Tyler lifted his eyebrow like it was his job. “Don’t pull that with me. You know exactly who I’m talking about, and he was in here yesterday.”
“I don’t know why you’re telling me,” Lauren said. Patient privacy laws prevented her from telling Tyler about Andrew showing up at the cancer center, so she had no out other than pretending to be uninterested.
“Damn, you’re infuriating.” Tyler stood. “Fine, I’ll act like I didn’t notice you checking him out the other day, before and after you spilled coffee on him. And I’ll pretend I didn’t notice him doing the same thing.”
Thatgot her attention.
“He did?”
A smug grin settled across Tyler’s features as he nodded.
Lauren filed that tidbit away to think about later. For now, she said, “Well, be that as it may, I don’t know the guy, and I’m sure he’s not interested in me. No matchmaking, okay?”
Tyler snorted and turned away.
Lauren jolted up and grabbed his arm. “Tyler, I mean it. Promise me.”
Tyler held up three fingers before he left, and Lauren giggled at the image of him as a pre-teen in a Boy Scout uniform.
She stayed for another hour before starting her commute home.
When she’d first started pharmacy school at UMKC College of Pharmacy, she’d lived in an apartment nearby and could have walked home from here. But halfway through the four-year program she’d decided to rent a house farther south in Waldo. Living near downtown had been fun at first, but she preferred something quieter. Now, her drive was twenty or thirty minutes, depending on traffic, but the charming ranch-style home she’d found, built in the 1940s, was worth it. With a soft gray-blue exterior, white shutters, and a yard full of mature trees, the twelve-hundred-square-foot home was the first place she’d ever called her own.
She realized as she checked her mailbox—empty, as usual—and pulled into the partially shaded driveway that she’d lived in this house nearly four years now, with almost nine between the states of Missouri and Kansas, if she counted undergrad at KU.
By this point, she rarely thought of her prior life in Oklahoma. Other than a few good friends who kept in touch, there wasn’t much left for Lauren in the state where she was born. Her only contact with her mother was a call on her birthday. She spoke to her dad more frequently, but she certainly wouldn’t consider them close.
Lauren fished her phone from her purse and pulled up the voicemail as she walked through the dappled sunlight to the front door.
Might as well get it over with.
“Lauren, it’s Dad. I was just calling to ask if you were planning to come home for Thanksgiving or Christmas. Several of my staff asked for the holidays off, and I was hoping you might be around to cover some shifts at the store. It’s a good idea to keep up your familiarity with the system, you know, if you decide to—”
Lauren cut the message off, silencing her father’s nasally voice and the guilt-ridden thoughts that arose in her own head. She’d deal with that later.
She stepped into her house. Enough sunlight streamed through the sheer curtains in the entry and living room that she didn’t even flip on a light switch. Ever practical, she’d chosen furnishings that were neutral-colored and cozy, and she felt a sense of calm each time she walked through the door.
She changed clothes, warmed up leftover pizza, and ate in front of the television. Just after seven, her phone buzzed with an incoming message.
Emma:Let’s go out tonight.
Lauren: Meh.
Emma: Come on. I know you’re just sitting on your couch watching some weird ass documentary.
Lauren: Am not.
She was sitting in the oversized armchair.
Emma:What are you doing, then?
Lauren:I don’t wanna say.
Emma:I knew it.
Emma: We’re young, hot twenty-something’s who work hard and deserve a night on the town.
Lauren:But I’m already in my Netflix pants.