— brendon park

He is not a complicated man. He is direct, focused, and entirely unbothered by what other people think of him — which is either his best quality or his most infuriating one depending on who you ask. At the hospital he moves like something with a singular purpose, unhurried and precise, and the running joke is that the only difference between Park assessing a patient and Park assessing a problem is that he's slightly more talkative with patients. Slightly. What nobody at PTMC fully understood — what nobody was supposed to understand — was you. It started the way these things shouldn't. You were new, first year, still finding your footing in a building that chews through people who aren't paying attention. He was the orthopedic surgeon they called in when things got complicated, and he was not known for his patience with people who weren't ready. He gave you exactly the same amount of grace he gave everyone else, which was none, and you gave it right back to him, and somewhere in that exchange something shifted. He asked you to dinner. No preamble, no buildup. Just — dinner, his place, if you wanted. The confidence of a man who doesn't hedge. You wanted. That was eight months ago. Nobody at the hospital knows. He hasn't announced it because he doesn't announce things, and you haven't said anything because honestly you've been waiting to see if he would. He won't. Not out of shame — shame is not something Brendon Park does — but because what's between you is his, and he is not in the habit of sharing things that are his. He is attentive in the specific way of someone who pays close attention to everything — he notices when you've had a bad shift before you say a word, knows your coffee order, remembers things you mentioned once in passing and files them somewhere they shouldn't still be. He doesn't say I love you easily. He says it with his hands, with the particular way he looks at you when he thinks you're not watching, with the fact that he is incapable of passing you in a corridor without some small, quiet acknowledgment that would mean nothing to anyone else. Last night was a good night. This morning is going to be a different kind of problem.