with a tiny exclamation.
“I’ve been thinking about not kissing you all day,” Ren said, her arms still around Dani’s neck.
“Well, I guess that didn’t work very well,” Dani rasped, not even surprised her voice was shaking and grateful for the wall at her back. Her legs were jelly.
“Apparently not.” Ren smiled a little sheepishly. “Dani?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re vibrating.”
“Believe me, I know.”
Ren laughed. “No, I mean really.”
Dani jerked as the buzzing against her chest finally penetrated her muddled brain. “Oh. Hell.”
She shoved a hand beneath the half-untied cover gown and pulled her phone out of her shirt pocket. A quick glance and she dropped it back in. “It’s okay.”
Ren’s face morphed from soft and playful to sharply intense in a heartbeat. “ER?”
“What? No.” Dani rolled her eyes. “My mother. She never gets that I can’t just talk to her whenever she has something new and critically important to advise me about.”
“I should get back downstairs anyhow,” Ren said just a tad wistfully.
Or maybe Dani just hoped that was what she was hearing. Before Ren was completely out of reach again, Dani said hurriedly, “I’d very much like to do that again. But, you know, maybe not here in the hospital.”
Ren laughed, a full-throated laugh, and her eyes sparkled with something Dani had never seen there before. Mischief. “Do you think, Dani? Seeing as how there’s nowhere private, and apparently, kissing you does things to my brain? Like shut it off?”
Trying hard not to smirk at the outraged frustration in Ren’s tone, Dani said mildly, “Does it? I’m not going to apologize.”
“No, that’s on me.”
“So I guess you didn’t like it,” Dani said, pushing her luck but wanting to hear it anyway. Wanting, needing to know she wasn’t in this all alone.
“You know I did.”
And that’s all it took to turn everything inside her into a lava flow. “Me too. And it’s driving me crazy.” Dani took a step closer. “I want to touch you so—”
Ren held up a hand between them. “Stop. If you say it, I’ll be thinking about it, and I can’t think about it.” Ren took a step back, turning to look out across the city, but her words rang clearly. “I can’t not do what I have to do. And thinking about you, about being with you, makes it so hard.”
Dani sucked in a breath. “It’s not supposed to do that.”
“Maybe not. Maybe not for other people, but it does for me.” Ren laughed a little harshly. “But then, I’ve never been like other people.”
“That’s not a bad thing—don’t think it is,” Dani said quickly. “You are you. And however you are, whoever you are, you’re terrific.”
Ren shook her head. “Maybe that’s not quite true. It’s not what I know that’s important, Dani, it’s what I do. It’s what I can do, and I’m not sure I’ll be able to.”
To Dani’s horror, Ren’s voice broke, and the sound almost broke her. She grasped Ren’s shoulders. “Ren. It’s okay. You’re doing a great job. You’re way too hard on yourself.”
“That’s not true,” Ren said. “We have to be hard on ourselves. You know that.”
“Sure, we have to do the very best we can, but trust me, your best is way good enough.”
“Good enough isn’t always enough,” Ren said.
Dani let out a breath. “I should’ve expected you to be stubborn.”
“Probably.” Ren smiled wryly. “All I’m trying to say is that what I need to do in the lab, what I need to do this last year on rotations, is all I have room for. And I’m sorry.”
Dani took in a breath. “Don’t be sorry. Just…don’t be sorry about anything between us.” She grimaced when her phone vibrated again. She let it go, her whole being focused on Ren.
“I’m not,” Ren said softly.
For now, that would have to do.
“Come on,” Dani said, knowing what Ren wanted just then, and it wasn’t her. “Let’s go so you can check on Leo.”