Make Time For Me

It didn’t matter if she was bound to end up regretting staying out late instead of sleeping as she should be. She was going to enjoy that evening. She deserved that break.

Olivia laughed when a chorus of welcome greeted them. She hadn’t realized that she was becoming a part of them – a community of their own. She recognized more people from the hospital, including her favorite nurses.

Yes, it was nice to be welcomed.

“What can I do to help?” asked Olivia when she made it to Paul.

It was hard not to smile when you saw Paul. He was tall, slim, elegant, and unfailingly cheerful, with an underlying kindness that must make it comforting to see him in an emergency, which was unfortunately when most people saw him.

“If you insist, I will put you to work,” he declared, and even if she hadn’t insisted, she let him do so. She helped with soaking the canvas, layering the seaweed and the food, and after half an hour of it, she both regretted having made the offer to help and felt like she had definitely earned the meal.

“Right, now we wait! Grab more drinks, everybody! Let’s have music! And feel free to have at the snacks but don’t ruin your appetite for the main course.”

“Sure thing, Mom,” teased Olivia, and Paul chuckled.

Even within a community, there were always groups. Maybe it was only natural that she eventually found herself with Jason, Ellie, Angela, and Paul.

“No shop talk,” declared Angela after enduring it for a few minutes, and Paul steered the conversation smoothly to their lives. And inevitably, to dating.

“Haven’t had time,” said Olivia, though that wasn’t entirely honest of her. She knew she could have made the time if she’d wanted to. She’d just been burnt before, and had no intention of being burnt again. She would choose her time to date this time, and she would do it right. The next time she got serious with somebody, it was going to last. There would be no power plays. There would be no manipulation. She would compromise on many things, but not that.

“I can understand that. I had to work for my scholarship and then med school and now this. Who has time to date? Anyway, our only options are people who work at the hospital and I’ve seen what happens there.”

“What happens?” asked Olivia, curious. Paul sighed dramatically before answering.

“My sister is a nurse. She dated a doctor, who didn’t bother to tell her that he was already married. Those who knew didn’t tell her, they just spread ugly rumors about her, and those who didn’t know just treated it like hot gossip.”

“That’s terrible!”

“She found out, and she was heartbroken. It happens so often! I don’t mean that every married doctor lies about being married, but affairs are so common.”

“It’s understandable, isn’t it?” asked Jason.

Everybody turned to him.

“I didn’t say it was okay, I said it was understandable.”

Everybody still looked at him.

“Well, it’s a high pressure situation, and if your partner is not in the same business, they don’t really know what it’s like. It’s easy to get drawn to somebody who knows what it’s like.”

Was it her imagination, or was he looking at her when he said that? Olivia shook it off.

“So, you cheated on somebody, didn’t you?” asked Angela.

Olivia grinned as Jason squirmed.

“It’s not as simple as that. Anyway, I wasn’t talking about myself. I was talking about in general. That’s why there are so many affairs in hospitals. And why they blow up spectacularly, too. With that much stress, things are bound to go wrong.”

“Mothers should hear this esteemed doctor speaking honestly before they pressure their children to marry doctors instead of becoming doctors themselves,” mumbled Ellie, making the girls hoot in approval.

“Exactly! We need trophy husbands who will pick up after us and cook and clean for us and support us unconditionally, that’s what we need. Where are the mothers telling their sons to grow up learning how to cook and make themselves pretty so that they can snag a nice doctor wife?”

The girls laughed again, Olivia slipping an arm around Angela’s shoulders.

“Excellent point, Angela. We need to find those mothers and ask them how well they taught their sons because we need good husbands who know how to take care of their hardworking, responsible, important doctor wives.”

They giggled, and Jason grinned good-naturedly.

“You know what, that’s fair enough. I asked for that one. I will put out a call for such mothers and their sons, and you can all hold interviews and decide who you’re going to pick. How about that?”

The girls toasted him, approving his idea, and Olivia sat back, leaning on her hands, her coat around her now that it was getting pretty chilly.

The beach was lovely, but she wanted to walk along and find the place she could see from her cottage window. She wanted to walk with her feet in the water, watch scuttling crabs, see the stars wink and be reflected in the water. She wanted to watch the glory of the sunset and feel at home.

But it wasn’t so bad, being there with friends, either.

Angela got up to get another drink, Paul got up to check on progress, and Ellie grabbed her sketchpad from her bag and started drawing. Ellie, Olivia had discovered, was an excellent artist.

Olivia couldn’t sit still any longer. She got up.

Jason looked up at her.

“Going somewhere?”

“Just for a walk.”

“I’ll come with you.”

Olivia hesitated, but there was no polite way to say no, and besides, she didn’t really want to say no. She didn’t really want company. But he stood there, looking so appealing, and he looked like he would be hurt if she said no. So she nodded, and let him fall into step beside her as she started walking.

“You’re not that comfortable around so many people, are you?”

Olivia smiled.

“What gave it away? I put up a good enough show, usually.”

“Oh, you did. You just don’t open up and you don’t crack too many silly jokes. People who like attention usually do one or the other.”

Olivia shrugged, stopped to pick up a shell.

“Maybe. You crack a lot of jokes.”

“But I don’t open up?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Well, I did consider going on stage for a while, so I guess it’s natural that I like attention.” Olivia laughed. “I was a ballerina, remember?”

“But you chose not to do it when it came to being the focus, on stage.”

Olivia had to concede the point.

“Being a doctor isn’t exactly an introvert’s choice, either.”

“Isn’t it? Maybe not that of a classic introvert, but the focus is never on the doctor. At least, not on the individual who is the doctor. It’s just the fact of what they can do. What we can do. Our faces don’t matter. What we like, who our friends are, our family, none of that matters.”

“Not to our patients, maybe. All of that matters to people around us, though.”

“You mean nepotism?”