Challenge

by Amy Daws

  “Gosh, I wasn’t trying to be a tease.” I blanch, feeling mortified because I haven’t thought about that night with him until right this moment. “He just caught me in a weak moment. Wilding out is survival.”

  “I know, I know. Tequila Sunrise,” Belle adds, voicing our own personal mantra.

  Tequila Sunrise is essentially our more original version of YOLO. Actually saying YOLO makes my skin crawl. That’s what immature tweens shout when they decide to purchase a full calorie soda instead of diet. Tequila Sunrise is so much more.

  Our first day in Accident and Emergency—or Patch Alley as the hospital staff all call it—Belle and I were both pummeled with a crippling dose of reality when a baby was rushed in on a stretcher and pronounced dead only moments later from SIDS. The mother’s screams shook us so much that Belle ended up sick in the bathroom while I stood there, frozen and shell-shocked.

  The Paediatrics doctor on call that night yanked us both into her office, pulled out a sticky pad of paper, and scribbled some ingredients down on it.

  Tequila Sunrise:

  1 part Grenadine

  3 parts Tequila

  6 parts Orange Juice

  Do not mix.

  She told us to go home and make them when our shifts ended, and to remember that there is still sunshine above the chaos. Belle and I did exactly what she said and ended up completely wasted. We both realised in that moment that med school prepared us for the answers, but it did not prepare us for the heartache. So, rather than wallow in the sadness, we adopted the Tequila Sunrise philosophy as a part of our everyday lives.

  Therefore, as a single, somewhat naïve twenty-four-year-old determined to live my life to the fullest, I thought that meant letting down my hair at clubs, drinking in excess, dancing ‘til I sweat, and traveling when I can manage the time. The occasional flirting and making out is all a part of that game plan, too. It’s not about being loose and easy. It’s about living the one life you’re given and having fun while you can. Then getting right back in the trenches when your shift arrives and doing your best to lessen the sadness in the world. Add some sunshine.

  But what I did with Stanley wasn’t the perfect Tequila Sunrise decision. “I’m afraid Stanley was just…there,” I add regretfully. “I’d just finished a nine-day workweek, and I don’t think it’s unheard of for me to want to remind myself that I’m still alive and my girlie parts are all in full working order. I have you to thank for my wild side, you know,” I accuse.

  Belle pulls on a pair of fresh scrub pants over her black thong. “Too right,” she admits proudly. “I’ll take the blame because we had a blast in med school and not many people can say that. But poor, poor Stanley.”

  “Oh, don’t feel so sorry for him,” I baulk. “I hate that any time you kiss a man he just assumes it’s going to end in sex. I mean, seriously. What’s the rush? Foreplay is bloody exciting enough.”

  She shakes her head and giggles. “No. No, it is not, Indie. I’m telling you for the hundredth time, I know you went to all-girls schools and probably had to learn how to kiss on the back of your hand, but you are seriously missing out.”

  I roll my eyes and grumble, “I didn’t learn how to kiss on the back of my hand.” If I’m being honest, I didn’t have my first kiss until University and it was horribly awkward. I think my teeth scraped his tongue on its way in because I didn’t even know it was coming. Shouldn’t there be some sort of universal signal for tongue insertion on a kiss? A little shoulder tap? Maybe a couple cheek clicks? Something that says, “Hey, lady! I’m about to ramrod your mouth with my tongue. Open sesame!” The guy probably thought I was mentally unstable because he never spoke to me again.

  “Look,” Belle says, striding over by me to lean against the nearby locker. “We know that you are book-smart, Indie. You’re sharper than the majority of the third year residents here and probably some of the attendings. You are my little prodigy wunderkid after all.”

  “Oh, shut it,” I snap, blocking her hand from pinching my cheek like a proud mum.

  Her eyes glitter with determination. “But you have to stop saving yourself for Mr. Perfect. He’s not going to come. He most likely doesn’t even exist. Just give it up to someone like Stanley so you can stop obsessing over it so much. The Penis List we made is a solid plan, but not at the expense of spontaneity.”

  My eyes widen at her blatant dismissal of the sacred list we spent drunken hours coming up with in order to give me the boost I needed to lose my virginity. I even made a Pinterest board for it and added her as an admin.

  First Tequila Sunrise judging and now this.

  Okay, so I’m a twenty-four-year-old virgin who’s slightly obsessed with how she’s going to lose her well overdue virginity status. As I said before, though, part of the reason I’m still holding on to my V-Card is Belle. It’s not her fault, per se, but when I met her, I was so focused on having fun with my first real friend that my virginity wasn’t a top priority. Hell, I’d never even been to a party before Belle dragged me to one.

  Then, by the end of our three years in med school, I realised that I’d focused entirely on maintaining my scholarship and barely looked at boys. Sure, I’d had plenty of interactions with blokes. I learned how to accept and give a good French kiss, plus some basic foreplay stuff. But none of them felt right enough to go all the way with. I wasn’t ready. Med school had me over-flowing with firsts and the idea of getting intimate was overwhelming.

  Enter the Penis List.

  It was Belle’s idea. She thought that if I had a game plan and a clear type to look for, it would help me look at sex as an equation and not a conquest. It started out as a half-cracked idea, but I could see the strategy behind it, even when I was sober.

  The list goes as follows:

  The Penis List

  Penis #1: The virginity snatcher.

  Should be a bad boy. A player. A little sleazy. Should be hot—the hottest guy I’d ever see in real life. Cocky, confident, and even arrogant. Should administer the best sex of my life. Should be well penially hung.

  Penis #2: The sweetie.

  Should be kind, sensitive, nurturing, and tender. The ultimate nice guy. Should dress nicely. Should tuck his shirt in. Might cry when he comes. Should put your needs before his. Above all: A penial giver.

  Penis #3: The ultimate cocktail.

  The perfect blend of number one and number two. Should be both a giver and a taker. Both a DOM and a SUB. Both a lover and a fighter. A blissful penial balance. Husband material.

  “Look, Belle, you were there when we made the Penis List.” I cup my hand and whisper the last bit, my eyes sweeping the room to double-check that we’re still alone. “I’m not saving myself for Mr. Perfect. I’m saving myself for Penis Number One.”

  “We made that list two years ago, Indie. When are you going to find Penis Number One already?” she asks, her tone approaching shrill. “He shouldn’t be the Holy Grail of cocks for God’s sake. I love you, but you are in serious need of a push right now. Don’t make me mama bird you out of the nest. ‘Cause I’ll do it. I’ll shove you right out and make you fly.”

  I exhale heavily and drop my head back against my locker, turning my gaze up to the ceiling and begging the heavens for some act of God so I could get on with it already.

  “Is it too much to ask for the universe to drop a bad boy player on my lap? I don’t want to settle for a Stanley. Stanley is a number two. I don’t want to lose it to a number two. I want my first to be the most epic shag ever. A night that I will never forget. A night that makes me hoarse from screaming that I love life for giving me the experience. The kind of shag I’ll be able to tell my grandkiddies about someday.”

  “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 w
ild 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.

  “WE NEED THE BEST FUCKING doctor here, right the hell now. I don’t care if he’s on holiday, get him here!” Tanner’s voice booms as a man attempts to introduce himself as my doctor.

  I wipe my face as small flicks of spit come raining down on me. It’s shocking to see him this worked up. Granted, I’ve seen him get mighty upset over football before. But he’s not the one being wheeled into Accident and Emergency right now. I am. Shouldn’t I be the one screaming? Aren’t I the one horizontal on a stretcher?

  My stomach rolls as I recall what happened only minutes ago.

  The slip.

  One fucking slip.

  And my career is probably over.

  I cover my face with my hands, willing a time machine to materialise and take me back to the second when everything went horribly wrong so I can stop it from happening. Reverse the damage. Undo what has been done. Anything.

  It was a wet and wild game as London’s sky decided to open up and rain holy hell down onto the pitch, turning our match into a virtual mud bath. There is no such thing as rain delays in football, so the ball and every square inch of our bodies were covered in mud.

  We were up two-nil—both goals scored by me. I was driving my way to a hat trick and potentially securing myself an offer from Arsenal. Suddenly, a back tackle came sliding across the mud right toward me. I attempted to cut left to dodge the harsh contact. My feet couldn’t find any grip, though, and they slipped out from under me just in time for him to come crashing into me. It was that second that I felt it…The slip. That’s the only way to describe it. Something in my knee slipped and I knew I was fucked.

  I went down awkwardly and froze while the defender recovered with the ball and took off with my teammates down the field. I didn’t care. I couldn’t care. My whole career had just flashed before my eyes like it was over.

  Wet.

  Muddy.

  Bleak.

  And over.

  I rolled onto my belly and punched the mud-soaked grass over and over and over with all my might. I roared in anger and glanced up, immediately connecting eyes with Tanner across the field. He dropped down to the ground, reacting to the horror that overwhelmed me. He quickly leapt up and charged toward me, sliding on his knees to my side. This was bad. Just looking at his face I could tell it was bad.

  Don’t get me wrong. You can’t play football for most of your life and not experience the odd injury here and there. But this was different. This was a game changer.

  “Fuck, Cam!” Tanner cried, his expression marred with a knowing doom beneath his dripping beard.

  “I tore something, Tanner. I know it,” I exclaimed. Right on cue, I felt a sharp slice of pain shoot up my quad. “Fuuuuuck!”

  “Maybe it’s just a cramp. Can you get up?” Tanner asked hopefully.

  I shook my head but attempted to stand anyway, hoping fate was playing a mean trick on me. My stomach flipped again when it felt like both the top and bottom parts of my leg were moving in two different directions. When I stumbled, Tanner slipped under one of my arms to hold me up. My ego crumbled with that one gesture. I held my lame leg completely off the ground, unwilling to tempt fate by putting more pressure on it.

  In a flash, our baby brother, Booker, was under my other arm. Panic spread across his entire face—a face that always looked so young to me, even though he was only two years below us.

  “Fucking hell, Cam. Tell me you didn’t!” he croaked the knowing question.

  I clenched my jaw as I felt the distinct sensation of bone rubbing on bone under the skin of my kneecap.

  Suddenly, the crowd erupted around us in celebration. I looked up at the board to see the opposing team had just scored a goal.

  “Booker,” I groaned, realising he must have left his box when he saw me go down. “You should be in your box.”

  “Sod football. You’re my fucking brother,” he growled back angrily. “That wanker was completely out of control. Utter horseshit and no card from the ref…It’s bullshit.”

  I chomped down on my lip, seemingly fighting back pain when, in fact, I was fighting back the immense emotion that swept over me at the sight of my two brothers. The act of them choosing to leave the match mid-play to carry me off the pitch and not subject me to the scene of a stretcher was overwhelming.

  These brothers of mine truly would do anything for me.

  On the sidelines, we were swarmed by the team medic, a ref, the pitch emergency staff, our dad and, eventually, our raging, wildfire sister.

  Vi was covered in an enormous Bethnal Green poncho and looked ready to burst. “Where was the fucking red card, Ref?” Her screams were in no way intimidating or threatening, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. “That was utter shite and you know it! Get some fucking glasses, you twat!”

  I winced as they settled me onto the hard stretcher on the ground and prepared to carry me away. Everyone was talking at me, including my d
ad. He was touching my knee and looking earnestly at my eyes with a million soundless questions. His lips were moving—everyone’s were—but I couldn’t hear a word of what they were saying. The blood rushed loudly in my ears as hot sweat dripped down my mud-stained face, blurring my vision. All I could do was stare down at my offensive knee.

  My dream-crushing knee that just ruined any chance I had at a contract offer.

  “Fuck!” I screamed loudly into my shoulder, feeling utterly betrayed. I slammed my fist down onto the hard plastic of the stretcher just as some blokes lifted it and began escorting me off the sidelines. “I blew it,” I whispered on an exhale as I glanced back at Tower Park.

  Tower Park.

  This pitch was a place that had been my home for most of my life. From going along with my dad as a child while he attended practises with potential recruits, to now playing on it myself for the past six years. This was my career. I became a man on this grass. And now, I was being carried off of it…like a baby.

  My eyes glazed as I took note of the fans all standing up…even the visiting fans. The men had their hats off and placed respectfully against their chests. The women had their hands cupped over their mouths in shock. Down below, the players had all taken a knee, even the ones on the sidelines. My chin wobbled as I admitted that for the first time in my life, I hated this fucking game.

  When I finally pull my hands off my face because of the muted noise, I find myself in a small exam room surrounded by glass. I look out the closed sliding door straight in front of me and see my family gesturing wildly at the doctor who received us when we first came in.

  A throat clears from beside me and I jump. “Um, sorry. Didn’t mean to frighten you. My name is Dr. Porter, and I’m going to be prepping you for your MRI.”

  I frown and turn to eye the petite woman who barely looks old enough to drink. Her red, curly hair sits in a mess atop her head and she touches it self-consciously.