Speech? Her sudden retreat has me forgetting why I’m here in the first place. Where the hell is she going so fast? I’m usually the one doing the dismissing. “I, uh…” I clear my throat hard, removing the folded sheet of paper from my inner jacket pocket. “Right, my speech. Now that I know there’s someone in the audience acquainted with machine perfusion, it suddenly feels inadequate.”
She giggles.
All breathy and light.
Girlish.
My dick throbs, pushing against my zipper.
“If I had to guess…” she says, biting her bottom lip to temper her smile. “I would say your speech is a cold dose of reality and that never, ever goes amiss. The world is a hard place, right? At least this way, we can’t say we weren’t warned in advance.”
A few moments ago, I mentally referred to this girl as a medical groupie.
Jesus Christ. She’s far, far more than that.
In the space of a few minutes, she’s proven to be intelligent, insightful, mysterious and arousing. And I don’t like the fact that she continues to back away from me, preparing to make her exit back to the field in front of the stage. “Your name, please.”
The girl stops walking, eyebrows shooting up. “Why? Are you going to rat me out to security for sneaking back here? I didn’t mean to disturb you, Doctor Fletcher.”
You’ve disturbed me all right. “You’re not in trouble. I just want to know your name.”
“Oh,” she says on a puff of air, shoulders relaxing. “I’m Charlotte. Beck.”
“Charlotte Beck.”
She hums in affirmation and every cell inside of me responds to that sound. It’s warm. Intimate. I want to hear it against my stomach. In the fading light of my bedroom among the sweaty, rumpled sheets. This girl is ten years my junior. How is she having such an immediate impact on me? I don’t even like people. Yet I’m worried she’s going to slip through my fingers.
Elude me.
“And…Miss Beck.” I go back to what she said earlier. “Why is it going to be a while before you attend medical school?”
A wrinkle of confusion appears on her forehead, as if the question doesn’t make any sense. “Well…it does cost a small fortune. I definitely don’t have one of those lying around. My mother was just about able to send me to state college.” She pinkens slightly after making that admission. “But don’t worry, I’ll get to med school someday.”
The mystery of Charlotte Beck deepens. Why wouldn’t she simply take out loans like so many other medical students? How is she going to “get there” otherwise? If this girl is already reading surgical papers as nuanced as mine, she needs to be in school now.
Money has never been an object for me. Not growing up and certainly not now.
Is it possible that, in my privilege, I’m missing something?
“Charlotte—”
“Please give a round of applause for your commencement speaker, the man who singlehandedly saved the president’s life, Doctor Dean Fletcher.”
Applause and whistles ring out over the field.
“I should go,” Charlotte says. “Thank you, Doctor Fletcher.”
“Wait.”
But she’s already slipped through a curtain and vanished. The applause is dying down and I’m expected on stage. My surgeon side is ordering me to fulfill my obligation promptly, but I’m mostly filled—consumed—with the girl.
I want her back here standing in front of me again. It’s not until this very moment that I realize the stress I normally carry in my neck has fled. The minutes I spent talking to Charlotte are the longest I’ve gone without thinking of the hospital, the emergency room, my mounting responsibilities. I was just here, present, anchored by her voice.
I need to see her again.
No, I will see her again.
And if money is the obstacle standing between her and medical school, I’ll simply have to eliminate it.
Two
Charlotte
I stop outside of the cleaning agency and lean back against the building, taking a moment to breathe before going inside to get my assignments for the week. The sun is beginning to dip low between skyscrapers, businesspeople rushing along the streets of Chicago to get home. Technically, I’m one of them. I spend my days working as an executive assistant to an up-and-coming tech wizard, requiring me to be hyper-focused from nine to five, and I would gladly saw off an arm in exchange for going home right now and drowning in a pint of mint chip, but my second job beckons.
Suck it up, sweetheart.
If I look hard enough into the distance, I can see the silhouette of Chicago General.
Now that is where I want to spend my days. Truly making a difference. Saving lives. Getting people through their hour of need. Currently playing in my headphones is a medical podcast. Stuffed into my back pocket is the New England Journal of Medicine. I eat, sleep and breathe surgical breakthroughs. But I have a long road ahead of me if I want to walk the halls of Chicago General one day in a white coat.