“Joey’s roommate told me what Joey said to you before the surgery,” Max said. “I’m real sorry.”
“I’m used to it,” I said. “You wouldn’t believe some of the things I’ve heard from my pre-op patients.”
Max nodded and lit up another cigarette.
* * * *
I’ve performed thousands of surgeries in my career. Most of my patients are over sixty. The younger ones are almost always trauma victims. A few, like Joseph Zorich, are just unfortunate enough to injure themselves seriously enough to need surgery. I’ve seen a Joseph Zorich or two in my career. But I’ve never, ever in my eight years as a surgeon, responded to a patient sexually before.
When I was in the operating room I was all business. Joey and Max didn’t cross my mind once as I performed my usual array of spinal surgeries. It was in my off time, when I was alone, that they kept creeping into my mind. As I sat in the cafeteria eating my salad and drinking my cappuccino, my eyes would suddenly close, and I’d be watching my own private erotic slideshow.
Joey and Max in the shower.
Joey and Max on the living room sofa.
Joey and Max in the hospital’s elevator. Joey and Max and me in the hospital’s elevator, going down…
I don’t usually fantasize about being with two men. I’ve always been a good girl. I’ve never cheated on a boyfriend, never experimented with another woman. I have no problem with people being gay or bisexual, but it’s not something that I usually think about. Still, I had to face it: Max was hot, Joey was hot, and the two of them together made my knees weak.
A week went by, and more and more the fantasies involved Joey and Max—and me. I told myself this was normal. Probably just a sign that it had been too long since my last date, but otherwise normal. The ability to engage in sexual fantasies is a sign of a healthy mind, I reminded myself, quoting one of my psych professors. And that’s all it was—just daydreaming. Joey left the hospital three days after his surgery, and I didn’t think I’d ever see him, or Max again.
One afternoon I checked my office voice mail. I was expecting all the usual calls from other doctors’ offices, and maybe a call or two from my mother. I wasn’t expecting a message from Max Lowell.
“Dr. Keller?” Max’s voice said in the message. “I found your card in Joey’s hospital room. I hope it’s okay that I called you. I just have one more question about his surgery.” He left a call-back number.
I wrote the number down and stuck it in one of my pockets, making a mental note to call Max back later. My calls to other doctors and their offices came first, though. I ended up in a long debate with a radiologist about some films, and by the time I got around to Max, it was the end of the day. I decided to call him from home.
Whoever picked up the phone sounded sleepy; I couldn’t tell if it was Max or Joey. “Hello?”
“This is Dr. Keller,” I said. “I’m returning Mr. Lowell’s call. Is this Mr. Lowell, or Mr. Zorich?”
“This is Joey,” he said. Then I heard him calling for Max. After a moment, Max took the phone.
“I’m sorry about that, Dr. Keller,” Max said. “Joey’s on much less medication now, but he’s still a little out of it.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “You had a question about Mr. Zorich’s surgery?”
Max laughed. God, he had a cute laugh. “You can just call him Joey, Doctor,” he said.
“Fine,” I said. “And you can call me Maggie.”
“Okay, Maggie.” There was that little laugh again. “This is kind of hard. No offense, but I wish you were a guy right now.”
I understood what he meant. “This is a sex question, right?”
“Yeah,” he said. “How long is Joey supposed to wait?”
I don’t spend a lot of time with my patients after surgery. Most of the follow-up is done by their family doctors; somehow, getting to know my patients as people makes it harder for me to keep cutting them up and sewing them back together. I’d seen Joey briefly after the surgery, and he was still in a lot of pain. But his nurses told me that he’d already been up and walking around by the end of his stay. That was a good sign.
“That’s really up to Joey,” I said. “He’ll let you know when he’s ready.”
“He’s ready,” Max muttered. “I just don’t want to hurt him, you know?”
“Then don’t start out with anything too acrobatic,” I suggested. “Max, I’m going to be perfectly frank with you. I don’t know what your sex life was like before Joey got injured, and it’s none of my business.” Wishing it was my business didn’t make it so. “I’ve heard that a lot of couples get by with a lot of hand jobs and oral sex after a surgery like this.”
Max laughed uncomfortably. “Thanks, Dr. Maggie.”
“No problem,” I said, even though there was a problem. Now I was going to be thinking about Max’s lips on Joey’s cock, obsessively, and I wasn’t going to get any sleep that night. “Anything else?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Actually, there was something else. You’re a Kings fan, right?”
That wasn’t exactly what I was expecting. “Yeah,” I said. “How did you know?”
“Your t-shirt,” he said. “You had it on under your scrubs the day of Joey’s surgery. You don’t by any chance have tickets to this Saturday’s Kings-Lakers game, do you?”
“No,” I said. I’ve been watching the Sacramento Kings since I was a little girl at my daddy’s knee, but I hadn’t been to a game in years. The NBA’s schedule was generally in conflict with my work at the hospital.
“Good,” Max said. “Then you can come over and watch the game with us.”
I hesitated, naturally. To go to a patient’s home would be totally inappropriate, not to mention unethical. It was the kind of thing that could get me sued, or worse.
Even though alarm bells were ringing in my head, I said, “I’m on call at the hospital on Saturday evening.”
That was the perfect excuse not to see Max and Joey again. If I went to their place, it was bound to be an uncomfortable situation, and I should have left it at that.
But then there was another sound in my head, the little voice that whispered that I wanted to get into an uncomfortable situation with Max and Joey, that I liked those long-repressed, forbidden feelings they were giving me. Dangerous? Yes. But sexy as hell, too. Before I’d even made up my mind, I heard myself adding, “But I’ll stop by if I can.”
Max laughed again; he was so stoned. “Cool,” he said. “We’ll see you when we see you, Dr. Keller. I mean Maggie.”
I got off the phone. The way Max had said my name echoed over and over in my head. Maggie. As in, “Maggie, suck my cock… Maggie, I want to watch while Joey fucks you… Maggie, have you ever been with two guys at the same time?”
In my mental slideshow, Joey and Max totally disregarded my medical advice not to do anything acrobatic.
* * * *
Joey and Max shared a second-story apartment in a gorgeous old brick building. As I pulled my car into the parking lot, I saw that all the apartments had separate patios. I saw a man standing on a second-floor balcony, smoking a cigarette. Was it Max? I couldn’t tell.
I went to the door and knocked. Inside, I heard the sounds of a party. The TV was turned up, and I heard the game in progress. I was late; it was already the third quarter. I heard voices.
I knocked again. Joey answered.
“Joey,” I said. “You look great.”
He smiled wide. I noticed for the first time that Joey’s teeth were really straight and nice. “Hey, you actually made it,” he said.
I held my pager up. “I might not be able to stay long.”
He nodded. “Stay as long as you like. There’s pizza over here on the table, and beer’s in the fridge.”
“I wish I could have a beer,” I said, “but I’m on call.”
“Oh,” he said. “Right.”
I stepped into the apartment where Max and three of his friends were squeezed onto an old, beat
-up blue-and-green plaid couch. Queer Eye this was definitely not. It was a guys’ apartment, with stacks of pizza boxes by the door and a carpet that looked like it hadn’t been vacuumed in months. All of the furniture was worn, especially the big leather chair with the stuffing coming out of one crack and duct tape over another. There were two bedrooms, and both doors were open. Two messy, unmade beds.
Max and Joey’s friends and I looked each other over. The guys looked like typical twenty-something sports fans, wearing sweats and Kings jerseys. I wondered if they understood Max and Joey’s situation.
Joey, still walking a bit stiffly, fell into the battered armchair. “Guys, this is Maggie,” he said. I was glad that he didn’t add something like, “My surgeon.” He added, “Maggie, this is Alex, Erik and Miguel. And I think you’ve met Max.”
They nodded in my direction, but I could see they were caught up in the game. The Kings were having a rough time, though. It was a great game for Kobe.
There was no room left on the couch, so I sat in the only comfortable spot left: right on the arm of Joey’s chair. Joey looked up at me and smiled.
During a time out, Max leaned forward in his seat and said, “Hey, Maggie, I’m glad you could make it. Want a beer?”
“She’s on call,” Joey said.
I got into watching the game. The Kings, meanwhile, had battled back to within five points of the Lakers. In the middle of the fourth, Joey went out onto the patio for a cigarette. I wanted a cigarette, too, so I followed him.
“I hate to act like a doctor,” I said, closing the patio door behind me, “but how’s your back?”
“It gets a little better every day,” Joey said. “I’m off the heavy meds. I just take the over-the-counter stuff now.” He took a long pull from his bottle of beer. He looked like he’d had a few.
“That’s a good sign,” I said. “Can I ask you something?”
He smiled. His dark eyes were sparkling in the fading sunlight. “Sure,” he said. “Anything.”
“Can I see your scar?”
He set his beer on the wooden railing and found an ashtray for his cigarette. Then he lifted his gray t-shirt over his head and turned around.
My eyes traveled from his shoulders down his spine to the section I’d worked on. The wound I’d made had healed completely, and was now truly a scar. It was a small, discrete mark on the smooth plain of Joey’s back, shaped like the letter C. I congratulated myself for making the mark so carefully.
But what really got me about Joey’s scar was the color. It was a deep, angry-looking red-brown. Although the wound was healed, the color was as smooth and liquid as fresh blood. It would fade over time. But for now, other parts of Joey must be this same color. His lips. His nipples. His cock. What would Joey do, I asked myself, if my fingers brushed against his scar? Would he react as surely as if I’d touched his lips, his nipples, or his cock? I wanted to find out. I wanted to reach around him, unbuckle his belt, reach into his jeans and hold his cock in my hands.
I wasn’t going to, of course, although I sensed that he would have let me. Instead I had to be a good girl and be content to touch the scar, lightly, with my fingertips.
“Is it bad?” he asked.
“No. It’s not bad at all. It’s beautiful, in fact,” I said. “When I touched you there, did you feel any pain?”
“No,” he said.
“How does it feel? Numb?”
“No,” he said. “Sensitive. Really sensitive. Like goose bumps, or…”
Joey jerked away from me and put his shirt back on. Turning to face me, he caught me and pulled me close to him. “Maggie,” he said into my ear, “Stop being such a damned doctor for a moment. You know what I want to do.”
Held tight against him, I could feel the stiffness of his cock through his jeans. But I could have figured out how badly he wanted me just from the look in his eyes.
“Max wants you, too,” he said. “So it’s up to you. After the guys leave, you can go. Or you can stay. At least until that fucking pager goes off.”
“I don’t know,” I said, sitting in the patio’s deck chair to smoke my cigarette.
Eventually, there was cheering from the vicinity of the plaid couch. It sounded as if the Kings had won after all. Max came out to smoke.
Joey looked past him into the apartment. “Where did everybody go?”
“The guys went down to the corner to celebrate,” Max said. I nodded, remembering the pub I saw on the corner.
“You didn’t want to go with them?” Joey asked, raising an eyebrow.
“You look like you’re having a good time out here,” Max said, looking over at me. “I wouldn’t want to miss out on any of the fun.”
I was glad I was sitting in that deck chair, because my knees were weak. I knew that I wasn’t supposed to be there. I was faced with the possibility of actually doing all those nasty things that I’d been imagining for the past couple of weeks. I was excited, but I was nervous, too. I never thought this would actually happen, and you know what they say about being careful what you wish for…
Joey finished off his beer. “So, Maggie,” he said, “what do you want to do?”
“Let’s go inside,” I said.
We went inside. Max carefully drew the blinds over the patio door.
“So,” I said, my eyes following Joey as he sat on one end of the plaid couch, “do your friends know about your situation?”
Joey shrugged. “Some do, some don’t,” he said vaguely.
“We never tried to hide anything,” Max said. “Everyone’s been cool with us, except for Joey’s sister. She keeps telling us we’re going to hell.”
Joey smiled. Max walked over to the fridge and grabbed a couple more beers. He gave one to Joey and the other to me.
I looked at the beer, considering that I was still on call, and might have to go to the hospital to perform an emergency surgery at any moment. I knew it was wrong. But I was getting thirsty, and it seemed rude to reject Max’s hospitality. Especially when he stood before me, looking right into my eyes, and smiled at me in that totally disarming way. I twisted the top off and took a few sips before sitting on the couch beside Joey, nervously.
“How did you two meet?” I asked.
Max sat on the other side of me, sandwiching me between him and Joey. They both smelled like beer and cigarettes, and Max smelled like pot. I started to sweat.
“We knew each other in college,” Max said. “Moved in together afterward, just as roommates. Joey had a girlfriend.”
“So what happened?” I asked.
“We used to watch straight porn together,” Joey said. “After a while I realized that it wasn’t watching people fucking on TV that turned me on. It was watching Max get turned on. The first time he told me he wanted to touch me, I almost punched him in the face.”
Max laughed. Resting his hand on my thigh, he leaned over me and kissed Joey’s lips. They didn’t have to tell me the rest of their story; I could see it in their eyes. They kissed deeply and passionately. I could see the love between them.
Then Joey turned his head slightly, leaned in, and kissed me. He tasted just as I imagined he would. Beer and cigarettes. He was a good kisser; I could feel it in my belly. Max’s hand still rested on my thigh. His other hand supported Joey’s back, just inches from where I knew Joey’s beautiful scar to be. I felt the warmth of Max’s body against me, but I lost track of his hands as Joey’s kisses got longer and deeper. Joey’s hand was under my t-shirt, playing with the lace of my bra at first, and then teasing my nipples. I wanted to take off my shirt for him, but didn’t know how to break away.
It was Max who broke away first. He knelt on the floor in front of me. Max untied my shoes and worked them off my feet. He did the same with my socks. Then, gently, he began to work on the buttons of my jeans. I helped him slip them off. Joey pulled my t-shirt over my head, then took my face in his hands and kissed me with a fervor I’d only wished for before.
He reached behind me to
unhook my bra.
Max, meanwhile, couldn’t wait for me to work my way out of my panties. “Oh, Maggie,” he said, “you’re so soft, and you smell so good.” He kissed his way up my thigh, then hooked a thumb into the crotch of my panties and pulled them aside. I felt both his tongue and his moustache brush against my pussy lips. “Is that okay?” he asked me.
“Yes,” I said. I reached for Joey, stroking his cock. He showed his appreciation by enthusiastically sucking my nipple. The sensation went straight to my pussy.
The warning bells were going off in my head again, big time. I was on call. I wasn’t the kind of girl who did things like this. Worse, I wasn’t protecting myself like I should. My medical training was telling me that the exchange of bodily fluids between Max’s very hot, very wet mouth and my pussy should not be allowed. But I didn’t want him to stop. The reality was much better than any of my fantasies. And it wasn’t going to take much more licking and sucking for me to come.
I felt my toes curl up tightly. Joey’s lips clamped down on my clit, and my fingers clenched around Joey’s cock. My hips bucked wildly as I came with a long, loud scream. The neighbors must have been really confused. As my rapidly beating heart slowed to normal, I caught my breath.
“That was amazing,” I said.
Joey stood up from the couch. Max helped him out of his jeans and his white briefs. Standing there in the dim light of the postgame coverage that still played on the TV, his cock was long and beautiful. And its head was the same violent red-brown as his scar. He threw his t-shirt over the back of the couch.
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