He took a deep breath and ran a frustrated hand through his hair. “Me too. I know this isn’t your fault, Will. I just…”
Have a remarkable kid that I’ve spent years trying to turn my life around for, I silently thought the words for him.
“I get it. Seriously. Don’t worry about me, dude.”
He very nearly broke into a smile. “Wow. Close call,” I teased. “You’re almost smiling.”
That tipped the scales, and the corners of his mouth actually turned up. “Wouldn’t want that, would we?”
“I gotta run grab some shit and then get back up to four. Catch up later?”
“Sure, man.” He held out his hand, and I shook it. Something was still plaguing him. I could see it in the fatigue around his eyes, but I wasn’t about to delve into it.
I currently had my own problems.
Not knowing when Melody would make it there, I pushed through the door to the stairwell and drank my coffee as I climbed to the fourth floor, also known as the maternity wing.
The last drops left the cup and hit my tongue as I moved through the door and onto the floor. I ducked inside a room and threw away the empty cup in the trash inside the door and then continued down the hall to the supply closet.
I needed a suture kit in case my patient tore during delivery and to find something to give her as a push gift—society’s modern-day reward for having endured the trials of labor. It wasn’t exactly a hospital-approved use of supplies, but I agreed with this new era—these women deserved a little something extra for their trouble—and paying for each gift on my own would make me broke in no time.
The door to the supply closet creaked as I pushed it open, and as if provoked, other sounds exploded around me: several supplies hitting the floor in violent succession, an amusingly creative expletive involving the words “pickax” and “cockpecker,” and finally, the heavy breathing of someone trying their best to go unnoticed and failing spectacularly.
My initial plan was to give them what they wanted, get in and get out with the stuff I needed and do my best to ignore whatever couple I’d found in a starkly nude, professionally compromising position. I’d been in this situation myself a time or two, and like any good boy, I was trying really hard to live by that treat others how you want to be treated credo. Plus, just because my sex life was officially ruined by the show from hell didn’t mean everyone else’s was.
And I would have followed the plan, I really would have, if it hadn’t been Melody I found and she hadn’t been wearing way more clothes than I was expecting. Though, if I was honest, Melody in fewer clothes probably would have decreased the probability of me leaving without incident even further.
“Mel?” I asked, my mouth curving up into a smile as her body jerked unnaturally and rotated woodenly to face me. She seemed disappointed that her back’s powers of invisibility had worn off but not all that surprised.
“Oh, hey, Dr. Cummings,” she tried to remark casually, brushing some loose hair off of her face with one hand and keeping the other behind her body. “What brings you here?”
My smile deepened. “Supplies. And you?”
“Oh, you know. The same.”
I wanted to let her off the hook because she was so fucking cute, but the little tiny voice in the back of my head that actually helped me pass my boards spoke up like an annoying parakeet. Squawk, what if she’s stealing drugs, squawk.
“Oh, okay,” I said with a nod. Her face eased and she moved to go past me, but I stopped her with a gentle hand at her elbow and dropped my voice to a playful whisper. “What, oh what are you hiding, Melody?”
Her shoulders sagged as her eyes rose slowly from the ground to meet mine. She looked embarrassed but resigned, so I steeled myself for whatever horrible deed I was about to uncover and the horrendous circumstances of dealing with it.
“Tongue depressors,” she replied in a rush, the gust of her expelled breath hitting me right along with my surprise—and the box, which she shoved hard—in my chest.
“Tongue depressors?” I asked, but my shock did nothing to slow her painfully embarrassed, highly comical confession. I looked down, and—hot damn, look at that—tongue depressors.
“I know. Stealing them from the hospital is wrong and unethical and completely unacceptable. I’m always telling myself, Mel, why don’t you just order them online or, for fuck’s sake, steal something more interesting if you’re going to put it all on the line, but they’re just so useful.”
“Useful,” I muttered, dumbfounded, and she nodded.
“I make a jar of the week’s tasks and pull one out to keep myself on my toes and prevent my already pathetic life from seeming mundane, and I use them to wax my legs with those at-home kits because the ones they include are so flimsy, and sometimes I use them to write personal affirmations—”
“Tongue depressors?” I asked again, cutting her off with a smile.
“Yeah.”
I cleared my throat and stepped even closer into her space, pulling the box from her hand—we’d both been maintaining our hold on it—as she backed nervously into the shelf behind her and made it rock. “And why is it again that you don’t just order them online?”
She shrugged helplessly. “Easy access?”
Immediately, unbidden and uninvited, my motherfucker of a male mind flashed to an image of sweet Melody, my nurse, bent over in this very supply closet, hands on the shelf and her ass out and inviting, a skirt pulled up around her perfect round hips. Easy access.
Danger, Will Cummings. Motherfucking danger. I’d managed a spotless record of not fucking my actual employees since getting the practice up and running, but that record currently felt like I might run it off of a cliff into a catastrophic explosion scenario. Back away slowly.
“Ha…ha.” I forced a laugh. Jesus, I sound crazy. Wrinkles formed at the corners of Melody’s hazel green eyes and sucked my focus in like little tributary rivers.
What am I supposed to be doing again?
“Will,” she called, her lips so close I could practically taste them. Okay, a good foot away, but still, they were good lips.
“Yeah?” I asked softly, mesmerized completely.
“Are you…um…”
“Yeah?” Two more seconds like this and we were going to kiss.
“Are you gonna—”
“Yeah.”
Are we going to kiss?
“Oh, yeah.”
“You’re going to rat me out?” she peeped, her voice rising a full octave in despair.
Wait…rat her out? What?
“Wait. No. Rat you out?” My mind struggled to pull the blood back from my dick quickly enough to catch up. Not kissing. She’s not thinking about kissing at all, you fucking schmuck. “For the tongue depressors?” I managed around the knot of would-have-been embarrassment clogging my throat.
“Well, yeah.”
Despite the disappointment of circumstances being considerably different than I’d been imagining for the last two minutes, I smiled.
“No, Load-y. I’m not going to rat you out for stealing the tongue depressors.”