“Is it weird for you that you have to work with her?” Sheryl asked.
“My ex-girlfriend? Yeah, it’s weird.” She nodded and bit into the baby carrot she had been holding to her lips for the past few minutes. “We weren’t together all that long, but she’s making a big deal out of it.”
“About what? The breakup? It was a couple of weeks ago, yeah, but you were together for like a month, I think.”
“The reason why we broke up.”
“You never told me why, just that neither of you was feeling it.”
Jennifer watched her ex-girlfriend, if she could even call her that, walk into the hospital cafeteria, wearing her usual scrubs, which Jennifer had always thought she looked hot in. That was saying something because, for one, scrubs weren’t exactly form-fitting, and for two, as an ER doctor, she wore them all the time herself and had never thought them sexy on anyone else.
“Okay. No one else knows this, so you can’t say anything,” Jennifer told her friend and fellow doctor.
“I won’t.”
“About a year ago, I applied for this… singles’ thing. It takes a while to get chosen because there’s a waiting list, and it’s this exclusive event. I was at home one night around my birthday,and I wasn’t on call, so I had a little too much wine and went for it.”
“A singles’ thing? Why is it so exclusive?”
“There’s a bit of a catch to it. You know how I’m taking a week off starting tomorrow?”
“Yes. Then, you’re coming back to turn in your resignation to join that practice, and instead of working a million hours a week here, you’ll only be working a thousand there.” Sheryl smiled at her.
Jennifer laughed and said, “Yes. Well, no one here knows about that, either, and I only got accepted to the event a couple of weeks ago. That job offer became official after that, so the timing isn’t exactly ideal, but anyway – it’s a specific kind of event, and it’s for the whole week, which is why I’m taking time off even though I’m leaving after that.”
“What will you be doing for a whole week, exactly?”
“Well, I hope I’ll be having sex,” she said and chomped on another baby carrot from her bag.
“What?” Sheryl laughed and looked around the somewhat busy cafeteria.
“It’s a sex singles’ week. The idea is that we get chosen for a specific event, matched with other women we might be able to make a connection with. There are activities and stuff planned for us to get to know one another, and we’ll switch partners throughout the week to give everyone a chance. The owner of the business is there running the whole thing. She has an amazing track record of making long-term matches.”
“So, you’re looking for love, not just sex?”
“You know how it is here… I already work all the time, and I’m on call pretty much whenever I’m not working.”
“You do this to yourself. You could’ve been ER chief, but you turned it down. And you don’t make the schedule, but you could–”
“I love my job. It’s not that I don’t want to be here all the time. It’s just that I need someone who understands that about me, and so far, I haven’t found her. I thought dating another doctor might be the way to go, but when I got the call that I’d been accepted for an upcoming event, I was doing laundry at home. I had my phone on speaker because I was folding something, andsheoverheard the whole thing.” Jennifer pointed to her ex-girlfriend, who was paying for her lunch. “I told Nia, the owner of this thing, that I was going to take a look at the information she sent me, and that was all I committed to, but when I hung up, she got upset and told me I should’ve definitely said no. I explained that I’d signed up a year ago and forgot all about it, which was true, and I wasn’t going to go but wanted to get Nia off the phone. She was clearly unhappy with that, so I suggested we end things because I wasn’t happy anyway, the sex was only okay, and I didn’t want to pass up on the opportunity.”
“You told her the sex was only okay?”
“No. I told her that maybe we should call it what it was, and she was still upset about the whole phone call, so she just stormed out and then texted me later that we were done. I haven’t talked to her since. I’m forty-two years old. I’m too old for this crap, Sheryl. I’m about to start a new job at a practice where I’m one of three doctors, and it’s only open during regular business hours. I’m ready to finally give something real a shot, and it wasn’t with her, so that’s the whole story.”
“And now, you’re going to some… sex party?” Sheryl whispered.
“It’s not exactly that. It’s more of an event where everyone there is interested in that being a possibility, but we’re all there to find love more than just have sex.”
“I’ll take your word on that one.”
“I leave tomorrow, so I need to get home and pack. I haven’t even thought about what I’m going to bring.”
“Something sexy,” Sheryl suggested. “Lingerie?”
“I don’t have any. Do scrubs count?”
She pulled on her blue scrub shirt.
