Why would anyone deal with emotions when they could just bury them?

The transfusion lab was bustling, even at this time of night. Automated arms moved samples across bleached white analysers as they buzzed and whirred, brightly coloured reagents being fed through pipes in noisy clicks as they switched from sample to sample. Organisation masked as chaos, perhaps that was the real motto of the National Health Service. Henry sat down at the manual testing bench after taking his tray of samples from the fridge. He fixed the slides in ethanol, incubated them for a few minutes, before dipping the set into the staining solution. Henry was running the tests as a favour to get in his boss’s good books, but providing them late would do the opposite. He was already days behind, so staying late was the only option.

Henry looked up from the desk to see his boss, Matt, across the lab in his office, the green command-line interface of his computer glowing against his unshaven face. Matt was, in Henry's humble opinion, an arse. No more than a walking management textbook, a talking cliché, an opinionated teen stuck in a forty year-old's body. How could Elle have fallen for him? The thought of her sleeping with Matt made Henry's skin writhe, however the real mystery was how she could cheat on the man she had so much heralded as the love of her life? Henry might not like Tom, although he wouldn't acknowledge why, but Elle cheating on him made no sense.

“Henry! For Lords sake, what are you doing?” said a loud voice to his side. “I think they've probably had enough!”

Bloody Mary was staring at Henry's workbench with puffed red cheeks and an eyebrow raised so high, it was lost in her wonky fringe. Henry glanced down to the slides and cursed. He had left them in too long and now they were ruined, every slide stained purple. Pulling them from the dye bath, Henry dropped the set straight into the biological waste bin.

“Sorry, I was a million miles away,” Henry said.

“Try to pay attention, equipment doesn't grow on trees and you're clogging up my lab,” Mary said.

She walked back over to the cross-match bench, although waddled may have been a more accurate description, as her lab coat poppers strained to constrain her figure. Henry lambasted himself for ruining the slides and, taking the pipette in hand, began to prepare a new batch. He had reached the staining stage again when the door to the lab opened and Elle entered with a rack of samples, her pristine lab coat somehow fitting perfectly to her body. How did it do that? Nobody looked good in their lab coats, they weren't supposed to be flattering. She didn’t acknowledge him, but instead, headed to an analyser in the corner of the room and loaded her samples. Henry counted to sixty in his head, his eyes absently focused on Elle the entire time, and pulled the slides out of the dye bath. Wafting the first slide in the air, a slight indeterminable chemical smell filling his nostrils, Henry clamped it in place under the microscope. Adjusting the focus, several bright pink spots came into focus: the test had worked, which meant he could head home.

“Elle, have you got a minute,” Matt called across the room.

She followed him into his office, the door closing behind her. Dixie was right; he needed to stop caring for her, that would be the sensible thing to do.

Henry got up from the desk, arranged the slides neatly on a tray, and made his way back to his own lab. As he reached the door, his heart began to pump impossibly fast, straining to beat as the world crashed down around him, blurring into nothingness.