Chapter 4
The familiar fragrance of antiseptic greeted her when she stepped into the empty operating room.
Janae tried her best to find a few quiet moments in the room before staff, providers, and the patient arrived to settle herself by double-checking all of her equipment, cataloguing all of the meds, and making sure she had enough saline and lactated ringers bags hanging to be certain they’d be ready to go in case they needed emergent intravenous access.
Dressed in light blue scrubs and a matching surgical bonnet, Janae sat down at the head of the operating table, placed her hands on the mattress pad, closed her eyes, and bowed her head.
“Dear God, please allow me to use my skills to help this person you’re placing in our care.
Remove my ego and any other noise that may prevent me from best serving the life you’re placing in this team’s hands.
Allow the procedure to progress in a routine fashion and should there be an emergency, please keep my mind sharp and my responses accurate, yet quick.
Above all, whatever is done in this room, allow it to help and not hurt the person whose care you’ve entrusted to us. Amen.”
She’d said that same prayer or some variation thereof since she’d started clinicals in nursing school.
Practicing in the medical field could be a heady drug, and there were too many providers who thought their knowledge and degrees made them infallible.
Janae had seen too many patients suffer at the hands of decisions made by arrogant people in charge.
She was confident in her skills, but she never wanted to be so sure of herself that she hurt a patient.
Science was great, but some added help from above was never a bad thing as far as she was concerned.
Janae had needed this prayer more than anything today.
Since yesterday, she’d been hard-pressed to focus on anything but her interaction with Adam in front of the high school.
His physical presence was enough to knock her off her game with his smooth complexion, his neatly twisted locs, and his tall and muscular form covered by that gorgeous dark suit he’d worn.
It wasn’t just his physique that made it hard to get him off her mind, and that was the problem.
His mental presence, the things he’d said to her, the encouragement and interest he’d shown in her work and educational background, it was heady.
And right now, with this new problem of the closure of the arts program for the district, the last thing she needed was to get lost in Adam Henderson’s words.
Janae took a deep breath, languishing in the fact that there was no reason for thoughts of Adam to follow her into this room. This was the one space where she could be free of this unsettling hold he had over her.
“Morning, Janae.”
Janae looked up to find Christina Leeds, a surgical nurse, coming into the room.
She was a short blond woman with a slight build, but when she lasered her ice blue eyes on someone, she could make them cry.
Janae had seen her do just that to several surgical residents who hadn’t yet learned that their MDs didn’t mean they didn’t have to possess and use manners.
“Morning, Christina. What’s the next case on our shift?”
“A C-section. Mom has been laboring for what seems like forever. The little one is beginning to show signs of distress, so the OB decided it was time to section the mother.”
Janae nodded. Tapping a few keys on her tablet, she brought up the patient’s information and began to peruse.
“I’m sure you know this already, but Adam Henderson is back. With him back, y’all little quintet is back together again, right?”
Janae winced at that description. It wasn’t that Christina was technically wrong. She just wasn’t close enough to the situation to be right.
“Yeah, we’ve run into each other a couple of times.” Janae went back to reading the patient’s chart, or at least pretending to. Giving Christina the slightest hint that something was wrong would have a breaking news bulletin spread across Monroe Hills before brunch.
“Do you know if he’s single?”
Janae’s eyes snapped up from her tablet and onto Christina’s gaze so quickly, she might’ve strained an eye muscle.
“We haven’t spoken long enough to get on the subject of his love life. I’d think with him being so busy with moving back to town and getting his life set up, he probably hasn’t had time to even consider dating.”
There was absolutely no way Janae could know if any of that was true.
There was also no reason Janae should be telling Christina something like this.
What did it matter if the woman was interested in Adam?
What did it matter if Adam welcomed Christina’s interest?
There was absolutely nothing going on between Janae and Adam.
He was as free an agent as there came. Yet, as she stood there with her gaze clasped onto the woman’s across the room, she had no intention of relenting.
Eventually, Christina blinked first and nodded her head. “You’re probably right, Janae.”
Janae just nodded and turned her eyes back to her tablet. Cockblocking a man you had no interest in was next-level weird and Janae couldn’t figure out for the life of her why she’d done it.
She shook her head and refused to run down that rabbit hole. She’d said this was a distraction-free zone, and here she was being wholly distracted by the one man she needed to stay away from. Her work and her kid were all she had time for. Nothing else.
Now, if only her head would cooperate and get Adam off her brain.
“Heyyyyy, girl!!!”
Janae didn’t need to see the two women standing by her car to know exactly who was calling her, and that the greeting was directed at Janae.
“It’s eight in the morning,” Janae groaned as she walked closer to where her two best friends were standing. “Don’t y’all have jobs to do or something?”
“That’s the beauty of owning our own businesses,” Vanessa said.
“Yeah,” Cree replied. “It means we can come bother you whenever we want.”
Janae couldn’t help but laugh. It wasn’t like she hadn’t done the same thing to each of them in the past.
“What are y’all doing here?”
Cree stepped to Janae’s side, looping an arm through Janae’s as she smiled down at her. “You have been missing one too many Savvy, Sexy, and Single Club meetings. Vanessa and I decided to ambush you when you got off work and take you to breakfast as a way of rectifying that.”
Janae rolled her eyes, feigning displeasure when she absolutely loved everything about her friends showing up to gather her when she needed it. This was what their group was about, giving one another what they needed even when sometimes it wasn’t so obvious to the individual themselves.
“Fine, but y’all are paying.”
In a town as small and quaint as Monroe Hills, there was never traffic.
Within fifteen minutes, they were on Main Street, at their favorite coffee shop, sitting under a canopy in their designated sidewalk seating.
Even though they’d had a few crisp days this fall, for the most part, a light jacket was all you needed to be comfortable outside.
Once they were seated and their orders placed, Cree started in on her.
“What’s been going on and why haven’t we seen you?”
Janae started to deflect Cree’s question, but when she looked at the tall, brown-skinned woman with deep brown eyes who could work a dark Caesar haircut like nobody’s business, she realized she didn’t want to lie.
“I’ve just been feeling a little out of sorts. So many things are changing, and I’m just not sure how to appropriately adapt.”
Cree and Vanessa looked at each other before fixing their mutual knowing gazes on her. Cree leaned in with a smile. “Does that mean that fine-ass brother Adam is getting under your skin?”
“Really, girl,” Vanessa chimed in. “What is your issue with that man. Did he do something to you back in the day? I know Cree told me y’all bickered like an old married couple back then. Is that still the case?”
The server came with their orders, which gave Janae just enough time to try to figure out how to answer Vanessa’s question.
“Cree is overstating things a bit. Adam and I didn’t have a whole lot of interaction in high school.
Considering our graduating class only had about fifty kids in it, that took some effort on his part.
I don’t think Adam ever really cared for me back in school.
I was an opinionated, outspoken plus-size girl, and he was a shallow jock.
A smart shallow jock,” she clarified. “But a shallow jock nonetheless.” We couldn’t have been more opposite.
We mostly stayed out of each other’s way except for in our AP classes. ”
Vanessa’s expressive face with its lines crinkling across her forehead showed she was more puzzled than before.
“What happened in your AP classes?”
Janae sighed, remembering how frustrating those shared classes with Adam used to be. Her AP classes were her sanctuary, the one place she could focus on school and not have to deal with all the social nonsense high school brought.
“Adam and I were the top two students in our class. I guess that created a natural competitive friction between the two of us. Outside of class, Adam didn’t have a word to spare for me.
In class was another story altogether. He had a counter for everything I said, and those debates often got energetic. ”
Cree let out a howl of laughter. “She means she’d have to figure out academic ways to curse him out every time he pissed her off in class, which was often.”
Janae cut her eyes at Cree as if to silently ask, “Who’s telling this story? You or me?” Cree got the message and quieted her laughter, waving a hand to let Janae continue.
“I just didn’t get it. I was invisible to this guy in the halls for four years.
But the moment we were in an AP class together, it was as if his challenges were always directed at me personally, as if I’d done something to him.
” Janae held up a hand when she saw Vanessa’s mouth open to ask another question.
“It’s not that Adam’s points were wrong.
They weren’t. As I said, we were number one and two in our senior class.
But it always sort of rubbed me the wrong way and made me think he was just being dickish because he was the most popular guy at school, and he knew I didn’t have any respect for him, his jock buddies, or them skinny heifers that seemed to plaster themselves to him every free moment they had. ”
Vanessa raised her perfectly waxed eyebrow into an arch. “Are you saying Adam bullied you?”
“Who?” Cree interjected. “Janae? Kids might not have liked her, but they knew damn well not to cross her. Our girl has always been queen of ‘don’t play in my face.’ Adam just wanted Janae’s attention, and she would never give it to him.
He just figured out what made her tick and stayed in her face hoping she’d eventually see him.
But it never worked. Janae only saw him as a competitor and an annoyance, nothing more. ”
“Because that’s all he was.” Janae’s words didn’t come out as matter of fact as she’d hoped.
Instead, the softness of her tone revealed the regret she always felt where Adam was concerned.
Janae had wanted more than to be Adam’s intellectual sparring buddy.
The truth was, though, he’d never seen her as more.
And there was one thing about Janae Sanders, even back then: She never stayed where she wasn’t wanted, and she didn’t beg anyone to care for her.
As much as she might’ve wanted more, her high school self wasn’t about to beg any boy, most popular guy in school or not, to see her worth.
“What about now, Janae?” Vanessa’s gentle tone pulled her back from those memories of yesterday. “Have things changed? Has he changed?”
Janae shrugged. How could she honestly respond to that question when she didn’t know the answer herself.
“How am I supposed to know? I saw the man once in more than twenty years. That was when Michael’s parents died, and he came home for the funeral.
He was wrapped up in taking care of Michael, and rightfully so.
I don’t know if he’s changed or not. I just know that I don’t have time for distractions. ”
“And if it’s one thing that gorgeous man is”—Cree infused her lightness into the conversation again, making Janae smile even when she didn’t want to—“that man is a walking distraction.”
Yes, the hell he was.