A Bad Case of You

by Taylor Holloway

  “You know what’s funny?” Lucy said, looking through her files. “There was a McNamara that just came in a couple of minutes ago. She had a funny first name, too.”

  My blood ran cold. “What was the first name?”

  She flipped through a few folders. “Oh, here it is. Rosary.”

  15

  Eric

  Faith McNamara [1:30 p.m.]: Sorry, something really unexpectedly came up. An emergency. Some other time, ok?

  I frowned down at my phone and ground my teeth in frustration. This was the fourth time in the past two weeks that she’d brushed me off for lunch. Trying to get time face to face with my own wife was proving next to impossible. I hadn’t even had a private conversation with her since our date.

  I’d severely underestimated Faith’s ability to avoid me. She was a master of evasion. She’d apparently missed her calling as a superspy because no matter what I seemed to do, she was three steps ahead. Actually, that was an understatement. She wasn’t three steps ahead, she was already around the corner, and heading right on out the door, and had an Uber ready to take her to the airport. I wasn’t just struggling to connect with her; I was a total failure at it.

  You might think that since we worked in the same building, sometimes with the same patients, I would eventually run into her in the hallway. But that never happened. Not once. She must have some kind of spidey sense. She said she was tight with Peter Parker. Maybe he taught her some tricks or something.

  Yet despite the fact that I was struggling with my patience and wanted to go bang on her door every evening, I knew that would only push her farther away. She’d said she didn’t want to date me, but then kissed me senseless. She said she wanted to stay married for the sake of our respective careers but wouldn’t speak to me. She’d text with me now and then, sometimes for hours at a time, but then refuse to meet up. It was driving me fucking insane.

  Eric Carter [1:35 p.m.]: Ok. I hope everything is ok.

  Faith McNamara [1:36 p.m.]: Thanks, but I’m sure it’ll be fine.

  Eric Carter [1:37 p.m.]: Let me know if I can help.

  It was really all I could do. I was still determined to win her over, but I’d resigned myself to playing the long game. If I needed to slowly build her trust, that’s what I would do. Eventually, I hoped, there would be a breakthrough.

  Faith McNamara [2:45 p.m.]: I need you. Right now. Meet me at room 455. Please come right away.

  Lust replaced frustration in an instant.

  Well, shit. I didn’t expect it to be to be today. I’m not going to turn that sort of an invitation down though. Not in a million years.

  I hightailed it down the stairs with from where I’d been sulking on the mostly empty sixth floor to the cardiac unit on the fourth with a giddy skip in my step. I wasn’t sure if the middle of the busy ward was quite the best place to mess around in the middle of the afternoon, but I supposed that we could lock the door and hide in plain sight. My brain was rapidly filling up with all the things I wanted to do to Faith. So, when I arrived in front of room 455, I was extremely disappointed to see the door open and Dr. Ortega trying to contain a distraught and tearful Faith. She was sobbing and attempting to get past him and into the room.

  Huh? This isn’t at all what I expected. This isn’t as good as sex.

  Dr. Ortega caught my eye and relief colored his features. He turned Faith around to face me and all but pushed her into my arms. She sort-of flopped against me, making a sad little warble against my clavicle and setting her palms against my shoulders. I hugged her close.

  “Dr. Carter, thank god,” Dr. Ortega said. He sounded far happier to see me than ever before. “Can you take your wife to the waiting room and stay with her? She keeps badging her way back through the door.” He looked down at Faith and added sternly, “I don’t want to call security, but I will.”

  I was still so, so confused. “What’s happening?”

  Ortega frowned. “If I could get into the room to evaluate her mother, I’d tell you.” He shook his head and mouthed. “I think she’s just having a panic attack, but we have to do the EKG.”

  I nodded vaguely. That was standard. “Ok.” I told him. Then, to Faith, “come on, let’s go wait together.”

  Faith looked up at me and shook her head. “No. I want to see her.” Her dark eyes were swimming with unshed tears and it made my heart ache to see her so upset.

  “No way,” I said as gently as I could, pulling her down the hallway toward the double doors. “You know that’s not how this works.”

  Doctors and nurses make the worst patients, and the worst relatives of patients. We’re much too pushy, think we know everything, and don’t take no for an answer. Usually, in this situation, I’d be calling Faith to help. Having to be the reasonable one was hard.

  “You’re a much better doctor than Ortega,” she complained, trying to turn us back around. “You should go treat her. If I promise to wait I the waiting room, will you go treat her?”

  Although I appreciated the vote of confidence, Faith was wrong. Dr. Ortega was an older, more experienced physician. I was just a resident. He’d probably treated cases like this a thousand times over. That meant that he was, objectively, a better doctor to treat her mother.

  Ultimately it was irrelevant though. “That’s not how this works either.” I wasn’t allowed to treat an immediate family member, which is how Mrs. McNamara would be viewed anyway. “Come on Faith, you know this.”

  Faith looked like she wanted to argue, but she knew all this, hell, she probably knew the rules better than I did. But when it’s your mother in the hospital room, I also knew that the rules didn’t matter. I’d gone through the same thing with my own mom during her battle with cancer. There were many, many times that I’d been relegated to a waiting room when I thought my time and talents were being wasted at her expense.

  But the truth is that there are good reasons not to be involved in the treatment of family. Not the least of which is the horrible, crushing guilt that would be felt if the family member didn’t recover. It was better to follow the rules.

  Once we made it into the waiting room, Faith was too distraught to do anything but melt atop my lap in a chair and bury her face in my shoulder. The easy show of her trust made my heart pound, even if it was only brought on by her panic and not, well, real. I tried my best to comfort her.

  “It’s all going to be ok,” I told her, running my fingertips through her hair and rocking her back and forth. She just clenched her eyes shut tighter and shook her head. Holding the soft curves of her body against me like this would have been sexual in any other context, but this wasn’t. This was just meant for comfort.

  “What if someone tells her about us?” she asked after a little while.

  I shook my head. “You know nobody has time for stuff like that. They’re not going to be chatting with her. Plus, she’s on sedatives. She wouldn’t remember.”

  Faith frowned but nodded after a moment. She seemed to have accepted that there was nothing she could do but wait. I knew how helpless that must make her feel.

  Hours passed. From the periodic visits of the staff that was treating Faith’s mother, we learned that there was no significant danger to Mrs. McNamara’s heart or life. She’d indeed only been having a panic attack, a condition that could convincingly mimic a heart attack, but was mostly in the mind.

  She would have to stay the night, though. There were a number of other tests Dr. Ortega wanted to run in order to rule out anything else. Few people began having panic attacks in middle age. He needed to make sure there was nothing else going on.

  I don’t know if it was really me that comforted her, or the news, but eventually Faith’s trembling slowed and then stopped. It was hours later before she talked to me again though. She sighed all of a sudden and looked up at me.

  “Will you take me home with you tonight? I don’t want to be alone.”

  Her hands rose up from between us and angled my face down to hers. Before I could rep
ly, she kissed me. So much for me seducing Faith. Apparently, it was going to be the other way around.

  16

  Eric

  Maybe I should have said no to Faith that evening in mid-January. Maybe I should have taken her back to her apartment and left her there alone because she’d had a rough, emotional day and because she was a rough, emotional mess. But I couldn’t.

  There were limits to my self-control and this was well beyond them. I’d been dreaming about having her back in my bed for two solid weeks, and of a solid year before that. Every morning I woke up rock hard and covered in sweat from dreaming about her. When given such an inviting offer, I was helpless to resist her.

  I took her back to my apartment like she asked, and I’d barely unlocked the door before she was in my arms. Her eagerness as she kissed me, and the light scent of her perfume reminded me of the last time she’d been this close to me, when we’d both been drunk, sloppy messes.

  This was a thousand times better, though. This time, I knew what I was doing. I didn’t have the numbing effects of alcohol to make things distant and blurry. Everything felt immediate, exciting, and right.

  We were both wearing our work scrubs, which made for simple undressing since they’re basically just glorified pajamas. I tugged my shirt off with eager hands as she did the same, revealing the sight of her high, round tits and slim ribcage. Her body was shaped just like an hourglass—it was almost laughably proportionate. She must make other women green with envy. Faith was without a doubt the most beautiful woman I’d ever met. I could barely believe she was here, in my apartment, pulling off her clothes and smiling shyly at me the whole time.

  “You’re so gorgeous Faith,” I heard myself saying in awe when she unhooked her black bra and let it fall to hit my kitchen floor. She flushed at the complement, shaking her head as if to deny it, and the pink pigment extended all the way down her ample chest.

  You can shake your head all you want. It doesn’t make it any less true.

  With her long black hair cascading over her narrow shoulders, and the hard, pink peaks of her nipples peeking through the raven strands, she looked more like every teenage fantasy I’d ever had than a reality.

  I’d always had a thing for women with high cheekbones, soulful dark eyes, and very dark hair. I attributed it to watching a lot of Star Trek: The Next Generation as a child. The character of Deanna Troi had been etched on my boyhood subconscious as the peak of sensual womanhood. Only now her throne was taken. From now on, it would only be Faith.

  I took her in my arms again, hooking my thumbs under the waistband of her pants and slipping them off her hipbones so they joined the rest of her clothes on the ground. Faith went for the ties on my pants in return. The feeling of her hands on my bare skin made me shiver.

  Somehow, we managed to stumble through the rest of the apartment to the bedroom. By the time we got there, she was fully stripped, and I was down to just my boxers. Faith smiled at me.

  “I promise not to make you sleep on the floor this time,” she purred. Her voice, usually soft and high, had transformed into something lower, huskier, and sexier. Her eyes were heavy-lidded, and her lips were wet and red from kissing. She might be a virgin right now, but she wouldn’t be leaving this room as one.

  “You can make me sleep wherever you want as long as I get to fuck you first.” I was beyond any gentlemanly behavior now. I wanted her. Just her. Right now.

  My crudeness had a couple of interesting effects on Faith. Her brown pupils dilated, and her full, red lips parted. “Ok,” she breathed. Faith laid down atop the bed, over the plain white coverlet. “You’ll tell me if I do something wrong, won’t you?” she asked me.

  Wrong?

  I sank down to sit next to her and smoothed her hair back from her eyes. “You couldn’t possibly do anything wrong.” I cupped her chest, reveling in the way she inhaled sharply and arched up into my hands.

  The tiniest crease appeared between those big dark eyes. “I just don’t know what I’m doing.”

  I lay down next to Faith, still wearing my boxers and feeling utterly surreal. “What are you worried about?” I asked her between kisses. The last time I’d taken someone’s virginity I’d been about sixteen. It hadn’t gone so well, although inexperienced teenage sex was, as a rule, not spectacular. But I knew a lot more now, and I knew I could make this good for her. I was committed to making this good for her.

  She reached for my shoulders and I obligingly turned on my side at her coaxing. “I don’t know,” she sighed, hitching one long, sculpted leg up over my hip and playing with the hair at the nape of my neck. I could feel the heat between her legs through the thin material still separating us. It was a struggle not to push against her. “I just don’t want to disappoint you.”

  “You definitely can’t do that.” I laughed a little. My body was starting to shake from having her so close. I’d been hard for so long now that I ached all over. “I’m the one worried about that.”

  She shrugged at my admission. “I guess there’s only one way to find out.”

  A challenge? Really? From nervous to demanding in exactly two seconds flat. Who was this woman in this bed with me? I arched an eyebrow at her. “I guess you’re right.” I told her.

  Now that she’d challenged me to fuck her properly, the only thing I could really do was to make good on my promise. I’d always been a sucker for dares, or challenges, or games. This was like all three rolled up in one. And the prize? Faith.

  I was going to win.

  I rolled us over, so she was underneath me, and spread her knees wider. I worked myself down her body, lavishing attention on her long, graceful neck, her tits, and the silky soft skin on her inner thighs.

  “Do you like this?” I asked her when I was cradling her thighs between my hands and staring up her beautiful body at her. I’d had partners before who didn’t enjoy having their pussies licked, which I found as perplexing as I did disappointing. I loved nothing more.

  She nodded eagerly, and I grinned in relief before going to work on her perfect pink pussy with my tongue and fingers. She tasted like heaven. After a little while of teasing her sweet clit, her little noises told me she was pretty close to being there, too.

  Even though I was just about dying to fuck her the entire time, there was a zero percent chance that I was going to cut corners on Faith’s first time. She sighed and trembled beneath me, coming hard for me and clenching around the two fingers I’d worked inside her.

  She was ridiculously tight, but I was still committed to going at her pace. I crawled back up her body, shifting us onto the side again as I did, and returning her leg atop my hip. I reached behind me to the nightstand and grabbed a condom, unwrapping it and tugging my boxers down in her full view. When I pressed the condom into her palm, she blinked, wide-eyed.

  “Go ahead,” I told her, guiding her slim, white hand to my cock. “Put it on me.”

  She did so clumsily, and the feeling of her little fingers working the latex down around me were a torturous pleasure. She smiled up at me in victory when it was done and it eroded the very last of any self-control I had left.

  I rolled atop her, penetrating into her sweet, tight warmth in a single, slow stroke. Her head lolled back onto the pillow. She made a little inarticulate noise that indicated that she was not in pain.

  “More?” I asked her, moving slowly when she nodded eagerly. “Harder?” More wide-eyed nodding.

  Thank god.

  She caught on after a moment and started moving to meet me stroke for stroke. We found a leisurely, gentle rhythm. She was incredibly tight, eager, and sweet. I fucked her with every ounce of tenderness I had inside me, wanting to give her even a fraction of the pleasure she was giving me.

  In time, our movements quickened, and her body went plaint and submissively loose-limbed beneath me. She clenched her eyes shut and grasped at my hair, gasping her way to a second orgasm when I finally started to really drive into her. My climax was moments behind hers, and I
heard her saying my name as a blinding, mindless pleasure pushed me over the edge.

  Afterwards, we lay curled around each other for a long, quiet moment. The male refractory period demanded sleep, but I peeled my eyelids open to examine Faith’s face.

  “Are you alright?” I asked her, kissing the tip of her nose to make her open her own eyes. “I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

  She smiled at me. “Did it sound like you were hurting me?”

  “Not really. No.” I continued to stare at her until she spoke.

  “You didn’t hurt me, Eric. It was perfect.” Her smile was beautiful.

  I exhaled deeply. I hadn’t realized I was holding so much tension about it until her words relieved me. “Good. Will you stay the night, Faith? I’m off tomorrow. We could have breakfast before going to see your mom get discharged.”

  Faith’s eyes flashed wide but then she just yawned and snuggled closer to me. “Ok.”

  “We also probably need to talk more about what this means for us.” I sighed. “I know you’re only here right now because… well, it’s not because you’ve suddenly decided to give us a try, have you?”

  “I don’t know.” Her voice was small. “Is it ok if this is just for tonight?”

  “I don’t have any expectations.” It was a lie, of course. I’d been dreaming of having her right exactly where she was for a year and wasn’t about to lose her now. But I didn’t want to scare her.

  I could tell that Faith was at her emotional limit for the day, so I left it there. I wanted to talk to her about a lot of important things, our impending annulment, her mother’s condition, our possible future relationship, but now wasn’t the time. Right now, Faith needed me to be warm, comforting, and most importantly, quiet. I could do that. I let her sleep.