Night Nurse in Ny

** All characters, names and situations are fictional. Mostly. ;-) **

*****

1am. Closing the door of the utility room behind me, I slumped against the back of it and sighed. My feet ached, my back was killing me, and I had a pounding headache starting to creep around my temples from the chaos reigning on the other side of the door. I was starving. Dehydrated. Exhausted. Somewhere, in the back of my head, a tiny voice reminded me that I had other, more animal, appetites that were in desperate need of attention. There was a bloodstain on my trousers, I hadn't had the chance to change them yet, and I just desperately wanted to go home.

Basically, just another standard Friday night in Accident and Emergency, then. Sorry, I mean the Emergency Room; people look at me oddly when I call it A&E - I've been here for four months already but I suppose old habits die hard.

I should really have known how much crazier things would be here. It seems like years ago that I first started putting plans in place to move to America to continue my nursing career. I'm English born and bred and I love my country, but something had always drawn me to cross the ocean and find out what exciting things lay on the other side. It had taken considerable time and effort to upgrade my humble UK nursing registration to the all-singing, all-dancing American requirements, but I'd found an agency who specialised in helping foreign nurses transfer to the US. Thanks to an unexpected inheritance and a sudden surfeit of spare time when my marriage fell apart (my husband began finding his new attractive young co-worker much more tempting than what he had at home, and with no kids to keep him around, he left in a mid-life crisis shaped cloud of dust...good riddance...) I'd invested all my time and money into making what was a scary, but thrilling transatlantic move. Although I'd been an A&E nurse in the biggest hospital in Manchester, which was frantically busy at times, when the agency finally got all my visa paperwork and certification in order and organised a temporary assignment for me, they decided to place me in New York - a bit of a culture shock to say the least.

I'd set out with no expectations, other than to fully embrace everything the huge city might have to offer me, but the sheer scale of the place and the volume of people had overwhelmed me. When I wasn't working I had a tendency to pretty much hide like a dormouse in my tiny apartment (how exotic that word seemed at first, I'm used to living in "flats"!) and talk to my friends back home on Skype. I almost never left the building other than to go to work or brave a dash round the corner to buy coffee. Suffice to say, as much as I had been desperate to move to America, so far it was just very busy and very scary, and I had to yet to make any friends. The other nurses at the hospital were very friendly and welcoming, but so far I hadn't really been able to break into the clique of tight-knit friends in the ER. I'm a naturally outgoing person and so I was becoming increasingly lonely (although I'd have died twice over before admitting it to my family back home).

This led to the other fairly significant problem. Not only was I lonely through lack of friendship, but I missed intimacy and human contact in a far more carnal sense. I've always had an extremely healthy appetite for sex, and I was starting to climb the walls with sexual frustration - I hadn't been with someone for over a year (I'd had a very drunken, and deeply unfulfilling, one-night stand the night my divorce came through and my girlfriends took me out to "celebrate"). I'm highly-sexed enough that going without for a mere week leaves me cranky and frustrated, so the unprecedented drought I was experiencing was killing me. I have a modest collection of faithful toys that had made the 3,000 mile journey with me, but what I craved more than anything else was real, live, human flesh, preferably of the male kind. Although I'm partial to both men and women, at this point I desperately just needed fucked deep and hard by a real cock with a real man attached to it. And I mean *really* hard.

I hoped and prayed I might gather my courage at some point and try dating, but in the meantime, I read copious amounts of erotica online and tried to satisfy myself with my fantasies and my hands. It wasn't the same though, and some days I was so horny I thought I might die from it. I don't know if it's just me, but year by year, working in emergency medicine seemed to make me even hornier. I think it's something to do with the realisation of how transient and close to death we all are all the time, and the fact that us nurses need to switch off a part of ourselves to deal with that and stay professional for the sake of our patients and their families. My ex-husband could always tell when I'd had an especially grim day because I wanted to be fucked senseless when I came home - it helped remind me I was still here and still human, and it helped me forget about the horrors I'd witnessed at work. The tears, if they needed shed, would come later on whilst he held me and let me unload. Unfortunately, I was now witnessing way more traumatic and horrific things in America than I ever had at home - I'd never seen gunshot wounds before, for starters - and I no longer had anyone waiting at home for me to fuck the day away.

Back in the ER, I stood half-slumped against the door of the utility room and surveyed myself in the mirror above the sink. At 5'8" and well over 200lbs, I was what would be kindly called a BBW; in most people's eyes I was just, well, big. Try as I might to shed the pounds and achieve the size 8 figure I dreamt of, I was always going to be curvy - genetics and a few health issues meant that although I was physically fit (try running about an ER for 13 hours straight and tell me it's not good exercise) I was voluptuous, at best, and had curves which filled every inch of my scrubs. Any time I attended a code and was at the "bagging" end, I was always terrified that the patient would come to and suffocate in my linen-clad bosom heaving about in his/her face; don't even get me started on how mortified I'd been once when a filthy old alcoholic guy slapped my scrub-clad arse as I turned round to reach the dressings trolley and proceeded to compliment me on how much he'd have to "hang on to"... eww. I have to admit, I might have been slightly less gentle than usual as I sutured his gashed forehead, but then I'm only human...

I cast my eye critically over the dark circles under my greenish-blue eyes and unclamping my barrette, I ran my hand hopelessly through my hair. I'm lucky, if you can call it that, to possess a mass of long, curly dark brown hair with a life (and postcode...sorry, zipcode..) of its own, and it was a daily fight to keep it from cascading out of its precarious pile on the back of my head. Still, I refused to tame it into the neat bobs and cute pixie cuts my colleagues seemed to favour, since I loved the way it felt when I was riding a guy hard and it tickled my ass, and I still fervently hoped I might get to remember what that felt like sometime. I was also kind of partial to wearing it in two long pigtail braids, Heidi-style, and having a guy use them as handlebars while I devoured his cock; as I say, sex is never far from my mind.

All in all, I didn't particularly like what I saw, but I shrugged my shoulders and rearranged my mane into some semblance of propriety, took a deep breath and prepared to head back into the fray. The utility room was mainly an overflow linen store, and it was my little haven of peace in the melée of the ER; I'd discovered it on my first day when I was looking for the drug prep room and got lost. I'd taken to volunteering to gather fresh linens whenever they were needed, which gave me the opportunity to rest my aching bones for a few minutes (and fix my hair). I was amazed that nobody else seemed to do the same thing; the linen bags were always stacked up in such a way that they provided a very comfortable place to sit and rest, and I always half-expected to find someone in there. I will admit, I'd also contemplated just how perfectly placed they were for supporting the weight of two people, and the tiny dimensions of the room would mean that any such two people would be forced into very close quarters...not for the first time, as I left the room and locked the door behind me, I felt a twinge of regret that I had nobody to test the theory with. Not unusually for me, I felt my pussy twinge with frustration, and my tight scrubs rubbed against the silver ring in my clit, reminding me of how badly it needed attention.

But my poor neglected pussy would need to wait. As I walked back round to the nurse's station, a tannoy announced yet another incoming to resus, this time a pedestrian versus a 4x4, ETA 5 mins. Sighing, I grinned wryly at Karen, one of the other nurses, as we scrambled to prepare for the coming storm, and I put all thoughts of my non-existent sex life out of my head.

*******

Six hours later, I had half an hour till my shift was over and I could give report and get home, and I was counting the minutes. Nightshift doesn't bother me the way it does some people, but I knew my warm bed awaited me after a long hot bath, and I couldn't wait to leave. Karen and I had spent the past twenty minutes in the drug room checking the controlled drugs, and giggling about the young, nervous new junior resident spending his first night on call in the ER. It never fails to scare me how young some of the new doctors look now - I'm only 35, but I swear this guy hadn't even started shaving yet. To give him credit, he had enough front to start openly flirting with Karen over the comatose form of an elderly lady who'd been found unresponsive in her care home, and she wasted no time in putting him sharply in his place while they attended to the patient. I admired Karen enormously; she was a damn good nurse, who cared deeply about her patients, and who had impeccable standards when it came to delivering care. She was petite, red-haired and gorgeous and had the dazzling white teeth I was getting used to everyone flashing me in New York (making me wary of showing off my own NHS-funded dentalwork... some clichés are true...). Karen was also a bloody good laugh, with a filthy sense of humour to match my own, and in short, I loved working with her. She was young, free and single and possessed the bounding confidence of a New York native; of all the people I'd met since crossing the ocean, she'd been the closest I had to a friend. Recently she had been caught up caring for an ill relative, but she kept promising to take me out and properly show me the city ("...and get you better acquainted with its inhabitants!" she'd said, winking at me knowingly).

I wasn't surprised that the adolescent resident had been keen to get a piece of Karen - or at least try - this was a virtually daily occurrence whenever I worked with her. She was the epitome of "cute, sexy nurse" and anyone with a pulse could feel the energy from her when she bounced into the room. If I hadn't been missing a man's touch so badly, I might have looked at her through much more visceral eyes myself, but as it stood, for now I was grateful simply to have her as a friend and ally. As I locked the controlled cupboard, I asked her why she never took anyone up on the countless offers of coffees/dinners she received. Not all of her suitors were hitting above their weight either - one of our most senior trauma consultants (or attending, as I was still trying to remember to call him) was forever dropping not-so-subtle hints in Karen's direction and staying just the right side of sexual harassment laws in doing so. She found this hilarious, playing along with him but blithely announcing to me that she had no intention of giving him what he wanted. Forgetting his evident financial security - I have never been a gold-digger - the guy was ridiculously hot, and had he been sniffing around me like that, he could have had me any which way he wanted *and* I'd have made him breakfast the next day. She explained, casually, that even if she had time to date, she wasn't interested in making any kind of commitments to anyone, and her tone of voice and the way she scurried past me to check a chart made it clear that the subject was definitely closed, for now at least.

Feeling a pang of regret that I'd love to be in the position to be so blasé about having a string of potential lovers, I checked in with another elderly patient sat in a cubicle with his wife, patiently answering the usual questions about my "cute" accent and politely listening to a rambling history of how her great-great-great grandmother knew an English person once. I was rescued, albeit aggravatingly, by the tannoy squawking again. Great, a query STEMI. I guessed I wouldn't be going home on time, again.

Reluctantly, I made my way to resus and waited with the others for the patient to arrive. I knew they were being brought in by ambulance - sorry, bus - and as always, I looked forward to the guilty thrill I got from taking handover from the paramedics. I wouldn't exactly call it a fetish, but I do like a man (or woman) in pretty much most kinds of uniform, and paramedics were no exception. It'd been the same in England, and it was the same here; I vividly recalled the first shift I'd worked after arriving in New York when I encountered the NYPD: back home, our cops don't carry guns, and the thrill of fear I felt when I saw them was mingled with a thrill of something else entirely.

Shaking my head to clear my very unprofessional thoughts, I heard the rattle of the trolley and the thundering of feet as our newest patient made their dramatic entrance. As I hurried over to the empty bay, my heart pounded with the usual combination of too much caffeine and undiluted adrenaline, and that was when I caught the eye of one of the paramedics expertly guiding the trolley into place.

Fuck, he was hot. Compact, powerful-looking, with dark hair and even deeper, darker eyes; a killer combination guaranteed to get my blood flowing. In the microseconds our eyes held each others it was like someone had shot electricity down my spine and directly between my legs. I caught myself going hot and cold all over and quickly looked away, embarrassed, feeling like my frank lustfulness was written all over my face. I managed to stay composed as I approached the gaggle of people around the trolley, the attending barking instructions as we all rushed to our "spots", but as luck or fate would have it, I ended up stationed right beside Him. I could feel every fibre in my body tingling with energy, which was normal for these kind of calls, but with an additional hyper-awareness, caused by the proximity of the quiet, handsome paramedic stood just behind me. I was just getting to obsess about how awful my hair probably looked from the back (I repeat: I'm only human, for heaven's sake) when he stepped past me to give handover.

As he spoke, I struggled to concentrate on anything except the rich tones of his voice, which went straight through me in a melting rush, and I had to almost physically shake myself to concentrate on what I was being told. Karen stood on the other side of the patient from me and I caught her eye; she smiled quickly and winked, and I knew she could see what was happening to me. I managed to get a hold of myself and focussed on the vital signs and history enough to reorientate back into the room, feeling like a hot wave had flowed over me when he finished his report and made to depart with his partner. To cover my confusion, I set about doing all the necessary bits and pieces like a robot, mechanically pushing IV morphine, transferring the patient to our ECG from the portable one and casting about for a larger BP cuff.

Suddenly, the alarm went off as our poor patient went into VF. Time blurred as it always does in a code, but I'm pleased to say we managed to get him back and relatively stabilised, safe in the hands of a fresh-faced young nurse at the beginning of her shift. As I cleared up all the opened packets, ready to crawl off home as soon as I was done clearing up, Karen came over to my side of the trolley and not-so-subtly nudged me, whispering "You know he's still over there watching you, don't you?"

I felt my blood run cold - I had been so engrossed in the code that I hadn't even realised the dark-haired paramedic was still in the department, let alone standing only ten feet away from me, just watching. Sure enough, I turned round and saw him standing casually, talking with his partner. Karen hissed: "See?!! He's a new one, haven't seen him around before. Guess I should be friendly, huh?", causing him to look directly at us, and she giggled, waved and winked in his direction before bouncing off towards the locker room. I saw the corner of his lips curl ever-so-slightly in a smile, before he said something I couldn't catch to his partner, who laughed and shook his head. I was far too shy to do anything more than finish my clearing up, grab an unused O2 mask and scurry away blushing frantically. Dammit.

As I trudged towards the locker room, alongside my exhaustion another weight dragged me down. I had been so sure that an almost tangible jolt of energy had run between me and the paramedic, and yet it was clear that - like everyone - he only had eyes for Karen, which I could totally understand. Still, it had unnerved me the way his fleeting look into my eyes had felt like being explored and devoured in a single heartbeat, like he knew the wildcat that lives inside me and wanted to meet her. Damn, damn, damn. I idly wondered what his name might be as I began to strip my scrubs off and pull my hair down.

*******

It was a freezing cold morning with treacherous black ice coating the pavement (yes, okay, sidewalk) outside the hospital, and I pulled my woollen beanie hat closer down over my ears. I had two scarves wound round my neck under my thick coat, and essentially only my eyes were visible to the outside world, buried in a mountain of woollens. My contact lenses discarded in the locker room, I was now waiting for the freezing fog on my glasses to dissipate so I could actually see out of them. You'd think I'd have been prepared for New York winters, given I come from a country famous for being cold and rainy, but this was something else. I *hate* the cold.

As my glasses finally demisted, I carefully made my way over the parking lot to walk the short distance home, and as I did so I spotted a stationary ambulance parked up outside the ER. My heart skipped a beat as I got closer - standing beside the bus, laughing and talking over steaming cups of tea, were Him and his partner, and Evan, one of the male nurses from the ER that I was vaguely friendly with. Fuuuuuck. I buried myself even deeper in my woolly cocoon, my fingers gripping the cup of strong black coffee I was clutching and tried to become invisible. As I came nearer I heard snippets of their conversation:

"...totally checking you out, man..."

"...sweet ass just begging to be..."

"...naw, she's definitely at home alone, no competition there..."

Of course they were talking about Karen. Had to be. As I walked past, I heard Him asking Evan what her name was, and I nearly died when Evan said, "Oh, that's Louise, she's pretty new. And she's foreign. British, I think. Kinda shy but you get the feeling that's just a front, if you know what I mean..."

I was almost level with the ambulance now and I could hardly bear to walk past, my heart was beating so loud and fast, and I was in serious danger of being admitted to my own department. I glanced in the wing mirror to check my appearance, and realised with relief that I was completely anonymous in my winter clothes and librarian-like glasses - there was no way they'd recognise me. I breathed in and walked quickly past the little group of laughing men, gambling a quick look at Him. Gambling was never my strength, though, and he again caught my eyes for a fraction of a heartbeat, a flicker of recognition in them as I sped past.