Relentlessly Reckless

by Lucy Covington

  RELENTLESSLY RECKLESS

  (Addicted To You #6)

  Lucy Covington

  LINDSAY

  Was this what a broken heart felt like?

  It had been two weeks since I’d talked to Justin, and they’d seemed like the hardest two weeks of my life. I knew that my reaction to being away from him was ridiculous and immature. I hadn’t even known Justin that long, and in the grand scheme of things, two weeks was nothing.

  But this feeling inside of me was just… it was awful.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about him. My heart jumped every time I imagined him close to me, holding me, his hands on my body. When I closed my eyes, I could still feel him sleeping next to me, his chest moving up and down in a soothing rhythm with his breathing.

  I just missed him. I missed everything about him.

  Every five seconds I though about calling him. It was complete torture. One night I got so close to dialing his number that I had to bring my phone to my gym locker and lock it up for the night just so I wouldn’t be tempted. I wanted to ask him what happened, why he’d just disappeared out of my life with no warning. I knew we’d had a fight, but still.

  He’d dropped those movies off at my dorm room, and he’d come when Rachel needed help.

  So then how could he just leave me like this, without even really saying goodbye?

  I didn’t understand it.

  Of course, I didn’t really understand anything about Justin.

  And as the days went by, I started to convince myself that maybe he was just a boy, and not some great college romance I’d been meant to have. Maybe he was right to stay away from me. Maybe we were just too different.

  That is what I was thinking about while I walked to the Cambridge University Medical Center for my first day of work as Dr. Klaxton’s research assistant. I was supposed to meet Carter there at noon. We’d been trying to get together for the past couple of weeks, but it seemed like whenever we’d figure out a good time to meet, he’d have to cancel for some reason.

  It was kind of making me anxious. Everything involving Dr. Klaxton felt so unpredictable, and I didn’t want anything about this new position to be weird or unsettled. But then Carter called this morning and asked me if I could meet him today to get started.

  Of course I said yes. I even made sure to leave fifteen minutes earlier than I needed to, just in case.

  The Cambridge University Medical Center was one of the premier centers in the whole country, and as I walked through the doors, I got that familiar twinge of excitement. This was what I was meant to be doing. This was what I’d been working toward my whole life. And no one, especially not Justin Brown, was going to distract me from that.

  I followed the signs to the research clinic, then gave the receptionist my name.

  She told me Carter was in the back office. I walked down a hallway past examination rooms, followed her instructions and took a right.

  The door to the office was slightly ajar, and I could see Carter inside, his back to me, feeding papers into a shredder.

  “Hey,” I said, leaning against the doorframe.

  Carter jumped and turned around. “Oh,” he said, clearly startled. “What are you doing here?”

  I grinned. “You asked me to meet you here, remember? Don’t tell me you forgot already, Carter, it was just a couple of hours ago.”

  “Yeah, I know. But you’re fifteen minutes early.” He sounded slightly annoyed, and almost accusing. Which made no sense. Why would he be upset that I was here a little early?

  I shrugged. “Better to be early than late, right? You know I’ve learned my lesson about that one.”

  Carter smiled, and his easy demeanor returned. “No problem,” he said. “I’m glad you’re here.”

  “Am I the first one?” I asked, readjusting my messenger bag on my shoulder.

  “The first one?”

  “Yeah. I’m assuming the other research assistants aren’t here yet?” I hadn’t even met the other research assistants. They were in a different section of Dr. Klaxton’s class.

  But I knew their names were Levi Folsom and Michael Schwartz. They’d been included on the joint emails we’d been sent.

  “Oh, they’re not coming,” Carter said. He fed another piece of paper into the shredder. “I thought it would be good for you to get some experience before we really started. You know, see the clinic, that kind of thing.” He flicked off the shredder and turned around and gave me a grin. “So it’s just me and you.”

  “Sounds good.” My stomach did a flip. Had Carter he invited me here so we could spend some time together alone? No. That would be ridiculous. Ever since Justin made that remark about all guys having ulterior motives, I couldn’t stop thinking that every guy wanted something from me. Which was stupid.

  Carter was a grad student, he was older, he was more mature. He was just being nice. In fact, he was probably going to invite the other assistants over here at some point to have their own solo session.

  “Let’s go back up to the receptionist desk so I can show you our schedule,” he said.

  I followed him down the hallway back toward reception.

  “Hey, Carter,” the receptionist said when we got there. She was in her early twenties, and pretty, with blonde hair and green eyes. “Working hard or hardly working?”

  “Always working hard, you know that, Jenna.”

  Carter introduced us, and Jenna gave me a warm smile. “You’re lucky to be working with Carter,” she said. “He’s the best.”

  “I’m looking forward to it,” I said. It was obvious this girl had a crush on him.

  And honestly, who wouldn’t? Carter was smart, he was nice, he was good-looking.

  Justin. His face popped into my brain, and I pushed it right back out, annoyed at the intrusion.

  “I was just about to go to lunch,” Jenna said. “Think you can hold down the fort?”

  “Holding down forts is my specialty,” Carter said.

  Jenna smiled and then grabbed her purse. “Nice to meet you, Lindsay,” she said.

  “Nice to meet you too.”

  As she walked out, I realized Carter and I were alone. Like, really alone. I wondered again if he’d done it on purpose. And then I wondered if I’d be disappointed or not if I’d found out he hadn’t.

  Carter pulled out his iPad. “So did you read the study overview I sent you?” he asked as he pulled up the patient schedule.

  I nodded. He’d sent me a paper explaining the study Dr. Klaxon was involved in.

  Apparently Dr. Klaxton had gotten a grant from the government to help develop a new weight loss drug. They were in the testing phase now, giving the drug to patients to see if it had any kind of significance in helping them lose weight.

  “Good,” Carter said. He turned the iPad toward me and showed me the schedule for the day. “So we’re going to be seeing five different patients today, asking them how they’re handling the drug, administering their meds, recording their weights, that kind of thing.”

  “Cool.” My heart soared. Yes, it was a lot of paperwork and routine measurements. Some people would find it boring. But not me. It was working with patients, which was the only thing I’d ever wanted to do in my life.

  Suddenly, there was a loud noise from the waiting room.

  “I’m here!” someone called. “Everyone! I’m here!”

  “Oh, God,” Carter said. He leaned in close to me, so close that I could smell his shampoo. “Brace yourself.”

  “Brace myself?”

  “Yup.” Carter grinned. “Devorah’s here.”

  A woman appeared at the reception window. She was wearing bright pink lipstick, a tight lime t-shirt, and she was a holding a toddler, who was wiggling and
trying to get down. “Stop it, Frederick,” she admonished him.

  Frederick wiggled some more and then reached for the basket of lollipops that was sitting on the ledge of the reception window. “Frederick!” the woman said. “You know you get the lollipops at the end, and only if you’re a good boy!”

  “Ahh, it’s okay, buddy,” Carter said, giving the kid a warm smile. “You can have a lollipop now.”

  Frederick beamed. “And then one after, too, right, Carter? Two lollipops, right?”

  “Right, bud.”

  Devorah shook her head. “I swear, this kid has no self control.” She bit her lip and thought about it. “Although I guess shouldn’t really talk!” She laughed, a big guffaw that echoed through the whole waiting room.

  “Now, Devorah,” Carter said. “You know what we talked about. Food and overeating can be an addiction. It doesn’t mean you have no self-control.”

  “I know, Carter,” she said, and sighed. “You always know exactly what to say to make me feel better.”

  She was looking at him like maybe she was in love with him. Not in a romantic way or anything. It was more that she thought maybe he was going to be the one to save her. I was impressed. I wanted someone to look at me like that, to know that I was having that kind of impact on someone who was struggling.

  “Of course,” Carter said. “Now why don’t you go back to exam room one, and I’ll sent the nurse in to take some blood and get you started.”

  Devorah headed through the door, her son still on her hip, eating his lollipop happily.

  “That’s Devorah,” Carter said. “She’s a really nice woman, but she loves to tell me everything that’s going on in her life.”

  “Do most patients do that?”

  He shrugged. “It depends. Some of them talk and talk, some of them get quiet and just sort of zone out. I think it depends has on how nervous they are. I try to just take my cue from them, put them at ease by matching their energy, you know?”

  I nodded, taking in everything he told me. Obviously I knew I was going to learn a lot about science and medicine at college, but this kind of information – about dealing with patients and actually being in a medical environment – were the things I was most looking forward to.

  We waited a few minutes so the nurse could take Devorah’s vitals, and then we headed for the examination room.

  When we got there, Devorah was sitting on the table, her legs hanging over the side. The nurse was swabbing the inside of her arm with alcohol, and Frederick was sitting on the floor, playing with a tongue depressor.

  “Frederick,” Devorah was saying. “Please do not put the tongue depressor back in your mouth after it’s been on the floor.”

  “Germs, germs, germs,” Frederick said happily. He dragged the tongue depressor across the floor and then promptly stuck it in his mouth.

  “Frederick!” Devorah yelled.

  Carter kneeled down and gently took the tongue depressor from Frederick. “Hey, Frederick,” he said. “Wouldn’t you like to play with the fire truck instead?” He reached into a cabinet by the door and pulled out a tiny toy fire truck.

  Frederick’s eyes lit up. “You remembered!”

  “Of course.”

  Frederick grabbed the truck and start making vrooming noises.

  “Thanks,” Devorah said. “I don’t know what’s gotten into him. Lately he’s just been off the wall.” She shook her head as the nurse swabbed at the inside of her elbow with a cotton ball, getting ready to take blood. “He’s definitely acting out because of the divorce. And of course it doesn’t help that my ex-husband is parading around all his new girlfriends.” She shook her head and threw up her hands. The nurse had to grab at her arm and hold it steady again. “I just don’t know what to do.”

  Carter was nodding his head in sympathy, but then Devorah turned to me. “Are your parents divorced?” she demanded.

  “Mine? No.”

  “Well, you’re lucky.” She looked at Frederick, who was slamming his fire truck into the leg of a chair. “I just worry about what this is going to do to his fragile little psyche.”

  Frederick didn’t look like he really had a fragile little psyche. In fact, it seemed as if Frederick was anything but fragile. I just nodded, and then I noticed Carter giving me an expectant look, and I realized he wanted me to say something.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t worry about him,” I said to Devorah. “Children are so resilient.

  And a lot of studies these days show that staying in an unhealthy marriage is much worse for children in the long run than it is to have divorced parents.”

  “Really?” Devorah looked at me in awe, like I was some kind of expert on divorce, and not just a research assistant.

  “Really. I read it in this month’s issue of Psychology.”

  She smiled at me and Carter gave me an approving look. I felt pride and excitement flow through me. This was what I’d come to Boston for. So I could help people, and study and get things done. Not so I could end up getting all caught up in some guy with tattoos and a bad attitude. I was supposed to be getting an education, not wandering around bad parts of town and cleaning out some random guy’s wounds. That was crazy.

  “Well, I think you’re definitely right,” Devorah said. She held out her arm and the nurse began taking blood. “I think Frederick is going to be fine.”

  “Watch out, firemen!” Frederick screamed as he slammed the fire truck into the wall. “It’s going to blow, it’s going to blow, it’s going to blow your torsos off!”

  “Look how smart he is,” Carter said. “He knows what a torso is.” He smiled and took out his clipboard. “Now, tell me how you’re doing. Any problems?”

  “Not really,” Devorah said, shaking her head. “Oh! There was one thing, though.”

  The nurse was finished swabbing her with alcohol, and she started applying a tourniquet to Devorah’s arm. The veins bulged, and the nurse pulled out the needle and stuck it in.

  “Oh, yeah?” Carter asked. “What kind of thing?”

  “Well, it was weird,” Devorah said. “I took my pill, and about an hour later, I was walking up some stairs, and I started to feel a weird sort of tightening in my chest.”

  As soon as she said those words, the strangest thing began to happen. I started having a tightening in my chest. At first I thought it was just my imagination, some sort of weird sympathetic reaction to what Devorah was saying. But then my face started to get hot and my head started to feel woozy. My stomach did a somersault, and I realized it was the blood. It was watching Devorah’s blood pool into the vial that was making me sick.

  I averted my eyes, but it didn’t help much. I’m going to faint, I thought. I’m going to faint right here in this room. Everything started to fade into a pinprick, like I was looking through a tunnel or a lens.

  My legs got wobbly, at it felt like I was standing on a platform that wasn’t nailed down to the ground. It was the weirdest sensation, almost like I was on a diving board.

  And then I felt Carter’s arms around me, and he was saying, “It’s okay, you’re okay.”

  And then Devorah was getting moved off the table and I heard her telling Frederick to come with her and the nurse. They walked out the door and Carter laid me down where Devorah had been sitting.

  “Take deep breaths,” he told me.

  I did as I was instructed. For a horrible moment, I thought I was going to throw up, but then, just like that, the feeling passed, and I started to feel a little bit better.

  “I don’t know what happened,” I said. I still felt shaky and unstable, but I was also starting to feel embarrassed.

  “I’ll tell you what happened,” Carter said, giving me a smile. “You almost fainted.”

  “No, I know that,” I said. “It’s just that I don’t usually faint.” It was true. I had an iron stomach. I’d watched hours of surgery videos on the Internet, and I hadn’t even blinked when Adam cut his leg the other day. I never got freaked out by the sight of blood
.

  “Hey, it can happen to anybody at any time. Seriously, don’t be embarrassed about it.”

  “Yeah.” I was trying to sound nonchalant, but I was actually really upset.

  “Will you be okay here for a second?” he asked. “I’m going to go and finish up with Devorah, and then I’ll come right back.”

  I nodded. Physically, I was starting to feel a lot better. It was emotionally that I was starting to panic a little bit. How could I be a doctor if I couldn’t even watch a simple blood draw?

  I closed my eyes and took more deep breaths until Carter came back.

  He was holding a sugar cookie and a Dixie cup full of orange juice. “Here,” he said, handing I them to me. “We keep these here for when people get woozy.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I took a small sip of the juice.

  Carter must have noticed I was upset, because he squeezed my shoulder. “Hey,”

  he said. “Don’t get down about this.”

  “I’m not.”

  He looked at me skeptically.

  “Okay, I am.” I managed a smile. “It’s just that I’ve never had that kind of reaction before. And I’m not… I mean, I don’t want it to end up being something that becomes a thing.”

  “It won’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because.” He shrugged. “A lot of people faint once or twice, it doesn’t mean it becomes an issue forever.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah. The first time I had to work on a cadaver, the smell made me so sick that I ran outside and vomited into a trash can.”

  “You didn’t!”

  “I did.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “I got some water, went back into the room, and it never happened again. And it won’t happen to you again, either.”

  I shook my head. “But what if it does?”

  He grinned and tilted his head. “But what if it doesn’t? Lindsay, you’re going to be fine, I promise.”

  And something in the way he said it made me believe it. He was just so sure of himself, so constant. From the time I’d slipped that paper under Dr. Klaxton’s door, he’d made me feel like whatever I was going through was no big deal. It was nice.