Chapter one
She wants to shave my dick
Reid
“You’re not shaving me. I’ll bleed out on principle.”
Dr. Carina Park doesn’t look up from the chart in her hands. “That’s an alarming stance to take, considering you’re about to be in an operating room.”
“You touch me with a razor, and I swear to God—”
“You’ll what? Limp away?”
I glare, but she doesn’t flinch as she slowly turns the page. She’s got all the time in the world and none of it is for my bullshit.
It’s been over twenty-four hours of this. Her, strolling in with all her cool doctor logic and zero bedside charm, rattling off statsand options like I’m not sitting here trying to hold my season together with tape and denial.
She’s young for a surgeon. Sharp-jawed with dark eyes that don’t soften for anyone, least of all me. And she’s stunning—not that it matters. Not when she’s also just told me they’ll need to remove my piercings before surgery, too. Andshave my groin.
I shift on the bed with irritation. “It’s unnecessary.”
“It’s not.”
“It’s my knee, not my dick.”
There it is—a line I shouldn’t have said, but did anyway. One I’m hoping will garner some sort of reaction from her.
It doesn’t.
“If I were confused about what we were operating on, Mr. Hutchison,” she says evenly, “we’d have much bigger problems.”
For fuck's sake.
She just walked in here and told me they’re about to remove metal from my dick and razor me below the waist while I’m unconscious, and she did it with the straightest face I’ve ever seen.
“I don’t think you’re grasping how non-negotiable this is,” she adds, flipping another page.
“And I don’t think you’re grasping how attached I am to my… these particular pieces of jewelry.”
That finally earns me a reaction. Not a smile, but the tiniest hitch of her mouth. Maybe amusement, but I’m sensing pity.
“We’ll keep them in a sterile bag for you.”
“How thoughtful.”
She lifts her gaze to mine, and her expression is just as unreadable as usual, which annoys the shit out of me.
“Look,” she says in a maddeningly calm tone, “you can either let us prep the area and reduce your infection risk… or, you can make this difficult and we do it anyway, only you wake up later with slightly more emotional damage.”
My mouth opens to argue, but then I close it again as I realize, with absolute certainty, that I’m fucked either way.
She nods like she knows it too, then turns back to her chart.
I bite down on the inside of my cheek and shift my glare to the window, pretending to ignore her.
And when she leaves a moment later, she doesn’t say goodbye—doesn’t even glance back. Just slots my file back on the end of the bed and shuts the door behind her, like I’m a piece of paperwork. Not a guy about to have a camera jammed into his knee, and his dignity stripped along with it.
Not a guy with an Olympic year hanging in the balance. Or a career that might not recover from this.
