The Last Hour

The apartment I rent has good light and bad acoustics, and by that I mean the walls don't do anything to help you. Every sound is yours alone. When I finished my coffee at nine and opened my laptop and stared at a freelance invoice that was three weeks overdue, the only thing I could hear was the refrigerator humming, and some time after I turned forty I decided I would rather hear anything else, even the beep of a heart monitor at two in the morning.

So that's how I came to be a hospital volunteer at an age when most people have better sense. I signed up two years ago, when I was forty, and I took the overnight shifts because nobody else wanted them and because the quiet hours suited the quiet in my head, or at least kept it company. I restock things. I fold linens. I ferry forms from one floor to another and I nod at nurses who are too tired to talk. Most nights it is the least dramatic job in the building, and I love it in a way that would embarrass me if anyone asked directly.

The county hospital is not a pretty place, but at night it has a rhythm, and after a few months I could read it the way you read a song on the radio. The ER down on two runs hot and cold. Around midnight it floods, around three it empties out, and somewhere in that empty stretch the whole building seems to exhale. That was the hour I lived for, honestly, the last hour of the night shift, when the fluorescents buzzed over empty corridors and the air smelled of antiseptic and somebody's forgotten coffee.

And that was the hour Galen worked.

He's an ER nurse, thirty-eight years old, been at this hospital for ten years, and he is built the way you'd expect a man to be built who spends his shifts lifting patients and sprinting to codes. Dark hair buzzed short, forearms that the scrubs never quite contained, a way of moving through a hallway like the hallway was lucky to have him. He's never married. I know this because the overnight crew talks, and because when he laughs, which is often, somebody always says something about how nobody's managed to keep him yet.

For weeks I had been watching him work. I'm not proud of it exactly, but I'm not ashamed either, I was a lonely woman doing free labor in a fluorescent hallway and he was the best-looking thing in it. He'd catch me looking and hold it a beat too long, and then he'd wink, actually wink, as if he had never once doubted himself, and I'd go back to my cart of folded towels with my face hot enough to fry an egg on.

There was one night in October, a Tuesday, when he came around the corner pushing an empty gurney and said, "You know, Taylor, you fold those sheets like you're mad at them."

"They started it," I said.

He laughed, that easy laugh, and steered the gurney past me, and said over his shoulder, "One of these nights I'm going to find out what you do when you're not defending helpless laundry."

I thought about that sentence for about six days.

* * *

The night everything happened was a long one even by night-shift standards. I won't pretend to remember every detail, because mostly I remember the fluorescent buzz and the squeak of my cart wheels and the way the third floor goes glassy-eyed after four. What I remember clearly is that around five in the morning I was sent up to restock the supply closet on three, the one near the old family lounge, boxes of nitrile gloves and IV tubing and the little paper cups nobody uses anymore.

I had a box of large gloves halfway off the shelf when the door opened behind me and closed again, and I turned around and it was Galen, still in his powder-blue scrubs, stethoscope hanging around his neck like a scarf he forgot to take off.

"Hey," I started to say, "they told me we were short on, uh."

I never finished that sentence, because he crossed the closet in about two steps and stopped right in front of me, one hand flat against the shelf beside my hip, not touching me. "Tell me no," he said, "and I'll go back to work." I didn't tell him no. I grabbed the front of his scrubs and pulled, and his mouth came down on mine, hard, tasting faintly of terrible vending-machine coffee, and I made a small startled noise into it and then, about half a second later, kissed him back with what I can only describe as enthusiasm. The box of gloves went everywhere, and neither of us cared even slightly.

When he finally pulled back I was pressed against the shelf with cardboard digging into my shoulder blades and my breath going in and out like a bellows. "Well," I managed. "Hi."

"Hey," he said, grinning, not moving away even an inch. "Been wanting to do that since the sheet-folding night, honestly."

"You could have led with that a week ago."

"Yeah, well." He brushed a strand of hair off my face, and his hand stayed on the shelf like he was keeping me there on purpose, which, fine, he was. "I'm kind of an idiot about timing."

"Ten years a nurse and you can't read a pulse," I said, and he laughed, and the laugh did something warm and low in my stomach that I refused to examine on account of there being more urgent business at hand.

Then he leaned in close, his mouth at my ear, and his voice dropped into something quiet and sure. "On-call room down the hall is empty. Nobody's on it till handoff. We've got about forty minutes."

My pulse, which had already been doing something unprofessional, kicked up like a drumline. I am forty-two years old, I have never been the kind of woman who says yes to things in supply closets, and I said yes so fast that I nearly bit my own tongue.

"Yes," I said. "God, yes, obviously yes."

"That was easy," he said, looking pleased with himself.

"Shut up and walk."

He checked the hallway both ways like a man crossing a border with contraband, took my hand, and pulled me out of the closet and down the corridor, past the dark family lounge and the elevator that dinged at nothing, to a door with a metal sign that said ON-CALL 3 in lettering that had been there since roughly the Nixon administration. He shouldered it open and pulled me in and the door clicked shut behind us, and the room was small and dim and had a narrow bed with a paper-thin sheet, a locker, a chair, and absolutely nothing else, and I remember thinking it was the most romantic room I had ever stood in, which tells you a lot about my dating history.

"Nice place," I said. "Very understated."

"My interior decorator quit halfway through," he said, and then he backed me up against the door and kissed me again, slower this time, like now that the rushing was over he wanted to take his time about it. His hands settled on my hips and mine went up into the short hair at the back of his head, and somewhere in the back of my mind the volunteer coordinator's voice said something about facility policies, and I told her, politely, to be quiet, because a man was untying the drawstring of my scrub pants.

"Forty minutes," I said against his mouth. "That's a very specific number."

"I checked the assignment board twice." He nipped at my lower lip, and I felt him smile against me. "I'm a professional."

"Prove it," I said, which was maybe the boldest thing I've said in my life up to that point, and he took it as the invitation it was, and walked me backward the two steps to the bed.

The mattress had all the give of a church pew, and the sheet crackled when I sat on it, and none of that mattered because Galen was pulling his scrub top up over his head and I was getting my first real look at the chest I had spent weeks theorizing about, all lean and scarred in one spot near the ribs from some story I'd never heard, and my brain filed the theory as confirmed with a note to investigate further.

"Come here," he said, low, and I went.

He laid me back on that terrible mattress and stretched out over me, one forearm braced by my head, and kissed down my throat while his other hand worked my scrub top up my stomach, and the fluorescent light through the little window above the door buzzed and hummed and I lay there thinking that for the first time in two years the hospital's quiet hours belonged to me.

He got my scrub top off over my head in one economical motion, the way you'd peel a label off a jar, and then he paused for a second and just looked at me, which should have been awkward and instead made my skin feel two sizes too small. "You're staring," I said.

"Yep," he said, no apology in it at all, and then his mouth found my collarbone and I stopped keeping score.

I want to describe this next part accurately, because I have gone back over it about nine hundred times since, and accuracy matters to me as a writer even when the material is mostly elbows. He kissed his way down my sternum, unhurried, taking his sweet time with the clasp of my bra like it was a puzzle he was honored to solve, and then he slid lower on the bed and pulled my scrub pants and everything else down my legs in one long pull and tossed them in the general direction of the chair. The room was cold, that institutional cold that lives in cinder block, and then his mouth found the inside of my thigh and I stopped noticing the temperature entirely.

"Galen," I said, and it came out as basically one syllable of warning, and he hummed against me in a way that was clearly meant as shut up, I'm working. His hands hooked under my thighs and pulled me toward the edge of the mattress, and then his mouth found my pussy and my whole spine came off the bed.

I am not going to build this up with a lot of poetry. He was good. He was patient in a way that felt professional and filthy at the same time, licking slow at first, his tongue flat and thorough, then tighter, circling my clit until my thighs were shaking against his ears. My hand found the back of his head, fingers digging into that