“Oh yeah.” I waved a nonchalant hand in the air. “All the time.”
If her eyes had gotten any brighter, I could’ve turned the lights out and saved the Mavericks on electricity.
In my humble and maybe a tad bit judgmental opinion, this chick needed to get out a little more. I mean, dollar beer nights at Frankie’s in Brooklyn would’ve really given her medical-assistant-focused-mind a run for its money.
You didn’t even need to drink the cheap beer to have a good time.
The last time I was there, I watched two guys fistfight over which Jersey Shore character was hotter—I’m a JWoww fan myself—and a girl who could’ve been Courtney Love’s doppelgänger flashed her boobs so some guy with a goatee would play Miley Cyrus’s Party in the USA on the jukebox.
“Did you get to do a lot of blood draws?” Lisa asked, and I silently wondered if this was what the next two weeks of working with her would be like. Of course, her eyes did that thing again where they lit up like someone just handed her a winning lotto ticket.
I started to fear if I gave her any more excitement, she’d channel Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally—only this time, it wouldn’t be fake.
I’ll have what she’s having? No thank you, Lisa.
But to deny her more medical pleasure felt like a sin, so I just rolled with it.
“Oh yeah,” I answered. “Blood, brains, you name it, and I collected it.”
Her eyes popped big and wide. “You collected brains?”
Whoops. In the name of Lisa’s medical O, I’d officially taken it too far.
“I’m kidding,” I backpedaled, and the look of relief in her eyes was evident. “Just a little neuro humor.”
“You scared me for a minute there,” she said with a hand to her chest. “I thought maybe this Dr. Shepherd was running an unethical practice.”
Derek Shepherd unethical? That’s blasphemy! The man had lived his life for his career!
I felt outraged for all of Seattle Grace and Shonda Rhimes.
“Dr. Shepherd was the very best man I’ve ever known,” I said, and my voice turned soft. “Well, until he died, that is. May he rest in peace.”
Lisa’s eyes turned gentle. “He died?”
“Yeah,” I said, and I swear to God, the trauma of Season 11, Episode 21 hit me straight in all the feels. “Terrible accident,” I whispered and had to blink back the tears. “No one, and I mean, no one, saw it coming.”
Damn you, Shonda Rhimes!
“That’s horrible,” Lisa said, and I nodded, just solemn little tilt forward of my head.
“Tell me about it. Thursday nights haven’t been the same since.”
“Thursday nights?” Lisa, the goddamn supersleuth, asked, and I kind of felt like smacking her.
But I didn’t.
Instead, I backpedaled…again.
“Uh…we used to, uh…fish on his land every Thursday.”
“Wow. Sounds like you two were close.”
I nodded again. “You have no idea, Lisa. No idea.”
Obviously, I really needed to derail this crazy-train conversation before Ms. Medical Assistant caught onto my lying game.
“So, uh, Lisa,” I redirected. “Mind giving me the rundown on how you usually handle these drug tests?”
Quick as a flash, there were her happy, I-love-my-job eyes again, and it didn’t take long for my medicine-loving coworker to dive headfirst into a conversation that revolved around her favorite things—medical assisting, urine collection, and the potential for blood draws.
By the end of her instructional ramble, I knew two things.
Lisa was one hundred percent type A.
And two, she loved the prospect of medically allowed violence.
Her enthusiasm terrified me a little, and that was why it didn’t take long for me to make the executive decision to be the girl who told the players what to do and to collect their urine, and to leave the rest of the technical stuff to Lisa. She could test, she could log, she could do all the shit I wasn’t qualified to do anyway. I’d stick to handing out and collecting cups.
The hallway noise got noticeably louder as I crammed information from the instruction manual on how to collect a proper piss sample as quickly as I could, and my nerves kicked into overdrive.
Sure, Lisa had just instructed me on all this shit, but hells bells, that didn’t mean I retained it. If anything, I was more focused on the way her tight bun didn’t budge an inch whenever her head moved.
“Looks like we have our first customer of the day,” Lisa said less than a minute later, and I looked up to find the most gorgeous set of baby-blue eyes I’d ever seen in my life. With the rest of the team yucking it up and making more noise than I knew was humanly possible in the hallway, the first player had apparently found his way inside.
And I thought I had nice blue eyes? Sweet baby Jesus in a manger, this guy’s eyes were locked and loaded and prepared to take down any female in their vicinity.