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Victoria really hates him.
It’s been two hours of this shift and she’s already contemplating shoving him into the storage closet where they put all the tourniquets and vials, the one by triage that people don’t really know about unless you’ve been working here for a long time, the way she has and he hasn’t—anyway. He wouldn’t know what hit him.
She’d wanted to do the same thing to Trin when they’d met all those months ago, too, only she didn’t know about the storage closet and she’d probably just have pushed her down the stairs to Nuclear Medicine. But for some reason Trin is nowhere near as infuriating as this guy is—probably because Trin is actually pretty gentle with her, when it comes down to it—and it’s a capital-F fucking problem.
“You good?” Trin asks her as she storms past the main triage desk. She’d gone out to help Langdon bring a patient in, only Ogilvie was there already, smirking, helping an old lady from her wheelchair onto the bed—how can Victoria be a good doctor and get upset by that?, she thinks, and she thinks he’d been thinking that too, from the way his eyebrows had gone up to his stupid sandy blonde hairline. Victoria briefly considers turning her army of Tiktok followers on him, but decides that that undermines the sort of vibe she’s trying to go for with Doctor J. Then she realizes that Trin is still standing there.
“Oh, sure,” she says, trying to make it sound normal. Trin’s mouth twitches but she wisely decides to leave her be, simply rounding the desk to pat Victoria’s shoulder before she swishes off down the hallway.
She turns around and leans against the hard edge of the desk counter. Lets it bite into the bottom of her back, dull and painless, as she takes her deep breaths and reminds herself that Ogilvie didn’t survive a MCI shift the way she had, and if he had he wouldn’t have been as good at it as she had been. Victoria catches his eye as he swans out of triage a moment later. He stops walking. He’s so tall that he sort of has to duck under one of the swinging signs that announce that you’re not supposed to be back here without permission. When he’s not doing that ugly smug thing with his face, he’s not bad-looking. Victoria swallows. Reaches up and feels for her earrings, one two three, up the side of her earlobe; gives him a stink eye and darts away before she can process that thought.
He finds her though, of course, not twenty minutes later as Robby watches Whitaker run down their list of possible suspected diagnoses. Shuffles right up next to her and glances at her down the long length of his thin, beaky nose. Victoria short-circuits. They get into a fight and Robby has to talk them into a compromise with that soft, hurt-animal voice he uses when someone starts to spiral. It makes her feel sick. Victoria doesn’t spiral. She’s a tough kid.
Ogilvie doesn’t spiral either. He looks properly chastised, though, which is something. She goes out to the ambulance bay to get some fresh air. It’s kind of worse out here with the heat and the sounds of Pittsburgh—she yanks her sweatshirt off and ties it around her waist—but she’d rather gouge out her eyeball than go back inside right now, so she sits on the curb and weathers it. She can feel sweat starting to slick up the back of her neck. She does her breathing exercises again and contemplates switching over to night shifts. Ogilvie can’t—he’s too junior to choose what shifts he gets—but she’s sure if she sucked up to Robby enough he’d let her go. Maybe then she could show off to Doctor Abbott, too, and they’d both be raving about how great she is. Boom. Double whammy.
It smells like cigarettes out here. This is where Dana comes to smoke. Victoria wonders how long Dana’s been claiming the little sliver before ten AM as her break time, and how long she’s stood in that exact corner by the door smoking. Victoria’s worried she can’t do it. Stick through it. It feels more like she’s trying to prove something to everyone else than herself, but that’s all she knows how to do, really; she should have begged off her first rotation and asked her mom to switch her to OBGYN or whatever. But it’s kind of too late for that, now, now that everyone already knows her as the kid who Christmas-tree adapted an airbag. She’s got a reputation to uphold.
She sniffs. The door opens behind her and she turns to find Ogilvie there, just goggling at her. The skin of her upper arms breaks out in goosebumps. He’s close enough that she can feel the heat of his shin behind her back and can smell the antiseptic on his hands. She’s level with them, sitting on the curb, and she contemplates grabbing him and yanking him onto the road just as an ambulance is wheeling in. She doesn’t.
Victoria is, like, historically bad at letting people walk all over her. She’s determined not to let him. It’s different than it had been with Trin because Trin had already been a resident when they’d met, and she’s a girl, too, so she gets what it feels like to be looked at like a waste of air. She probably knows better than anyone, Victoria thinks, remembering with a start the rumors about Langdon.
“Hey,” says Ogilvie, drawn out. His hair flops in front of his eyes as he stares down at her. She wishes he would sit. Or move away so she can stand, at least. If she tries right now she’ll bump her head on his stupid fat chin. She doesn’t think he’s doing it on purpose, but it’s all bad all the same. Most men don’t really think about it and Ogilvie is so young, maybe twenty-three at most, too young to start thinking of himself as something scary.
“Can you let me up?” she says, a little nasty. She’s trying to channel Trin.
He gives her a look that she can’t decipher, then shuffles to sit down. “I’m sitting,” he says belatedly.
Victoria should probably get up and walk away. She stares at his shoes on the asphalt instead. They’re navy, brand new, with the laces tied up nicely in a double knot. The material of his scrub pants is loose around his ankles.
“I’m sorry for undermining you back there,” he says.
She clenches her jaw. “You didn’t undermine me,” she shoots back.
Ogilvie looks at her, mouth flattening. He raises his eyebrows again, like come on. Victoria bristles. “You didn’t.”
She thinks he might be magnanimous about it but he just keeps looking at her. It’s unsettling. Victoria doesn’t spend a lot of time alone with men and most of the time she is alone with one, it’s here at the ED. And then it’s usually Robby or Whitaker or Shen. These are all men she trusts and who are too old for her, anyway. If she thinks about how handsome they are it’s in this fleeting way, almost clinical, before she lets it roll off her back and goes back to paying attention to the things they’re trying to teach her. Ogilvie cannot teach her anything. They’re level. Whitaker was at least a year ahead of her in med school, so there had been things about rotations that he’d known about before Victoria could discover them. And now she respects him, so she’s willing to demure to his knowledge. Ogilvie hasn’t given her a reason to respect him.
“You were wrong,” he says.
“There’s no need to explain information that isn’t pertinent to the case,” says Victoria, sniffing. “You’ll learn that eventually.”
“It wasn’t about the case,” he fires back, “it was about Doctor Robinavitch asking for possible issues.”
She rolls her eyes. “What does that even have to do with lumen midlines?”
He just stares at her. It’s fucking irritating—she knows he wants her to walk it back and apologize, maybe even grovel a bit, oh yes I forgot about hyperglycemia, one of the first things you learn in med school, stupid me—but she’s not backing down. Her stomach twists unpleasantly. His eyes are the kind of blue that make her squeamish but his face is so shadowed that they read more as brown or maybe hazel. He has this little divot in his chin that Victoria wants to touch.
What? She balks. Shifts away from him. Ogilvie doesn’t even seem to notice. She wonders if he even thinks about things like that with her, like if he thinks her eyes are pretty or if he notices how dry her lips are. She doesn’t think so—but he’s still looking at her, so there’s something about her that he’s finding interesting.
“Are you wearing red, white, and blue earrings?” he blurts.
Victoria gapes at him. “Um,” she says.
He’s blushing, maybe. She sort of wants to throttle him.
“I hope you know,” she begins, “that I’m getting that residency spot. My parents work here. My first shift was a MCI.”
“My entire family works through PTMC,” Ogilvie says, biting. “My sister is a nurse up in Pedes.”
“But did you work a MCI?” she asks.
“Eventually I will,” he answers her. She thinks she might be getting to him because he keeps biting the inside of his cheek, eyes darting across her face. They get stuck somewhere between her chin and her nose and just stay there, narrowed. “You got lucky. I’ll get lucky too.”
“Keep telling yourself that,” Victoria says as kindly as she can. Then she stands and stomps back into the ED, feeling his eyes on her back.
“He’s totally into you, by the way,” says Trin.
Victoria looks up from her charting. “What?”
Trin smirks. Leans across the desk with her fingers stretched out like a cat, her dark hair falling across her shoulders. “Ogilvie,” she says.
“What? No,” Victoria says. Her fingers twitch on the keyboard.
“Trust me,” Trin murmurs, “I know about these sorts of things. It’s really obvious.”
“You’re crazy.”
“He’s kinda cute, I guess.” That actually gets Victoria’s attention, because usually Trin takes every opportunity to shit talk the men of the ED. She thinks everyone’s mandatory crush on Abbott is stupid as hell, which is crazy, really, since anyone with eyes can tell that Abbott is hot. Victoria normally just accepts these facts and moves on; she’s not interested in dating right now and Abbott being into her would automatically ick her out.
“He’s got a stupid chin,” Victoria tells her.
Trin’s eyes shimmer a bit with mirth. “You like a man with a strong chin, Crash?”
“I won’t play your games,” she spits back, which makes Trin double over with laughter. Victoria surges up and slaps her hand over her mouth, flushing, trying to ignore everyone looking at them.
“What’s going on?” says Ogilvie, appearing behind Trin. Trin just starts laughing again and Victoria gives up completely on stopping her, removing her hand and wiping it on her leg. When she looks up, he’s staring at where the damp fabric of her scrubs is sticking to her thigh. For the first time that day, Victoria feels totally unmoored. What, she thinks. What?
His eyes snap up to hers. He doesn’t smile, exactly, but his mouth flattens out and curves a bit. The noise of the ED dulls around her. Victoria imagines pushing him off the roof, then shoving him down the Nuclear Med stairs, and then kissing him the next time he tries to speak over her. She gets it, a bit. She’s always liked guys who challenge her. He’s a fucking asshole but he sees her as a threat, which is—it’s good.
“None of your business,” she snaps. Then she smiles back with all her teeth, the same smile she uses when guys try to flirt with her in triage, sharp little shark teeth flashing white. Ogilvie goes very still. She thinks he might be blushing again.
“Sorry,” he says, and leaves so quickly she has to twist around to find him, running down the hallway to the North trauma rooms.
Trin is looking at her when she turns back. She says, “yeah?”
Victoria swallows. Twists her fingers behind her back. “Yeah.”