“Look out for bed seventeen,” Jen said as she was handing over. “He’s a real perv.”

“Great,” I said. “Just what we need.”

I’ve heard some horror stories from other nurses, of course. Tales of patients - male patients, always. Not all men but always a man, right? - with weird kinks who get bored in their beds and have nothing better to do than to harass the staff being paid to look after them. But on Ward F it’s usually fine.

I’ll spare you the grisly details about exactly what sorts of cases we look after here, but let’s just say we see men who’ve had surgery in ... let’s call it intimate areas, shall we? Most of them are in pain, dealing with the embarrassment of having dressings change and being prodded and poked in their most private of places all day every day. Sex is generally the last thing on their minds, and we tend to get left alone. But it sounded like bed 17 had other ideas.

Thankfully I was on nights, so as I gathered my things and sat through the handover I thought that I probably wouldn’t have to worry about him too much.

How wrong I was.

The first time I saw him was early the next morning, three-ish. He was scheduled for surgery that day and so I went to do a bedside check to make sure there was no food or water nearby. I expected him to be sleeping, but it’s never a surprise when patients are awake at that time. Quite aside from the pain and discomfort, hospitals just arent’t easy to sleep in. There’s always a light on, there’s always someone awake and making noise, there’s always something beeping or being wheeled along the ward. So I wasn’t shocked when he spoke as I was cleaning away the jug of water that had been left by his bed.

“I haven’t met you yet,” he said, his voice low and rough.

“You haven’t,” I said. “How are you feeling?”

“Thirsty,” he said. “And sore. Can I get some more pills?”

I smiled and shook my head. “Sorry. You’re nil-by-mouth now until you go into surgery.”

He laughed, shifted under the thin bed sheet. I saw his hand snake down to his crotch. Here it comes, I thought.

“Well, I can think of something that might help with the pain.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Meaning?”

“I might be nil-by-mouth, but you aren’t.”

I turned away from him, reached down to the bottom of his bed to grab his chart. “Next of kin is listed as your wife,” I said. “I’m sure she’d be delighted by what you just said.”

He started to speak again but I cut him off. It’s always best to take a firm hand in these sorts of situations. “I need to hang some fluids for oyu. I’ll get some painkillers up with them, too.” And before he could say anything else I walked away.

“You were right,” I said in the morning when Jen arrived back on the ward to hand over.

“I was?” she asked.

“Bed seventeen.”

She rolled her eyes as I told her what he’d said, and how I’d made sure to request good strong painkillers to knock him out for the rest of the night so that he wouldn’t bother me again. “He’s scheduled for this morning,” I said, “so he probably won’t bother you much today, at least.”

She laughed. “which means he’ll be bothering you all night again. Lucky you.”

At home my mind kept coming back to that one interaction, replaying his words on a loop, the image of him grabbing himself under the thin sheet seared into my imagination. The light had been dim and I hadn’t really seen anything, but in my head I’d been able to trace the shape of his cock as it hardened under the sheet, been able to see it pulse as he squeezed it.

Something about the way he’d said what he said was really getting to me, somehow pushing past the disgust that logically I knew I should be feeling but couldn’t quite summon. He’d said it with such calm confidence, without a hint of contrition or shame. Normally when men say things like that there’s a sense that they know they’re pushing at the boundaries, a feeling that they want you to react so that they can feel powerful. It’s always made me feel dirty, violated, like being forced to take part in someone’s fetish against my will. But this felt different, somehow. Like he’d said it with the full expectation that I’d say yes, sir, you’re right, I can put that in my mouth.

Why did I like it? Why could I not stop thinking about his voice, and the veins in the back of his hand?

I drifted off to sleep with the image of the shape of his cock under the blanket in the forefront of my mind, and I hated myself for it.

The next day Jen reported that she’d had no trouble. Bed seventeen had been into surgery and come out with no complications, and he was resting. He’d eaten, he’d asked for seconds, he’d moved his bowels already. You know, all that sexy stuff that nurses deal with. Now, she said, he was sleeping.

“Let’s hope he stays asleep,” I said, but somewhere in the back of my head was the image of the tendons in his wrist flexing as he squeezed his hand.

I busied myself with rounds, trying to distract myself, glad of the fact that the curtains around his bed were drawn and I didn’t have to look at him. But, of course, I could only put it off for so long. Whatever had happened the night before, whatever images were haunting my imagination now, I still had a job to do.

“Are you awake?” I asked as I parted the curtains. I heard a sleep-thickened grunt in reply.

“Sorry,” I said. “I need to hang more fluids for you, and take your blood pressure.”

He sat up in his bed, tentative and slow, shifting his weight with the care of a man in pain and trying not to show it.

“How are you feeling?” I asked.

“Still sore,” he said. “But a different kind of sore now, I guess. Not ‘oh god get me to hospital’ sore, you know?”

I smiled and nodded. “Sore like we fixed it, sore.”

“Yeah, exactly.”

I hadn’t really seen him the night before, but now that I could I was surprised. He’d spoken with the confidence of a much more attractive man. Not that he was unattractive, you understand. He certainly wasn’t ugly. But he was just a guy. A perfectly normal guy. Slight stubble, a chin that wasn’t weak but wasn’t going to win any jawline awards. Nice, normal features that went together well but weren’t moistening pants in the street.

I wrapped the blood pressure cuff around his arm and pressed the button to start it inflating, and I braced myself for whatever comment he was about to make. But the biggest surprise was that he didn’t say anything at all. Instead we sat in silence while the cuff clenched around his bicep. With each pulse of increased pressure I felt that silence stretch out a little bit longer, felt the weight of his gaze on the side of my face, saw the veins in his forearm become a little more prominent.

Suddenly my mind was back in bed the night before, back obsessing around the image of his hand grabbing his cock through the sheet. The man may not have had a model’s face but I found myself staring at his forearms and his hands, unable to pull my gaze away. Wondering what those fingers might look like tugging at the buttons of my scrubs, or looped under the elastic of my underwear as he peeled them to the side.

“All good?” he asked, when the cuff beeped and the tension in it hissed away. Suddenly I felt flustered, and I busied myself with folding the machine away and noting down his blood pressure on his chart.

“Yeah,” I said. “All good.”

“I’m glad,” he said.

“Can I get you some water?” I asked. He shook his head.

“No,” he said, “but actually, can I ask you something?” I nodded, and he smiled. “Why are you blushing?”

I don’t remember the rest of that shift really. I brought him water, and hung fluids, and took empty fluid bags away, and did my job, and it was all on autopilot. My mind wasn’t present. My mind was focused on his hands, and his forearms, and the soft, warm smell of him that had filled my nose as I was taking his blood pressure, that I hadn’t noticed at the time but that was all I could think of now.

In bed I thought about his hands and his cock again, and this time I filled in the blanks for myself. I pictured what it would look like for those veins and tendons to pulse and flex as he handled himself. I thought about his smell, and how it would be amplified down in the thicket of his pubic hair - hair I hadn’t seen but was imagining, downy and dark, a tuft of tight curls marking the boundary between public and private skin.

I desperately wanted to touch myself, to give in to the fantasy, to make myself come so that I could settle my mind and get some rest, but I also knew that if I did it would be written all over my face the next day. He’d see it immediately, and he’d know.

I slept terribly.

When I arrived at work I could tell immediately that something had happened. Jen was in a rage that she barely contained while we were handing over, and she conveniently found a reason to leave the ward as we came to his bed on rounds.

“What’s the matter?” I asked when I caught up with her afterwards. She was in the staff room, already in her coat, halfway to going home.

“He’s lucky he’s going home tomorrow so I don’t have to see him again, because if I see him again he won’t be walking out of here,” she said.

“Seventeen?” I asked, as though I didn’t already know who she was talking about.

“He’s a prick,” she said.

“Tell me what happened.”

She walked to the staff room door, peeked out of the window to make sure we weren’t about to be interrupted, the she turned back to me and crossed her arms across her chest.

“He got his cock out,” she hissed. How was it, I almost asked, having to bite back the words before they fell out of my mouth. Instead I tried my best to feign the disgust that I knew, logically, I should be feeling.

“What the fuck,” I said, just for something to say, just to sound supportive and appropriately enraged. I said it again with emphasis, just to be sure. “Did you tell anyone?”

“There’s no point, is there? He’s going home tomorrow and it’s my word against his anyway, nobody witnessed it. I just want to go home and forget about it.”

I nodded. “Did he ... say anything? When he did it?”

She laughed, an angry little snort. “Yeah, he did. He asked if I wanted to check his vitals. What a prick.”

She left for home and I went about my shift. I was snappy and irritated, short with patients and colleagues alike, and for the longest time I couldn’t figure out what was causing it.

It came to me in a hot, shameful flush as I was passing the curtains around bed seventeen, a feeling that settled in the base of my stomach like hot lead. I was jealous. I was jealous that he’d shown Jen his cock, that he’d propositioned her and not me.

I knew it was irrational. Jen had warned me about him in the first place, which meant he’d met her before he met me, had said something suggestive to her before his nil-by-mouth comment. Never had this only been about me and him. This had always been about just him, saying and doing whatever he wanted with impunity. And he hadn’t said anything to me after I rebuffed him the first time, after I made it clear that I knew he had a wife.

Had Jen handled it differently? Had Jen reciprocated in some way, played along and encouraged him? Or had she just not told him no in quite the same way that I did? Had she failed to make it clear that she wasn’t interested like I had.