on behind her innocent smile.
“Be good, mister,” she instructed as she made sure Chester had enough food and water for the day. He meowed as though insulted at the implication, and she laughed, smoothing his pretty grey fur. “I’ll see you later, okay?” Off sauntered the cat to his own little kingdom, a carpet-covered climbing house she’d bought for him when he was just a kitten, and from there he gave her a look of permission, as though he’d deemed it acceptable for her to depart. Brynn blew him a kiss and grabbed her purse as she closed her apartment door behind her.
Attending to her sexual needs, she realized as she drove through the busy downtown core, had done wonders for her mental state. She felt clearheaded and ready to tackle everything that needed to be done at the clinic today. Her memory even managed to impress her, as she was able to call to mind the first several patients and their concerns from the last time she’d seen the schedule, a full week ago now. She supposed that was part of what made her good at her job, and why, out of all possible candidates, she was among the very few that Dr. Hitchens had chosen to work alongside him so much more closely than one did in the hospital. But even she had to admit that an early-morning orgasm had given her an extra boost in recall. She grinned at herself in the rear view mirror as she thought she might have to add “getting self off” to her daily wake-up to-do list, no matter which shift she was working.
Brynn was so much in the zone as she pulled into the clinic parking lot and walked from her car to the side entrance that, for once, she didn’t engage in one of her usual rituals: normally, even on days when she knew for certain Dr. Hitchens was scheduled at the hospital instead, her eyes would scan the staff lot for his deep blue Audi. It was impossible to miss, even if one didn’t already know to whom it belonged. A joke gift from some of his colleagues when he’d been named Chief of Staff a few years ago was the license plate that now adorned the beautiful sports car: HITCH MD.
But today she had focused so much on her day’s patient load that she didn’t bother with the silly survey of the sea of cars around her. He wasn’t due in, and she was, which meant there would be business to attend to as soon as she had her first armload of charts handed to her. And that moment came almost immediately, when the secretary – a young, timid high school girl whose name Brynn had somehow forgotten in seven days – stood upon Brynn’s entrance to the main office. The poor girl looked stressed already, more than any sixteen or seventeen year old ought to on a Sunday morning, and she offered the young woman a sympathetic smile. She remembered those not-long-ago days of first jobs in the medical field, and how nerve-wracking it often was to be the first person in the office, not to mention what a huge relief it was to see the first person of any authority whatsoever arrive.
“Tough morning already, huh?” Brynn whispered conspiratorially, nodding toward the sprawling, plush waiting room that housed four edgy-looking patients. The girl gave a grateful smile in return as Brynn hung up her jacket on the coat rack behind the main desk. She then took the stack of charts from the student’s arms and began leafing through the tabs of names, silently impressed with how many she’d prepared herself to see.
“Um...miss...Nurse...?” The girl, whose plaited braids and pink-framed eyeglasses made her look even younger than her slight age, clearly had less of an idea what to call Brynn than vice versa, which was a bit of a relief to the adult of the pair. Brynn laughed and shook her head as she looped her stethoscope and her trusty pen-on-a-rope around her neck.
“Just call me Brynn. Most of us don’t stand on ceremony around here, especially when the boss isn’t around.” She winked, a theatrical and over the top gesture that made the young girl laugh,
Darren Koolman Luis Chitarroni