My Hot Doctor Fucked Me 04: Date Prep (Patreon)

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Chapter 4: Date Prep

My closet was not a place I normally spent a lot of time. But I had a "date", sort of, to get ready for. I stared at the bar hanging across the space and took inventory of the clothes, figuring out what I could wear. Anything too far off my usual and my mom would have questions. She'd catch me on the way out, ask where I was headed in her interested voice, and I stood there playing it out in my head. I was going on a date? Nope. With an older guy? No way. With the doctor who checked out my nuts? FUCK no. I couldn't come up with one single detail about my night that I wanted her to have.

So I made a plan while I stared at the clothes. Pick something normal enough that it didn't invite a question, wait until she was busy at the sink, and slip out quietly before she got a full look at me. Then I started actually seeing what I owned, and pictured myself sitting across from him in each of these.

Skate shirts. A fat stack of them, soft and thin and mostly ruined at the collar, half of them with holes near the hem from skateboarding and being an idiot in general. Hoodies. Two pairs of jeans with the knees worn or completely gone. A jersey from a rec league I quit. I found a dress shirt in there, pale blue, that I wore to a cousin's wedding once, and I pulled it out and put it on and could not get my shoulders into it. It bit into my armpits and pulled across my back so that when I moved my arms forward the whole thing locked up on me. I had grown since then. That was the only good news the closet gave me.

At the very end of the bar, on a hanger, was a white button-up with a thin grey stripe. I had worn it twice in my life, once for a funeral and once for a family holiday. 

When I took it down from the bar, it smelled like the plastic of the hanger. I put it on and buttoned it and tucked it and then untucked it and then tucked it again, and it fit fine.

I found a comb in a random drawer in my room, and brought it into the bathroom. His hair was always pushed back off his forehead and stayed where he put it. Mine was longer at the front, and shaped more by wind and sun than by anything I ever did to it. I wet it under the tap and combed it back, and it stood up in a ridge at the crown, so I pressed it down with my palm and it split into a part straight down the center. I put more water on it. I did it again. I got something that looked okay if I stood square to the mirror, and then I turned my head and looked at my own profile and had no idea if it looked good or if it looked like I had just combed my hair for the first time. There was nobody I could safely ask, so I stood at the mirror and tried to make my hair do something different for a while, before acknowledging that "playful messy" was the best I was going to get.

I went out through the kitchen, which was the obvious flub I had already planned around, forgetting at the last moment.

"Whoa," my mom said, and I felt my face drop. I knew I could never successfully lie to her face.

She had a colander of something in the sink and she shut the water off to look at me, which is never a good sign.

"I'm out," I said.

"Out where?"

"Andrew's thing. Across the bridge."

I felt myself sweating. I knew my face showed I was lying. 

"Andrew has a thing?"

"It's like a dinner thing. With his family."

She looked at me, holding a wet colander. I have known this woman my whole life. She was not buying it. 

"Who is she?" she asked, grinning.

"Who?"

"Whatever girl you're going to see."

I rolled my eyes and chuckled. "Mom I swear to god."

"Okay, okay," she said, turning back to her food preparation. "Well, you look handsome. That's a good shirt on you."

"Thanks," I said, heading out the door, now overthinking whether the shirt was good if my mom approved of it.

"I bet she's pretty," I heard her mutter to herself as the door shut behind me.

I looked at my phone and realized it was too early. I sat on the front steps with the board across my knees to kill time before I actually had to leave, and my phone buzzed.

It was the practice. One of those automated notifications with the clinic's name and a case number in it, all caps in places that made no sense. Your care has been transferred. My primary was now a Dr. Rahmani at the same office. Below it, in the same block of text, a line saying my scheduled recheck had been cancelled, no action needed.

Then a voicemail, from earlier that afternoon, that I had not felt come in. I read the text of the voicemail. It was Maria saying Dr. Lawson had reorganized his patients, and that they'd moved my chart over to Dr. Rahmani, and did I want to keep an appointment slot with her instead, or just call back when something comes up.

I felt my stomach fall out of my ass.

He dumped me. That was where my brain went first. And it landed hard. I felt my chest burn. Was this his way of telling me to fuck off?

I read the text again with my thumb over the case number. He hadn't asked me. He hadn't told me either. He did it at his office, through his office, and let me find out from an automated message and a lady at a front desk, and he had not sent me a single word about it, no heads up.

I sat on the steps with the board across my knees and read the notification again, and then again, like the words would change if I stared long enough. The words burned into my brain: "Transferred. No action needed."

He ghosted me. Grown men don't block dumb teenagerss, they reorganize their patient lists and let the front desk handle it. My throat tightened up and my eyes stung, right there on my own front steps, in the good shirt, with my hair combed back like an idiot. I pressed my thumb and finger into my eyes and held them there. If my mom came out and caught me crying in the driveway I would have to invent a dead pet on the spot.

And dinner was obviously off. Nobody cancels a guy's recheck and then goes on a date with him right after. I pictured the shirt back on its hanger, smelling like plastic again, and me mumbling to my mom that Andrew's dinner fell through. She'd assume the imaginary girl rejected me, which would be basically correct. Even my cover story was getting dumped tonight.

Fuck. Why did I let myself get so attached to a random, married doctor fucking me a couple times? He had a wedding ring and a locked account, with a whole life behind it. I was just a little passing fancy of his.

I opened Instagram and stared at our thread where we scheduled the dinner. He had followed himself from my own phone in the exam room, and then only briefly chatted to schedule the date night. I typed Are we still on for tonight? and deleted it. I typed Did something happen with my chart? and deleted that too, because it read like a kid asking why he got cut from the team. Every draft sounded like begging, so I didn't send anything after all. I just sat there holding my phone and my board, dressed up for a dinner that wasn't happening, figuring out how long I had to wait outside before I could believably come back in from Andrew's thing.

Then my phone buzzed in my hand and I almost dropped it down the steps.

Message from him on Instagram. I opened it so fast I fat-thumbed the notification twice.

Him: Heading out now, should be there in 20! See you soon.

I read it over and over. Heading out now. See you soon. It felt like Christmas. It felt like standing in Disneyland. He'd even put an exclamation point on it. Nothing about a transfer, nothing about any Dr. Rahmani.

My chest rose and I started breathing fast. The breath I let out emptied me all the way down to my stomach. He hadn't dumped me. He'd just moved a chart. I had mourned an entire relationship over an automated text, sitting on my own steps in a funeral shirt, while the man was getting in his car to come eat dinner with me. Maybe doctors don't keep a boy on the patient list once they start putting their dick inside him. I didn't know how any of that worked, and I didn't care anymore either.

I hearted the message, stood up, dragged my wrist across my eyes once to be sure, dropped the board onto the concrete, and hopped on.

I got maybe three pushes down my street before my hair lifted off my forehead and started doing something crazy. I had never cared about my hair a day in my life, and now I stopped at the corner and flattened it back down with my hand, and half a block later the wind peeled it right back up, and I slapped it down again, and it came up again, and I quit fighting it. Then the sweat came. That shirt was not built for skating. The back of it stuck flat between my shoulder blades before I hit the incline, and I held my arms out wide at the bottom of the hill to push air up the sleeves like a moron, and I almost ate it doing that, front wheels wobbling over a crack while I steered with nothing and pictured myself showing up to dinner with road rash on my chin to match the funeral shirt.

I took the bridge with cars passing close enough that their draft yanked at my collar, and then the last long stretch down Weller, catching my reflection in a dark storefront window and looking worse in it than I had in my own bathroom. And the whole ride I kept thinking about the skateboard, because nobody walks into a dinner date carrying a skateboard, and I had no way to not bring it. 

I was still there early. I kicked the tail up and caught it and stood on the sidewalk outside with the board hanging off my hand.

The place had those windows where the light inside is orange and everybody's face looks good through the glass. Little tables, candles in short glasses, a bar along the back with bottles lit from underneath. And the people in there were adults. Not adults like my mom, adults like people with jobs, women with real haircuts, guys my doctor's age laughing with their sleeves rolled up and their wine sitting in front of them. Nobody in there had ridden a skateboard anywhere that day.

So I stayed outside, against the brick between the window and the door, where I could watch the door without being right in front of it. I tried out a couple of openers in my head. Nice shirt. No, he would then comment on my shirt, which was totally stupid. You look weird without the coat. Worse, and I hadn't even seen him yet today anyway. I checked my phone, which had nothing on it, and then I checked it again a minute later, which was also nothing.

A car finally pulled in down the block, and he got out of it, and all my insecurities faded away when I saw him smile at me.