“Oh hey, Dr. Hernandez, you see I was… well… we had coffee, and I am going.” He squeezed past the roses and disappeared down the hall, making a quick retreat.
Sure enough, there was a whole carafe of coffee sitting on the lunch table. She did the math in her head and realized the medical student had escaped somewhere else in the hospital to deliver coffee to the nurses.
Good for him making his move on the ladies. It was a much better plan than huge flowers.
She had Murphy set the flowers in the middle of the lunch table and took out a paper towel and wrote, “Free to a good home.”
She turned to go when the security guard cleared his throat.
“Yes?”
“You left the card.”
“Oh, I did. It’s only some guy’s phone number, actually.” He might as well hear the truth if he was going to be trailing her everywhere. She grabbed the card and moved to throw it in the trash.
“That’s a four-hundred-dollar bouquet of roses,’’ Murphy said.
“It is?”
“Eight dozen long-stemmed roses off season. I don’t think he picked those up at Walmart.”
“Isn’t it a bit much? Like a statement, because he delivered them here instead of my house? It’s kind of big and creepy.”
“It is big, but he did try.”
“So I send him a ‘thank you’ text?” She held up the card.
“If you want.”
“I should be polite. Even if he should know this was too much after one date.” Calling it a date was a stretch, but Security Officer Murphy didn’t need that information. She fiddled with her phone. “Do I text him?”
He pointed to his chest. “You want my opinion?”
“This is peds. Other than the med students and an occasional baby daddy, you’re going to be pretty much the only guy in the whole clinic.”
“I can’t say.”
“Please. We met at the Halloween party, and we hit it off, and now he sent me this massive thing. I don’t even know what this means. If I text him, he’ll ask me if I like the flowers and I’ll lie and tell him I love them.”
“You would lie?”
“It’s impolite to say that they’re massively huge and now I’m being laughed at. Or how weird it is for him to send these to work when he could have asked my phone number at any point during our date.”
“How about ‘it was sweet of you to send flowers’? Then you don’t have to say anything about them. You already pretended to like them without actually lying.”
“Oh. I guess it’s not a lie because it is sweet and stuff.” She bit her lip. “Does this mean he wants to see me again?”
“I don’t send flowers much, but I wouldn’t send them to someone I didn’t want to see again.”
At least, that was encouraging.
“Oh, thanks, Murphy.” She checked her watch to see how much time they had. “I’d better take you upstairs to the nursery. I round on the well babies up there a few times a week. It’s a locked unit in Labor and Delivery.”
“You’re not texting now?”
Why wasn’t she texting? She’d wanted a sign of interest from Gene and she’d gotten one. But now she’d need to process how a guy who had seemed sensitive and in-tune with her had been so tone deaf.
“Nah, maybe later. I have patients coming and you need a tour,” Lily made her best excuse.
