by Jessica Ashe
Except Fred.
He hadn’t been back to the hospital since he’d been discharged two days ago. Did that mean everything was okay now? Or did he just not want to come back because he knew he couldn’t afford it?
“Who’s my next patient, Mel?” I asked the nurse.
“Mr. Elliot Michaels,” the nurse replied.
“Any chance this is just a routine cold? If I have to cup one more pair of old man’s balls today, or stick my finger up their… well, let’s just say this hasn’t been a fun shift.”
“You might not mind cupping this one’s balls,” Mel replied, with a smile and a wink. “He’s in room three. God, what I wouldn’t give to be a doctor right now.”
Mel passed me his file, together with some paperwork I’d need to sign.
Elliot Michaels. Age: 24. White. 220 pounds, so likely a bit overweight.
He had a long history of broken bones, but no major illnesses. Just incredibly clumsy then.
The other paperwork was an official document of the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Elliot Michaels was a fighter. I rolled my eyes and sighed.
I hated fighters. Okay, so eventually I had warmed to my friend Nora’s boyfriend, but he’d nearly died because of his stupid desire to beat up men in a metal cage for a living. Who in their right mind wanted to make a career out of fighting?
I had a good mind to walk in there and tell him to get bent, but the UFC provided good insurance and he only needed a basic medical. I was a doctor; I had a duty to treat all my patients. Even the idiots.
“If there’s any ball cupping required, I’ll call you in for a consult,” I promised Mel.
“Yes, please,” she replied enthusiastically.
I frowned. Why was she so keen to touch up some overweight guy? She usually went for the ripped muscular type if the nude calendar she kept behind her desk was anything to go by.
Alright, here goes. Only three hours to go, and then my shift is over. I can get through three more hours.
I walked into the room, stared at the man sat on the bed, and then walked back out again.
“You said room three, right?” I asked Mel.
“Yeah.”
I examined the number on the door as if my eyes were playing tricks on me. This was definitely room three, but there was no way the man in there weighed 220 pounds. Maybe it was an error on his chart.
I walked back into the room.
“Mr. Michaels?”
“That’s me,” he replied, looking up from his phone.
Damn. Now I realized why Mel wanted to be in here. Elliot didn’t look like a fighter; he looked like a fashion model. He had a strong jaw, but it didn’t look like any of the bones in his face had ever been broken. They were frustratingly perfect. His rugged face was coated in five o’clock shadow, but for once my instant reaction wasn’t to wish he would have a shave. It suited him, in a way that other men tried and failed to emulate.
I’d been weary and tired, but now my heart pounded in my chest, and my skin sparked with life. My white coat felt suffocating as I grew hot and my skin flushed red. I’d never had inappropriate thoughts about a patient, but this one… this one looked so good, I didn’t even think sexual thoughts were inappropriate. It would be inappropriate not to have sexual thoughts about a man who looked this tasty. It suddenly seemed perfectly normal for a doctor and a patient to have hot sweaty sex when she was supposed to be giving a medical exam.
I looked down at the paperwork, just so I could look away from his deep, green eyes for a second. There was nothing in here about making sure his manhood worked. Shame. Maybe I should add in some questions about sexual performance. Better to be safe than sorry.
“My name is Doctor Harvey,” I said, still looking down at my clipboard. “I’ll be conducting your medical today.”
“You’re a doctor?” he asked.
Was that an English accent? God, no wonder Mel wanted to be in here. A muscular English guy was pretty much her dream man. And I didn’t exactly dislike the accent either.
“Yes, Mr. Michaels,” I replied. “I am a doctor.”
“Aren’t you a little—”
“Young? Female?”
“I was going to say ‘sexy,’” he replied. “You could be a model.”
Oh, Jesus. Those words should have sounded cheesy and painful, but coming from him…
It’s just the accent playing tricks on you, Alison. Keep calm.
“To think I gave up a career walking up and down a catwalk in stupid clothes to save lives instead. It’s a decision I regret every day.”
“You need to learn to take a compliment,” Elliot replied in his smooth English drawl.
“And you need to learn not to hit on a woman who’s about to stick a finger up your rectum.”
“Um, I’m pretty sure that’s not part of the exam.”
“It will be if you keep being rude. Now, take off your shirt. I need to listen to your heart.”
Elliot slowly opened his shirt and revealed where all the extra weight was hiding. Muscles. Lots and lots of muscles.
People made a big deal about muscles being heavier than fat, but that wasn’t quite accurate. It was more that muscles took up less space than fat, so you could be thin, but muscular, and weigh the same as someone with a beer gut.
Elliot had enough muscle to account for quite a few beer guts. He didn’t look like a male model any more. He looked every bit a fighter. Especially with the tattoos.
God damn, there were a lot of tattoos. I recognized a couple of the Chinese symbols wrapped around each bicep, but the rest of it was an incomprehensible mess.
I hated tattoos. Not from a medical or artistic perspective. It had just been my experience that guys with tattoos were complete assholes. If you put writing on your body, then you wanted people to look at it, and there couldn’t be a much bigger sign of arrogance than that.
But Elliot didn’t need tattoos to make people look at his body.
I couldn’t look away.
His skin hugged the muscles tightly, reminding me of the pictures I’d looked at in textbooks at medical school. There was the deltoid, there was the pectoralis major, and there was the rectus abdominus. Medical students should study him to learn what a male body could look like.
“Something wrong?” Elliot asked.
I looked up into his eyes. I’d been staring at his chest with the stethoscope in my hand, while he was grinning like a teenager whose parents had just told him they were going away for the weekend. He recognized the look on my face. No doubt he’d seen that look on women before.
Is this what Nora had felt like when she’d met Riker? She’d described their meeting as setting off a chemical reaction in her body. It sounded like a crush to me, but now I knew what she meant.
This wasn’t a crush. It was more like lust. Or desire. No, not that. Need.
Right now, I needed this man. How long had I been without a man? Too long. I knew exactly what chemicals were flowing through my body right now, but I couldn’t rationalize this feeling with scientific jargon.
“Nothing’s wrong,” I replied, as I placed the cold metal against his chest.
I listened to his heartbeat. Was it normal? I couldn’t remember what normal was now. Three years of medical school and my residency training all went out the window.
I wanted to reach out and touch his chest with my palm, but I knew my hands were clammy with sweat. Maybe I could pretend my stethoscope was broken and press my ear to his chest. That wouldn’t be unprofessional, would it?
“You have a slow heartbeat,” I said, once I’d focused long enough to listen to it.
“That’s good, right?”
“I’d like it to be a little higher. There’s such a thing as too slow.”
“Open a few buttons on that blouse. That should do the trick.”
“Do you want me to go get a male doctor?” I threatened.
I should do that. I should get out of here and put it down to a temporary moment o
f weakness.
“Women usually go for the direct approach,” Elliot replied with a shrug. “I’m not one for subtlety. I say what I want, and I get it.”
“Maybe it’s the English accent,” I said, as I strapped the blood pressure monitor around his huge arm. “Some women like it.”
“But not you?”
“Nope,” I lied.
It’s not like I’d binged-watched Downton Abbey just because I was obsessed with Matthew Crawley. And Thomas. He might have been a servant, and a complete jerk, but damn the guy looked and sounded good enough to eat.
“Interesting. Did you get messed around by an English boyfriend or something?”
“Isn’t it just possible that I don’t find you attractive?”
Elliot frowned and looked confused. “I don’t understand.”
“Not every woman on this planet wants to have sex with you.”
Elliot kept looking at me blankly, as if I’d just told him that I had superpowers.
“You seem confused,” I said. “Want me to run a brain scan? Make sure everything is working up there.”
“I think the lady doth protest too much,” Elliot replied.
The word “doth” sounded archaic and pretentious, but it sent a shiver down my spine nonetheless.
God, this guy was such a prick. I thought the old men were bad, but I expected it from them. Elliot should know better.
“Let’s just continue with the exam,” I said, as I checked his blood pressure.
No problems there.
“Need me to take off any more of my clothes?”
No, it’s not medically required.
“Take your pants off,” I commanded. “I need to weigh you.”
Elliot stared at me while he slowly stripped off his pants, challenging me to look down at his crotch.
“You know,” Elliot said, “in England, ‘pants’ refers to underpants, not trousers. So you’ve basically just asked me to get naked.”
“You can get naked if you like. You don’t have anything I’ve not seen before.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that if I were you.”
Elliot stepped on the scales which confirmed that he did actually weigh 220 pounds. I stared at his firm butt, covered by the soft fabric of his boxer briefs, but then my eyes drifted up to his back.
It was covered in scars. The front of his body was borderline perfect, with barely a blemish on it, but the back had five large scars and plenty of smaller ones. How did a fighter get so many scars on his back and not the front?
“Can I get off these scales now?” Elliot asked.
“Oh yeah, sure. I’m going to take some blood samples.”
“My usual doctor doesn’t bother with blood samples.”
“Well, I want to be thorough. Why are you here if you have a ‘usual’ doctor?”
“He quit. I’m going to need a new doctor to accompany me on tour, actually. Any doctor will do, although it helps if they’re experienced with physical therapy as well. You interested?”
“No, I’m good here.”
“You’d get to see my body on a daily basis.”
Oh my God, did he never stop? How arrogant did you have to be to talk like that? I didn’t care that he had the goods to back it up.
“Clearly that wasn’t enough of an incentive for your last doctor. Maybe your body isn’t as appealing as you think.”
“Nah, it’s not that. He quit because I fucked his daughter.”
“Of course you did,” I said, trying to sound exasperated and not jealous.
“She was fit,” he said with a shrug. “And by fit, I don’t mean athletic, I mean she had a body that cried out for—”
“I think I get the picture,” I said tersely. “Sounds like you had no choice but to sleep with her. Can’t let a ‘fit’ woman go around not getting a piece of you.”
“If I didn’t know better, I’d swear you were jealous.”
I shouldn’t feel jealous, because I could probably screw him right now if I wanted to. He’d already made it clear he’d be up for it. But just because it was technically possible, didn’t mean it would ever happen.
I wouldn’t be able to go through with it. I never could with men like him. My body might crave the sweet, wet satisfaction a man like Elliot could bring, but my mind wouldn’t let me go through with it.
That’s why I was jealous of this other girl. Of all the other girls. No doubt there were many. I was jealous because they had the nerve to go through with it, whereas I never would, even when offered it on a plate.
I drew some blood from a thick vein running down Elliot’s arm and then took a swab of saliva from inside his mouth.
I’d done all the tests required and more. I could sign the paperwork and send him on his way. But that’s not what I did.
“I need to ask you some questions about your lifestyle,” I said, pulling out a blank sheet of paper so I could at least pretend to make notes.
“Like where I’ll be Friday night at eight o’clock? That kind of thing?”
I know where I’ll be—at home. Alone. Unless Nora and Riker take pity on me again.
“No, Mr. Michaels, not that. You obviously work out a lot—”
“You noticed, huh?” he said with a wide grin, as he admired his biceps.
“I meant, because you fight for a living,” I replied angrily. “What about your diet?”
“Lots of protein, occasional binge nights, but otherwise it’s healthy enough.”
“How much do you drink?”
“I celebrate after fights with expensive vodka. That’s my weakness.”
“What if you lose?”
“I don’t lose, sweetheart.”
“That’s Doctor Sweetheart… I mean Doctor Harvey to you.” I scribbled words on the page. I knew what I wanted to ask next, but I didn’t know if I wanted to hear the answer. Not to mention, it was an entirely inappropriate question in this context. Sure, I was his doctor, but that didn’t mean I could pry outside the scope of the exam.
Unless I feared for his health. Yes, that was it. That was my excuse. I was worried for my patient.
“What about your sex life?” I asked.
“It would be a lot better if you let me see the woman under the uniform,” he replied. “But generally it’s pretty damn good.”
“Generally?”
“Well, the last few days have been a touch disappointing. What about you, doc?”
Days? The last decade had been one of constant disappointment.
“That’s none of your business,” I snapped. “Are you straight? Gay? Bi?”
“I’m as straight as my cock will be once you get those panties off.”
I doubted my panties would get him all that hard. Why did I have to wear granny panties today? Oh yeah, because I only owned granny panties.
They were wet though. Could he smell my eagerness? I took a step back just in case.
“Do you practice safe sex, Mr. Michaels?”
“Are these questions really necessary?” he asked.
“Yes, of course,” I lied.
“Well… not always.”
“Not always?” I asked excitedly. I was relieved to have found a flaw. If there was one thing that could turn me off any guy it was one who didn’t wrap his dick before throwing it around like he only had one night to live.
“No,” he replied.
Was that embarrassment in his voice? He looked down at his lap, the confidence rapidly draining out of him.
“Care to elaborate?”
“Yeah, sure. I guess you should know. It’s an important part of my health and all that. I started seeing this girl. Just a casual hookup. She had tits like you wouldn’t believe.” He motioned with his hands a foot out from his chest. I crossed my arms over my own inadequate boobs. “Anyway, we’d shared a few drinks, and before you know it she’s leading the way up to her room.”
“Are you going to suggest this was all her fault?” I asked. “Because it takes two to
tango.”
“I know. We were both at fault. She starts getting kinky. Like, real aggressive shit, and before you know it, she’s showing me this sex swing hanging from the ceiling.”
I nodded, as if I knew what the hell a sex swing was or how it worked.
“I’m up for anything, so we get in and… sex happens.”
“But you weren’t safe?”
Elliot shook his head. “We got caught up in the heat of the moment. I’m sure you can guess what happened next.”
“She got pregnant?”
Please tell me this man isn’t a father.
“No,” he said shaking his head solemnly.
“STD?”
“No, we used a condom.”
I frowned. “But I thought you said you weren’t safe?”
“We weren’t. I didn’t do one of the straps up properly. Fell off the swing and cracked my shoulder on the hard wooden floor. Still hurts like hell,” he added, rubbing his shoulder gingerly.
I sighed aggressively. “Mr. Michaels, when I asked you about safe sex, I meant, did you use protection?”
“You mean like putting something soft on the floor in case I fell off?”
“No, I meant—”
A large smile spread across Elliot’s face. He couldn’t contain his amusement any longer.
“You’re an asshole,” I said. “Just so you know.”
“Is that your professional opinion?”
“Yes. And I’m sure the blood tests will confirm that. Now get dressed.”
I signed the UFC paperwork and handed it over to him.
“Thank you, Alison,” he said, reading my name off my badge.
“It’s Doctor Harv— oh whatever. Let me know if you need any help getting your big head through the doorways.”
“See you soon, Doc. Oh, and don’t worry, I always practice safe sex. Speaking of which, I have somewhere I should be.”
Elliot darted off for his next tawdry appointment, while I handed the paperwork to Mel.
“Well?” she asked. “What did you think?”
“I think he’s a complete tool.”
