Doctor-Patient Confidentiality: New Adult Enemies-to-Lovers Romance

Chapter Seventy-Four

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Each of my toes feels like a large bag of cement, weighty and swollen, as if they're on the verge of bursting inside my shoes. My steps are strained as I struggle to place one foot in front of the other, forcing my reluctant body to keep up with the other pair of moving legs in front of me.

The soft, barely audible sound of the nurse's shoes pressing into the built-in carpeting registers in my ears, and I realize the only reason I can hear her footsteps is because I'm trying my damnedest to focus on her feet instead of mine.

She forgoes the elevator in favor of the open stairwell. She's probably as healthy as a newborn if this is her routine every day.

At least that makes one of us.

I walk up the flight of stairs, following closely behind the evenly paced steps of the conservative nurse. I'd snuck a peek at her tag earlier. Not even sure why I did. It says H. Levins. I randomly wonder what the H stands for. Helen. Harriet. Hannah. Hell, maybe even Hippolyta from the Roman myths. I wouldn't be surprised if she also has super-conservative parents who decided to give her an equally super-conservative name that fit the rest of her perfectly.

My mind keeps on guessing, making ridiculous projections about a woman I don't know and occupying itself with the idle task of trying to guess a stranger's name in a blatant attempt to steer itself away from dealing with the impending and quickly-approaching fact that: one, I have to face Frost again after what had happened the last time we were together, and two: any awkwardness or anxiety I'm certain to feel around him may very well be the least of my worries after the kind of news I'm almost positive and deathly afraid he's going to give me.

Happy.

I decide then and there that nurse H's name is Happy. Happy Levins. At least in my mind, it is. I need it to be. Especially right now when I have no sort of happiness of my own. I can at least pretend to be near happiness, to have some inkling of hope that even the tiniest bit of it will rub off on me if I walk next to it long enough, whatever form it appears in. It's crazy and irrational and pretty damn stupid, but then again, the mind conjures up crazy and irrational things when it comes down to the nitty gritty of self-preservation and survival. I should know.

We get to the top of the floor but nurse "Happy" goes off in a different direction, bending into an intersecting corridor and leaving me less than ten feet away from Frost's door all by myself.

His door is half-way open, but I still decide to knock. I lift my hand to the door tentatively, my fingers trembling so badly they can barely curl up into my palm to make a fist, let alone carry out the simple action of knocking. But somehow I manage. Three quiet, timid taps eventually break the eerie silence as my knuckles meet the wood, almost as if the door is a living, breathing entity and I'm scared I'll hurt it if I hit too hard.

Frost looks up from his desk immediately, registering the barely-audible sounds.

"Come in," he says, his eyes on me, unblinking as I force myself to walk inside.

I hesitate for a moment, my feet reluctant to step over the threshold, but I force my body to move forward even as my heart pulses like a rabid dog in my chest, thrashing around in my body like it has zero self-control.

My steps are wary and slower than normal, my breathing much faster than normal, but then again, this isn't exactly a normal situation.

I take a seat opposite him, intentionally avoiding the chair I'd been seated in when I signed away all my dignity and decent moral standing to his perverted, trifling ass.