Layce Gardner - More Than a Kiss

"Are you okay?" he asked. He walked uninvited into her office and plopped down in a chair. He stretched his long legs out in front of him. He looked like a cat toying with a mouse – like he could sit for hours in front of a cabinet waiting for the mouse to innocently poke its head out so he could rip it off. "You look a little sick."

"Hello, Chad, won't you come in? Have a seat, make yourself right at home," she said with ultimate sarcasm. "And, no, I'm not sick. You just surprised me is all." She drummed her fingers on the desk, hoping her gesture conveyed her impatience and he would excuse himself and walk away never to come anywhere near her again. Well, the never again part might require something more extreme than tapping her fingers.

It didn't happen. Chad smiled instead. He made sure to give her his toothiest smile - the one with the high-wattage bling factor. When he did that to the nurses, Amy swore she could smell sex pheromones emanating from every pair of panties in a two-block radius.

And then, as if to compound matters, there was that cleft chin. Amy abhorred that cleft in Chad’s chin. All the nurses drooled over that cleft, but Amy thought it made his chin look like a tiny little butt on the end of his face. She must be the only woman in the world immune to his cleft and good looks. She'd seen all the nurses fan their faces and pat their hearts when he walked by. Amy wrinkled her nose like she smelled something stinky anytime he was near. To tell the truth, she was sick of Chad and tired of all good-looking male doctors. What she wouldn't give to work with a measly, shrimp-y, ugly doctor with a wart on his chin instead of a cleft.

Chad gestured to her closed laptop. "Did I catch you looking at porn?"

"What? No," she said quickly. Maybe too quickly. Saying it quickly like that made her look guilty.

Chad laughed. She hated his laugh. It wasn't genuine. It sounded like the canned laughter in a sit-com. She knew Chad had probably carefully cultivated the tenor and rhythm of his laugh. It was designed to charm a woman out of her panties. Well, it wasn't going to work on her. Not again.

Amy had been with Chad once before. Once . It was when she was new at the hospital, and didn't know any better. Chad had shown her lots of attention those first two weeks. He showered her with his cleft, his laugh, his toothsome bling. He asked her out for a drink and she tried to say no, but he made it impossible. And, maybe the truth was that she might have been a little bit lonely. Okay, a lot lonely. She met him for one drink that turned into four or five or who the hell's counting and next thing she knew she was too drunk to drive and they were sharing a cab and sharing his bed.

The sex was unremarkable – at least the parts she remembered. Not that she was all that well versed in this particular human diversion, but she didn't have an orgasm that was for sure. Why did she keep chasing that elusive orgasm? She knew it wasn't something physically wrong with her – she could give herself one. Was it a mental deficiency on her part? Or perhaps emotional? Maybe it was due to the poor performance of the man.

When Chad was kaput , he rolled off her. She jumped up and grabbed her clothes on the floor. She dashed for the bathroom, but it was dark, and she was still half-drunk and she didn't see the used condom he had thrown on the floor until it was too late and when she stepped on it, she slipped, fell and conked her head on the hard wood floors. While she was unconscious, Chad rushed her to the emergency room and when she came to she was wearing only a T-shirt and her undies. Why the hell didn't he dress her in proper clothing first?

The doctor, she didn't know him, thank God, asked her what happened and she told him the first thing that came to mind: She had slipped on a banana peel. Oh, she could kill herself for saying that. Who slipped on a banana peel outside of a Three Stooges movie? It didn't take long for the rumor to circulate around the hospital that she had hooked up with Chad and slipped on a “banana peel.”

This all happened months ago but the rumor still hadn't died completely. Was it still called a rumor if it was mostly true? She had become a running joke of the hospital. She kept finding banana peels in the trashcan in her office and nurses giggled at her over the tables in the lunchroom while they exaggeratedly peeled a banana. Once in the cafeteria she had walked away from her table to get a Sweet'N Low and when she came back there was a banana peel on her tray.

Then Chad had suddenly appeared at her side. He pinched the peel between his thumb and forefinger, held it up like it was contaminated and said loudly, "Be careful, doctor. I've heard these can be very dangerous." The whole cafeteria busted a gut laughing.

And the worst thing about the whole banana debacle? Chad now thought it meant they were dating. He acted like he owned her or something. Like they were an item. She even heard him refer to them as “Chamy” as if they were a power couple like “Brangelina.”

That was why she hated Dr. Butt-Chin Banana-Man Chad Dorring.

"I'm shopping for a birthday present for my nephew," she lied.

"And here I thought you weren't the maternal type," he said.

"Shows how much you know me," she retorted. She didn't know why she said that. She really wasn't all that maternal and she didn’t have a nephew. But she didn't want Chad to know that.

Chad shrugged like it didn’t matter either way. "I dropped by to give you a heads up. I'm having dinner with you tonight."

"Wrong," Amy said. "I'm having dinner with my roommates tonight." What Amy couldn’t figure out about Chad was that the meaner she was to him, the more he liked it. Was he a masochist? And did that make her a sadist?

"So am I," he said. "Jeremy invited me."

He stood and stretched his arms over his head in a calculated move so she could admire his sculpted abs as his scrub top rose up. Gross. The last thing she wanted to see was his hairy belly.

She opened her laptop and looked at that instead. Chad placed both hands on the edge of her desk and leaned his face in close to hers. He said, "Just thought I'd warn you so you can be sure to get all gussied up for me." He winked and strode out the door.

Gussied up? What the hell kind of word was that? Women hadn't been getting gussied up since the turn of the century.

Amy looked back at her computer. Staring at her from the screen was a smiling picture of Jordan March. It was her author profile page on Amazon. Jordan had written three children’s books and all of them had great reviews. She not only wrote the books, she illustrated them as well. She was beautiful and smart and talented and had a hairless belly. It didn’t get any better than that. Maybe those drunken kisses with her college dorm mate were a precursor… like little seismic shakes right before the big earthquake.

Amy chose the boxed set of Jordan's books, clicked on the 'add to cart' button and selected expedited service. Maybe she could get Jordan to autograph them for her.

Ch…Ch…Ch…Changes

Amy pulled her gray Nissan Sentra into the driveway and parked behind Jeremy’s enormous gas-guzzling Buick. She turned off the car but didn't turn off the radio. She sat for a moment, listening to NPR. She looked at the house. She looked at her car. She looked at her clothes. She looked at her fingernails with the clear nail polish. She looked in the rear view mirror at her lightly applied make-up.

She didn't recognize this woman, the one she had become. When did she turn into this person? The Amy of old used to be daring – she’d gotten a tattoo after all. Admittedly, she was a weekend rebel – one didn’t get through med school without a effort, but she went to Nirvana concerts, wore high heels, a leather bomber jacket and groovy sunglasses. When did she morph into this person who lived in the burbs, drove a sensible car, had a sensible job, wore sensible clothes and sensible make-up? She even listened to NPR! And now her exciting Friday night was coming home to a dinner cooked by her best friend and after dinner she would force herself to pretzel her body through a yoga video, then curl up in bed with a book.