Page 82 of One for the Money
I shake my head, and she grips my knee tighter. “The patient will go into a manic episode. Standard treatment for someone with ADHD is to give them a stimulant, but in someone with bipolar disorder, the stimulants can induce manic episodes. So now your ADHD is treated, but your bipolar disorder is worse. So instead of triaging and treating the body and the comorbidities that come with the injury, like an arterial tear with a gutshot wound, you do that with the mind.”
Her passion as she speaks tells me everything I need to know about why she became a doctor. There is genuine joy lighting up her face, and this is the most alive I’ve seen her since she was exposed to our scents.
It makes me ache to touch her face, to pull her in a soft kiss. There is nothing more attractive than competence, and she has that in spades.
I want to fuck up the Alpha that took her away from the joy of her work. As thrilled as I am that she ended up a part of our circus, because otherwise we wouldn’t have met her, I hate that her “pack” is keeping her from living out her dream.
“Did you always want to be in the circus?” she asks before I have a chance to ask follow-up questions.
“Do kids grow up wanting to be in the circus?” I chuckle and shake my head. “It feels more like a threat whenever they get in trouble. ‘I’m going to run away and join the circus!’”
Alex’s giggle at my childish falsetto lights me up from the inside. It takes a minute for her to calm down before I can speak again.
“No, I didn’t. I thought I was going to end up in some boring desk job. And then I met Quinton.”
The memory of the first time I saw my Alpha is one of my most cherished. I was in a coffee shop, sketching anddrinking a plain black coffee because it was all I could afford, when he walked through the door. I was miserable, still grieving the death of my girlfriend from two years prior, and feeling untethered. My family wasn’t bad, but I didn’t feel like I could go to them with the sadness that seemed to coat my body like cheap moisturizer.
It was a windy day, and the first whiff of his scent washed over me, and it was like my heart stopped. As if every piece of my broken soul was being rewritten to include him.
“But the thing is,” I tell her, after describing the day we met, “I didn’t know the scent came from him.”
I thought it came from the woman who followed him into the shop.
His girlfriend.
So, of course, I didn’t approach. How was I supposed to approach this woman and say, “Hey, I know you’re here with your boyfriend, but I think we’re destined to be together.”?
“Quinton, of course, recognized what I was to him immediately. I watched him sit down with his girlfriend over a cup of coffee and break things off with her. After she ran from the coffee shop crying, he sat across from me at my table and pulled my sketchbook out of my hands gently, forcing me to look at him.”
Alex gasps, her hands over her mouth. “And then what happened?”
He was so fucking handsome I could hardly breathe, and when he shifted in his seat and his sweet scent enveloped me, I realized how wrong my initial impression was. It wasn’t her.
It was him.
My world began to refocus. The grief I felt over losing Paula was still there, but it was quieter. More manageable.
I will always have love in my heart for her, but we both knew we weren’t endgame. It was very much a “here for a good time, not a long time” relationship, but then she died in a car wreck, and she never got to find her long-time person.
At the beginning, I felt so guilty for being immediately drawn to him. There were moments of back and forth where I questioned if I deserved to have Quinton in my life, if I could move on from Paula.
But of course, my Alpha helped me see that she wouldn’t have told me to put my life on hold for her. She would’ve asked for a threesome, patted me on my back, and told me she was happy for me.
I don’t burden Alex with stories of Paula. Maybe one day, when she’s better and our relationship is on solid ground, I’ll tell her about the woman who came before her. But for now, I tell her about the moment I fell in love with Quinton Black.
“He reached across the table and took my hand. He told me that he expected nothing of me, but that he needed me to know that he was all in.”
“From one smell?” she shrieks. “How could he know from one smell?”
My smile has to be blinding. It always is when I think about that first day with him. “That’s who Quinton is. He acts first, asks questions later. He’s passionate and weird and so fucking sexy that it’s hard to function around him. As soon as the words left his mouth, I knew that no matter what, that man would be in my life.”
Alex reaches out for my hand, and I wrap my fingers through hers, falling with her when she throws herself into a supine position on the bed. “I can’t imagine being so sure about anything.”
“That’s Quinton for you. He could make the biggestskeptic believe in fairy tales. He’s so romantic that I have no doubt he’s going to knock your socks off on your date with him.”
She stiffens at my words, and I regret them immediately. But she doesn’t give me a chance to pull them back, and she carries on as if I never said them. “So Quinton was in the circus?”
“No, he was working at an electronics store. But he was a regular at one of the kink dungeons and loved being suspended. I started going with him and learning the art of shibari. The first time he saw body suspension, he begged to try it out. Of course, that’s not something you just jump into.”
