A Love More Than Lovely
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 10
Rotations ended on a Friday afternoon with a whimper instead of a bang — no ceremony, no send-off, just Brad’s urology attending shaking his hand once and telling him to go study, and Soo Yi finishing her last day on OB-GYN the way most of her rotation had gone, with one more delivery running long and a chart she still had to finish before she could leave the building. They met in the parking garage afterward, both of them still in scrubs, and stood there for a second just looking at each other like two people who’d survived something without fully believing it yet.
“That’s it,” Brad said. “No more six a.m. rounds. No more Dr. Callahan quizzing me about kidney stones while I’m still holding my coffee.”
“You spent six weeks in my specialty and I spent six weeks in yours,” Soo Yi said, a little wondering about it even now. “Feels like we should’ve swapped notes the whole time.”
“I tried. You were always too tired to talk shop by the time we saw each other.”
“Fair.” She smiled, tucking that thought away — urology, the field she already knew she wanted, seen for six weeks through Brad’s eyes instead of her own, and OB-GYN, the field he wanted, seen through hers. Neither of them had planned it that way. It just meant that whatever came next, they’d each spent a season standing exactly where the other one was headed.
“Don’t get used to the free time, though,” she added... “We’ve got three weeks until shelf exams. Then it’s fourth year — sub-internships, applications, the whole thing. I made us a schedule.”
“Of course you did.”
“Somebody has to.”
They’d learned, over the past year, exactly how to study together, and it hadn’t happened by accident. Freshman year they’d tried studying side by side in near silence, each of them buried in their own notes, and it had been pleasant enough but useless — two people occupying the same room, not actually helping each other learn anything. By third year they’d built something better, a system worn smooth by repetition: one of them would pull up a UWorld question, read it aloud, and the other had to answer out loud before either of them looked at the explanation. Wrong answers got argued over, not just corrected. Right answers got explained anyway, because explaining something out loud was how you found out whether you actually understood it or had just memorized the shape of it.
“Pop quiz,” Brad said, three days into the study block, sprawled across his living room floor with an AMBOSS deck open on his laptop and a mostly empty bag of pretzels between them. “Woman comes in with recurrent UTIs, post-menopausal, vaginal atrophy on exam. First-line treatment?”
“Topical vaginal estrogen.” Soo Yi didn’t even look up from her own screen, where she was three questions deep into a Blueprint shelf set. “That’s not even a hard one. Give me something real.”
“Fine. Fifty-five-year-old male, new onset gross hematuria, no pain, smoking history—”
“Bladder cancer until proven otherwise. Cystoscopy.” She finally glanced over, catching the look on his face. “What? I told you I’ve been living in AUA guidelines for a month. You’re not going to stump me on urology.”
“I know. That’s why I keep trying anyway.”
It was true, and they’d both stopped pretending otherwise a long time ago — Soo Yi had the edge, and not by a small margin. It wasn’t that Brad was slow; he wasn’t, not even close, and his instincts on physical exam findings and surgical anatomy ran circles around most of their classmates. But Soo Yi absorbed material the way some people breathed, effortlessly and constantly, turning dry guideline language into pattern recognition faster than anyone else in their cohort. She’d read something once and it stayed. Brad needed to see it three or four times, needed to turn it over out loud, needed the friction of explaining it to someone before it actually stuck. The difference used to bother him back in undergrad, when exams felt like a scoreboard and hers always came out a little higher. It didn’t bother him anymore. Somewhere in the last three years it had turned into something closer to relief — she caught what he missed, and increasingly, he’d started to notice, he caught the frustration in her before it built into something worse and talked her back down from it, which was its own kind of intelligence nobody gave him credit for on paper.
She hit her limit on the surgery shelf material two nights later, somewhere around eleven, staring at a Surgical Recall page on postoperative fever with the flat, glassy blankness of someone whose brain had simply stopped absorbing new information.
“I don’t get it,” she said, and her voice had an edge in it that wasn’t about the material at all. “I’ve read this page four times. Four times, Brad. Wind, water, walking, wound, wonder drugs — I know the mnemonic, I could recite it in my sleep, and the second they change the question stem even slightly I freeze.”
“Because you’re exhausted, not because you don’t know it.” He closed his own laptop and moved to sit next to her instead of across from her, close enough that their shoulders touched. “Walk me through it again. Out loud. Slow.”
“I don’t want to walk through it again, I want it to already be in my head.”
“I know. Do it anyway.”
She glared at him, but she did it — talked through post-op fever causes day by day, atelectasis first, then UTI, then the deep vein thrombosis window, then wound infection, then the drug reactions nobody remembered until it was too late — and by the third pass through it her voice had lost the edge, and by the fourth she wasn’t reading from the page at all anymore, just saying it, because it had finally gone from memorized to understood. She stopped and looked at him.
“That actually worked.”
“It always works. You just hate needing it to.”
“I don’t hate needing it. I hate needing it from someone else.” She said it quietly, and then, quieter still, admitted the truth under it: “I like that it’s you, though. I don’t think I could do this with anyone else and not feel like I was failing at something.”
He didn’t say anything clever back, just pulled her against his side and let her rest there for a minute before either of them opened another page.
Their days fell into a rhythm neither of them had planned but both of them protected fiercely once it existed. Mornings were videos — OnlineMedEd for whatever organ system was on the schedule, Boards and Beyond when the OnlineMedEd explanation didn’t stick, SketchyMedical whenever the material was infectious disease or pharmacology, because Soo Yi swore the ridiculous cartoon mnemonics worked on her in a way straight text never did, and Brad had learned not to argue with results even when he found the drawings faintly disturbing. Osmosis got pulled up on lazier mornings, when neither of them had the energy to sit through a full lecture and just needed the short version playing in the background while they made coffee. Afternoons were questions, UWorld mostly, occasionally AMBOSS when they wanted faster, punchier review instead of UWorld’s longer clinical vignettes. Evenings were flashcards, the AnKing deck running on both their phones, buzzing at them in grocery store lines and waiting rooms and the five idle minutes before either of them fell asleep, because spaced repetition didn’t care that they were tired, it only cared that they showed up.
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