Delivery Dash

I do the overnight deliveries at St. Alder's General, mostly blood samples and paperwork nobody reads until morning. I'm twenty-three, single by choice, and I've never once lost a game of chicken in my life. That last part matters, so keep it in mind.

It was a Tuesday, around one in the morning, and I had a package for the fourth floor nurse's station. The fluorescent lights up there hum like they're complaining about their job, and the whole corridor smells like industrial bleach.

The senior nurse on duty that night was Victoria. Thirty-one, been there forever as far as I could tell, and famously impossible to rattle. I'd heard the other delivery guys talk about her. Nobody had ever gotten so much as a raised eyebrow out of her.

Naturally, this sounded like a challenge.

I set the box down on her counter with a little extra thump.

"Special delivery," I said. "Handle with care. It's either a heart for transplant or a birthday cake, they don't label these things."

She didn't look up from her chart. "Just sign there, please."

"Come on, I'm funny. Ask anyone at the loading dock."

"Then the loading dock must set a very low bar." She tapped the signature line. "There."

I signed. She slid the clipboard back without touching my hand, which I didn't even know was possible. Then she turned to a colleague and said, "Dr. Briggs's labs are still pending, chase them, will you?"

Dismissed. By a woman signing a form. I walked back to the elevator feeling like I'd been swatted with a rolled-up newspaper.

Now, a reasonable man would let that go. But I've been told I stopped taking reasonable offers somewhere around the time I learned to talk, so I spent the next hour composing round two in my head while I hauled orthopedic supplies to the second floor.

* * *

My round two came at three in the morning. Another package, this one genuinely urgent, which gave me an excuse to come back to the fourth floor looking purposeful instead of pathetic.

Victoria was alone at the station when I set it down. She glanced at the label, then at me.

"Back so soon?"

"We keep meeting like this," I said. "Is it fate, or do you just order a lot of gauze?"

"It's the gauze."

I handed over the clipboard, and here's where I made my move. Deliberate, timed, a brush of my fingers across hers as she took it. Light. Casual. A professional's touch.

She looked at my hand. Then at my face. Then she did the eyebrow.

"Was that it?" she asked.

"Was what what?"

"Was that your attempt?" She set the clipboard down. "I've been briefed, you know. The porters have a running joke about whether you can make me blush. Lesley in the lab started it. She's rooting for you."

"There's a joke?"

"There's a joke. And I want you to know that nobody has taken your side except Lesley. That should tell you something." She picked up her coffee and took a slow sip. "If you're going to try, try. This was a hand brush. My dentist does a hand brush."

I stood there for a second, recalibrating. "Okay. What would count as trying?"

"That's your problem to solve, isn't it?" And she went back to her chart like I was furniture.

The thing about Victoria, I'd learn later, is that she doesn't win by refusing the game. She wins by changing what the game is. I did not know that yet. At three in the morning I just knew my pride had a hole in it and I was going to keep poking it.

* * *

At four fifteen I came back with a truly unnecessary delivery of printer paper, just to have an excuse, and she was waiting for it. I could tell she was waiting, which should have been a warning sign.

"There's a man delivering paper at four in the morning," she said to nobody. "What dedication."

"Price of service."

"Mm. Tell me, Robby." She'd read my badge. Of course she'd read my badge. "Do you have anywhere to be before your shift ends?"

"Nope."

"Good." She came around the counter. "Then walk with me. I want to show you something, and I'd rather not do it while you're performing for the corridor."

The performance bit stung. I followed her anyway, down a side corridor to a cramped break room with a folding table, a coffee machine older than me, and one feature I'd never noticed from the outside: a big window set into the wall, except it wasn't a window. It was a two-way mirror, and on the other side was an empty exam room.

"Watch," she said, and walked through a door into the exam room.

From the break room I could see her perfectly. She picked up a chart, arranged herself, and started what was clearly a mock examination on one of those rubber training dummies, the kind with no head and one plastic arm. She listened to its chest. She asked it questions.

"So, Mr. Dummy, how long has the pain persisted? Very good. And on a scale of one to ten?"

I stood there like an idiot at a window, watching a thirty-one-year-old nurse take the pulse of a mannequin, and I still could not look away. There was something about it. She knew I was watching. That was the entire point of her knowing I was watching.

She came back into the break room, pulling on her cardigan like she'd just finished a full patient round.

"That," she said, "is what it feels like."

"What what feels like?"

"Being watched. Being the show instead of the audience." She poured herself more coffee. "You spend your whole shift being looked at and spoken over and rated by a running joke, Robby. Lesley gave me the forecast. It is not favorable."

"Lesley talks too much."

"Lesley is delightful, and she works nights in a basement, so let her have her fun." She leaned against the table. "Here's my counteroffer, since you're clearly not going to stop pestering me. You want to make me blush. Fine. But everything you do from now on, you do knowing I could put an audience on the other side of that glass. Or in the room. My terms, my timing. Do you understand what I'm offering?"

"Not even slightly."

"Good. That's the right answer." She checked her watch. "Think about it. Paper delivery guy."

I walked back to the loading dock in a fog. The dented vending machine ate my dollar, which felt thematically correct. Lesley was down there sorting specimen trays, twenty-four, lab coat two sizes too big, and she took one look at my face and grinned.

"She got to you, didn't she. What did she do?"

"Made me watch her examine a dummy through a two-way mirror."

Lesley put down a tray and pressed her hand to her chest. "Oh, that's so good. I wish I'd thought of that. So what are you going to do?"

"That's the question, isn't it," I said. And the honest answer, which I did not give her, was that I had no idea, except that I was definitely going back up to the fourth floor.

She was waiting for me at the nurse's station at five sharp, which was the last hour of my shift, which was not an accident.

"You came back," she said.

"I have a delivery." I held up a cardboard box with a lab supply label on it.

"You delivered that twenty minutes ago. I signed for it." She took it from me anyway and set it behind the counter. "So you just brought an empty box upstairs to have a reason."

"Okay, yes!"

"Good. Honesty is step one." She glanced down the corridor both ways. "The exam room is empty until seven. The break room door locks from the inside. Do you want to know what my counteroffer actually is, or do you want to keep doing this dance badly?"

"Tell me."

"Come with me and I'll show you. That's the ask. You can say no and go home and never think about it again, or you can say yes and find out. Either way I win, because you're already thinking about it."

She was right, which was annoying. "Yes," I said.

* * *

The break room smelled like burnt coffee and hand sanitizer. Victoria locked the door, then turned to face me, arms crossed, entirely calm.

"Here's the arrangement. You do what I tell you. You stop whenever you say stop, and I stop, no argument, and we never speak of it. Same for me. And this is separate from work. I don't sign your timesheet, you don't write my reviews, and nothing about tomorrow changes whichever way tonight goes. Agreed?"

"Agreed."

"And you understand there may be an audience?"

"Like Lesley?"

"Like whoever I decide deserves a show. Tonight, possibly just me. Possibly not." She said it like she was reading a menu. "Last chance to run, paper boy."

"I've never lost a game of chicken in my life."

"I know. That's why I picked you." And she reached up