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life's a losing game when you don't play
don't hold your cards too close is what they say
and love is just another leap of faith
but I jump right in
— mxmtoon, ‘fever dream’
/
i.
Beatrice doesn’t like like Ava.
They’re best friends, she and Ava and Camila. She's known them since university. They work in the same hospital. For goodness’ sake, they all live in the same house.
She doesn’t like Ava that way.
At least, that’s what she tells herself and her stupid, traitorous, racing heart after Ava gives her a kiss on the cheek and walks away like it was nothing. But the thing is, it is nothing. Ava hands out affection like it requires no deliberation, as generously as the kindly street hawker a few blocks down from the hospital plops a gratuitously hefty scoop of crispy pork lard on Beatrice’s weekly 车仔面 despite her insistence that it’s more cholesterol than anyone should be consuming in a day, let alone a single meal.
It probably actually is nothing to Ava. It’s not that she’s straight — quite the opposite of that, in fact. She’s open about her bisexuality, and Beatrice is pretty sure there’d been something between her and Camila at some point. But this is Beatrice — and that’s Ava. Ava, who lights up the room the moment she steps foot in it. Ava, who’s universally adored. Ava, who’s smart, patient, brave, thoughtful, hilarious and unendingly kind. Ava is leagues above her, and there’s no way Ava would like someone like Beatrice.
So, more importantly than the fact that Beatrice doesn’t like Ava like that, she can’t. She doesn’t stand a chance. The ensuing fallout would completely upend her life.
“Oh, right! Don’t forget our dinner date!” Ava calls out suddenly, snapping Beatrice out of her thoughts. She looks up to see Ava, peeking out from the turn down the corridor, wink and flash her that signature grin, a sight that knocks the breath straight out of her lungs.
Damn it all, Beatrice does like Ava like that.
ii.
Beatrice finds the courage to bring it up at dinner.
“Were you and Camila together at some point?” Stupid, stupid, stupid, she berates herself the moment the question rolls off her tongue. She blames the beer for eroding her filter, letting her vocalise her thoughts the moment they’re formulated, without first considering that these thoughts might not be appropriate ones to be having.
But Ava grins, and the regret nearly disappears in its entirety. “We were, but it was nothing serious.” She gives it further thought, shovelling the noodles and a frankly horrifying volume of crispy pork lard into her mouth. “We both needed it at the time, I guess. We agreed that it would be casual. Honestly, it wasn’t even that much different from how we are now. I just think there’s no need to put a label on it, you know? I loved her then, still love her now. Just, you know, the sex.” Beatrice chokes at that, and Ava guffaws, most definitely having said that just to elicit a reaction.
“So you wouldn’t want to be in a committed relationship?” Beatrice asks, emboldened. Liquid courage works wonders. But an inkling of doubt forms when the question gives Ava pause. She puts down her chopsticks, and her smile wanes, and for the moment before she responds, Beatrice starts to think it might’ve struck a nerve.
“I do,” Ava says, giving Beatrice a hesitant glance. “It’s not the same for me now as it was back then.”
“How so?” Beatrice asks, and she feels it — the flickering of an ember, a nervous warmth in her chest, like the beginnings of a fire that doesn’t yet know if it wants to devour or to vanish. Hope.
“There’s– there’s someone, now,” Ava says, softly, resuming her task of getting the perfect ratio of noodle and soup and pork lard on her spoon. “Someone I want to be with.” She glances up at Beatrice and their eyes meet. Ava’s gaze is undecipherable, but she’s always worn her heart on her sleeve, and Beatrice can tell, inexplicably, that Ava is nervous. Like her words have been a confession.
The spark bursts to life, and a wildfire rages in her chest now.
iii.
“How do you do it?” Beatrice asks, without context. “How are you so brave?”
Ava knits her brow. “Well,” she starts, placing her takeaway bowl of 车仔面 on the dashboard, “I guess almost dying helped. I got a new chance at life, and I’m not gonna let anything stop me from making the most of it. Why do you ask?”
Beatrice has been acting off tonight, and she’s desperately hoping Ava hasn’t noticed, but of course she has. Nothing escapes her. But Beatrice has only just received her diagnosis today. A cardiac tumour, months old by now because she refused to acknowledge the chest pain, the tightness, the palpitations and lightheadedness and breathlessness until it’d started significantly affecting her work. She’s not ready to admit it to herself yet, let alone to Ava.
So she doesn’t. She deflects, but the looming possibility of mortality has ignited a strange, novel desire to broach emotionally heavy topics. “Have I told you about my coming out to my parents?”
At that, Ava turns and gives Beatrice her full attention. “No,” she says, barely above a whisper; an invitation. “I’m all ears.”
“I came out, the day we finished our residency,” Beatrice begins, steeling her gaze and willing the tears to stay away, at least long enough for her to finish saying what she’s been dying to tell Ava but has never had the courage to relive. “I knew they wouldn’t be happy about it, so I tried– I tried so hard to do everything in my power to make up for it. I topped my class every year. I excelled in all my extracurriculars. I got into med school and did well there too. I hoped I’d be enough.”
But I wasn’t. The last sentence goes unsaid, but they both hear it, deafeningly loud.
“Bea,” Ava says tenderly, her gaze soft but serious. “What you are is beautiful.”
A tear makes its way down her cheek. Unknowingly, they’ve both leaned in, and their faces are inches apart. At the same time, their gazes flick down to each other’s lips. Beatrice chuckles, a self-deprecating thing, even as the woman she knows now that she loves with her whole heart stares at her with a reverence unbefitting the tears in her eyes and the wrongness she’s had in her her entire life. “Is it bad that I still want this?”
Ava knows Beatrice isn’t homophobic, but rather, she’s plagued with a deeply ingrained self-hatred, the last souvenir from her parents. “No,” Ava whispers, cupping her cheek and wiping the stray tear away. “Not at all.”
Beatrice hears a choked sound, unsure of whether it might’ve been a laugh or a sob. It takes a few beats for her to realise it’s from her. Her heart beats erratically, and this time, she doesn’t know if it’s because of their proximity and contact or the errant mass of cells, a growing parasite usurping her life from within her being. It takes another few beats for her to realise that they’re both stock still, save for her loud and ragged breaths.
“Hey,” Ava says, nothing but gentle. “We can stop.” It’s an offer, an out. “Do you want us to stop?” she asks, and her tone indicates that ‘yes’ would be a perfectly acceptable answer.
“I– I don’t know,” Beatrice says. “I want this, I do. But I can’t.” The dichotomy rages a war within her, tears her apart. More tears surface when she realises she might not have the time to figure herself out.
“I want you to know that you can,” Ava says, before pulling away slightly. “There’s nothing wrong with what you want, Bea.”
Beatrice leans back against the seat, closing her eyes as the pounding of her heart slows. She can imagine it, the tumour, a gnarly thing, rebelling against the structure of the healthy tissue beneath it. An abomination, greedy and destructive. Lying in wait to pounce when she drops her guard.
Finally, she hums in acknowledgement. Ava deserves more, she thinks. But she’s bone-tired and frustrated and feeling incredibly unlikeable, so it fits the bill.
“Can I hold your hand?” Ava asks, always gentle, always generous, always kind. Another tear escapes, warm on Beatrice’s cheek. She extends her shaking hand out to the side, and Ava takes it in a comforting grip.
Beatrice squeezes. Holds on, like a lifeline.
iv.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” Ava demands, storming into the locker room, where Beatrice slumps against a corner, pill bottle in hand, drawing ragged breaths.
“Is that how you talk to your patients, Dr. Silva?” Beatrice jokes, but it comes out a tired, raspy whisper.
Her eyes are closed, but she hears heavy footfalls that inexplicably get softer as they get closer, and eventually, she feels her weight being shifted to lean against a warm body. Instantly, she yearns, craves for more contact, the comfort easing the vice grip around her straining heart.
“I had to hear from Superion that you collapsed on duty and that you have a fucking cardiac tumour,” Ava seethes in complete contrast to her fingers lightly raking through Beatrice’s hair. “And you kept this from me and Camila. For months. Months!”
“It’s ‘Camila and me’,” Beatrice mumbles, clinging desperately to her last thread of lucidity. She’s been advised to admit herself to the hospital to be treated. She’s also staunchly refused.
“Do you have a death wish? Why the fuck are you working? Do you realise how long our shifts are? How little sleep you run on?”
“I don’t know,” Beatrice breathes, “how to do anything else.”
“Then let us,” Ava says, exasperated. Then, in a less aggressive tone: “Let us help you.”
Beatrice hums, noncommittal. She’s been doing that to Ava a lot lately. She makes a mental note to stop, when she isn’t so damn exhausted and dizzy and scared all the time.
“Get some sleep,” Ava instructs, looping her arms around Beatrice. “I love you.” There it is, the threat of mortality, the elicitation of a tender whisper, earnest and easy. Ava is, perhaps fortunately, a terrible liar. And the admission of truths has always come easy.
I love you too, Beatrice wants to say. She feels the sentiment scream and claw and fight its way into the universe. She’s unsure if it makes it out of her throat.
v.
In the end, Beatrice doesn’t need Ava’s or Camila’s convincing to be admitted as a patient — she’s admitted for surgery. It’s her only shot of survival in the long term, and they all know it. But the chances of her surviving the operation aren’t desirable. It’s a risky procedure, Dr. Tong explains. They have to be thorough but careful, and they’ll be racing against time.
It’s a strange feeling, to be the receiving end of such a speech, when she’d usually be the one giving it. The man before her is a mentor, a friend, a colleague, and now her doctor and surgeon. She’s not sure how to reconcile these identities.
Especially as a cardiologist herself, she understands the risk. She knows there’s a likelihood she won’t even have a chance at recovery, that her heart, momentarily stopped for the surgery, won’t start again. That she’ll die right there on the operating table, where her last conscious moment will be morphed by the haze of anaesthesia.
“When you finally get out of the hospital, you’ll have actual proof for Auntie Yeung to stop giving you extra crispy pork lard,” Camila jokes, defusing the palpable tension in the room. When. Not if. The word choice goes unspoken, but not unnoticed, and Beatrice feels the familiar spark, the beginning of what could become a roaring flame. Hope, a dangerous thing.
“Camila’s right,” Ava agrees, gingerly brushing stray strands of hair away from Beatrice’s forehead. She lets her fingertips trail lightly over skin, lets herself savour the warmth below the pad of her thumb. She’ll get to do this again — combing Beatrice’s hair, feeling the weight of her body next to her. It wouldn’t serve her to consider otherwise. “You got this, okay?” Ava reassures softly, and she’s not sure if she’s trying to encourage Beatrice or soothe her own nerves. “We’ll be waiting for you when you’re done.”
“Don’t pace too much,” Beatrice nags, pointedly ignoring Ava’s eye roll. “Not good for your back.”
“I’ll be fine,” Ava grumbles. “I’ll even sit.”
Beatrice cracks a smile, and Ava decides that she’d give anything to see that again.
/
Upwards of 10 notifications each from their pagers interrupting their vigil, a few cans of coffee and hours of gruelling wait later, the light above the door to the operating theatre turns off. Dr. Tong strides out, wearing a tired smile as he announces that the surgery was a success.
vi.
Home, to Beatrice, is the smell of burnt pancakes from the kitchen when Ava valiantly attempts to make them breakfast. It’s the polaroids of her with her two favourite people in the world hung up among the fairy lights on the wall of the living room they all share.
It’s seeing Ava’s soft and sleepy grin against the backdrop of their living room sofa, on a video call from a medical camp a few borders away.
“How was work today, darling?” she asks, the tension from a long day slipping from her shoulders at the sight of Ava half-asleep on the sofa that she will undoubtedly roll off of within an hour.
“Amazing,” Ava says, then pauses to yawn. “I got to work with Dr. Yeung on an 11-hour surgery. Incredible experience, even if my back is killing me now. Sorry I’m sleepy; I took acetaminophen and you know that shit knocks me out cold.”
Rolling off the sofa immediately becomes less of an endearing joke and more of an actual concern. Beatrice frowns and gives into her first instinct — ‘mother hen mode’, as Camila calls it. “Have you eaten? Is Camila home with you? Is there–”
“Woah, woah, slow down,” Ava interrupts, laughing before cutting off into another jaw-cracking yawn. “I’m waiting for Camila to come back with supper. I’m not hungry, but before you say anything, I know I need to eat, okay? And I will. Quit worrying about me and tell me about your day.”
Beatrice sighs. She knows she can get overbearing, and she’s trying to be better — to trust that Ava is more than able to take care of herself, and that she’ll reach out for help if and when she needs it. With that, she leans her head against her hand, elbow propped against the table, and gives Ava a soft smile as she tells her stories about her patients and fellow volunteers, knowing Ava is minutes from falling asleep.
She remembers telling Ava and Camila about her plans after recovery. “I’m going to sign up,” she’d said, holding up her phone screen towards them, the Doctors Without Borders website open for the umpteenth time in the week she’d taken to pore over the decision. “For six months.”
She remembers the nerves she’d felt, wondering if they’d tell her it was impulsive or premature, even if she’d mentioned her interest in it before. She’d wondered if they’d believe it was possible for her at the time, given her recent discharge.
She remembers the fire — hope and passion and conviction roiling in her chest, the strong, steady beat of her heart that knew with an unfathomable surety that this is what she wants. This is where she goes next.
She remembers the relief that came with Ava and Camila sweeping her into a hug, the warmth that wound its way into her veins when they’d given her their support, the tears springing into her eyes when they said they knew how much it meant to her.
And it does. She’s never felt more alive, helping those in need of medical care but too far away from the city or simply unable to make the journey or afford treatment there. She’s never felt more alive, surrounded by passionate, dedicated volunteers with a vast range of motivations leading them where they all are now.
She’s never felt more alive, trailing off as she realises Ava is fast asleep, curled up on her side and hugging a cushion to her chest.
She ends the call, sends Ava a sappy miss you text, and turns in for the night.