Dr. Fake It - A Possessive Doctor Romance

“Really?”

“Honestly, these last couple days have been the most time off I’ve taken in a few years.”

I let out a little laugh. “That can’t be true. Don’t you have scheduled shifts?”

“Sure, I have shifts, but even when I’m not on duty, I’m at the hospital in my office, making calls or checking on patients.”

“You have friends, right?”

“Most of them are doctors, too.” He laughed and ran a hand through his thick hair. “They sort of understand the lifestyle.”

I looked up at him and frowned a little. I couldn’t imagine living all my life between two places, a hospital and a small, lonely apartment—but then again, I existed in the same way before, drifting between my mom’s apartment and my job as a waitress. Except I had my mom at home to keep me company, and I had my friends at work to hang out with when shift was over. I wondered if they were worried about me—I’d gotten a few calls from my manager and texts from coworkers that I hadn’t responded to yet, and I more or less assumed I’d been fired, but found I couldn’t bring myself to care about that, not yet at least.

That would matter down the road if I survived all the rest first.

“Sounds pretty lonely,” I said.

“Sometimes, but mostly I stay busy. I like being a doctor.”

“I guess you’d have to, and the money must be nice.”

He shrugged a little. “Money’s nice, but that’s not why I do it. That’s not why most doctors do it.”

“Oh, come on.”

“Seriously. Look, if you want to make money, you become a dentist, or a plastic surgeon, or something like that. But most of the doctors that work at our hospital do it because they want to help save lives and take care of people. It’s demanding and grueling and difficult as all hell, but it’s rewarding when things go right and someone lives to spend more time with their kids or grandkids because you made the right calls and gave a damn.”

“I guess I can understand that then.” I shook my head a little. “I’d never thought about work as anything other than making money. The idea that I might love my job—it always seemed like that was for someone else.”

“Why do you say that?”

I swept my hands outward, gesturing at the street around us, toward Rittenhouse Park, toward the fancy restaurants, toward the high-powered people in their nice clothes and their perfect hair. “This isn’t my world.”

He made a face. “Tell me what you mean.”

“My dad was an addict. He sold drugs. He stole from people, got into fights, drank himself half to death, hit my mom, screamed at me, and kept coming back, and we never told him to stay away. My mom, she worked herself to the bone, smoked like a chimney, cursed like a sailor, had a great sense of humor, but she didn’t go to college and I didn’t either, there was never money for that. I’ve never had a chance to do anything but keep going, you know? As soon as things looked okay for us, Dad would come home and take anything we had.”

He looked at me and for the first time since we’d met, I felt judged and seen in a way that I didn’t like—but then he reached out and put an arm across my shoulder. I should’ve pulled away, but the gesture felt so real and genuine that I pressed myself against him for a second in a sort of sideways hug.

“I’m sorry you had to go through that,” he said, voice low. “I understand what you’re saying. My parents died when my sister was fifteen, but they’d already set aside money for my college and had saved up for hers. They left us a house, which I sold when Jamie moved in with me, and that money floated us both for a long time. I guess I got pretty lucky in a lot of ways, even if I struggled through med school and helping to raise my teenage sister.”

“You must’ve loved her.” I looked up at him.

He nodded. “I really did. And when she was taken away, I was bitter for a long time.”

“How’d it happen?”

His eyes narrowed and he stared off into the distance. “She married a man she shouldn’t have, a man that didn’t treat her well. A man with problems.”

“You said his name was Silvo and he’s in jail now.”

He nodded and looked down at me. He dropped his arm and walked forward, eyes into the distance again, and I could tell he was remembering something ugly, something he didn’t enjoy thinking about, and I felt bad for asking, I wished I could pull it back from the air and let him off the hook.

“It was late one night. I don’t know how it happened, because I wasn’t there. She married him when she was eighteen and moved in with him the day she graduated high school, because she’d promised me she’d finish school before marrying him.”