Chapter 2
Two
Wes
“Show me my award,” Jesse said as he strolled up to the desk. His scrubs were wrinkled where they’d come untucked after wrestling an addict with severe cellulitis back into his bed.
“Sorry, Dr. Tanner,” Liza, the head nurse for the day, said, glancing up from her notes. “It’s gone to someone else, but if you’re free, curtain seven needs a ride to the morgue. He’s been here for two hours, and the porters haven’t shown up yet.”
“Hold up. Who won? And for what?”
Reaching into the desk drawer, Liza pulled out the largest purple penis dildo I’d ever seen and turned it to face him. I smirked, knowing my name, neatly typed with the label maker and stuck across the balls, would annoy him.
Jesse frowned. “What? I just saved two nurses and a phlebotomist from a raging junkie; how did I not win?”
“Dr. Lake made a better save yesterday.”
Jesse’s eyes cut to mine. “You? You get to be Dr. Dildo all next week?” He pointed. “The betrayal.” He held a hand over his heart.
I shrugged. “I didn’t ask to be involved in this weird game you guys play.
In fact, I didn’t even know why we referred to different medical professionals as Dr. D each week, at least not until Liza explained yesterday as she handed me that…
monster.” I pointed at the thick veiny phallus, a grimace on my face.
“So, you’re welcome to it, Dr. Tanner. I prefer Dr. Lake. ”
The silicone dick had apparently been removed from some politician’s ass many years ago. The poor fucker claimed to have fallen on it, which was ridiculous and the most often used excuse when people came in with strange things stuck up their assholes.
Over the years someone had drawn a face on it with a sharpie, and then a stethoscope around what would be the neck, and finally according to Liza, they’d added a cape ten years ago and started the game.
The cape was made out of a piece of old hospital gown that someone must have taken home and sewn because it had two ties around the neck and a D sewn on the back of it.
Jesse clapped my shoulder. “Are you sure you don’t prefer, Dr. Feel Good?” He laughed.
I shook my head. “Don’t start.”
“What was his big save?”
“Toddler,” Liza said. “Pool accident. Down for close to ten minutes. Got him back with full brain activity, which, as you know, is pretty much a miracle. Was singing Daddy Shark to his parents when they walked out of here yesterday. Totally heroic.”
Jesse turned and gave me a slight bow. “I think we’d all agree a toddler trumps just about everything.”
“Indeed,” Liza said, “But, Dr. Feel Good? I need to know more about this.” Liza spun on her rolling stool to fully face me, her eyes narrowing slightly.
“It’s a nickname. An offensive one. Ignore him.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll tell you why we called him that,” Jesse said, jumping up to sit his ass on the nurse’s desk.
I shot him a pleading look. “I’ve only worked here for three months, and I came to Butte for you, remember? Do not ruin my reputation with the nurses just because you’re jealous I won the hero dildo for the week.”
“I gotta hear it now,” Liza said, scooting closer to my best friend. “Su-pill the tea.”
“We used to call him Dr. Feel Good in med school because he had a lot of ladies visit, and every one of them left with a secretive shy smile and flushed cheeks.”
I sighed, pressing my fingers to my temples. “It sounds so bad when you say it like that.”
Liza looked at me and I shook my head. “I wasn’t a sex worker or a man whore.”
“Nothing wrong with either, doc.” Her eyebrow rose and fell in a wiggle, taking the barbell piercing with it and making it seem as if the bushy, but groomed line of hair was lifting weights.
“They weren’t there for sex,” I protested. “I was tutoring them.”
“Tutoring?” Now Jesse’s brow rose. “In what? How to say your name in moans and gasps?”
“For fuck’s sake,” I grumbled low enough that only they can hear me.
“You’re supposed to be a grown man, a fucking doctor.
You sound like a teenaged boy in a locker room full of other horny teenaged boys.
” For a second I felt guilty for saying it, because that wasn’t who he was anymore, not really, although he kept up the facade for reasons I’d never understand.
When I showed up at his door three months prior with our med school best friend’s thirteen-year-old daughter and told him he was a father, he didn’t believe me.
He thought I’d hired some kid to prank him.
And then when I handed him an envelope from Beth’s lawyer with a DNA test she’d gotten somehow, likely when we used to practice medical procedures on each other, he thought I’d known all along and kept it from him.
It took me a long time to convince him I was just as shocked as he was that Marni was his. Beth and I had worked in the same hospital and lived in the same condo since Beth’s daughter was eight years old, and we spent most of our free time together. How could I not have known?
Beth and I were so close most people thought Marni was mine.
Even my parents, which at least had the benefit of keeping my matchmaker mother at bay.
Beth and I used to laugh about it. She told me a million times she had no clue who the father was.
And that stung. Almost enough for me to ignore the request in her will that I be the one to deliver Marni to Jesse and explain.
Actually, if it weren’t for Marni needing me, I might have denied Beth her dying wish, that’s how bitter I was.
And then when I was supposed to leave Butte to go back home to my life, both Marni and Jesse separately begged me to stay.
“Please, Uncle Wes, I don’t know this guy. Just because my mom’s will says he’s my father, it doesn’t make him my dad. Hell, you’re more of a dad to me than this rando.”
“Wes, bro, you know the kid. She’s grown up with you in her life. You gotta stay and help me. I don’t know the first thing about being a dad, let alone a single one, to a teenaged girl. I’ll fuck this up. She already hates me.”
All of those things were true, except the hate thing, because you can’t hate someone you don’t know, so I left everything behind in Canada.
I settled in Butte, Montana, moved into Jesse’s two-bedroom house, where I slept on a lumpy couch, and took an open position in the emergency department of St. James Hospital.
It wasn’t totally altruistic of me though. Beth’s death hit me hard, and I didn’t want to lose Marni too. There was also the bonus of escaping my family.
And then there was the girl. The girl who stopped replying to my texts one day and then out of the blue sent one that said I should forget about her, she’d met someone else. And yet I still couldn’t get her out of my head.
I hadn’t even known if she was still around when I’d made the decision.
She could’ve been married, or halfway around the world, hell, she could’ve been dead.
Although that last thought had killed me, it didn’t make it any less true.
If I’d learned anything working in the ER it was the fragility of life.
“Don’t deny you’re a master with the ladies,” Jesse said, bringing me back to the moment, and I wanted to strangle him, because his emphasis on the word master was too on the nose for my taste.
Even though secretly Daddy was more my thing.
Although only one girl had ever called me that.
I didn’t need anyone here knowing my personal life.
Not that I had a personal life lately.
I shot him a hard look, one that would have any one of those ladies I used to tutor buckling at the knees and sinking into the proper submissive position.
I shiver suddenly as I remember her… the one who called me Daddy, sinking to her knees.
And then I swallow hard because that’s not me anymore.
Wesley Lake was going it vanilla these days.
Actually calling it vanilla would imply I was dating at all, and I was not, so…
Wesley Lake was going it monk these day?
Liza was looking at me in a way that made me uncomfortable, so I lifted my shoulders in a shrug. “Ignore him, seriously.” My eyes cut to Jesse’s, my jaw tight. “He has an overactive imagination.”
Jesse nodded sarcastically, mouthing the words “sure, I do”.
He’d been trying to get me some action for a while, worried I would leave him alone with Marni if I didn’t get some of those needs met, but resorting to this was absolutely crossing the line, especially when I knew just the place to get those needs met.
“I dunno, Doc, I thought you were a mild-mannered sweetheart, but suddenly my heart’s a flutter. Should I call you Master Lake?”
I closed my eyes, praying for the restraint I needed not to twist my best friend’s neck like a chicken for this.
“Liza, I—”
She cut me off. “I’ve heard we have one of the best BDSM clubs in all of North America here in Montana.” She leaned closer to me. “A friend mentioned it in passing. I could see if she knows more if you’re interested.”
Shifting my jaw, I give Jesse another hard look.
See what you’ve done? Are you satisfied?
The charge nurse is giving me BDSM club recommendations!
But as Liza goes on talking about a book she’d recently read with a dungeon scene that included the use of a spanking bench, leg spreader bar, and nipple clamps, I forgot all about my best friend’s betrayal and instead concentrated on quelling the heat and swelling that had started in my crotch.
Because she was talking about Rawhide Ranch.
And I couldn’t think of Rawhide without thinking of Mira.
And across the hall, half hidden by a curtained partition, Mira sat next to her mother, and I was trying my damnedest not to stare at her because, as devastating as it was, she wanted nothing to do with me.
“Really?” Jesse jumped off the counter, grabbed a rolling stool and planted his ass on it, getting way too close to Liza. “Why am I just hearing about this club now?”
“You brought up the topic.”