Chapter Nine
542 Words
‘Damn,’ Hugh said. ‘I wanted to talk to you.’
‘I’m sure it will keep.’
Hugh thought for a moment as he answered his page. Emily was right, it would keep and what he had to ask her would probably go better with wine!
‘Can I borrow you for ten minutes on Friday night?’
‘Borrow me?’
‘Well, I know you’ll be busy but there’s something that I want to ask you away from everyone else.’
‘Like what?’
‘Not here.’
‘Have you got another rash?’ Emily smirked.
‘Ha-ha.’
They both smiled as they remembered the day when Hugh, for once, had struggled to focus. Emily had been scrub nurse and had frowned as a usually together Hugh had breathed loudly beside her, sweat beading on his forehead as he kept moving from one foot to the other. The second the operation had been over he had fled and, walking past the male changing rooms on the way to the staffroom, Emily had seen his frantic face peer out.
‘Emily...’ he’d hissed. ‘I need some antihistamine.’
‘What?’
‘Now. IM...’
‘An injection?’
Hugh let the towel slip a fraction and Emily’s eyes widened at the sight of the angry red welts and urticarial rash spreading down his***.
‘Believe me, Emily, that’s not the worst of it...’
‘I don’t want to see the rest.’
Oh, my!
Emily had returned with the injection and some hydrocortisone cream for Hugh to put on himself and had happily stabbed him.
‘Maybe it was the shaving cream...’
She didn’t want to know that he’d shaved, or that she, whoever she was this week, had shaved him. Emily was tired of the glimpses into his love life.
‘Have you changed your washing powder?’ Emily asked instead.
‘No.’ Hugh shook his head and thought for a moment. ‘Though I did buy the liquid one.’
As it turned out, he had bought the triple-strength liquid one!
Happily, his reaction had calmed and the theatre list had gone ahead, Emily trying and failing not to dwell on the fact that he was*** and bald beneath his scrubs.
‘What will I do without you?’ Hugh asked, still smiling as he recalled that day.
‘Inject your own antihistamine!’
‘That was a long time ago, Emily.’
Yet she remembered it like it was yesterday.
The hurt, the jealousy, the itch of her own that she simply refused to scratch.
‘If I don’t catch up with you properly,’ Hugh said, ‘then I’ll see you Friday.’
‘Okay.’
* * *
Friday found her in the staff changing room, getting ready to go to Imelda’s, a nice casual bar that did amazing food and, on weekends, had a band.
Emily was tired before the night had even started but, given it was her leaving do, she did her best not to show it.
- Writer
