1
Cal
It started out as a game,an exercise in observation not unlike assault drills from Army Ranger school. It kept my mind from wandering to surgeries and patients, and since I couldn't simply go on an early morning run without a mental task to keep my head busy while my body worked, I started tracking the targets.
The moms with jogging strollers were the arms dealers.
The serious runners and fitness freaks—the ones lunge-walking—were the insurgency.
The rowers on the pond were the counterintelligence.
The birds and animals were the civilians.
And then…then there was the dark-haired woman with golden olive skin andthat ass. She was built like a pinup, thick and round in all my favorite ways.
At first, she was a welcome reminder that, even at forty-two, my libido was very much alive and I could still appreciate a beautiful woman…even if only from a distance. She walked at a brisk pace, but when I was running a five-minute mile, I had the luxury of passing her twice if I pushed hard and timed it right. I'd get her once from the back and then reverse course and get her again from the front.
I couldn't determine which side I admired more and I thanked the god of ripe rear ends that I didn't have to choose.
Even bearing the winter's dark, wind-chilled mornings was worth it to catch a glimpse of her and that flash of recognition in her smile.
She was the asset.
But it wasn't only her body that caught my eye. It was everything about her. She looked people in the eye and smiled before sunrise. She walked with her chin up, her hips swinging. Sometimes her shoulders shimmied with the music coming through her earbuds or she moved her hands with the beat. The girl had swagger and that—thatwas captivating.
One frosty morning in January, I'd jogged by her and our eyes met. She'd smiled at me and called "Good morning." I couldn't wipe the sloppy grin off my face for the rest of the day. My third-year residents thought I was having a stroke. They tried to run a brain bleed protocol on me. One of them went so far as to lobby for an MRI. I let them buzz around me all day as they ran down wild diagnoses, never telling them the strange face was the result of a smile that warmed me through and through and a backside that kept me up nights. Kept meupmost mornings too.
No, I didn't tell them that. I didn't tell them anything.
But after that smile, she became a fascination bordering on flat-out obsession. Instead of maintaining my routine of rotating through Boston's Emerald Necklace parks for my morning workouts, I stuck with Jamaica Pond. I couldn't tear myself away. Not when that meant risking a chance at saying "Good morning" back to her. Or asking her name and how she liked her coffee and which side of the bed she favored and if she'd take my name when we married.
Despite my preference for scheduling six a.m. surgeries on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I pushed them back to eight after missing her on those days for three straight weeks. The way some relied on a morning jolt of caffeine to get them going, I needed to share that brief, anonymous connection with her. Without it, I was edgy and distracted. My residents interpreted that behavior as evidence of a frontal lobe tumor. Cardiothoracic surgical residents were off the deep end like that. They even dragged my neurosurgeon friend Nick into that go-round. He enjoyed the consult far too much.
I didn't explain away my mood or tell them about the woman at the pond. Not to my residents. They survived on RXbars and hospital gossip, and I wasn't giving them any of the latter.
And now, after all those mornings, all those runs spent imagining everything about this woman—her name, her voice, her interests, her history, and her future—now she was here. Perched on the back of my Jeep, smiling like she knew a secret but had no plans to share it, and bleeding in several spots.
Yeah, bleeding. I couldn't claim credit for the smile or the secret but the bloodshed was all on me.
2
Stella
Feelin'the burn.
Sweatin' to the oldies…because late nineties boy bands now qualified as oldies.
Gettin' my fitness on and loving every damn minute.
Okay, none of that was true. I was dragging my ass around the Jamaica Pond path, sweating like I had a fever and pretending I loved all this healthy, outdoorsy, exercise-y crap.
Not that I hated it. I mean, who could hate this quiet, beautiful space just minutes from the hustle and bustle of Boston? It was an oasis of green and water and calm. Now that spring was breaking through winter's stranglehold, the trees were filling in and the pond felt even more secluded and secret.
And I needed every step in this one-and-a-half-mile path to keep my ass in check. I was in a serious, committed relationship with cheese. And wine. And my mother's Dominican cake with pineapple filling. Always the pineapple filling, never guava.
I reserved my serious and committed for carbs and fat.
There was also the task of preventing my brain from overheating into nuclear reactor-level stress meltdowns. Occupational hazard. My boss could give a master class in the art of tyranny. Most of my clients too.
