AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Which, of course, only made me hate him more.
Sure, Drs. Hughes and Miller only showed up to do press releases and photo shoots and shit like that, but they did at least see a couple patients while they were around before driving back to their nicer area with their upper-crust patients.
I half-expected that Michael was exaggerating about the nap thing. But when I looked, sure enough, there was Dr. Laurier sitting lounged back in my office chair that I’d gotten on after-Christmas clearance, with his legs up on my desk, putting his fancy leather shoes on display, only reminding me of my own painful new shoes that I couldn’t afford to replace.
Dr. Laurier was maybe in his early forties with medium-brown hair with some flecks of silver, a handsome face, and thin body that he had clad in slacks and a band t-shirt.
He was literally taking a morning nap when the line of clients was damn near wrapping around the building?
Another wave of anger coursed through me as I grabbed the door handle and flung it back as hard as I could so it knocked off the wall.
Dr. Laurier didn’t jolt awake, but his blue eyes slid open and over to land on me.
“You’re too pretty to have gone to medical school.”
“Excuse me?” I hissed.
“Pretty girls don’t usually throw away that many years of their life.”
“In what world is getting an education throwing anything away? And that is the most sexist thing I’ve heard today. Which is saying something because Homeless Hank out front the gas station told me I was shaking in all the right ways this morning.”
Dr. Laurier ignored that.
“If you were normal pretty, girl next door pretty, I can see you going to medical school. Ra-ra feminism and all that.
“But you’re top-tier pretty. Model pretty. You could be living large on some rich man’s yacht without a care in the world. Which makes me wonder why you’re here? In this shitty clinic. In this town. Working for the low salary my cheap-ass partners must be tossing at you.”
“First of all, I went into medicine because I am passionate about taking care of people. Second of all, maybe I don’t want a rich man on a yacht and no cares in the world. And thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, maybe this clinic would be less shitty if you or any of your partners actually gave a fuck about it.
“Those shoes,” I said, still caught up on them. “What did they set you back? Two hundred? Three? Do you know we ran out of tongue depressors this week? Tongue depressors. And there’s no money for new ones.”
I was going to go ahead and not mention the private donation. Since that was besides the point.
“They were seven-fifty, actually,” Dr. Laurier said as he pulled his legs off my desk to scoot forward and fold his arms on the surface instead. “Now, why did you interrupt my nap again?”
“Patients. There are patients. You know what those are, right?”
“Runny noses. Achy limbs. Suspicious rashes,” Dr. Laurier said. “I’m familiar.”
“And the reason you’re not seeing any of them…”
“I’m not exactly here out of the goodness of my heart,” Dr. Laurier said. “I’m here because my partners are forcing me to be here. But, funnily enough, they never mentioned me actually having to see patients. I believe there exact words were:Christian, you need to be at the clinic today. And look at that. I am here. At the clinic. Today.”
“Wow,” I said, too stunned for a moment to speak. “Just… wow.”
“I knew it couldn’t have been the brains that got you through school. So, tell me, who did you—“
“I swear on every single cotton swab in this building, if you finish that sentence and it goes in the direction I think it is about to, I will find a lawyer, and I will sue you until you don’t have a goddamn dime to your name for sexual harassment.”
“Oh, that was saucy,” he decided, and that smirk of his was actually almost a little charming, even if I thought he was a scumbag.
“Look. Take some patients, or get the hell out. I don’t need you here, lying about and annoying me.”
With that, I turned around and started to make my way toward the nurse’s station.
“You know you could be fired for talking like that to a superior.”
“Luckily, I don’t see anyonesuperiorhere,” I said, and I caught the daytime guard try like hell to cover a chuckle with a cough. “What?” I snapped when Dr. Laurier’s head tipped to the side a bit as he looked at me.
