My First Time with the Night Shift Doctor

It all started with a crossed glance in the middle of a hellish shift. We had just taken in three polytrauma patients from a highway accident and, amid the beeping of the monitor and the nurse shouting for me to get a central line, someone walked past the corridor and split my concentration in two. I had never seen her before. Sky-blue uniform, long hair tied back in a loose ponytail, enormous eyes that locked onto mine for a second and then moved on, as if she had read my whole head and left without asking permission.

Later I found out from the attending physician: a new resident, she had done three months in intensive care at another center and been transferred to the sanatorium to cover the night shift. Her name was Renata. She was married to a cardiologist in private practice, a man twenty years older than her, known to the board. And she was, with no effort at all, the most unsettling woman I had crossed paths with in years of hospital life.

I’m not one of those guys. Or at least I thought I wasn’t. I was raised by a father who repeated the word “word” like it was a commandment. I never cheated on anyone, never touched a woman who wore a ring, never stuck my nose where it didn’t belong. But that first look got under my skin like a splinter, and three days later I was already inventing excuses to walk by the room where she reviewed charts, to ask her stupid questions about a case, to have her explain an anticoagulation protocol twice when I knew it better than she did.

I started slowly. A brownie wrapped in paper, on top of her folder, no note. The next day, a lukewarm coffee in the doctors’ lounge at five in the morning, when I knew she came in at that hour. I caught her with her hand still on the thermos and the face of someone who hadn’t slept. She thanked me with a half smile, without looking at me.

—Are you the chocolate guy? —she asked on the third day, while she was putting on a clean uniform in the common changing room and I pretended to read a magazine on the bench.

—I have no idea what you’re talking about.

—Liar —she said, and left without waiting for an answer.

After that word, I wasn’t the same anymore. I wanted to shatter her calm; I wanted her to know I had every hour of the day planned around her. I texted her from the service phone, slipped her notes written on old prescription forms, brushed her hand when I handed her a report. She played along, laughed softly, told me “behave yourself,” and kept going. She never backed away, but she never took a step too far either.

***

One Thursday at dawn, things changed. I had gone down to the rest room after twelve hours on duty, my uniform stained with iodine and my back in pieces. I threw myself onto the cot without taking off my shoes, ready to steal twenty minutes from exhaustion. I had left the door ajar because the room air got heavy and the extractor had been broken for months.

I heard the footsteps before I saw her. The footsteps of a tired woman, not a hurried nurse. The door opened a little wider and there she was, standing in the frame, her cap loose and a strand of hair across her face. The corridor light came in from behind her and outlined her whole silhouette against the fabric of the uniform. Without ever having touched her, I already knew that silhouette by heart.

—Is the other side of the bed taken? —she said.

It must have taken her two seconds to ask me that. To me it felt like ten years. My breath caught and an uncomfortable heat started climbing up my chest. I scooted over without answering, gave her a nod, and she came in and closed the door with her hip.

Nothing happened that night. Or everything happened, depending on how you look at it. She lay down beside me on the narrow cot, clothed, fully dressed in her uniform, and stayed talking until five in the morning. She told me about her husband, about medical school, about a dog she’d had as a child that had died the previous summer. I told her I was afraid of not measuring up to my father, that I’d had trouble sleeping since the pandemic, that sometimes, when I left the hospital at dawn, I sat in my car and cried without really knowing why.

I brushed her hair with my nose, looked at her mouth, concentrated on holding back. My cock had been hard against the seam of my pants for two hours, so swollen it hurt my groin, and of course she noticed, she noticed everything; every time she shifted on the cot, she brushed against me with her hip and then settled herself again. She laughed, told me “stay still,” put a finger to my lips and then, very slowly, slid that same finger along the edge of my belt, no lower, marking out the territory of everything we were not going to do that night. At five ten she stood up, gave me a kiss on the forehead, and left. I stayed there with my dick throbbing in the dark, took it out as soon as I closed the door, and jerked off in three hard pulls thinking of the mouth I hadn’t kissed, finishing over my own stomach like a teenager.

***

From that dawn until tonight, three weeks went by that turned my head completely inside out. We traded shifts on purpose, did everything possible to line up our coffee breaks, stayed behind arguing cases until the last colleague left and the room fell silent. One afternoon she kissed me behind the supply closet door, a short kiss, almost like a test, and I couldn’t think of anything else for the rest of the week. Another afternoon she took my hand in the elevator and squeezed it, then got off two floors before her stop so she wouldn’t arrive with me at the ward.

But tonight, this night I’m running from now, was different.

There was a complicated emergency in the OR and the two of us were left covering the outpatient area, empty at that hour. She suggested we review some overdue charts in exam room four, the farthest one, the one that faces the inner courtyard and that almost nobody uses on Wednesdays. I said yes. Of course I said yes.

We went in. I turned on only the desk lamp because the overhead light felt obscene. She sat in the patient chair, I in the doctor’s. We talked for a while, almost in whispers, about a pediatric case that had unraveled her that very morning. At some point I leaned over the desk and kissed her, and this time it wasn’t a test kiss. It was a long kiss, tongue and all, biting her bottom lip until a soft moan escaped her, with no apology to anyone.

—We have to stop —she said, pulling back barely a millimeter—. We have to stop.

—Yes —I answered, not moving.

She laughed. A low, hoarse laugh, different from her usual one. And then she did something I wasn’t expecting: she turned her back to me. She stood up, walked to the gurney, sat on the edge, and looked at me over her shoulder as if daring me. The desk lamp hit one side of her face and left the other half in shadow.

I walked over slowly. I put both hands on her shoulders and pulled her against my chest from behind, without warning her. The moan that slipped out of her was not planned. It was that sound that comes from the stomach, not the mouth, the sound that confesses everything. I sank into that sound and knew we weren’t stopping now.

I started with her neck. I pushed her hair aside and kissed the place where the tendon showed when she turned her head. I moved down to her shoulder, along the line of the uniform, lowered the front zipper with two fingers and left her in her bra. Her skin was lighter than I had imagined, and there was a dark mole beneath her collarbone, like a mark. I ran my tongue over the mole and felt her tremble all over. I squeezed her tits over the bra with both hands, pushed them together, kneaded them, and pressed my hard cock against her ass over the fabric of her uniform pants. She pushed her ass back to rub against me better, and I could feel her slit against my dick even with two layers of cloth between us.

—Keep your voice down —I told her in her ear, even though I was the one running out of breath.

I turned her to face me. I opened her bra and stood there for a second looking at her, both tits exposed, bigger than I’d imagined under the uniform, the nipples pink and so hard it hurt to look at them. I ran my thumb over one slowly, drawing circles, and she bit her lip to keep quiet. Then I leaned in and bit the other nipple, without delicacy, sucking it into my mouth, tugging it with my teeth until her back arched. I licked from one to the other, covered them in spit, blew on them just to watch her shiver. I took her hand and brought it to my fly, pressed it there so she could feel the bulge.

—Touch it —I told her—. Touch it, look what you do to me.

She lowered my zipper slowly, looking me in the eye, and slipped her hand inside my underwear. When her cold fingers closed around my cock, I thrust my hips forward without meaning to. She pulled it out over the elastic, held it in her palm for a second as if weighing it, and then started stroking me very slowly, sliding the foreskin up and down, making the shiny head appear and disappear. She watched me while she did it. Watched my cock and watched my face, alternating, as if she were measuring each reaction she pulled from me.

—Mateo —she said, and it wasn’t my name, but the name of her husband had slipped out on her.

I stopped for a second. She noticed and covered her face with both hands, without letting go of my cock, so the whole thing became an absurd image: her eyes hidden and her hand still gripping me.

—Sorry —she murmured.

—I don’t care —I lied, and kissed her mouth so she’d stop talking.

I finished taking off her uniform. She was wearing plain black underwear, nothing fancy, nothing chosen with me in mind, and that detail drove me crazier than any piece of lingerie ever could. I ran my hand over the fabric, felt how wet she was, the panties soaked through, a dark patch where the cotton had stuck to her cunt. I slid two fingers in from the side of the fabric, without pulling them down yet, and found swollen lips, hot flesh, the clit hard as a button. I rubbed it with the pad of my thumb while I pushed my two fingers in to the knuckles. She grabbed my shoulder and bit the sleeve of my uniform to keep from crying out.

—You’re soaked —I told her in her ear—. Look at you dripping all over my fingers.

I pulled them out, shining, and brought them to my mouth. She sucked both fingers without taking her eyes off me, with the same challenging face she’d had in the corridor the first night. Then I dragged her panties down to her knees without patience and knelt on the floor between her spread legs, my face level with her wet cunt. I licked from bottom to top, sucking up all the juice running down her slit, and stayed there eating her clit, sucking it, tugging it with my lips, burying my tongue inside. She gripped my neck with both hands, dug her nails into my hair, pushed her pelvis against my mouth without being able to control herself. I grabbed her ass with both hands, spread her open, lifted her a little off the gurney so I could suck her better. I put my tongue in her cunt and rubbed her clit with my thumb at the same time, and after thirty seconds I felt her go rigid, hold her breath, and come against my face in a long spasm, squeezing my ears with her thighs, biting the back of her hand so Marisol wouldn’t hear her from the corridor. She drenched my chin. I kept licking her slowly, easing off, while she shook and laughed and told me “stop, stop, I can’t take any more.”

I laid her on the gurney. The disposable paper crackled under her back, a ridiculous, almost comic crackle that made us both laugh for a moment before silence took over again. I pulled my pants down to my ankles without taking off my shoes, because there was no time for ceremony. I spread her legs with both hands and rested the tip of my cock at the entrance to her cunt. I rubbed it there for a second, sliding up and down, wetting my glans in her moisture, bumping her clit with every pass. She shoved her hips forward so I’d fuck her already.

—Put it in me —she told me, with a voice I had never heard before—. Put it all in me.

I drove into her in one thrust, without asking. I felt her close around me, squeezing me like a hot fist, so tight I had to stay still for three seconds not to cum right there. The ufff that escaped her is burned into me forever. It’s a sound I can’t reproduce, can’t describe. It’s a person’s complete surrender in a single syllable. I braced myself on my elbows to see her face while I moved. Her eyes were closed, her mouth a little open, her eyebrows knitted as if something hurt, but it didn’t hurt. What hurt was holding in the noise.

—Look at me —I asked her.

She opened her eyes. And she looked at me exactly the way she had in that first shift, three weeks ago, when she passed through the corridor and kept walking. The exact same look. And I understood that look had been the beginning, and this moment was everything that look had been promising.

I moved slowly at first, wanting to last. I pulled my cock almost all the way out, until only the glans stayed inside, and then pushed back in to the hilt, feeling how her cunt opened and closed around my rhythm. She dug her heels into my ribs, clawed my back, bit my shoulder through the fabric of the uniform so she wouldn’t scream. Every time I sped up, she held her breath for three seconds and let it out with an ummm that split me open inside. I held on by biting my tongue, by thinking of anything else, by not looking at her tits bouncing to the rhythm, hitting out to the sides every time I drove all the way in.

I grabbed one leg, lifted it, put it over my shoulder and went deeper that way, at an angle that pulled a moan from her that she couldn’t hide. I covered her mouth with my hand. She sucked my fingers, bit them, covered them in spit. I let go of her mouth and grabbed both tits, squeezed them, pinched the nipples in time with my thrusts. The gurney was creaking. The disposable paper was already a disaster beneath us, damp, torn in two places. I fucked her faster and faster, deeper and deeper, and she bit her knuckles, bit her forearm, did whatever she could not to wake the whole sanatorium.

—Face down —I told her—. Turn over.

I came out of her, helped her turn, put her on all fours on the gurney, propped on her elbows with her ass lifted toward me. I saw her cunt open, shiny, still throbbing. I ran my thumb along the slit to her ass hole and she pushed her ass back. I shoved my cock into her again and she buried her face in the gurney paper to smother the cry. I took her hair, not hard, and pulled back so she’d arch her spine. I started fucking her like that, both hands on her hips, marking her ass cheeks with my fingers, skin slapping against skin in a wet sound that bounced off the exam room walls. I slid one hand underneath and found her clit with my fingertip, rubbed it in time with my thrusts.

—Ah, like that, like that, harder —she told me, her voice wrecked—. Fuck me, fuck me, don’t stop.

I fucked her harder. I was going in to the balls, I could feel them slap against her flesh each time, and she came again, I felt her clench all around my cock, crying out softly into the gurney paper, biting it, leaving me a hot ring that almost made me finish. I held back. I pulled out, took a deep breath, and stroked myself slowly so I wouldn’t cum yet. I wanted to see her ride me on top.

***

I lay down on the gurney and signaled her. She climbed up without hesitation, settled astride me, took my cock in one hand and guided it herself to her cunt, lowering down slowly, impaling herself with her eyes closed until she sat all the way down, my cock buried to the root. She stayed there motionless for a few seconds, adjusting, breathing, and then started moving.

We were halfway through the second round, her on top of me now, both hands planted on my chest and her hips setting their own rhythm, riding me slowly and deeply, up and down, her tits swaying level with my face, when we heard the first scream in the corridor.

—Doctor, doctor, red code, come now!

It was Marisol’s voice, the night nurse. She was three doors away from exam room four.

Renata froze on top of me, my cock still buried to the hilt inside her cunt. I grabbed her waist with both hands so she wouldn’t fall. We stayed like that for two seconds, both of us holding our breath, both of us feeling one inside the other while footsteps ran and names were shouted on the other side of the door. I could feel her cunt throbbing around my cock, squeezing me involuntarily every time she breathed.

—Get off —I told her in her ear.

She stood up slowly, my cock sliding out of her, shining and hard, leaving a thread of fluid hanging between her thighs. She got dressed in thirty seconds, the uniform twisted, hair undone, panties shoved into the uniform pocket in a hurry because there was no time to put them on. I pulled my pants up with my cock still hard and the mark of her shining on my glans, adjusted myself as best I could, handed her the bra that had been left on the doctor’s chair. My hands were shaking.

—You go first —I asked her—. I’ll go through the window, circle around, and come in through the other wing.

—Not necessary.

—Yes, it is.

She looked at me. She looked at me the same way as before, the same way as the first night, the same way in the hallway that first day. And for the first time in three weeks I saw something new in her eyes: a little fear and a little laughter at the same time. As if she’d only just realized the mess and, at the same time, wasn’t sorry about any of it.

—Go —she said.

I opened the window of exam room four, the one that faces the inner courtyard. I jumped. I landed badly, twisted my ankle a bit, didn’t care. I crossed the courtyard diagonally, went in through the service door, climbed the fire stairs, and appeared at the nursing station looking like I hadn’t slept in three days and with my cock still halfway down inside my pants.

—Finally! —Marisol shouted at me—. Where were you?

—In the rest room —I lied—. I just woke up.

I treated the patient. It was a heart attack, a fifty-two-year-old man. We stabilized him in time. Two hours later, when they were already taking him up to the coronary care unit, Renata passed by the station. She had a clean uniform, her hair tied back, tired eyes. She walked past me without looking at me. When she was already at the door, she turned her head just a little and nailed me with that look again.

Just one. One look. The same as always.

Today I’m writing this from my car, in the sanatorium parking lot, before driving the two blocks home. I still have the smell of her on my fingers; I bring them to my nose every two minutes like a sick man. I have no idea what love is. Truth is, tonight I don’t much care. I know that tomorrow at ten I’m going back into the hospital and that, in some corridor, at some point during the shift, she’s going to walk past me. And she’s going to look at me.

And everything will begin again.