He smiled again. “Back to my place to cuddle on my futon—” She gasped, and he chuckled at her reaction—like he’d actually tell someone he was bringing home a booty call—and he winked again. “If you count my dog lying across my ankle while I zone to fantasy baseball as a hot date.”
The techs cleaning up the blood and chips of bone off the floor sniggered.
She groaned and rolled her eyes. “God, Travis, you had me going there for a sec.”
He grinned harder now—bravado—as the anesthesia techs attached new wires to the machine and dumped a handful of new trach tubes in the drawer.
The nurse shook her head. “Pathetic. A cute guy like you?”
That his futon mattress was flopped atop a slab of plywood on four cinderblocks, like a damned truck in primer gray, might’ve been too much for these normal people to handle. But why bother with furniture when it was just him and his mutt? He could take a girl out. He didn’t have to bring her home.
“You oughta be at the club on a Friday night with some cute girl,” she continued.
Yeah. Negative to club. Or the alcohol. Medicine had helped him reinvent himself. This was his playground now, not any barrel-riding competitions or desert escapades with the sexiest chick in the world tucked against his chest and thigh while he revved Red Lightning’s accelerator like a lead foot and kicked up dirt. The action of a trauma, the purpose behind his every surgery, this was the thrill he now chased, not the wind in his hair like he once had, and judging by Ashley down in the ED, he had a new, viable conquest on the radar.
He played off her remark with a lazy salute goodbye, but if he played his hand right, he’d soon have Ashley’s phone number.
He strode into the corridor, pushing the foot pedal down on the scrub station and checking the monitor on the wall to see what surgeries were still in progress, tucking into the sink as the water sluiced off his hands to make room for a bed being wheeled to recovery. The tech, some cute twenty-something, eyed him.
He gave her his hallmark “Dixon chin jut” and a grin that he knew dimpled his cheek, even though she couldn’t see it behind his mask. “Sup?”
The tech giggled to herself, her eyes twinkling, just like Dr. James’s eyes had—
“Dr. Dixon…physician’s lounge… Dr. Dixon…physician’s lounge…”
The paging system called mechanically through the overhead system. He patted his hands dry with a paper towel and plucked his hospital phone from his holstered pocket on his drawstring pants. Tapping the lounge’s extension, he tucked it against his ear.
“Dixon here,” he said as he breezed past the tech and patient bed without another glance, ignoring the muttered comment about “…hot…surgeon…Dixon…”
“Hey, man, Lopez just scrubbed into Room Eight, and I gotta volunteer in the clinic before the director gets pissed. I know you’re about to take off for the weekend, but can you catch a consult in ED?” Like middle schoolers, they shared a chuckle at the acronym. This medical gig could really warp a sense of humor. “Hate to do it to you on Friday at five, but they need a cowboy down there, and of course as the resident, they pinged me first.”
Travis snorted at the joke. Meyers loved taking offensive medical slang and appropriating it for his own glory. Cowboy meaning surgeon. And he took exceptional pride in calling Travis one, considering Travis was both a surgeon and had been born with a Stetson halo, a Stetson he no longer had a reason to wear.
“You’re probably ready to blow this joint,” Meyers added.
Naw,he loved his job. Loved that he’d found something to work toward and distinguish himself in after those dark months long ago, but he was also starving after missing lunch today.
“I’m hoping I can score a date, man,” Travis added, grinning.
More importantly, he needed to get home to Yoda, his dog. Women seemed to think his affection for the dog was cute, an adorable ploy to get them to talk to him. He might have milked that reaction a time or two.
“Sorry to cramp your style,” Meyers said.
Travis strode toward the sterile hallway’s exit, dropping his mask as he passed through it, letting it sag around his neck. “No prob. Gotta go update my knee’s family in the waiting room first, though. Is the patient stable?”
“Yeah, anterior dislocation, muscle spasms—pretty routine. But Lopez wants to know if your knee’s okay to keep standing on.”
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
Irritation bloomed, but he swallowed the bite out of his gruff response. He hated that Lopez had the entire staff twittering around him, trying to gauge if he was okay. What the hell about top of his class, summa cum laude, Ferguson Fellowship, multiple research grants, program codirector at the age of thirty-three said he wasn’t okay? Did Lopez think reminders about his leg were helpful?
“’Cause you’ve been on it for the past eight hours and are probably hungry?” Meyers said as if Travis was a dumbass who needed the reminder.
His stomach rumbled as if to drive the point home about that missed lunch, now tepid on his office desk, too.
“So?” Travis frowned. Don’t you dare treat me like a crippled SOB. More determined now, he dug his stubborn heel in.
“Okay, man, don’t bite the messenger.”