AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Cade paused, “Something wrong?”
“Day job,” I intoned.
“Your receptionist still giving you hell?” he teased.
Not for the reasons you’d think,I thought grimly. It wasn’t that I had expected June to text me, but… okay, I kind of figured she would text me. And I could have texted her too, but something told me that if happy, lemon-drop June hadn’t sent me a funny text or an offer to hang out, then her brain was doing something very different than what my brain was doing.
Or my brain was overthinking that.
“Brady?” Cade prompted.
I cleared my throat again. “She’s a pain in the ass, but no. We’re… working through our differences.”
“Weird,” Cade said.
I flicked my blinker, getting into the turning lane that would take me into the medical district. “I was bound to get along with someone eventually.”
“Yeah, except you said you’d trade her for the Tasmanian Devil like three weeks ago.”
Fair point. “I was wrong.”
Silence crackled over the line. It stretched on and on, and I tapped the screen to make sure his call hadn’t dropped. Finally, Cade said, “What the fuck?”
“Language,” I intoned.
“Did you just sayyou were wrong?”
“I’m hanging up,” I droned, hovering my finger over the red button. “I’ll touch base at four.”
“Wait a second, who is this gir—”
I tapped the end call button and blew out another breath.
He had a good question, though. Who was June to me? I’d been able to lose myself in research protocols for a solid day and a half, but I found my thoughts wandering to June more often than they should. It was hard to ignore how differently she made me feel than other women I’d been with. Hell, I felt different about her than the long-term relationships I’d had and let go. It wasn’t just that I wanted to be in her company, because I was no stranger to that feeling. No, it was different than that. It was magnetic. It was gravity. It was some kind of science I didn’t fully understand.
Actually, it was a lot like connectomics. When I studied a slide of inhibitory axons, the main cells were presented in rainbow colors. Each cell looked like a large, bright dot on the slide, and they could be seen easily. But behind those cells, like a fine web or loose tapestry, the microscopic nerves that meshed around those cells were a mystery to us. At least, at the moment, they were.
June was like those neurons. She had somehow tangled herself in the background of my thoughts, always there and necessary for my brain to function, but a complete enigma to me.
As I parked and exited my car, heading for the air-conditioned surgical center, I wondered if, for once, I’d gotten in over my head with a girl. As I opened the front door to the lobby, I knew immediately that my assumption was right.
I wasn’t in control. Because I suddenly wanted to beat an old man to within an inch of his life.
Mr. Larsey’s voice rang loudly through the lobby, which at this hour, only had two other patients in chairs by the window. They were glaring at him with undisguised annoyance, but it wasn’t for their sake I wanted to shuck off “do no harm” and pull the old man’s arthritic arm out of its socket. It was because he was bent over the desk and yelling loudly in June’s face.
MyJune.
“… if you’re telling me you can’t punch my name into that schedule,” Larsey said, hammering his finger on the top of June’s monitor and causing her to flinch, “then you’re a dumber bitch than you look.”
I saw red. The tendons in my arm pulled painfully as I gripped my fingers into a fist. Then my better judgment went tumbling out a back door as my rage took over and propelled me across the room.
But before I could take more than two steps, June, who hadn’t even seen me enter, stood suddenly and flung the contents of her boba tea all over the front of Mr. Larsey. The old man spluttered, coughing and hacking as he took several steps away from her desk. “This is a surgical center,” June said, her small frame visibly trembling. “And I don’t care who you are, you willnotspeak to me that way.”
Larsey gasped, looking down at his tea-stained plaid shirt and blue slacks. A couple boba beads rolled off his hair and plopped to the ground. He wiped a shaking hand across his face. “You crazy bitch. You—you—where is your—”
“Boss?” I asked darkly.
All eyes swiveled to me. June went milk-tea white, and the other two receptionists, Maxine and Katherine, stood from their chairs with horror on their faces. Larsey turned last, his aged skin drooping and dripping with iced tea like the sugar was actively melting him. Anger pinched his large lips, and completely misreading my thunderous expression, he rounded his outrage on me.
