Good Time Doctor

by Penny Wylder

  It’s good advice. I probably needed to hear it. But… shit.

  He catches me watching him, and grins. “So, I believe I still owe you a proper first date, Naomi.” He straightens and finishes buttoning his shirt. “What about this Friday? There’s a new restaurant that opened in town, a little Italian spot a few of my coworkers have been raving about. We could go there, maybe see a movie afterward… I’m sure we can find some terrible movie you’d like.”

  I laugh and pretend to glare at him. “You can’t mock my taste in entertainment when yours is the same,” I point out.

  “Sure I can.” He winks. “It just means I’m mocking myself, too.”

  I snort. But in the back of my mind, all I can hear is Monica. You just have a tendency to leap in with both feet first… I can’t help thinking about what happened last time.

  Last time, when I married a guy I barely knew in little to no time at all. Last time, when I wound up getting cheated on and saddled with a divorce under a year later. I fight to keep a grimace off my face. She’s right. I can’t move too fast. No matter how much I like spending time with this guy right now.

  So when Jason tilts his head and says, “So, Friday then?” I force myself to shake my head.

  “I’m sorry.” You have no idea how much I want to. I bite back that answer. “I just, er…” My mind races. Think of an explanation, quick. Because I do want to see him again sometime. Just not that soon, not until I have a little more time to clear my head of the past two days we spent glued to each other in bed. “I’ve got my cousin’s graduation, this weekend, so I’ll be busy with family stuff…” Not a lie. My cousin is graduating this weekend, and my family did task me with getting all the flower arrangements for it. Since I work in the floral shop with Monica, I am the natural choice for the job. If I really wanted to, though, I could probably sneak out Friday for a date night. But for once, I promise myself I’m going to take my friends’ advice. I’m going to move slow with this.

  “Cousin’s graduation, huh?” He arches a brow. “Mm, sure, I can accept this ‘excuse,’ I suppose.”

  My heart skips a beat. I don’t want him to think I don’t want to see him. “It’s just, uh, you know, they want me to help with the floral arrangements and all, since, well, that’s my day job anyway, and—”

  “Naomi.” He steps over to me to bring both hands to my shoulders, stilling my protests. “I’m joking. Of course you need to be with your family for this.”

  “Oh.” I blink up at him for a second, before we both laugh. “Sorry.” My cheeks flush. “I just, I do like hanging out with you, is all,” I confess.

  “And I really, really enjoy spending time with you,” he replies, before he bends to kiss me again, slowly. “But if I have to wait a little longer to see you next time? Then, well, that will just make the reunion all the better.” He winks and kisses my forehead.

  “Definitely,” I reply, smiling up at him, and wondering how in the hell I got lucky enough to stumble into this guy’s life. Doesn’t matter. I’m going to enjoy it while it lasts, and if it becomes something real? Great. If not? It will just be the best rebound of my life.

  That’s what I tell myself as we part ways outside the hotel. But deep down, a little worried voice in the back of my mind can’t help telling me… I might be in trouble again.

  8

  It’s been 24 hours since I last saw Dr. Jason Robinson, and so far, I’m holding up fine. I’m definitely not counting the hours as they pass, or rereading his last text to me, a cute little Thanks for the date message he sent yesterday morning right after he left the hotel. Nope. I am being a sensible, perfectly reasonable person about this.

  I am not rushing in.

  I spent yesterday working at the shop with Monica, who did tease me incessantly and pry me for details about our hookup the night before. But then we moved on to talking about Becca and her latest preschool incidents (some boy in her class teased her and she put gum in his hair, which Monica had to scold her for even if she secretly approved a little bit), and we debated the hit-and-run driver, too.

  “I seriously think you should file a police report,” Monica kept telling me, all throughout the day. “I mean, you could have been really seriously injured.”

  “Not to mention if anything had happened to Becca, I would’ve had to find this woman and kill her myself,” I mumbled in response, still angry every time I thought about it. Who could do that? Hit a car—or at least, cause a car to hit a pole due to your bad driving—and then speed off like nothing happened?

  “You’re sure you can’t figure out where you know her from?” Monica had prompted me over lunch, sharing the bag of chips she’d brought as we split a hoagie I picked up from the local deli.

  “Trust me, if I could figure it out, I’d have tracked her down already and demanded at the very least an apology and some money for the car repairs. I mean, my insurance covers it, but that’s not the point. Her insurance should be the one to pay the damages.” I groaned. “But I don’t know. All I know is I’ve seen her around somewhere before, I think at Becca’s school, maybe?”

  “Is she another mom?”

  I shook my head. “A teacher, I think. Or maybe an aide. I don’t know, it all happened so fast.”

  “You’ll figure it out,” Monica reassured me. But it wasn’t until today, the next time I drove over to pick up Becca, that I actually had a chance to confront the whole thing.

  I arrive half an hour early to give myself plenty of time to scout. At first, I linger around the parking lot, trying to surreptitiously peek into all the other cars in the lot to see if any of the faces inside jog my memory. I find a few moms bent over cheesy gossip magazines, a couple reading on their Kindles, and a handful of dads listening to sports radio. But none of the women look familiar—or at least, not like the woman I glimpsed through the windshield on Tuesday, right before I spiraled into the pole.

  I frown and head back up to the school right as the bell rings. The minute it does, I slip inside and pace the halls, peeking into each classroom I pass as the teachers ready the kids to leave. It’s a preschool and kindergarten rolled into one, with a few different age levels here, so there are a few classrooms to check. I don’t see the woman in any of those. Not until I reach the one next to Becca’s, the room the kids all file into for lunch and naptime. There, I freeze, staring through the classroom window, my eyes wide.

  I recognize her. Same dark red hair, clearly dyed, because you can see her black roots. Same tortoiseshell glasses, with small, pinched eyes behind them and a mean tilt to her pursed mouth. She looks a few years older than me, but also like she tanned too much when she was younger, so she’s probably aging even faster than she really is.

  She glances up and meets my eye through the window, as if she can sense me watching her. The moment our eyes meet, I see a brief flicker of recognition, before she hurriedly looks away.

  Oh, hell no. She’s not going to run away from me again.

  “Auntie Naomi?” Becca calls down the hallway. She breaks away from the aide who’s escorting their group outside. The aide reaches for her, frustrated, but I give a wave and jog toward Becca to indicate it’s all right. She reaches me and wraps my legs in a tight hug. “Want to come see my classroom?” Becca asks my knees, as I ruffle her hair, and duck to hug her back.

  “In a minute, okay? I have someone I need to talk to first.” I take Becca’s hand and lead her back to the classroom.

  The woman is still inside, gathering the kids together. She shoots a nervous glance at the door, and flinches when she sees me still standing there.

  I check the name plate on the room. Mrs. Randall. “Can you wait right here for a second, Becca?” I ask as the classroom door opens and a few kids start to excitedly spill out. “I need to talk to Mrs. Randall for a moment.”

  Becca shuffles her feet. “Okay. Then we’ll go see my classroom?”

  “Then we’ll go and check it out,” I promise. That seems to placate her. She leans
against the locker and pulls a toy out of her pocket. I leave the door open behind me so I can keep an eye on her, and inch into the room around the flood of kids moving in the other direction. There’s an aide leading them out to the lot, and another one bringing up the rear. Mrs. Randall, for her part, is bent over her desk, trying to look busy with work, if you ask me.

  “Excuse me.” I lean against the door after the last kid files out.

  She stops and stares up at me, eyes narrowed. “May I help you?”

  “You don’t recognize me?” I tilt my head, glaring at her.

  She lifts her eyebrows, mildly. “Should I?”

  “I’m the woman you ran off the road a couple of days ago,” I reply through gritted teeth. “So, yeah. Probably you should recognize me. Because you should have stopped the minute you saw me crash.”

  She turns back to her desk. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But to judge by her tense shoulders, not to mention the way she won’t meet my eyes anymore, I am sure she knows exactly what I mean.

  “You were speeding the wrong way up a one-way street. I turned off the road to avoid hitting you and collided with a pole.”

  “I’m sorry you had such a terrible experience, but I’m afraid you have me confused with somebody else.”

  “Oh really?” I lift my eyebrows. “Then you won’t mind if I take a look at your car, will you? Whoever hit me scratched my rear bumper pretty bad. They’d definitely have a matching scrape on the front of their car.”

  “Look, Miss…?”

  “Naomi Jordan,” I reply.

  “Ms. Jordan. I don’t have any obligation to talk to you about… well, anything. I don’t know who you are; I don’t know why you’ve come barging into my classroom—”

  “Auntie Naomi?” Becca pokes her head around the corner of the doorway. “Are you coming?”

  “I’ll be right there, Becca,” I reply, smiling at her before I turn my glare back on Mrs. Randall. “Do you know I had her in the car when you almost hit me head-on?” I ask, jaw tight with fury. “Do you know I wound up in the hospital with a concussion?”

  “As I said, I am very sorry to hear about what happened to you…”

  “If I hadn’t swerved and taken the fall for both of us, you would never have been able to pretend this didn’t happen, you know. We would’ve both been in the hospital, if not worse.” I grab Becca’s hand, and start toward the door before I say anything worse in front of her. “You were in a residential neighborhood, driving the wrong way up a one lane street… You’re lucky to be alive and in one piece. Think about that while you sit there and pretend you’re innocent, Mrs. Randall.” With that, I slam the classroom door behind me and start dragging Becca toward the exit.

  “Aren’t we going to stop and look at my classroom?” she asks, pouting.

  I slow my steps and suck in a deep breath, trying my best to calm myself. “We’re running pretty late, Becca. Mommy’s going to be wondering where we are right now. We’d better get going. Can we look at your classroom another time instead, sweetie?”

  She pouts even more deeply at me, but in the end, probably after looking at the barely concealed anger on my face, she relents. “Fiiiiine I guess.” She trudges after me, shoulders slumped. I hate to let her down but I also know that if I stay in this building with a woman who nearly killed me or injured Becca for one minute longer, I’m going to march right back into Mrs. Randall’s office and call the police on her right then and there. It would only serve her right. I wonder how much the penalty for a hit and run is. Would she get jail time?

  I’m daydreaming about it when we reach the parking lot, and Becca shoots me another one of those long, piercing looks, the kind that only kids her age can give. Like they know way more than you ever expected them to notice.

  “Mrs. Randall is a big meanie.”

  My eyebrows rise. “I have to agree with you there.” I glance at her again, and my eyes narrow. “Why, what happened? Did she say something mean to you?”

  Becca shakes her head, and I relax, just a little. Okay. One less thing I need to be furious about. “She just yells a lot. Especially at her husband.”

  “Her husband?”

  Becca nods. “He comes by school sometimes, to talk about his job. He works as a fireman. But Mrs. Randall is always mean to him whenever he’s here.”

  “Huh.” I wonder if she’s having marital problems too. Maybe that’s why she was speeding the wrong way up the street the other day, acting so recklessly. But that’s hardly an excuse for hitting someone’s car and speeding off without checking on them. Just go to a therapist or work out your stress at the gym or something. Or if your husband’s really that bad, divorce his ass and hook up with a hot doctor instead.

  I smile a little, for the first time since I found Mrs. Randall’s identity, and I catch myself in the rearview. I force the smile off my face. Whatever. No matter what that teacher is going through, it’s not a reason for her to act like a rebellious teenager. She’s a grown ass adult. She should have owned up to what she did right away and stopped putting people—and their innocent kids—in danger with her driving.

  “Well, it’s not nice to be mean to people,” I comment as we steer toward the flower shop. I take care to stick to the main road this time, and not to take any chances with the short cut again. I’m not driving that way again, not even if the lights and traffic the longer way take twice as much time. I learn from my mistakes.

  Sometimes, a little voice in my head can’t help pointing out. But sometimes you just keep repeating them. I think about Dr. Robinson, and about my ex. Am I doing the same thing again, like Monica fears? Rushing right back into something headlong without pausing to think about the consequences?

  Maybe. But if I am, do I really regret it? Because at the same time, part of me can’t help comparing Jason to my ex and thinking about how much better the good doctor is. For one thing, my ex never bothered to worry about my pleasure. It was all about what he wanted, and what felt good to him. If I got off, it was a secondary concern, a happy coincidence that I was into the same thing he was doing for himself. I can’t even remember the last time he went down on me. He certainly never did it like Jason, for hours on end, making me come over and over without any seeming concern for his own pleasure.

  It’s like he actually enjoys giving me pleasure, instead of worrying about himself first, second and last. There’s something impossibly sexy about that.

  But maybe Monica is right. Maybe I should be taking this slower, giving myself more time between guys to… I don’t know, figure out what I want, and who I am before I jump straight into another serious relationship.

  Relationship? See, this is what she means. I’m always ten steps ahead of myself. Here I am hooking up with a guy a couple of times and I’m already worried about the long-term ramifications. Why can’t I just have a little fun?

  In the backseat, Becca has moved on, babbling happily now about some new topic. If only I could just be more like her. Live in the moment and forget about annoyances like Mrs. Randall as soon as they happen. Not to mention, stop worrying about a future that I don’t even know can exist yet.

  I force a smile onto my face. Right. I’ve done enough worrying for one day. The rest of today, I am determined to enjoy myself. I’ll hang out with my best friend, work in the store we both love, and that’s that.

  And if my brain wants to fantasize about the sexy as hell doctor who’s been making my nights hotter and more distracting than they’ve ever been in my life? Well, then, I’m not going to resist a few dirty fantasies. After all, why not enjoy whatever this is for as long as it lasts?

  9

  I pull up outside the flower shop to see a line halfway out the door. Crap. I forgot that this is graduation weekend. Both the high schools in the area and the giant local university are having their ceremonies. We even have a waiting list for bouquets. I hurry out of the car, bringing Becca with me, and into the shop, where we both pause for a
moment in the doorway to drink in the chaos of the place.

  Monica and Carrie, our other shop girl, are both rushing back and forth between the stock room and register and the huge cool fridges where we keep the prepared bouquets so they don’t wilt in the heat. I drop Becca off with Monica behind the counter. Monica pauses in checking out a customer to kiss the top of Becca’s head and ask her to head to the little side room she usually waits for us in—a room we’ve nicknamed Becca’s office, because she’s decorated the whole thing from top to bottom in drawings and scribbles.

  Becca dives right into her desk, happily distracted by drawing some new cartoons. I catch a glimpse of her creation: an angry lady with giant glasses yelling at a man in a fireman’s hat. I have to hold back a chuckle. Okay, so maybe Becca doesn’t forget her annoyances as quickly as I think. She’s just found a more creative outlet for her anger than I have.

  Then I rush back to the register to help Monica fill the orders.

  “Where’s all this rush coming from?” I call to her between filling orders. “Graduation, you think?”

  Monica shakes her head. “Apparently there’s a high school prom this weekend too. And for some reason, about half a dozen anniversaries to judge by the number of guys in here looking for last-minute bouquets.”

  We spend the next half an hour completing a few last minute orders. Being in the back and arranging some of the bouquets gives me time to clear my head a little. Like Becca and her drawing, I find that arranging flowers always makes me feel better. It’s a creative outlet, a time for me to clear my head of any other pressing worries and just focus on one simple task for a while.

  Once I’ve finished, and we’ve helped the last of our rush customers check out and pay, I finally heave a deep sigh and lean against the counter next to Monica. “Well that was a change of pace.”