Alphas Like Us (Like Us 3)

Audrey still hasn’t overcome the mortification of sending apology cookies to Oscar.

Jack, who returned to our booth, asks my cousin, “Audrey, do you still have a crush on Oscar?”

We all just hear a mumbled noise from the pillows.

Kinney keeps eyeing the bowling alley entrance. I can’t just sit here and hope for the best. There has to be something more I can do.

And I tell my sister, “Let me call this girl.”

She looks back at me, brows pinched. “What are you going to say?”

“I’m going to ask if she needs a ride here, ask what’s holding her up and tell her that I can help. That’s it.”

Kinney takes a giant breath, and she speaks into her phone. “I’ll talk to you later, Audrey. I need to text Moffy her number…” she trails off, and all of our heads swerve as the door opens.

A blonde thirteen-year-old girl in a flower sundress nears the hostess podium.

Dear World, I’m so damn grateful for this good luck. She needed it. Best Regards, a human who’s a big brother

“Holy shit,” Kinney’s eyes bug. “She’s here.” She glances at her phone. “Audrey—”

“Go fall madly in love and you must tell me everything!” Audrey hangs up first.

And before Kinney darts away from the booth, she stretches over Farrow and flings her arms around me in a short hug. “I’m sorry. I was the turd this time,” she tells me. And then she looks to Farrow. “But not to you. You were late.” She skips off at that, and Jack follows my sister to film Holly and Kinney greeting each other.

I’m about to apologize to Farrow, but he’s laughing hard. “God, your siblings.”

I love him. I love that he loves my siblings, even when they’re emotional and wound up and taking jabs left and right.

And as his laughter fades, our hands intertwine, and I tell him, “You made it in enough time so I can beat you at bowling.”

He smiles softly, almost sadly. It fucking hurts, and I can easily fix my sister’s tiny crisis—I can try to fix anything—but I can’t even attempt to fix this. And I want to be patient.

I need to be patient.

If I ask what I can do, I know he’ll just say, be here. And I’m here. But it’s been over twenty hours since we last even saw each other. Those digits are becoming normal, and I can’t remember the last time his shift was under twelve hours.

“Farrow…”

I want to find the right words. To tell him it’s alright if he has to be late again. To not make promises to my little sister about next time. Because it’ll feel worse for him if he breaks it. But I’m not sure how to say anything.

And more than that, I can practically feel his fatigue, the heaviness that mounts on his chest and tries to drag him under. I want to take that weight off Farrow. So damn badly. I open my mouth to speak, but aching, strained words come out of him first.

“I’ll be okay.”

28

FARROW KEENE

I made a mistake.

It’s been hitting me all week. All month. Shit, possibly even the first day I stepped into the hospital. I thought I could weather it out. What’s one more day. One more week. One more year. But my boots clap along the sterile halls, and I feel my time draining away with my energy and will to keep course.

Pushing open the break room door with my shoulder, charts fill my hands, and I see the sofa. Instantly, I collapse on it lengthwise and kick my feet on the cushion.

Charts lie on my lap, but I don’t have any desire to finish them. I have—I glance at the wall clock—around fifteen minutes before I’ll need to check on my other patient. Unless someone codes.

It’s been that kind of day.

“Can’t believe he tried to shock an asystole rhythm,” Dr. Shaw says, entering the break room. The third-year Med-Peds resident heads straight for the coffee pot. “Nice catch on that intern, Keene.”

I stopped a first-year resident from trying to shock a flatline. Asystolic patients are non-shockable and won’t respond to defibrillation. And if an attending had been present, he would’ve done the same thing as me.

I can’t muster a response. I just click a pen.

Do your motherfucking job, Farrow.

Dr. Shaw pours coffee. “You look beat.” He sweeps me from head to toe. “Rough day?”

I could explain to him how a simple diagnostic exam that’d normally take twenty minutes lasted an hour and a half.

The patient instantly recognized me and wanted pictures, wanted an autograph, wanted to Instagram Live—which I turned down. And then she called her friends, who showed up ten minutes into the exam. I had to run through the whole parade again.

It’s not the same as patients gawking at my tattoos and piercings. I was used to that.

Being famous. Not so much.

I’m recognized every single day, sometimes minute-by-minute. I’m stopped walking down the hall. I’m stopped when I eat lunch in the cafeteria. When I’m minding my own fucking business during rounds.

If it’s not the patients or their families, it’s the nurses, technicians, doctors and hospital staff. They want to gossip with me about the Hales, Meadows, and Cobalts like I’m their direct outlet to secret information they’ll never be allowed to have.

Every day I have to brush them off. I’m perfectly fine with a bad reputation. I don’t give a flying shit if people call me cold or arrogant or an entitled bastard—but when it affects my job, when it affects my ability to be the best at what I do, then I fucking care.

I hate knowing that I’m not contributing enough. That I’m taking the spot of someone who could potentially do better work than what I’m doing.

I could tell Shaw about this morning.

When I had a patient who refused to give me a medical history. He said he didn’t trust me. Not with that kind of personal information, and I tried to explain how there’s clear patient-confidentiality laws, but he didn’t want to hear it.

In his eyes, I have too many ties to the media and public and the things that I say aren’t just a whisper in the night.

Hell, that wasn’t the first time I had to hand over a patient to another intern. Or be reprimanded by the hospital board for not carrying as big of a load as the other residents in my year.

And I can’t argue with them. It takes me three times as long to do a job that they can do in under ten minutes.

I thought it’d be different coming back to finish my residency, but I didn’t imagine this kind of struggle. I’m not sure I could have.

I’ve become a “celebrity” doctor, and that’s hindered my ability to help people inside Philly General. And I feel worthless here.

Three years. It’s what I keep telling myself. That in three years I’ll be worth more again. I’ll be out of this hospital and working for the famous families.

But that’s three years of running at a brick wall and not being able to breathe.

I haven’t been able to talk about this with Maximoff. I want to protect him from feeling at fault, or from blaming himself. Broaching the topic means that I’m reaffirming his worst fears: I’ve lost an immeasurable source of happiness by being with him, by being famous. And that’s not how I see it.

He’s my happiness, and I’m fighting for the day where I go back to him. And fuck, it’s right there. The day is right in front of me.

Just go.

I sit up, boots dropping to the ground. I glance back at Shaw. “Just a long shift,” I tell him, my mind racing.

Just go.

“Tell me about it.” He downs his coffee and then disappears into the locker room.

When the door swings closed behind him, I stack the charts from my lap and place them onto the coffee table.

Quickly, I push into the locker room. “Hey, Shaw!” I shout.

“Yeah?” He sticks his head out, past a few cedar lockers. Bare-chested, he pulls on a Polo shirt.

“Who’s on-call tonight?” I ask while I yank open my locker.

“Morris,

Kim, and Bakshi.” He narrows his eyes at me while I take off my scrubs and change into black pants and a plain shirt. “I thought your shift ended at ten.”

In an hour. “It does.” I tuck my black V-neck in my pants and buckle my belt. For me, that hour will be stretched to three depending on how many people will stop me and ask for pictures.

It’s why I’m always late. To everything.

Shaw hangs on his locker door. “Is it Maximoff Hale?” he asks. “I can keep a secret if you need to talk or something.”

“I’m good,” I say.

“You know I’m not like those other people,” Shaw continues. “I’ve watched Maximoff Hale on TV since I was about ten. He’s practically a real person to me, not just a celebrity.”