“I’ll consider being less insufferable,” he said, “but you’ll have to stop calling me Dr. Jay out here, Hope.”
“Stop telling me what to do.”
“Maybe I would if I didn’t think you liked it so much.”
“Jay…” I warned, though it came out a little breathless.
“That’s better,” he murmured, eyes flicking down to my mouth and then back up to my eyes. “See? That wasn’t so hard.”
“Jay.” I swallowed. “I know that before I knew you were a dentist, I sort of… flirted with you.”
His expression barely changed, but something in his eyes darkened a bit, like he remembered every second of it.
“But now you’re my boss,” I continued. “Now that I work for you… We can’t. I can’t.”
He shook his head once, slow and deliberate. “I’m not trying to start something with you, Hope. You’re my employee. I would just appreciate it if you called me Jay when we aren’t in the office. I really don’t think it’s too much to ask to be friends outside of the clinic.” His eyes held a sort of challenging glint in them.
I swallowed, hating that everything he said made complete sense. “Okay. Fine. We can be friends. But friends don’t call each other adorable.”
“They don’t?” Jay asked, his forehead scrunching as if this were genuinely new information to him.
I shot him a flat look. “No, they don’t.”
Jay’s brow furrowed, giving a faux expression of seriousness. “Huh. Then I guess it’s a good thing that’s not what I was doing.”
I blinked. “Jay.”
“I’m serious,” he said, and for once, there was no teasing in it. “Calling you adorable wasn’t flirting. It was an observation.”
My jaw dropped. “Do you hear yourself?”
“Yes.” His eyes softened. “Do you?”
I closed my mouth, opened to say something, then closed it again. “Jay…” was all I could manage again.
“Look, I’m not rewriting basic facts of the universe just to make you feel less flustered.”
“I amnotflustered,” I said a little too quickly before I could hide the defensiveness in my tone.
Jay laughed under his breath, a warm, husky sound that made the butterflies return full force to my stomach.
“Sure, whatever you say.”
Before I could come up with a comeback, he stepped back from my decrepit cabin, running shoes crunching softly on the gravel driveway.
“I’ll see you later,” he said, tugging gently on Luna’s leash for her to follow him. “At work.”
And with that, he turned and jogged into the trees, disappearing into the darkness, leaving me standing there, still a little flustered, wondering what in the world just happened.
The next day, I had the day off. I cleaned my kitchen and the bathroom. I folded a bunch of laundry and even prepped some meals for the week. It felt weird having free time. Because I wasn’t paying rent, my three days a week at the clinic were enough to provide for my minimal needs.It was so ingrained in me that I should be studying at all times if I wasn’t working that I kept getting the feeling I’d forgotten to submit an assignment. It was odd just having time to myself that didn’t involve studying an anatomy chart or a math equation.
I tried my best to appreciate the quiet time, and after I finished my chores around the house, I decided to sit down and write for a bit. I stared at my computer screen and the blinking cursor for about twenty minutes before I gave up. Of course, now that I had the time to write, I didn’t have the inspiration. Wasn’t that just my luck?
Maybe it was the conversation I’d had with Jay last night or maybe it was just the pressure I was putting on myself. Either way, my mind was distracted, and I needed to relax.
I went to my bookshelf—the place I’d always gone when I needed an escape. Ever since tenth grade, my father had made sure I knew he didn’t approve of extracurriculars because they would interfere with my studies. The only time I was allowed to do anything fun was if it would look good on an application. So I hid my novels inside my textbooks, letting him think I was studying organic chemistry when, really, I was just trying to catch a break and slip into a fictional world for a moment.
I’d discovered Lindy Parker at age fifteen. My parents had a big library at home, but it rarely contained books that weren’t academic. One day, though, there had been a stack of Lindy Parker novels on my father’s desk. He often received patient gifts, and someone must have given them to him because I’d never seen them before. I remembered picking upThe Wildflower Apartmentthat day and beingutterly consumed by the story. It was the first time I’d ever read a book front to back in just a few hours. It was the beginning of my love for reading, which would later turn into my motivation to write.
