FLATLINE| JK

eight

I'm going to slap whoever is knocking on the door in the face.

That's conclusion I come to after I roll out of bed at this ungodly hour of the morning. After working the shift I just had, sleep is the only thing I want to do. When they say your social life disappears during your interning year, they aren't kidding. Even if the person knocking at the door was knocking at a normal time, rather than three in the morning, I still wouldn't want to see them. In fact, I had planned on ignoring the perpetrator until they went away; I had tried to sleep through the incessant sound of knuckles against door.

Except they didn't go away. It's been twenty minutes since the first knock, and the person is still knocking just as persistently as when they started.

Thus, my current situation: answering the door after two hours of sleep, pajama pants with turtles on them, braless in a tank top, squinting with sleep hazed eyes and hair sticking up in so many different directions you'd think I stuck a fork in a light socket, ready to give the person behind the door a piece of my mind. Sighing in annoyance, I twist the knob and throw the door open.

"Do you fucking mind—?" I trail off as my eyes focus on the the culprit. "Dr. Jeon?" I blurt out in surprise. A million questions race through my mind, but I can't manage to verbalize any of them, because Dr. Jeon looks a wreck. His hair is disheveled and messy, clear signs that he had been running his hands through and pulling on his dark locks in frustration. His teeth anxiously bite the inside of his cheek, and the hand that he had raised to knock some more is shaking. He had changed out of his scrubs into gray sweat pants and a white tee, as if to sleep in them, but the dark circles under his eyes show that he hasn't slept a wink. His eyes—rather than their intense fire when he's angry, or the ice cold precision when he's practicing medicine—are stormy. He's troubled by something, more than I've ever seen from him. Before I can come up with something else to say, he walks straight in to my apartment, pushing right past me and begins to pace.

I open my mouth to speak, but no words come out as I watch him walk back in forth on the hardwood floor of my teeny tiny kitchen. He can only get about four steps in before he has to whirl around and walk back in the direction he came from. "Make yourself at home then." I deadpan dryly. So much for ignoring the person at the door and going back to sleep. Instead, I have one distressed Dr. Jeon in a tizzy walking in circles fast enough to form his own personal tornado.

Sighing, I shut the door, and Dr. Jeon winces at the sound. The longer I look at him, the more wrecked he looks—skin pale and with a sheen of sweat in the moonlight that streams through the window, knuckles even paler with how intensely he closes his hands into tight fists at his sides. Questions fill my brain. How did he figure out where I live? Why is he here? Why does he look like this? My lips stay shut, though, because something about this situation is wrong. I've never had a problem speaking to Dr. Jeon before now, but I've also never seen him like this before now. So...shaken.

"Can I get you some water?" I awkwardly ask the man pacing in my kitchen, anything to break the thick silence without breaking my surgical resident.

"How did you know?" He responds quickly, and I just look at him blankly, my groggy mind failing to process.

"How did I know...that you wanted some water?" I clarify, but Dr. Jeon narrows his stormy eyes at me, laughing humorously. The lack of emotion behind the short chuckle sent a chill to my bones.

"No, Moon. How did you know the patient was anemic?" He snaps. I gulp, my throat dry as I recall what happened just a few hours ago. Did he really need to show up at this unholy hour of night to ask me about a diagnosis?

"Well, the patient had been commuting to the hospital when the train derailed, listing leg cramping and dizziness as symptoms. He had an elevated heart rate, and he talked about frequently getting really bad migraines, and then when Dr. Jung said something about the man having a piece of iron through his head...it clicked and lead me to think he had an iron deficiency." I explain, trying to be as clear as possible with my exhausted brain. Dr. Jeon's pacing falters and he comes to a stop, his back to me. The thin white tee stretches over his broad shoulders, his toned back traveling down to a thin waist beneath the transparent fabric apparent in the moonlight— I'm stopping now, because me ogling Dr. Jeon carried on for far too long.