Strength
Page 33
“You know you’re speaking out loud, right?” Belle’s nose wrinkles as she asks, “Why exactly are you telling your grandchildren about how you lost your virginity?”
I roll my eyes. “It’s just an expression. Although, I envisage myself as being that really cool, hip nan who shares all my wild party days with my own little faction of whippersnappers.”
Giggling, she says, “Okay, couple of things wrong with what you just said. Faction? We’re not post-apocalyptic, so stop being so dramatic.”
I adjust my glasses and shoot her a glare, but it doesn’t slow her down. “Also, nobody uses envisage in general conversation. Your prodigy-ness is showing.”
“Ha, ha,” I grumble.
“Okay, back on topic.” Belle walks back over to her bed and slips her feet into her trainers. Her eyes are slanted deep in thought. “I think we can fix this virginity thing. What if you try just the tip?”
“The tip of what?” I ask, distracted by my own internal thoughts about finding the right kind of player to do this with.
“The tip of Stanley’s cock.” Her face is deathly serious. Her eyes pierce me with encouragement.
“You are such a bloke sometimes,” I groan, disgusted. “That sounds exactly like what a man would say if he were trying to get in a woman’s knickers.”
“Indie,” a proud smile spreads across her face. “A tip can be quite nice if wielded properly. You just have to have him stroke—”
“Enough!” I cover my ears. I’m over virginity talk with Belle. I am maxed out on Belle’s advice on how to get this done.
She doesn’t know what she’s talking about. I may still be a virgin, but I’m not immature anymore. My time hasn’t come and gone. I refuse to turn into a thirty-year-old virgin unicorn. That’s certainly not the type of majestic creature I want to be, even if it does entitle me to a forehead horn.
A tip from Stanley won’t be the way I lose this ridiculous cross I bear. I refuse. I’m not the under-developed, late bloomer I was in school. I will find the perfect Penis Number One. And I will do whatever it takes to complete this task.
Suddenly, my pager blasts from my scrub pocket. I glance down. “Yikes. It’s Prichard. 999. Gotta go.”
Without looking back, I turn and run out of the on-call room, bursting through the doors and skirting past a crowd of interns in the middle of rounds. Dr. Prichard is the attending ortho surgeon whom I’ve been working with for the past few months. His encouragement is the real reason I’ve developed such a focus on orthopaedics. If he pages 999, it means something big is happening.
My heart pounds as I fly into Patch Alley. Sirens blare through the automatic doors, and my face heats from the rush. This is why I love medicine. The exhilaration. The demand to think on your feet so you can save a life in the blink of an eye. The mature, capable confidence required to be a doctor.
My eyes squint at the flashing cameras outside the hospital doors, brightly popping off through the dark, pouring rain. I refocus to the foreground and see a pair of muddy boots hanging off the end of an evidently too-short stretcher. My gaze drifts up the muscular, socked legs beneath mud-soaked shin pads. Before I can clap my curious eyes on the patient, a pack of sweaty, shouting, and properly pushy men in kits comes ramrodding in behind him.
Rather than God answering my virginal prayer with a player, the devil answered it with four.
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