Schedule Update
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"Want one?"
Rhea was sitting on the step outside the convenience store, a cigarette between her fingers, holding the pack out toward Ren. Her eyes were still red at the edges. Her knees had dried blood on them from the platform. She was looking at the street, not at him.
"Sure," Ren said.
He sat down beside her. She tapped one out and lit it for him, cupping the flame from the lighter with one hand, and he noticed her hands were not quite steady. She lit her own after.
The first drag settled into his lungs and something in him went quiet. He had not smoked in a while. The taste brought back late nights in the hospital, the corridor outside the surgical ward at two in the morning, the specific tired that lived after a case that ended the wrong way.
"Haa."
"I thought doctors didn't smoke," Rhea said. She was still looking at the street. "You know, given that it's literally your job to tell people not to."
"Seventy percent of my colleagues smoke," Ren said. "We deal with deaths every day. Doctors are often the worst patients. We know exactly what we're doing to ourselves and we do it anyway."
Rhea was quiet for a moment. "Isn't that kind of contradictory to what you do?"
"You can call it that."
She pulled her knees up to her chest. A few people walked past without looking at them.
"What's your name, mister? I can't keep calling you mister."
Ren took another drag. "Just call me Doctor. I discarded my name a long time ago."
Rhea turned and looked at him with a completely flat expression.
"Eww," she said.
"What."
"That's so cringe, mister. How old are you? Why are you still saying things like that?"
Ren stared at the street. "You can just stab me in the heart if you're going to say it like that."
Rhea laughed. It came out genuine, the first genuine sound she had made since the platform, and it lasted longer than she expected. She coughed on her cigarette and waved a hand at nothing.
"You're actually funny, mister." She tucked her hair behind her ear. "Fine. I'll keep calling you mister. My name is Rhea, by the way. Rhea Jensen."
"I'll just call you Rhea then."
"Sure, mister."
She was quiet for a moment. Down the street a tram went past, bell ringing once.
"Thank you," she said, "for not asking about my situation."
Ren exhaled slowly. "It's not like you owe me anything. I'm just a cool uncle who was passing by."
Rhea turned to look at him. Then she started laughing and slapped him on the back, several times, with genuine force.
"Cool uncle," she repeated. "Mister, you speak exactly like a middle-aged man. You don't even look that old."
"It's the heart that counts. I'm a middle-aged man at heart."
"Okay, and?"
"Even the old gods should fear me."
Rhea made a sound between a laugh and a scoff and kept slapping his back. Ren let it happen.
"You're ridiculous," she said.
"Thank you."
"That wasn't a compliment."
"It was a little bit."
She stopped slapping and sat back, still smiling, looking at the street again. The cigarette had burned down to almost nothing in her fingers. She did not seem to notice.
He looked at her from the side. The crying had cleared something out of her face, and what was left was younger than the expression she had been wearing on the platform. She was probably twenty, maybe twenty-one. Sitting on a convenience store step with dried blood on her knees and a half-finished cigarette, looking at the afternoon like it had not quite decided to be her enemy yet.
"You go to university?" he asked.
"Second year," she said. "Political science."
"You want to change things."
She shrugged. "I used to think I could. Now I mostly just go to class and come back." She tapped ash off the cigarette. "It sounds pathetic when I say it out loud."
"It doesn't."
She glanced at him. "You're just being nice."
"I'm a doctor," Ren said. "I'm not in the business of being nice. I'm in the business of being accurate."
Rhea looked at him for a moment, and then she laughed again, softer this time. She pulled her knees in tighter.
"You want to change things again," Ren said. "That's still in there. Otherwise you wouldn't still be going to class."
She did not answer that. She finished the cigarette and held the dead end between her fingers for a second before dropping it on the step.
"Maybe," she said.
Ren did not push it.
They sat for a bit. The afternoon moved around them, unhurried.
The cigarettes finished. Rhea lit a second one. Ren declined and held his phone, turning it over once in his hand.
"So where do you work, mister?"
"Dao Guild. I'm a doctor there."
Rhea's eyebrows went up. "Whoaa. That's serious. Are you like, an important person there?"
"I am a very important person in the Dao Guild," Ren said. "There is no doctor better than me. The Guildmaster himself calls me brother."
Rhea laughed. "You really know how to boast."
Ren said nothing. She found that funnier.
"Okay but what kind of doctor?" she said. "Like what do you actually do, what's your specialty?"
"Surgery."
"Like actual surgery? Organ transplants and all that?"
"That's the basic level, yes."
Rhea looked at him sideways for a moment, taking in the white shirt and the tired face, apparently deciding something.
"I think you're actually really cool, mister."
"I know," Ren said. "I think so too."
She shook her head, smiling. The smile was small and real.
They sat for a while. Two pigeons argued over something near the curb. A kid on a bicycle rang his bell at a pedestrian who was not paying attention.
Rhea finished her second cigarette and tucked her lighter into her pocket.
"Contact?" she said, holding out her phone.
Ren looked at her.
"Are we friends now, mister?"
He took the phone and typed in his number. "You are my best friend now," he said, handing it back. "You will never get rid of me. Be prepared."
Rhea looked at what he had typed as his name. She pressed her lips together, holding back something.
"Nice to meet you, bestie," she said.
She stood up, brushed off her jeans, and looked down at him for a moment. Her knees still had the dried blood on them and she had not mentioned it once.
"Bye bye, misterrr." She drew the last syllable out, comfortable enough now to be a little annoying about it. "I'll contact you when I'm bored."
"You don't have to wait until you're bored," Ren said. "I'm generous. I'll pick up either way."
She pointed at him briefly, like that was a good point, then turned and walked, and then she was running, crossing the street at a jog. She did not look back.
Ren watched until she was gone.
He sat on the step alone. The convenience store behind him had a radio playing something quiet through the door.
He looked at his phone.
Her contact was already there. She had added herself while he was typing, name and a small star emoji next to it.
Rhea Jensen.
He stared at it.
Did I just, he thought, get a new friend.
He sat with that for a second. Then he put his phone in his pocket, stood up, and brushed off his slacks.
He had a conversation with Lu Changcheng to not be having, and he was going to not be having it for at least another week.