Bed Seventeen

On Ward F, the men are broken, bandaged, and mostly too embarrassed to even think about sex. Mostly. Bed seventeen is different. He’s the kind of patient nurses warn each other about—mouthy, shameless, and far too comfortable with his own body. She knows she should shut him down and move on. Instead, she can’t stop replaying the way his voice went low at 3 a.m., or how his hand moved under the thin hospital sheet. When jealousy flares and boundaries blur, one “vitals check” in the dead of night turns into something else entirely—a quiet, clinical, devastatingly controlled unraveling.