Heart Murmurs by Suleikha Snyder Page B

Mercy H that you’d like to share?”
    “No, Dr. McHenry.” Her golden skin didn’t register a blush, but the shift of her body told him she was embarrassed. She broke the tie of their gazes, staring into the room where Mrs. Stevens was fast asleep.
    When it became clear that she wasn’t going to say anything else, Vince knew he had to let her go. “Carry on, Dr. Gupta.” He nodded stiffly and stepped back into the hall. As he walked back toward the nurses’ station, he couldn’t shake the sense that he was the one who’d been hooked.
    ****
    His hands were on her hips, fingers digging into her flesh hard enough to leave bruises…bruises that she would trace later, as she got herself off on the memory of this. “You can’t stop thinking about Mercy, huh, Dr. Gupta? Then beg me for it,” he rasped against her ear. “Beg me for mercy.”
    But she couldn’t beg. She could barely speak. Even his name was too much. She surged upward, clinging to him and meeting his arrogant mouth. He locked her legs around his hips…
    Something was buzzing. Vibrating, even. They both instinctively tensed, and she pulled away, still breathless from his kisses. “Is that your pager? You’d better—”
    Anu jerked awake with a groan, blindly reaching out for her cell phone. She fumbled to turn off the alarm before it went off again, nearly dropping it over the side of the narrow bunk bed in the process. She’d set it for two hours, but she felt like she’d gotten only five minutes. Five minutes she’d spent totally consumed by Vince…which wasn’t restful at all. Her body was a mass of sensation and unfulfilled desire. It was her fifth fantasy since their hallway run-in some seventy-two hours before, and she was beginning to feel like a documented case of female hysteria, curable only with genuine orgasms. As administered by Dr. Vince McHenry. God, she was no better than the Mercy Vincibles.
    Anu climbed down from the top bunk, careful not to accidentally kick the intern sacked out beneath. The residents had a thing tonight, a mixer, and while attendance wasn’t mandatory, it was generally assumed that anyone who didn’t show would be written off as a total douche canoe. Anu had no desire to invest in a paddle.
    She hurriedly splashed water on her face and gargled some mouthwash before getting her civvies out of her locker. Jeans, a red tank top, the Om necklace and astrological garnet ring she didn’t dare wear on rounds in case she lost them. She still remembered horror stories from medical school about people losing wedding rings in cadavers. Once dressed, she spared all of five minutes on makeup. A swipe of mascara and lip gloss, and she was out the door of the on-call room and headed toward the exit. Any intern or resident knew to hustle, just in case they got stopped by an attending along the way.
    Like any good hospital hangout, the Subtle Knife was in walking distance. Med students who never cracked more than their textbooks had started gravitating toward the place years ago because of the name, thinking it was a reference to scalpels. On one of her first visits, Anu had won points with Ciaran, the owner, when she asked if he had a sister bar called the Amber Spyglass.
    She’d made the effort, as a kid, to be more than the sum of her academic parts. Sure, she’d gotten the straight As, learned to play the piano, and declared her intent for medical school before high school, but she’d also read everything she could get her hands on, watched way too much TV, and gone to Penn State because she wanted to. No one had pressured her into it. It wasn’t for the money or the prestige. She knew the stereotype, knew girls who embodied the stereotype, but she loved Philip Pullman and Gossip Girl and cell biology got her hot. Specializing in CT was like a dream come true. Medicine was the only thing that had ever really mattered to her. Until Vince.
    Vince, who plagued her like a case of herpes. Something she couldn’t