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Mel follows close on Dr. Langdon as he leaves the room. She needs to write up their notes but she also needs to ask –
“Dr. Langdon?”
“All yours,” he prompts, “But talk fast. I’ve got to pee.”
“Are you okay?”
He stops abruptly and turns to face her. She doesn’t see it coming. They collide.
There’s a tangle of limbs as he reaches out to steady her and she grabs at his arm to hold herself up. Under her fingertips, his sleeve is warm and moist.
“Woah,” he says, and he ducks his head down to make eye contact in the way that he does when he wants her to feel safe. “Hey. Sorry. Are you okay?”
“Um, yes,” Mel answers, “Except that I was asking you that question.”
He blinks, rapidly, and then smooths his lips into a smile. The kind that makes his cheeks dimple. It’s boyish, and charming, and he’s clearly very aware of it.
In this moment, it does not inspire trust.
“Yeah,” he says. His bangs are curling. There’s a fine sheen of moisture at his hairline. “I’m fine. Don’t worry about me.”
She lets her eyes fall to her hand on his sleeve. “Why are you so sweaty?”
“What? I’m not–” he starts to say, and then seems to think better of it. “It’s a little hot in here.”
It’s October. It’s not hot. Langdon put a hoodie on over his scrubs before their last patient visit, maybe twenty minutes ago. It makes him look a bit like Dr. Robby, Mel thinks, and very much unlike himself. Langdon usually wears a t-shirt under his scrubs. She’s never seen him in a hoodie before during his shift.
“Dr. Langdon, can I please speak with you privately?” she asks.
Something shutters behind his expression. “Of course, Dr. King,” he says. He’s being formal. He usually calls her Mel, when they’re not with a patient, no matter what she calls him. His voice has changed too. She thinks maybe she’s upset him, but she’s not sure. Sometimes he’s like two different people in the same body. “Lead the way.”
He follows her from the hallway into the nearby breakroom. The door closes behind him.
He speaks first.
“I wasn’t kidding about having to go pee, you know. So, if you could just say what you have to say and get it over with, that would be great.”
Mel can do that. “When I first met you,” she explains, “I noticed that you tended to sweat a lot.”
He squints, eyeline directed somewhere over Mel’s shoulder. It’s an acknowledgement, maybe. In any case, it’s not a denial.
“And then you left for ten months, and when you came back to the program you were on conditions. And I realized that you don’t actually sweat a lot. I mean, normally. Until this afternoon.”
He nods, his whole body bouncing through his knees.
“What about it?”
“I just thought – maybe you might need some help. And I want to make sure that I ask you this time. If you need some help. Because last time, I didn’t ask.”
Langdon lets out a long breath through pursed lips. He’s shifting his weight back and forth from foot to foot.
“Jesus, Mel,” he says, “It was never your job to take care of me, okay? It’s my job to take care of you. To teach you. To be a good example. I know I did a terrible job of that on your first day.” He cranes his neck to make eye contact with her again. “And I’m sorry for that.”
“I think you’re a great teacher,” she says, honestly. “I’m grateful I get to learn from you.”
He smiles. This one is the kind that starts from his eyes and pulls the rest of his face up. It’s the kind of smile Langdon does for himself, not for anyone else.
“So, are you?” Mel asks, “Okay?”
“I, um—” Langdon shifts from foot to foot, as his expressive face moves fluidly from smile to grimace. “It’s actually a little embarrassing.”
She raises her eyebrows and looks around. There’s no one else in the room. It’s not often anyone has much time for a break in the ED. “It’s just me.”
“Um—” He’s stalling, maybe, or he doesn’t know where to start. His fidgeting is constant. More than normal, definitely. She tries not to let it distract her. “It probably won’t surprise you that one of my conditions is random urine screening?”
Mel assumed as much. She shakes her head.
“Yeah, I might have picked up a habit of, um, waiting to use the restroom? So that if I get pulled out to give a sample, I don’t have to be off the floor for more than a few minutes.”
“Oh!” And Mel really should have found another room for them to talk in, after all. It’s true that there are no people in here, but there’s also no thermometer and no heart rate monitor. “You have a UTI!”
Langdon flushes red to the tips of his ears.
“Yeah,” he mutters, “Just burning and cloudy urine this morning, but now I’m pretty sure I’m spiking a fever, so...”
“You’re not on antibiotics?”
He shakes his head. “Not yet.”
“Back, side, or abdominal pain? Nausea or vomiting?”
“No unusual pain. No red flags apart from a low-grade fever for the past half hour or so. And the – obvious, I guess.” He reaches up to scrub the sweat from his hairline with the edge of his sleeve.
“Will you let me assess you properly?”
“If you, uh, wouldn’t mind, I’d appreciate it being you. But I was hoping to wait until handover. There’s less than an hour left and I don’t, um—”
“You don’t want me to present to Dr. Robby.”
Langdon bobs his head, licks his lips anxiously, presses them together. “You see a lot, huh?”
“Well, I can’t exactly present you to yourself,” she says, which is both true and also not at all what he meant, and they both know it.
“But if you need to leave after shift,” Langdon’s already backpedalling, self-conscious, “That’s completely fine. I can go to Shen when he gets in. He’ll be cool.”
“Well, we can do better than that, because I can put in the labs now, and then we can check in with Dr. Shen at handover and get you treated. That’s much faster than doing the labs after handover. You shouldn’t put this off. You know that.”
“You’re the best, Mel.”
She smiles up at him. He’s still bouncing.
“Go take a urine sample, clean catch,” she says, “And then come back here. I’m going to find a room we can borrow. And, Dr. Langdon?”
“Yeah?”
“In future, please go pee when you need to go pee.”
Langdon snorts and clamps his eyes shut in a momentary display of chagrin. A moment later he winks them open one at a time and beams up at her. That’s a smile she believes in.
“You got it, Dr. King.”
This time, the formality’s affectionate. She’s sure of that. Mel smiles back.