I didn’t want him to have touched me, certainly not when it seemed to have such an effect on me. I thought it wouldn’t—I was over Jody Banks, I had tried the entirety of my life to just forget about him.
And, for the most part, I had.
But he was sitting in front of me, vulnerable, and looking better than ever and I… God, I was useless in front of him, even though he was the patient, and even though he was the one who was sitting on the patient’s table and had a knife sticking out of his arm.
I coughed and moved away from him. “Would you be more comfortable if I had another doctor do this?”
He smirked, his gaze meeting mine. “I wouldn’t let anyone else do this,” he said. “So no.”
I was almost done. His shirt was open and I had to tug his sleeve down so that it wouldn’t touch the knife, which was sticking out of his arm. He extended his left arm—the unharmed one—so I would be able to take his sleeve off. I moved behind him to get a better view of what I was doing. The fabric of his button-up had bunched up behind him, which meant that I was going to be able to have enough give to pull it down without hurting him. That was good, at least, because I didn’t want to tug on the knife and make his injury any worse than it already was.
I walked around him, toward his right arm, and pulled on his shirt and moved it away, pulling the fabric away from his body and then slowly but surely pushing it down and slowly away from him.
I finally got it away from his arm enough that I slowly managed to move it away from his body enough to avoid the knife. I held my breath as he grabbed his sleeve and yanked down as hard as he could.
When it landed on the tiled floor in front of us, I felt like I could breathe again.
CHAPTER TWO
2009
The day was sunny and warm, so Jody had opened the screened windows to let some of the air in. The living room at his house was normally chilly, drafts coming from several different doorways in the large Victorian house. We were studying, our books and notebooks in front of us, and it was getting late, so the weather was uncharacteristically nice. We had spent all of the afternoon together, another one of our study sessions that had taken a little too long, even though he seemed to understand the material just fine.
He sighed and looked outside. “We should have been studying on the grass,” he said dreamily. “It would’ve been really nice.”
“We would have studied even less than we are now,” I replied, suppressing a giggle. Our knees were touching under the chair and when he turned around to look at me, I couldn’t help but smile.
I knew I was lucky, but every time my boyfriend looked at me, I felt butterflies fluttering in my stomach, making me feel a little like I was going to throw up. In the best of ways, but still.
He looked up at me and reached over, grabbing my hands and squeezing them as his fingers intertwined with mine. He inched slightly closer to me, and I saw the ridges on his lips, the green and golden speckles in his hazel eyes shining in the sunlight coming in from the window. He pressed his lips against mine and I felt my heart flip in my chest. I felt like I was going to faint from happiness when he put his hand on my cheek and continued kissing me, hard, until I was losing myself in his lips entirely.
He moved away from me and chuckled. “Stop,” he said.
“Me stop? I wasn’t the one who kissed you,” I replied, then kissed him on the lips, hard, without giving him a break. I kissed him so hard that I practically knocked him off the chair, and as he wrapped his arms around my waist, his head tilted up. He was holding onto me hard and I could barely move even as I needed to breathe.
He moved away from me for a second, still holding onto my hands as he jumped up to his feet. “What time is it?” he asked.
I looked down at my watch. “Half past five,” I said. “Your parents will be home soon.”
“Right,” he said. “Then we should make this as quick as possible.”
I laughed, throwing my head back as he held me close to him. Our bodies were pressed up against one another’s and he was kissing me passionately, not letting me go at all. He was on me, and soon I was kissing him back, my hands on his chest, barely letting go of him.
I was digging my fingertips into the fabric of his clothes and I could feel how strong and muscular he was under the thin layer of clothing. He was wearing one of those thin t-shirts that he wore to practice. It smelled like him, of his particular musk, which was bitter and earthy and sweet, and I could’ve kept smelling him for hours.
I kissed him desperately, hungry, as he kept his hands around my waist. I could feel his lean muscular frame pressed up against the entirety of my body. I could feel how hard his heart was beating in his body, and my heart perfectly matching up to the rhythm of his. Fuck, he could have held me like that forever, and I would’ve felt like I was in heaven. It felt like I was in heaven, in any case, and I wanted to stay there for good.
He kissed me hard, pressing against my lips as I found myself moving backward in the large airy dining room,
