FLIRTING WITH 40

the reason someone I wanted to get to know better walked away.”
I’d assumed Blakely had to leave when I’d taken the phone call. I’d figured she left me her card to let me know how to get in contact with her. I’d thought the attraction was mutual.
“C’mon, Romeo. Who is she?” Prisha asks.
“No one in particular. Just a woman in a bar.”
She is someone, who for some reason, I can’t seem to shake from my mind.
Maybe it’s because she was nothing like I’m used to and . . . so damn intriguing.
“Isn’t that how it always starts?” John teases. “Just a woman in a bar.”
“Ah,” Leigh coos, “did Slade find another lost puppy to fix and love before he adopts it back out?”
“Screw you.” I laugh and take a sip of my beer.
“It comes with the territory, doesn’t it?” John says with a shrug from across the table. He’s wearing scrubs, and I realize wearing my own scrubs is one of the random things I miss more than I can express. “The need to save and fix and make whole again.”
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.” I lean back, mimicking his casual posture.
“Projects. All of us residents love to have projects for the days we can’t save someone, then at least we can save the project we’re working on.” Prisha wraps her arm around my shoulders and gives me a quick squeeze.
Projects?
She’s crazy.
“I talked to the lady for like twenty minutes. She wasn’t a project. She was . . . I don’t know what she was.”
“The lady?” Prisha laughs. “Why so formal? That’s what you do when you’re hiding something from us.”
“Ohhh,” Leigh draws the sound out, “I think there was legitimate interest there with the lady, guys.” She clinks her glass of wine to the tip of John’s beer bottle. “Henderson doesn’t get like this over a booty call in the on-call room. I should know.” She raises her hand, and we all laugh, drawing the looks of those around us.
“Why you gotta bring up things that happened years ago?” I tease. Our fling was short, more than hot, but definitely magnified by the fact that we were merely two exhausted first-year residents who needed someone who understood them.
“It’s okay. We know how you roll, Henderson.” John chuckles. “In—make them get hooked on you. Out—oh crap, they’re hooked on you. Done—next, please.”
“You guys make me sound like a man whore,” I say and lean my head against the back of the booth with a shake of my head.
“But you do it in such a nice way,” Prisha says. “Never have I ever met a man who has so many exes—”
“Not really exes,” I try to explain.
“—who still love him after the fact.”
I lift my beer and ignore their razzing. I’m used to it with this group. “You guys are messed up.”
“And you miss the hell out of us,” John says, and the table quiets some, Prisha’s smile softens, and Leigh’s fingers play with the stem of her glass.
“I do.” I half snort, half laugh as my tone sobers. “More than you know.”
“How much longer?” Prisha asks.
“Your guess is as good as mine.” I shrug. “They want to hear from Ivy herself. She’s the victim, and until she can make a statement, it’s ‘my suspicions and overreactions’—their words, not mine—against his statements.”
“And so, what? You’re in limbo until then?” John asks.
“Basically. I’m waiting for the review board to reconvene in the next week or so, but I know nothing’s going to be decided until they hear from her. I’m sure that, at some point, I’ll have to do some dog and pony show to get the powers that be to accept me back into the program without prejudice.” I take a sip of my beer, acting as if it’s no big deal when they know it’s exactly the opposite. It’s my whole damn world. “But it is what it is.”
“How is she?” Leigh asks gently, and I meet each of their eyes, knowing I technically shouldn’t know the answer considering I’m not supposed to be anywhere near the hospital.
“Still in a coma. Still . . . hanging on. I’m not really allowed to check in on her, so that’s all I know.”
“The whole thing is fucked up.” John sighs. Each one of them has told me that they would have done the same thing had they been in my shoes. Would have let emotion get the better of them and protected their patient. That they would have acted how I did.
But they didn’t do it.
I did.
And I’m paying the price.
“I don’t regret it. I mean, I regret the suspension and the red tape I’m going to have to possibly cut through, but I don’t regret what I did when it comes to him . . . just don’t tell the board that.”
“Not a chance, brother,” John says.
“Not a chance,” Prisha reiterates.

Blakely
“I can do one better,” I say and take a bite of pizza before settling back against the couch.
“Nothing can be worse than walking into your very hot boss’s office with your skirt tucked into your panties. And panties is a loose term for the back-of-the-drawer ones I grabbed because I hadn’t done laundry. Nothing,” my best friend, Kelsie, says with a definitive nod as she empties her glass of wine and has no shame in refilling it with the bottle sitting on the coffee table between us.
“How about sitting in a bar, thinking the cute, sexy, young guy sitting next to you is flirting with you—”
“And the problem with that is what?”
“I’m far from finished, Kels.” I take a sip of my own wine, and the ridiculousness of my thinking he was actually flirting with me hits me once again. “The guy, Slade—”
“Slade?”
“Yes. Just go with it.”
“It’s kind of sexy. Tell me what he looked like.” I stare at her and shake my head. “What? I need the whole visual, and besides, you should humor me. It’ll be the most action I’ve gotten in months.”
I laugh and am so grateful that