BEAUTIFUL MESS [Book 2] | MIKHAIAH

9

With the excitement of holidays over, I moved to the next rotation on my learning curve: Surgery. Back on a crazy schedule, and juggling time between Surgery and Radiology, I was up to my armpits in lectures, digital imaging techniques, and bodily shoving other students out of the way to get first go at assisting in the next open-heart operation. Sam and I had been separated as our medicine rotation came to an end, and he had begun to text-stalk me. He should have been preoccupied with parts of the female anatomy, but somehow, he'd found time to send me over a hundred texts during his breaks.

I was in the middle of learning a complicated dish involving no less than eight vegetables when my phone chimed for the third time in under a minute.

Amaia growled, wiped her hands on a towel and stomped over to my phone. My child-like pin-code was quickly entered and she read the messages. "He wants to bring over some coffee, then apologized for sounding like he's inviting himself over, then he wanted to know if I'd mind if he dropped past for ten seconds."

"If you'd mind?"

Amaia shrugged. The phone chimed in her hand. "He said never mind, he'll catch you tomorrow. He doesn't want to be a third wheel." She rolled her eyes and pressed a button before holding my phone to her ear. "Sam, if you're that desperate to see Mikaila, then by all means, come on by." She listened for a moment. "Yes, we're busy, but I promise you, we still have our clothes on." She gave me a wicked grin when she hung up on him.

"You're evil."

"And you're not chopping that fine enough." She rounded the counter and stepped behind me, covering my hand that was currently trying to slice eggplant. "Cooking is like surgery. Pretend you're slicing a sample section of a tumor."

I screwed up my nose. I preferred not to think of weird growths when I ate.

She guided my hand and the knife to make a perfectly thin disk of ugly green vegetable. Someone knocked at the door and Amaia jumped, making her fine slice of eggplant into a wedge. We looked at each other in surprise as we concluded who was at the door.

"What was he doing? Stalking the apartment?" Amaia muttered as she strode to the door and nearly sucked Sam inside with the force she opened it. "Explain yourself."

Sam squeaked.

"What she's asking is why did you come all the way to our apartment block to stand outside and text?" I said, wiping my hands and moving away from all the free-radical fighting food on the counter.

"Coffee." He held up a tray of cups. The smell wafted to me and my eyes rolled back a little. My coffee addiction was a bit worrisome. "How are you?" Sam asked.

"Coffee," I said in reply. I heard Amaia scoff at me as I returned to the kitchen.

"We diagnosed someone with psuedomyxoma peritonei yesterday," I heard Sam say. Peering over the rim of the coffee cup, I could tell he directed that snippet at Amaia.

For some reason, Sam was spending a lot of time lately trying to impress Amaia, and I was sure he no longer found her a controlling know-it-all with zero tolerance for anyone. He knew the key to her friendship, because that little snippet was like catnip to Amaia and had the pair of them sitting at Amaia's desk discussing the ins and outs of the disease and leaving me alone to chop vegetables as thick as I liked and drink as much coffee as I wanted. I shared a cup with Sam, but Amaia stole the third cup when she noticed my hands trembling from caffeine-overdose as I tried to put on an oven mitt to check the ratatouille.

Sam stayed for dinner, a habit which gradually increased in time.

***

Time was a funny thing. One second I was celebrating a New Year's kiss, and the next, I was most of the way through my third rotation and summer was a week away. Amaia and Sam had bonded during their OB-GYN rotation, and while their friendship blossomed, so did mine with Steph, and curiously, Jed.