HOURS LATER Layla was stationed in the cramped room that served as the attending doctor’s office in the San Rafael Free Clinic. She took a deep breath and dared to peek out into the waiting area, which, she saw thankfully, was nearly empty. Just a short time ago it had been overwhelmingly full.
She smoothed back a couple of stray strands of hair that had escaped from her ponytail. While the time she put in at the free clinic was rewarding, it was also exhausting. And often disheartening. So many people. So few doctors willing to help. It was especially disheartening when they’d just lost another attending physician and she’d been called away from a perfectly inviting encounter to fill the void.
Lupe Rodriguez, the clinic’s long-standing head nurse, popped into the doorway and handed her a file. “Room two. Three-year-old with upper respiratory congestion. Room three, Ashanti’s getting into position for her annual pap.”
Layla watched an elderly woman tuck a tattered blanket more snuggly across a frail man’s legs.
“Ola, Layla?”
“Hmm?” She glanced at the Hispanic woman waving a hand in front of her eyes.
“There’s a thirty-something wealthy bachelor in room one looking for a hot night out.”
Layla blinked several times then grimaced at Lupe. “That’s not even funny.”
Especially since the man she’d met at the restaurant bar earlier in the evening kept intruding on her thoughts. Sometimes it would just be a flash of his grin. Other times it would be his suggestive comments. But mostly it was the feel of his mouth sliding against hers. She’d be peering down a teenager’s throat and remember the way he’d invited her to have dinner with him. Running her stethoscope across a patient’s back and recall how wide his shoulders were. Definitely hot.
“How long’s it been since you been out on a date?”
Layla took the patient file from Lupe and reviewed the preliminary information there. It wasn’t that the question was intrusive, really. It was just that she’d been asking herself the same thing all night.
And the answer? Much too much time had passed since she’d sat across a dining table from someone who engaged her on every level. And the man in the bar had appealed to her physically and mentally.
“None of your business,” she said to Lupe, smiling.
Lupe made a tsk sound. “That’s what I thought. Too long.”
Layla scratched her head. “Who’s got time to date? I certainly don’t.”
Lupe crossed her arms over her ample chest. “I work here, what? Fifty, sometimes sixty hours a week for the past fifteen years and I not only dated, I got married, had five kids, and still manage to have a pretty good sex life, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
“I do mind. What you and your husband do behind closed doors is your business.”
“And you?” Lupe teased. “What do you do behind closed doors, Dr. Hollister?”
“We already established that I don’t date.”
“What’s a man got to do with it?”
Layla stared at her as if antennae had sprouted from her black, over-permed hair.
“Hmmph. That’s what I thought.” Lupe held the door open. “Let’s go help someone who can be helped. You, Layla, are absolutely beyond hope.”
Layla preceded her out of the room, trying to hide her exasperation. It was hard enough to successfully ignore the poor status of her love life without other people showing interest in it. Who else talked about her and her pathetic dating abilities? Oh, sure, she was busy. But as Lupe so adeptly pointed out, time or lack thereof had very little to do with a person’s personal life.
Five kids? Did Lupe really have five kids?
She shook her head then strode to examining room three, opening the patient’s file as she entered.
Ashanti. A nineteen-year-old who had more sex than ten women combined.
Or at least ten Laylas.
The young woman smiled at her from the examining table. “So, Doc, how they hanging?”
“Oh, they’re hanging a little lower each day,” she said automatically.
The problem was that there was no one around to notice…
THE FOLLOWING MORNING Sam repositioned the pothos plant his sister, Heather, had bought him, moving it first one way then another on top of a filing cabinet in his office near the window. But rather than being a gift in the true sense of the word, she’d done it to make a point. Simply that even though he was a doctor, he failed to look after himself. According to her, his days were focused way too much on work and not nearly enough on the small pleasures of life. No pets. No real hobbies—outside serial dating and an hour-long run in the morning. And the only reason he returned to the model of modern architecture in the depths of Hollywood Hills he called home, was to sleep. If pressed under threat of torture, he couldn’t tell you the color of his bedroom walls, much less the makeup of the rest of the place.
“Come on, Porthos, buddy, you’re not making me look good here,” he said to the plant, reluctant to put his finger into the soil to see if it needed more water. Heather had given him the plant two months ago. And over that period it had gone from a lush, green plant to a dry, shriveled-up bunch of leaves. He sometimes wondered if it were still alive. No matter what he did, the plant looked worse. So he’d named it Porthos in honor of the musketeer who was popular among the ladies and had a mysterious suicide wish. Bringing Porthos to the office was a last-ditch effort to save the poor plant.
After picking up his empty coffee cup—another gag gift from his sister, it had a pair of gigantic breasts on the front, and a woman’s arm for a handle—he made his way through the back door leading to what was called the center’s personnel alley. Essentially it was where the doctors and other center employees could move around freely without being seen by patients. Its hub was a coffee-slash-lunchroom containing vending machines of microwaveable meals, your typical snack fare and three coffee machines, along with a cappuccino and an espresso machine. He put his cup under the tap for pure, full-octane coffee then glanced at his watch. Twenty minutes before one very delectable Doctor Layla Hollister found out he was the guy who had made her day so miserable yesterday.
“Hey, if it isn’t Dr. Lovejoy,” a male colleague came into the room from the opposite direction, navigating his way through the half-dozen other physicians already there. Bill Johnson was the center’s top proctologist and got his kicks ribbing Sam. “Good thing you’re not into proctology, huh, Sam?” he said as he put his cup in after Sam had removed his own. “Then again, I don’t know. Dr. Lovejoy, proctologist. Has a ring to it, doesn’t it?”
Susan Pollack, a pediatrician, nudged by Sam to get a packet of artificial sweetener. “I don’t know. If your patients knew what some people said about you, Bill, they’d change physicians posthaste.”
Sam lifted a brow. “What do they say?”
Susan smiled at him. “That, for Bill, proctology is ‘been there, done that,”’ she said. “You know, because of the, um, fact that he’s gay.”
Bill
