A Love More Than Lovely
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 8
Third year hit like a truck neither of them saw coming, even though everyone had warned them it would.
Second year had been hard in the way exams were hard — brutal, exhausting, survivable with enough coffee and enough hours in the library. Third year was different. Third year put a stethoscope in your hand, a white coat on your back, and a rotation schedule that didn’t care whether you’d slept, and called it clinical training. Soo Yi had heard the older students talk about it with a kind of grim reverence, the way people talk about a mountain they climbed and never wanted to climb again. She hadn’t understood what they meant until she was standing in a hospital hallway at six in the morning, badge clipped to her white coat, waiting to be handed a patient list she hadn’t asked for and didn’t feel ready to hold.
Brad found her outside the cafeteria that first week, both of them grabbing coffee between rotations that didn’t line up anymore. They’d gone from sharing every class to seeing each other in stolen fifteen-minute windows, texting between patients, falling asleep on the phone mid-sentence more nights than either wanted to admit.
“Fifty hours this week,” he said, sliding into the seat across from her. “They said it’ll be worse once we hit the harder specialties. Seventy, maybe.”
“I know. I did the math.” She wrapped both hands around her cup like it was the only warm thing left in the building. “We’re basically working two jobs and going to school.”
“We knew it’d be like this.”
“Knowing and living it aren’t the same thing.” She said it without bitterness, just tired honesty, and he reached across the table and took her hand because there wasn’t much else to say to that. They’d talked about this back when third year was still an abstraction, a line item on a curriculum they’d read together in her dorm room sophomore year. Neither of them had pretended it would be easy. But there was a difference between agreeing to run a marathon and feeling your lungs burn at mile eighteen.
Her first rotation was emergency medicine, and it broke her open in ways she hadn’t expected.
She wasn’t squeamish — years of premed prerequisites and now medical school itself had scrubbed that out of her early, somewhere between her first cadaver lab and her first day shadowing the trauma team. Blood didn’t make her flinch. She could hold pressure where an attending told her to hold it, call out vitals when asked, keep her hands steady while a resident quizzed her on what she was seeing in real time. What she hadn’t prepared for was the pace of it — the way trauma medicine didn’t leave room for the careful, step-by-step thinking her coursework rewarded, only quick observation and quicker questions fired at her from every direction, with no time to sit with any of it until the shift ended and she was alone in her car in the parking garage, hands finally shaking now that there was nothing left to do.
A motorcycle accident came in on her third night, a man not much older than her father, and she watched the team work on him for eleven minutes before someone called it, answering Dr. Marsh’s clipped questions about what she was observing the whole time — breath sounds, pupil response, what the monitors meant — without once being asked what she thought should be done about any of it. She stood at the edge of the room afterward, the smell of iodine and blood still thick in her nose, and understood something about herself she hadn’t known before: she could stand in that room and hold steady. And it would never be what she wanted to do for the rest of her life.
The attending running the shift, a wiry woman named Dr. Marsh who’d been doing trauma for eighteen years and looked like nothing could touch her anymore, caught Soo Yi staring at the empty trauma bay a few minutes later and pulled her aside.
“First code you’ve lost?”
Soo Yi nodded, not trusting her voice yet.
“You did fine in there. Hands were steady, you called out what you saw, you didn’t freeze.” Dr. Marsh studied her for a second, not unkindly. “But you’re not one of mine. I can always tell. The ones who belong in trauma get something out of the chaos — it feeds them, somehow, even the bad nights. You’re just enduring it.”
“Is it that obvious?”
“Only to somebody who used to be you.” The older woman’s mouth twitched, almost a smile. “Figure out what does feed you. Don’t waste four more years finding out the hard way.”
Soo Yi thought about that conversation for days afterward, turning it over the way she used to turn over her mother’s comments about her body — looking for the sting in it, and finding instead something closer to a gift.
“I don’t hate it,” she told Brad that week, curled against him on the narrow couch in his apartment, the first real hour they’d had together in five days. “I’m not scared of it. I’m not even bad at it. I just don’t want my whole career to be triage. I want to actually know my patients. Follow them. Not stabilize somebody and never see them again.”
“That’s not a small thing to figure out,” he said, running a hand slowly through her hair. “Some people go through their whole rotation year without figuring out what they don’t want, let alone what they do.”
“I think I already know what I do want.” She hesitated, then said it out loud for the first time. “Urology. Female urology, above anything else. I keep thinking about how nobody ever really talked to me about my own body the right way — not my mom, not doctors, nobody until Catherine and Kristen. I want to be the person who talks to women like that. About all of it. Not just the parts that are easy to say out loud.”
He didn’t say anything right away, just tightened his arm around her, and she felt him press a kiss into her hair. “That’s you all over,” he said finally. “Of course that’s where you’d end up.”
Brad’s rotation ran the opposite direction — orthopedics, and he took to it the way she’d never quite taken to trauma. Hips, knees, shoulders, the mechanical satisfaction of a joint replacement done well, a patient walking out of physical therapy six weeks later without the limp they’d walked in with. He liked that the work had a shape to it, a beginning and an end you could actually see. Spines he found harder to love — too much could go wrong, too much sat in gray areas he didn’t enjoy living in — but the joints suited him down to the ground.
“I watched a hip replacement today that was basically carpentry,” he told her over a rushed dinner, the kind eaten standing up at his kitchen counter because neither of them had the twenty minutes a real meal required. “Drill, ream, seat the implant. Guy’s going to walk again without pain for the first time in a decade. There’s something clean about that.”
“You sound like your dad talking about a system he just optimized.”
“Don’t tell him that. He’ll never let me hear the end of it.”
His attending, an old-school surgeon named Dr. Reyes who still wore reading glasses on a cord around his neck like it was 1985, ran rounds like an oral exam that never ended — stopping at every bed to fire questions at whichever student was standing closest, expecting a real answer and no hedging. Brad had frozen on his first morning and gotten it wrong twice in a row. By his second week, Dr. Reyes told him flatly, in front of the whole team, that he had better instincts and a better bedside manner than most residents twice his age. Brad had shrugged it off in the moment, but he’d repeated it to Soo Yi that night with a kind of quiet pride he didn’t often let show, and she’d loved him a little more for how much it clearly meant to him.
There was one patient he kept coming back to — a retired ranch hand named Wallace who’d waited eleven years on a bad hip because he couldn’t afford to be laid up while cattle needed tending. Brad sat in on the initial workup, watching Dr. Reyes read the imaging with Wallace and lay out the options plainly: physical therapy and injections to buy time, or a full replacement to actually fix it. Wallace chose the replacement without much hesitation, tired of buying time. By the day of surgery, the joint was bone grinding on bone, and he walked into pre-op leaning so hard on his cane that Brad had winced just watching him cross the room.
Brad followed the case all the way through afterward, the part most students didn’t bother sticking around for — the physical therapy sessions twice a week, watching Wallace grit his way through exercises that clearly hurt, cursing under his breath at a resistance band like it had personally wronged him. Brad learned more about the actual work of getting someone better in those PT sessions than he had in the operating room, watching a therapist coax range of motion back into a joint one stubborn degree at a time. Six weeks after the replacement, Wallace walked into his follow-up without the cane at all, just to prove he could, and shook Brad’s hand so hard it ached for an hour afterward.
“That man’s going to outwork men half his age for another decade,” Dr. Reyes said, watching Wallace stride out toward the parking lot. “That’s the whole job, right there. Not the drilling. The walking out.”
Brad thought about that for a long time — longer than he expected to, given how little spare time he had for thinking about anything that wasn’t directly in front of him. He wasn’t drawn to orthopedics because it was clean, he realized, or because it was mechanical, though both of those things were true. He was drawn to it because the ending was visible. You could watch a person get their life back in real time, on a schedule you could actually track, and there was something about that certainty he needed right now, in a year that offered him almost none.
They laughed about the carpentry line, and it was a small thing, a nothing joke traded over reheated leftovers, but it was the kind of small thing that had gotten rarer since rotations started, and they both knew it, and neither of them said so out loud. There wasn’t time to dwell on what they’d lost. There was barely time to notice they were losing it before the next shift started.
The schedule didn’t ease up as spring rolled toward summer. If anything it tightened, rotation to rotation, the easier specialties giving way to the ones that ate whole weekends — the ones where the older students’ warnings about seventy-hour weeks stopped being a rumor and started being Tuesday. Soo Yi learned to sleep in fifteen-minute increments propped against a supply closet door. Brad learned to eat standing up, walking, between rooms, whatever kept the calories moving without costing him time he didn’t have. They saw each other in doorways more than in beds. Some weeks the only sign they were still a couple and not just two exhausted classmates who used to date was a good-morning text sent at five a.m. and a good-night text sent past midnight, both of them too tired to say more than that they loved each other and meant it.
The general surgery block was the one that finally made the seventy-hour warnings real. It landed for both of them in the same six-week stretch, a scheduling accident nobody apologized for, and it swallowed whatever was left of their free time whole. Soo Yi scrubbed in on gallbladders and appendectomies until the motions stopped feeling foreign in her hands. Brad rounded before sunrise and stayed past sunset more nights than not, chasing post-op complications that didn’t care what time it was. They stopped trying to schedule dinners and started just showing up at whichever apartment was closer when a shift finally ended, falling into bed still half-dressed, sometimes too tired to do anything but lie there with their fingers laced together until one of them fell asleep mid-sentence.
One night in the third week, Soo Yi let herself into Brad’s apartment near midnight and found him asleep sitting upright at his kitchen table, a half-eaten protein bar still in his hand, a stack of patient notes fanned out under his elbow. She stood in the doorway for a moment just watching him, exhaustion written into every line of him even in sleep, and felt something in her chest ache in a way that had nothing to do with pity and everything to do with how much she loved him for not once, in six brutal weeks, complaining that any of it was too much. She eased the protein bar out of his hand, gathered the notes into a neat stack, and shook his shoulder gently.
“Bed,” she said. “You’ll wake up with a permanent crick if you sleep like that.”
“Five more minutes.”
“You said that forty minutes ago. I checked the time when I got here.”
He cracked one eye open, found her standing over him, and something in his exhausted face softened anyway. “You’re here.”
“I’m here.” She helped him up, walked him the ten feet to his bedroom like he was the patient for once, and he was asleep again before his head fully hit the pillow. She lay down beside him in her scrubs, too tired to change, and stared at the ceiling for a while, thinking about Dr. Marsh’s question — what feeds you — and understanding, in the dark, at midnight, on no sleep, that she already had her answer. It wasn’t the trauma bay. It was moments exactly like this one, unglamorous and quiet, taking care of someone who mattered to her. She just wanted to do it as a doctor, and not only as the woman who loved him.
Priya called her during one of the rare stretches Soo Yi had two consecutive hours free, and Soo Yi answered from her car, too tired to walk all the way inside before catching up.
“You sound like a zombie,” Priya said.
“I am a zombie. A zombie who held pressure on a gunshot wound today and then argued with an attending about discharge planning.”
“And you like it?”
“I like that I’m good at it. I don’t like it enough to do it forever.” Soo Yi let her head fall back against the headrest, eyes closed. “I think I finally know where I’m headed, though. Urology. I keep coming back to it.”
“Of course you are,” Priya said, warm and unsurprised, the way she said most things about Soo Yi these days. “You’ve been training for that specialty since before you knew it existed.”
But they never once talked about quitting on each other, not even in the worst of it, and that mattered more than either of them said out loud. They’d survived worse than exhaustion. They’d survived being hunted in hallways and photographed without consent and dragged through a disciplinary hearing in front of people who wanted them gone. A hard year of rotations was brutal, but it wasn’t cruel, and there was a difference. Nobody was trying to break them this time. The schedule was just the schedule, indifferent rather than malicious, and indifference, it turned out, they could grin and bear.
“Four more months of this rotation block,” Brad said one night, both of them collapsed on his couch too tired to do anything but exist in the same room, her feet in his lap, his thumb tracing slow circles against her ankle. “Then it eases up. That’s what they tell us, anyway.”
“They told us second year would ease up too.”
“Fair enough.” He smiled, eyes already half closed. “Come here anyway.”
She crawled up the length of the couch and tucked herself against his chest, and for a few minutes neither of them said anything at all, just breathed together in the quiet, two people running on fumes and choosing each other anyway. It wasn’t glamorous. It wasn’t the kind of love either of them had pictured back in a physics lab two years earlier, all lightness and lunch dates and a first kiss she’d blurted out about right after it happened. It was harder now, and heavier, carried in fifteen-minute windows and five a.m. texts.
But it was still love, plainly and completely, and on the nights she could barely keep her eyes open, that was the one thing about her life that had never once felt uncertain.
I’m telling you, the anatomy of a sourdough starter is basically just a very slow-motion riot,” Brad said, leaning over the kitchen counter with a grin. He was carefully poking a bubbling mass of flour and water that had been sitting on the counter for three days.
The apartment smelled faintly of yeast and the lingering scent of the cardboard boxes they had spent the last six hours unpacking. It was a small place, a third-floor walk-up with creaky hardwood floors and a radiator that hissed like a tired cat. They had spent the afternoon arguing over where the bookshelf should go, though the argument had been more of a playful negotiation, punctuated by brief, breathless hugs and the kind of effortless laughter that only happens when two people are terrified and thrilled by the same thing.
“If you keep poking it, you’re just encouraging the chaos,” Soo Yi murmured, stepping into the space between Brad and the counter. She leaned her head against his shoulder, her pixie cut grazing the cotton of his t-shirt. She looked up at him, her dark eyes shimmering with a mixture of exhaustion and a quiet, humming intensity. The sheer scale of the day—the heavy lifting, the frantic search for the missing toaster, the sudden realization that they were actually here—seemed to condense into this single, quiet moment of proximity.
Brad didn’t look back at the sourdough. Instead, he looked down at her, his blue eyes softening. He reached out, his large hand gently cupping the side of her face, his thumb tracing the line of her jaw. The air between them shifted, the playful energy of the afternoon curdling into something thicker and more urgent. They had spent months dancing around this, navigating the tentative boundaries of their relationship with a careful, almost clinical precision, but the privacy of their own four walls had finally stripped away the hesitation.
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