Jesus Christ, I can’t believe how packed this bar is tonight. Jeanine’s never gets like this on a Thursday. Look at her eyes. Not even she can believe how ridiculous this place is getting right now. You’d think there was some big hockey game that just finished or something. This stool isn’t very comfortable and I think one of the legs is a little shorter than the others because it’s kind of rocking back and forth. Once I get this next drink, I’m outta here. I’m too tired to deal with all of this commotion right now. I’m gonna go home, throw these scrubs in the wash, take a shower so hot it’ll tear the flesh from my bones, then walk my skeletal ass right into bed. Forty-eight hours in the ICU ain’t no joke. Oh good, here she comes.

“You want I should get you another one, doll?” Jeanine always called me doll for some reason. I think it’s because her mind is too full of names to remember any more.

“Nah, I think I’m done with whiskey for the night. Can I get a rum and coke instead?” I asked holding out my glass.

“Sure thing. And what does your fella want?” She responded.

“My what?” I asked, tucking the brown hair behind my ear so that I could hear her repeat what I know for a fact was an attempt at humor that I clearly didn’t get.

“Heh. I’ll have what she’s having.” Uttered a voice from over my right shoulder.

Turning my shoulders toward the direction of the words, I saw a dark-haired man about five feet, ten inches tall, with a medium build. One thing I didn’t expect was my immediate reaction to check his pulse and find out his blood pressure. I almost had to grab my own hand to stop from touching his neck. Talk about awkward.

“Alright.” Jeanine said jostling my attention back to her. “I’ll be right back with those.”

And here’s where it starts. First, he’s going to open with some witty line that compliments me in some way that definitely won’t have anything to do with my “beauty”. Then he’ll insist on buying me another drink and, if he’s stupid, ask me what I do even though the green I’m wearing would totally tell him. If he’s smart, and that’s a big “if”, he’ll try to say something like “judging by your outfit, you must really love helping people”. Then he’ll try to get me to talk about my job and find out my name and blah, blah, blah. Right?

“Well that was kind of weird, huh?” He asked while sliding into the stool next to me.

“I’m sorry?” I asked in response, not really understanding what he meant.

He did that typical guy thing, where he leaned really far forward with his hands clasped together over the bar while looking forward. It was like he saw some money on the other side and was waiting for Jeanine to look away before snatching it and stuffing it into the suede jacket he was wearing, trying to look all “cool”.

Still not looking at me, “What she said. ‘Your fella’. Like we’re a couple or something.”

“Yep. Real weird.” I said trying my hardest to give an air of finality so he wouldn’t think to try and continue to talk to me.

“So let me ask you something.” He pushed.

Dear God, kill me now.

“When they bring in a patient who’s dying…” Oh, so he’s the smart kind. “Is it like on TV, where the EMT lists off their blood pressure and all that?”

“Yep.” I said, giving him a look that says I want nothing to do with him at all.

Too bad he didn’t see because Jeanine was already back with the drinks. She set them down right next to each other with only, and this is using my world-class distance gauging eyes, two inches between them. Great, now our hands might touch on accident. Bleh.

“I swear to the Holy Ghost himself, I’m gonna end up breaking out the bat tonight, doll. If I woulda known that this place was ever going to get so damn busy, I never woulda went into business.”

You could always tell when Jeanine was getting upset because that natural Irish accent would come to the surface. She once told me that she came to America with her family when she was a young teenager and she tried really hard over the years to cover it up by learning from the TV how to talk like an American by watching actresses like Lee Meriwether and Tina Louise. She was a sweet old gal at heart but she never could stand being surrounded by too many people at one time.

Suede jacket decided he would interject his two cents. “Well if it comes to blows at least you have a nurse here to tend to the wounded and if anyone should…”

Just then some drunken kid, who I’m sure wasn’t old enough to legally be in here, decided he want to do the moonwalk on top of some pool balls and Jeanine lost it.

“Oi! I’mma beat the devil outta yer and see that some common blasted sense fills der vacuum!” She said, completely ignoring what he was saying, and moving toward that bat next to the register of which she was so terribly fond.

“Ha! I really like her. She doesn’t play around. Do you know her?” He asked, still trying to keep a conversation going. I could see that he wasn’t going to give up very easily so I figure if I give him a bit of my time, no matter how much I don’t want to, that maybe he’ll feel satisfied when I decide to leave without the exchange of numbers.

“Yeah, I know her a little bit. Her name’s Jeanine and she doesn’t like very many people.” I said.

He came out of the “guy pose” and reached for his drink. Well I thought he was reaching for HIS drink but it turns out that he grabbed both of them. First his, sliding it into his other hand and in a quick motion, grabbed mine by the bottom and slid it over the bar in front of me. I guess he grabbed the glass there intentionally so that I could see that he wasn’t putting some sort of drug in it but was still trying to do something that was nice. Was it nice? I don’t know, but he did it.

“It seems like you don’t like very many people either.” He said in a smug sort of way.

This caught me off-guard and I shot him a glare. He still wasn’t looking at me. If he was trying to pick me up or something then he wasn’t doing a very good job. I decided that I could be just as smug.

“Well I guess that’s why she and I get along so well…” I took a long sip of the black drink in front of me and continued my thought, “we just hate strangers.”

He did his little one-take laugh again. “Fair enough. I mean, your parents clearly taught you well. Don’t talk to strangers and all that. You can’t be blamed for it really.” He sucked back his drink all at once. I guess now is when he’s going to make his move…

“So I guess if I want to continue to talk to you, I can’t really be a stranger, now can I?” He proposed.

Yes please, continue to be a stranger so I can finish these next two sips, get up and bolt for the door and the solitude of my boiling shower.

“My name is Jason.” He said as he stuck out his hand. I looked at it for only a second because just then the kid that was dancing on the pool table fell right into him after bumping me and spilling what was left of my drink right on to my top. Absolutely perfect end to a hellish two days of work.

At this point, I had had enough of everything that was happening around me so I jumped up from my wobbly stool, peeled my purse from the sticky wooden bar, and said, “Nice to meet you Jason, I’m leaving.”

So what do you think happened next? If you guessed that he finally gave up so he could deal with the idiot kid who was about to puke all over his nice suede jacket, then you’d be wrong. That’s right, he shoved the kid away from him and called after me.

“Whoa! Hang on a second!” He yelled after me as I walked out of the bar, pushing my way through three drunk guys who were saying something about cheese curds. I pushed a chair out of my way and underneath the table that I assumed it belonged to, just to help out Jeanine a little bit, right before putting my palm on the frosted glass of the door and powered through. I was free. I was out of the bar and away from that guy and all I had to do was…

“Yo! Hold on a second!”

Are you freaking serious right now?!

This guy was jogging toward me with his hand in the air like I was about to call on him for an answer to a question that I posed for the classroom. It was fairly humid for a fall night and the air felt like the countertop at Jeanine’s, which only made me long for that torrent of water waiting for me at home even more. But before I could get what I wanted, I was going to have to tell Sisyphus that this rock wasn’t budging for him.

“Look Jackson…”

“Jason.” He corrected.

“Whatever. I know how it goes, alright? You see a girl in a bar who’s alone and you try to get her talking and find out about her and then maybe she’s cool and you exchange numbers and one thing leads to another and you end up with a barrel of kids and a mortgage. And that’s great! Really, it is.” I found my hands flailing around and gesticulating wildly. “But what you don’t know is that I just got off of a forty-eight hour shift and I was going to grab a drink at the bar before going home to sleep until someone comes by to attach some new feet to my legs because these are worn out!”

You ever do that thing where you hear what you’re saying and know that you should probably go a little easier, but for whatever reason you just can’t get yourself to do it?

“Here! Just look at my shirt!” I pulled the bottom of it forward so that it stretched under the light of the streetlamp to make it easily visible. “On top of the stain I now have because that moronic twelve year-old doesn’t have a tolerance, I have this one…” I began pointing them out with my right pointer finger, “from a 34 year old man with no control over his saliva production. This one from a 19 year old cheerleader who broke her leg so bad that the bone was sticking out of her shin and when we shoved it back inside, blood started to pour out like I was watering my plants! Oh and this one?” I pointed to a line of crust that sat right in the middle of my stomach. “Chronic masturbator. I kid you not.”

Jason seemed unfazed by any of what I was saying. He actually had a bit of a smile on his face.

“What the hell are you smirking at?” I asked with contempt.

He started to kind of chuckle like he was doing inside of the bar but it kept going this time. It wasn’t just one of those “heh’s” or “ha’s”. He was actually laughing now. Not hysterical or anything, but definitely a legit laugh. I didn’t like it at all.

“You think this is funny? I bust my ass to help people for days on end while getting puked on and bled on and when I get frustrated with you for trying to get my phone number, you have the gall to laugh at me?” I was shoving my finger into my own chest and I could feel a severe tightness between my eyes.

When I said that, he grabbed the zipper parts of his jacket and pulled them backwards off of his body. He folded it together and over itself and rest it on his right arm. Then he pulled on a small ID badge that sat clipped to a light blue button down shirt. It read, “JASON CHAMPLAIN: ASSISTANT MEDICAL EXAMINER”.

“Would you like for me to tell you the kinds of bodily fluids I had to clean off of my clothes today?” He asked with an innocent smile.

Welp, what could I do? He had me beat. Sure, working in the ICU, I see people die all of the time, but we’re usually trying to keep the organs inside of the body, not take them out. This guy was doing the opposite. So I did the only thing I knew to do at the moment. I threw my hands up in the air and started to apologize.

“Okay, look. I shouldn’t have…”

“No, no, no. It’s totally cool. I get it. I probably shouldn’t have tried to talk to you and I guess I shouldn’t have pushed it when you started to give me the cold shoulder. I just thought that it would be nice if I could talk to someone who’s had to deal with some of the same sort of work that I do.” He was shrugging his shoulders some and now I could tell that he was totally harmless. “I just moved here for this job and thought that I could use some friends in the area is all. I mean, yeah sure, you’re pretty cute and if you would have been really awesome then I definitely would have made a move, but I’m only human.”

“Yeah, you’re right. I guess I wasn’t being very helpful. I know what it’s like not having friends in a new place and all… But dude, I’m really freaking tired and I just want to go home. You know?”

The door to the bar swung open and just about everyone that was inside when I got there started to funnel out and run down the sidewalk toward the stoplight in the opposite direction of where Jason and I were standing. When the last of them came out dragging the kid that had ruined my drink and was now passed out, Jeanine was right behind them waving her baseball bat in the air and shouting obscenities in what I guess was Gaelic. She turned and looked at the both of us.

“Hey doll! You want to settle up tonight or should I start you a tab?” Her fists were resting on her hips now, with the baseball still in her hand pointing behind her to the still running drunken patrons.

“Oh my God! I’m so sorry Jeanine! I can’t believe I forgot to pay you!” I felt mortified and immediately started to search through my purse and walk back to the bar.

“You know what?” asked Jason getting in front of me. “Go on home. I’ll get this one.”

“What? No? I was so rude to you and you don’t even know me.” I was puzzled to say the least.

“It’s cool. Don’t worry about it. Go home and sleep. Maybe we can meet back here tomorrow and you can pay for mine.” He suggested slyly.

“Oh, I see. You think you’re clever.”

He chuckled.

“You know what? Sure. Why not?” I shrugged and pulled my hand from my purse to hold out and shake his. “It was nice to meet you, Jason.”

“It was nice to meet you too… Umm…”

“Lenore.” I informed him.

“Lenore. It was nice to meet you too, Lenore.” He smiled.

“HEY! I don’t got all night!” Jeanine yelled, bringing us both back to Earth.

I started to walk backward and nearly tripped over a trash bag lying next to the gutter, and called out “See you tomorrow!” before turning around to go home.

“Bring lots of cash!” He yelled after me as he pulled out his wallet to pay that sweet old bar maiden.

Time for that shower.