Daniel lay in his lofted bed and stared at a lone cobweb on the ceiling. Too tired to properly dry his hair, he felt the rumpled comforter beneath his head grow colder and wetter. He knew that intern year wasn’t supposed to be easy (he’d once said the same thing about medical school); but he hadn’t anticipated losing the energy and stamina of a pre-med college student by the time he turned twenty-eight, and he definitely hadn’t accounted for a global pandemic. After another 20-hour shift, he’d flopped onto his unwashed sheets and landed in the shape of a homicide chalk outline: legs splayed, one arm slung towards his forehead, the other angled towards his hip as if he’d been pumping his arms while running. When was the last time he’d gone on a run?
A text message awakened his phone screen. Without lifting his head, he strained his extraocular muscles to read the sender’s name, expecting his younger brother asking what classes to take next semester or his girlfriend telling him when she might be in town again. He winced at the potential tease and his hip-angled arm drifted further south in anticipation.
“Hey”—properly spelled and capitalized, no punctuation or emoji. No inflection, no clues. A lawful neutral text.
When he recognized the author he jumped to reply, ignoring the cool trickle of water down his neck as he sat up at attention. “Hey, how are you?”
“I’m good. I’m just checking in because I remembered you were doing an Emergency Medicine residency. And how you’re on the front lines. I hope you are okay. I don’t know how it is over there.”
He warmed at the thought of being wanted or at least cared for.
“Sorry, that was a lot. I know it’s been a while.”
It had been over a year. He counted again; it seemed like so much longer.
He still remembered everything. Granted, there weren’t that many isolated experiences to remember. They had seen each other a handful of times in a very practical, physical context. And he had a girlfriend now, who actually considered him her boyfriend.
Years, miles, and girlfriends notwithstanding, Daniel thought often about Grace. How she looked even better than usual somehow that time she came from the gym and was late to meet him at her apartment. Her hair piled on top of her head, sports bra peeking out of a sleeveless shirt, strong, supple legs almost wholly appreciable in spandex shorts. He’d never seen her in makeup, but her cheeks blushed from exercise and embarrassment for her tardiness. She still needed to eat and shower. Daniel had already eaten dinner but accepted the homemade noodles she offered when she reheated some for herself. She wouldn’t go on a real date with him, so he’d take what he could get.
Before her, he had been intimate with four people, two of them girlfriends. At twenty-six, he’d been afraid to ask her numbers in case she might return the question. When she learned he was about to graduate medical school she asked, “Have you ever done it in an exam room? When it’s been cleaned, of course.” He hadn’t. There were a lot of things he would do with and for her for the first time.
He hadn’t been sure what to expect. They had interacted only briefly before defining their (lack of) relationship. He knew she would be moving in a few months to take a job closer to her family. He was lonely and wanted to spend time with someone outside of the medical school—to feel like a guy in his twenties, not a Hippocratic robot running on flashcards and crass mnemonics.
The first time they’d planned to get together, she’d had to cancel. Her grandmother was sick and she didn’t know when she would have another opportunity to spend a long weekend with her. If he’d told any of his friends about Grace, they probably would have warned him that she was flaking. But he didn’t, and she wasn’t. But he had realized early on that Grace said what she meant and meant what she said, even if it made other people unhappy.
She had texted him most nights after her family had gone to bed. What started as casual flirting escalated into scrolling paragraphs about why he’d chosen to pursue Emergency Medicine and how she worried about financially providing for her parents and grandparents as they aged. When he’d felt a residency interview had gone well, she had been the first person he’d wanted to tell about it. “I can’t wait to celebrate with you soon,” he’d written. She hadn’t reciprocated explicitly but indulged him with “Congratulations!” and an emoji with a small smile.
Their first night together had been weeks later after Daniel finished his OB/GYN rotation. Conducting pelvic exams was not any kind of preparation for being with a woman as a partner, and he fumbled with even non-suggestive moves such as offering her a bottle of water. What was he, her Lyft driver? Erring on the side of gentleness even before any medical school soft skills indoctrination, he asked for consent at every “checkpoint” as a middle schooler might define them, from taking off his shirt to moving to the bed. “It’s your shirt, your choice,” Grace had laughed, and he was willing to make as much of a fool of himself as necessary to be the one to make her laugh like that again.
When he touched his lips to hers he felt her smile, tasted her sweet mint lip balm as she exhaled. He remembered discovering and tracing each of her tattoos and watching her pupils dilate when they turned the lights off. He hoped because her brain was getting a surge of dopamine to match his, that her nucleus accumbens might be sufficiently stimulated for her to reconsider their original agreement as he had. That she might want something more, too.
“It’s tough, but I’m okay.” He replied less than a minute later. Always too eager. “It’s good to hear from you.”
Amara Prato is an MS1 at the Perelman School of Medicine. Amara can be reached by email at [email protected].
