Useless…

******

Chuny agreed to cover her Friday midnight to noon– the penitent shift, as Abby was beginning to think of it– but not without a price. That price was coming in at six tonight instead of midnight. Eighteen hours– of patients and blood and irritable nightshift docs and interns hitting their twenty-fourth hour and all the craziness that Chicago bled two days before the full moon– was all that stood between her and Kim and a night on the town. Abby agreed to it without even blinking.

It also meant she hadn’t seen Kim today, wouldn’t see her until tomorrow until their date. She’d told Kim, "Just look fabulous…" although more and more she was beginning to think that Kim looking her best involved nothing more than bare skin and the odd sheet or two. Shaking her head at the lascivious direction her musings seemed to be taking– as was invariable when she thought about the blonde psychiatrist– she strolled into the ER, oblivious to the usual frenetic bustle of the place.

"Oh man oh man, you missed it," Malucci feverently proclaimed as she pushed through the lounge doors.

"Missed what? I’m fifteen minutes early for my shift."

"Dave…" Luka, who had been seated at the table methodically pouring through old charts, glared uncharacteristically sharply at the resident. "Don’t you have to see about the bleeding hemorrhoids in Curtain 2?"

"Aw man, the nurses can check on him. It’s not like he’s about to crump or anything."

"No," he said evenly, his eyes never leaving the resident’s. "They can’t."

Abby watched the exchange with crossed arms and growing irritation. If she’d missed something, undoubtedly it involved Kim. Or worse yet, Kim and Kerry. "What is it?" she asked her ex-lover after Dave had not so subtly stomped from the lounge.

"Just Dave being Dave," he demurred.

"Luka…" she chided him, sitting down at the table beside him. The Croatian hadn’t exactly been cool to her in the malestrom that followed the revelation of her affair with Kim, but he hadn’t exactly been friendly either. They had boxed warily around each other in the time since, elaborately careful with each other’s feelings and decidedly noncommittal about the five-ten blonde that stood between them. It was exasperating in a way, at least Carter would fight with her. With Luka, mostly what she had gotten was silence, and the nagging feeling that she had treated him far more badly than he had deserved. "What’s going on?"