4th & Girl

Of course, now, here I was. Twenty-three with no future prospects for a longstanding career to speak of. Completely uncertain of what I wanted to do or who I wanted to be. Instead of climbing the corporate ladder or padding my 401K, I was working for Star Temps—a temp agency that sent me to all kinds of odds and ends jobs—and paying the necessary bills.

Dog walking. Housecleaning. Secretarial work. You name it, and I’d done it.

And the current task of the day? Collecting professional football players’ urine for drug testing.

Apparently, this was an annual formality at the start of every Mavericks season.

I watched quietly as Lisa, my coworker of the day, stacked up fresh urine cups on the laboratory counter. With careful fingers, she piled them into some sort of neurotic tower.

Honestly, they appeared just fine to me in the cardboard box they’d been delivered in, but I kept my questions to myself.

With her perfect yet severe brown bun on the top of her head and her pristine white scrubs, Lisa appeared to be a woman on a medical mission, and far be it for me to put a damper on her pee-cup parade.

“How long have you been a medical assistant?” she asked, and I swallowed against the nerves doing a gyrating dance on their way up from my belly.

Technically, I wasn’t really supposed to be doing this temp job. But, Mable, the old lady who ran Star Temps, was short on medical assistants and figured what the Mavericks didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them.

Completely illegal, I was sure, but I wasn’t exactly in the financial position to be declining a paycheck. And, if I was being honest, the Mavericks compensated greatly for being in charge of their football players’ piss.

Lisa glanced at me over her shoulder, and I cleared my throat.

“Um…not long,” I finally answered, strategically sugarcoating the fact that I had zero medical background. Hell, the only time I’d ever stepped foot inside a hospital was back in high school when I’d thought being a candy striper would look good on my college resume.

It’d only taken two hours into my shift to realize medical shit was not for me.

Watching an old guy puke up green Jell-O I had to clean up, and then promptly ask for another serving, hadn’t been my idea of a fun extracurricular activity.

Not that I didn’t like helping people, I just preferred to do it with a little less bodily fluid involved.

Funny, given today’s activities, how that’d worked out for me.

“Do you have a full-time job somewhere?” Lisa questioned as she continued to stack. One cup, two cups, she paid careful attention to detail, going so far as to make sure all of the seams lined up perfectly. My messy personality nearly had a seizure watching it.

Playing Twenty Questions when you almost positively didn’t know any of the answers was a little like high-stakes gambling with no experience, but not answering wasn’t a normal human behavior and pretty much went against all social skills. My only option was to play nice with my coworker and hope to Jesus it didn’t end up getting me fired.

“No, not really,” I answered semi-honestly. “I’m more of a fly by the seat of my pants kind of gal.”

“Oh,” she said and glanced at me over her shoulder again. “What doctor’s office did you do your medical assisting clinicals at?”

Medical assisting clinicals? Were those a thing? Was this a test? There should have been some sort of warning if there were going to be trick questions! Fucking hell, Detective Lisa was hot on my heels. I could only assume she wasn’t making up crap like I was.

“Uh…Doctor…Shepherd’s.”

I didn’t personally know a Dr. Shepherd, but I knew Derek Shepherd from Grey’s Anatomy real flipping well. I mean, eleven years’ worth of Thursdays pretty much made me a Derek Shepherd expert, if you asked me.

May he rest in peace.

“Dr. Shepherd?” she asked. “I don’t know a Dr. Shepherd. What kind of practice does he run?”

The key to a lie was to stick as close to the truth as possible. Or so I’d been told. So, that’s what I did. I stuck to the truth. Or, in this case, the plot of a TV show.

“He’s a neurosurgeon.”

“A neurosurgeon?” Lisa’s eyes perked up like a stoner who’d just been told weed was legal. “Wow. That’s so interesting.”

Not that I know anything about being a stoner or smoking weed.

Well, besides that one year in college, but doesn’t everyone experiment their freshman year?

Just me? Okay, yeah, forget I said anything…

“Yep,” I agreed. And seriously, it was interesting. Who hadn’t loved watching Dr. Shepherd perform brain surgery? Before his shocking death—which I’m still pissed about—he’d been the best damn neurosurgeon Seattle Grace, hell, even the country, had ever seen.

“Wow,” she said again. “Did you get to see any surgeries?”