The conversation continued around the table, Léo and Déborah bickering, Jacob requesting yet another soda by apparent telepathy and nobody noticed that Tae-Hee, for the past twenty minutes or so, had quietly solved his stress problem in the most pragmatic way possible.
He was drinking.
Not ostentatiously. Not with Léo's festive energy, raising his glass mid-sentence. No, Tae-Hee was drinking with the methodical discretion of a man who's identified a problem and is applying a reasoned solution to it. A sip when Léo cracked a joke and everyone looked away. Another when Ashton spoke and Tae-Hee felt the urgent need not to exist for three seconds.
The problem was simple: he remained the only person who hadn't finished his introduction. And the last part, the one Léo had brought back up with the enthusiasm of a man oblivious to the danger cornered him in an angle he couldn't see a way out of.
He'd never had to put it into words out loud. Not at university, not on rotation, not anywhere. It was a piece of information that existed in his head with the calm of things accepted long ago, and that had never needed to be said in front of a group of coworkers, a neon-lit fast-food restaurant, and his direct superior sitting across from him two meters away.
He took a sip.
— So Tae-Hee, Léo resumed, turning back to him with the smile of a man who'd completely forgotten he'd been interrupted twenty minutes earlier. You were saying?
— I was saying... um.
A sip.
— Jong Tae-Hee, twenty-two, Applied Health Sciences University-
— We know that, said Léo. The last part.
— The last...
A sip.
— It's just that...
Déborah jumped in with saving energy on a trauma surgery anecdote, and Tae-Hee took advantage of the diversion to pick his glass back up with the relief of a man who's just dodged something without knowing exactly what.
Time passed.
The glasses emptied, his faster than the others', in proportions nobody was keeping track of.
★★★
Dave was the first to leave.
His phone buzzed, he looked at the screen, and his expression changed in a way precise enough that Tae-Hee, even in his state, understood it was personal and urgent.
— I have to go, he said, standing up. Sorry.
He set down his share of the bill, grabbed his jacket, and gave Tae-Hee's shoulder a quick squeeze on his way past a brief, familiar gesture that meant several things at once. Then he was gone.
Jacob watched the bill arrive, mentally calculated the cost of his three sodas, and laid the exact amount on the table with the particular care of someone settling a debt he'd hoped he wouldn't have to settle. He stood up without ceremony.
Anaïs grabbed her coat.
— Same way, she said, looking at him.
It wasn't a question.
— Probably, said Jacob.
Mathys, who hadn't entirely followed the transition, found himself standing without having made a conscious decision, swept along in the other two's wake with the gentle resignation of a man used to being carried along by events.
— Good night, he said to the group, waving from the door.
The door closed.
Léo and Déborah exchanged a look. Then they looked at the bill. Then they looked at each other again with the telepathy of two people arriving simultaneously at the same embarrassing conclusion.
— I've got something early tomorrow, said Léo.
— Me too, said Déborah.
— Really early.
— Very early.
They set down their shares with a haste that betrayed less urgency than the desire not to end up alone finishing the evening with their department head, mumbled something approximately intelligible in Ashton's direction, and vanished in thirty seconds flat.
The restaurant had emptied in waves.
Ashton set down his cup, retrieved his coat, and stood up with the economical movement of someone who's never lingered anywhere in his life.
He looked at the table.
— Good night, he said.
Silence.
He paused.
Tae-Hee was still sitting across from him. Elbows on the table, chin slightly down, eyes fixed on his empty glass with the intense concentration of a man maintaining a deep philosophical relationship with the bottom of a glass container.
Ashton looked at him for a second. Then he looked at the empty glasses lined up in front of him—three, maybe four—with the little rings of condensation on the table left by someone setting a glass down a bit too fast, a bit too often.
He leaned in slightly.
— Jong.
Tae-Hee looked up at him with the slowness of a man surfacing from considerable depth.
— Hm?
Ashton studied him for another two seconds—pupils slightly dilated, a vague smile addressed to no one in particular, the posture of a man who'd decided at some point during the evening that gravity was a suggestion rather than a law.
He murmured, almost to himself:
— Shit. He's drunk.
Tae-Hee blinked.
— I'm perfectly... he said, with the deliberate dignity of people who are not.
He stopped.
— Sober, he concluded, after a pause one second too long.
Ashton looked at him some more.
In the nearly empty restaurant, with the colored neon casting orange light over the table and the staff starting to stack chairs in the back, Christopher Ashton—internationally renowned surgeon, a man whose nonchalance was practically an art form—found himself standing in front of a drunk twenty-two-year-old intern in a fast-food restaurant, and arrived at the absolute certainty that his evening was not over.
He sighed.
— Do you live far? he said.
Tae-Hee considered the question with a seriousness that suggested he didn't find it simple.
— It's... relative, he finally said.
— Relative to what?
— To... how fast you walk.
Ashton closed his eyes for half a second.
— Give me your address, Jong.