Page 15 of Caught Up In You

Thanks Doc

Owen

You’re welcome

Let me know if you need anything else

I tell myself he means medical information or help deicing my driveway, not a string of explosive orgasms.

I think after what I witnessed Owen McBride doing tonight, I’m lying to myself. But I’m just going to have to keep lying until it becomes true.

Wyatt

Good night Doc

I’m still smiling down at my phone when I hear a car pull up to the curb behind me. It’s a white taxi, dinged and rusty and in serious need of some engine work and a new muffler. The rear passenger door creaks when it opens, and I blink at the figure stepping out. Her hair is longer and grayer, no longer dyed her signature cherry-cola red. She’s missing her uniform of winged eyeliner and deep red lipstick, and her brows aren’t tweezed within an inch of their lives.

But when she smiles, the crinkles at the corners of her eyes are as familiar to me as my own face. I remember how she’d smile like that when she told me we were having ramen noodles for dinner for the fourth night in a row, or that she’d forgotten to move the laundry from the washer to the dryer so I should just turn my underpants inside out, or that we were being evictedagain. Always trying to make her personal disasters seem like fun adventures. It’s the same smile she gave me as she was being led out of the courtroom, when she told me to take good care of Hazel, that everything would be fine.

It’s just ten years, Wyatt. It won’t last forever.

No, ten years didn’t last forever. It didn’t even last ten years, apparently.

“Hey, honey bun,” Libby Hart says, heaving the small duffel over her shoulder. “Aren’t you gonna welcome your mama home?”

CHAPTER 6

OWEN

February 14

“Jackson Evans is positive for strep,” Dr. Fatima Adebayo says, leaning against my office doorframe, arms crossed, her long box braids gathered over one shoulder.

I scrub a hand over my face and groan. “How many is that this week?”

“Fourteen,” she replies.

“And his sisters are probably going to be fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen before the week’s out.”

Fatima shrugs. “That time of year.”

“Better strep than the flu,” I say, knocking on my desk for luck and sending up a prayer of thanks to Alexander Fleming for his rad discovery of antibiotics.

“Or norovirus,” Fatima adds.

I narrow my eyes at her. “Donotspeak that into the universe.”

She arches a sculpted eyebrow. “Dr. McBride, are you superstitious?”

I grimace. I’m a scientist. I know better than to believe in all that shit. But I’m also a pediatrician, and at this time of year, I’ll take any help I can get. If the universe is offering, I’m not going to roll my eyes at manifesting or vision boarding or whatever.

“I’m at least a little ’stitious,” I tell her, and she laughs.

Fatima sheds her lab coat and folds it over her arm. It’s six o’clock on a Tuesday, and our day is finally over. We’ve been going nonstop since eight this morning, when we opened to a flood of walk-ins, all with sore throats and fevers.

“Norovirus is coming whether I mention it or not,” she says.

She’s right, of course. One of the things that impressed me when I was interviewing her was how no-nonsense she is. With adults, anyway. With kids, she has endless patience. It’s the perfected combination for a pediatrician.

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