2. Cal
Chapter two
Cal
Cal
T hat matchmaker was so fired.
If she could even be called a matchmaker. What was her doctorate in, fraud? There was no way she had actually paired me with Candy and hadn’t noticed who that woman was in relation to me. It wasn’t hard to miss who people’s previous relationships had been with. Unless Candy had lied about having been married to my sister. I wouldn’t put it past her, but if this “matchmaker” had done five minutes of research, she would have found out that Candy Lorensen was not a good match for me.
In fact, that bat out of Hell was the last possible person I wanted to see because she was currently responsible for the most miserable state of affairs I’d had to endure since my residency. It was because my sister had gotten divorced that my parents had swung their beady, baby-hungry gazes to me in the first place.
My shoes ate the pavement like ravenous alligator jaws, and I slammed the crosswalk button when I reached the end of the sidewalk. Lush, low-hanging boughs shrouded the warm sunlight overhead, which dispelled some of the humid heat. August in Eugene, Oregon wasn’t terrible, but there were days it felt like I was living in a swamp rather than the Northwest. The sign blinked into a white walking signal.
I crossed the street of historical downtown Eugene, equally as annoyed with the fact that I’d allowed my parents to convince me to go to Kiss-Met as I was with the turn of events after going there. My parents were obnoxiously ruthless about whether or not I was “settling down,” and it took every ounce of patience I had to not ask them if they’d been reading too many Regency novels or if they really thought that was a thing people my age still did.
Settling down. Like I was a spinning top out of control. I had been nothing but control since I’d been in middle school. For them to suggest otherwise was simply insulting. At one point, they’d been on my case for dating but never choosing, and that had largely contributed to abandoning the dating scene in the first place. It wasn’t that I couldn’t find a date—I probably could if I wanted to put myself through the torture.
But I didn’t want a real date. I wanted a convenient date. I’d hoped the dating agency would pair me with someone adequate, they would be up for a double date with my parents, and we could move on with our lives after Mom and Dad realized it was a lost cause.
Of course, my scheme to find a respectable partner for Friday had only added emotional injury to insult when that doctor had paired me with Candy. The mere memory of that awkward encounter had me clenching my fists at my sides. Unbelievable. Eugene wasn’t an enormous city, I knew that, but of all people…
I reached the urgent care clinic, and with barely leashed fury, I wrenched open the front door and breezed into the air-conditioned lobby. Annie looked up from her computer screen, probably intending to welcome a patient, and then her eyes sparked with recognition. “Oh, hey Dr. Reed. How was your meeting?”
“Fine,” I smiled tightly. Horrible. I want to wring that woman’s neck.
“Oh boy,” she muttered, her dark eyes bouncing with worry. Annie tucked her brown bob behind her ears, and fighting a smile, turned her attention back to the monitor. She, and most employees in the center, knew about my disastrous blind date. She also knew Kiss-Met was responsible because several of us had joined together for the same reasons. Not to find anyone real as far as partners went, but to get halfway decent dates before we attended an award ceremony at the end of the month.
I passed several people in the waiting area, smiling and waving at them before I opened one of the two doors that separated the cozy, living room-style front office from the back rooms and nurses’ station. The nurses’ station had been built in the middle of the back annex like a central hub, and it curved around in a half-circle that gave us a line of sight to each of the seven exam rooms in the clinic. There were four computers set up along the desk, fighting for space with piles of paperwork, filing baskets, and random, mobile medical units.
Annie followed, and her white tennis shoes squeaked against the laminate wood floors as she came in hot on my heels. “He failed,” she announced.
Several people looked up from the nurses’ station. Michael—our newest nurse—groaned from behind his mask, and Lynette sighed in disgust. The other nurse at the station, Harper, shook her head like that was exactly what she’d expected from me. I stopped, rotating an irritated look Annie’s way before glaring at the rest of them. “Excuse me, ‘failed?’”
“They didn’t fix the issue, did they?” Annie supplied.
“How are we supposed to find dates if the person in charge of making dates is garbage?” Harper asked accusatorily, her blond eyebrows lifting with concern over her green medical mask. “You didn’t get answers from her?” Harper looked like she was a sophomore in high school, and she often got questioned about whether or not she was “qualified” to be a medical technician. Her bright pink hair didn’t help that much. She just wanted a date so men would stop erroneously asking her out.
“Okay, wait a second,” I scowled at them all. “No one told me I was going to war for the entire medical center.”
“Obviously,” Michael said sourly. Like me, he had a pair of overzealous parents who wanted him to look appropriately “ paired.” Only, according to him, it was “level 9000” because their family legacy was involved, or something.
“I did find the ‘doctor’ in charge of the pairs,” I clarified, my hands on my hips as the employees faced me in silent criticism. “But she literally ran away from me before I could get any solid answers.”
“So, we’re dateless?” Harper glared.
Lynette laughed finally, the deep wrinkles around her eyes creasing. Michael pointed at her. “We will have silence from the happily married crowd.”
Lynette raised her hands, still laughing quietly. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think thirty years of marriage would be an asset at an urgent care center, but apparently, I got lucky.”
“Yes, you did,” Annie said from behind me, her voice wavering on the edge of laughter as well. “So, hush.”
“Someone has to check in patients,” Lynette reminded us all as she took a pen out of the breast pocket of her brightly patterned scrub top. She clicked it open. “So, I’ll just handle that while you all deal with your single-person crisis, shall I?”
“It’s not a crisis,” I muttered, rolling my eyes.
Dr. Reynolds exited one of the exam rooms, and as she pulled her mask off her soft, round features, her eyes bounced all over our impromptu meeting. Her brows fell in irritation. “Is this the dating site again?”
“ Service ,” Harper clarified.
Dr. Reynolds rolled her eyes before they landed on me. “You’re the problem here, you know that, don’t you?” Dr. Reynolds looked like everyone’s favorite third-grade teacher with messy, brown hair, a soft body that had brought four kids into this world, and kind, brown sugar eyes. She had a teasing kind of attitude that put patients at ease, and she had easily fallen into the role of “office mom” for most of the employees.
“Balderdash,” I replied easily.
“You’re causing problems,” she said with a point my way before coasting across the nurses’ station in her aqua-colored sneakers. “Fix it, mister.”
“Only because he let the love doctor get away,” Annie reminded everyone.
“So, what do we do now?” Michael demanded. “This was my last shot at finding a date before I redownload Spark.” He shuddered at the mention of the notorious dating app.
“You’re all very dramatic,” I pointed out, crossing behind the nurses’ station desk and looking for my medical bag. “I’m sure they can find me a better match eventually. Although,” I paused, thinking, “I don’t know if that goes for you all.”
Groans echoed through the room. They were cut off suddenly as an older patient exited exam room three. Michael cleared his throat, turning back to his computer, and Harper hurried off to exam room one, presumably to check in another patient. Annie went back to the receptionist’s desk at the front, and shaking my head, I bent over the desk in front of one of the computers.
To my left, Dr. Reynolds—Laura—glanced down at me. “You got three new patients today. I’d say this home care initiative of yours is going pretty well.”
“I mean, it didn’t win us any awards,” I replied with a meaningful smile her way.
Laura returned it wryly. The award ceremony we would be attending in Seattle was for her efforts to make our urgent care center the best in the area. She would be accepting the award for People’s Choice winner of this year’s “hospital” category for best local businesses. We had been up against more than 12,000 other businesses in the area, and it was really due to the locals’ love of her bedside demeanor that we had been recognized.
“Maybe not yet,” she conceded, flipping through a patient’s paper chart, “but I’m sure you will. It was a good idea to begin with, but it’s brilliant in execution. You should be proud.”
I clicked open my patient portal and spared her another glance. “ Thanks, Mom.”
She grinned. “We’re the same age, you brat.”
Snickering under my breath, I brought up the list of at-home patients I had to visit that afternoon. My Compassionate Home Visits Initiative started in 2020 when COVID-19 had essentially ground preventative care to a halt, and I’d realized that even before the days of quarantine, there had been plenty of people who were unable to leave their homes for routine medical care. CHVI had started as a way to care for the elderly without exposing them to deadly viruses, but it had evolved to include a wide array of patients who didn’t have access to transportation, or for whatever reason, simply did better with home care. There weren’t many physicians who made home visits anymore, but I was one of them.
Battling with insurance over the necessity of the service was an ongoing struggle, of course. But I was making headway, and I was nearly at capacity with my house call hours. Dr. Reynolds looked up from her chart. “Did you visit Dottie at McKenzie-Willamette this morning?”
“Yeah,” I replied absently, trying to print off the list of patients so I would know what supplies to bring.
“Oh.” Her voice fell a touch. I straightened, raising my brows in question. She winced. “I got the call that she passed away this afternoon. Massive coronary.”
My heart stuttered to a halt. I’d just talked to her this morning after she’d been admitted the night before for chest pains. I smoothed a hand over my mouth. “Damn.”
Dr. Reynolds squeezed my arm. “She loved you, Cal. I’m sorry.”
Nodding, I sighed through my nose and turned to the printer.
Fuck. Losing patients—especially when so many of mine were of advanced ages—should have rolled off my back, but it never did. It always hit me in the chest like a punch to my solar plexus. “I’ll find time to call her daughter later. Did they send over records?”
Dr. Reynolds patted my back as she passed. “She’ll like that, and yeah, I put them on your desk for you.”
Michael shifted a look my way from where he stood at the end of the desk. “Sorry, Cal. ”
Nodding, I plucked the three sheets of paper out of the printer at the back of the station and scooped up my brown medical bag. “Onward, right?”
I backed away to go to my office, and with cheeky insistence, Michael added, “Not without dates, bro.”
I rolled my eyes. “We’ll all have to persevere, I guess. Hey, I’ll be your date.”
Michael lowered his mask to glare at me with dark brown eyes. “Smooth talker is not my type.”
“Ouch,” I grinned. I nodded to a mother bringing her toddler in for what looked like a cold if the globs of snot on the kid’s face were any indication, and then I swerved into my office. A small stack of files waited in the middle of it, and that was to be expected. Usually, when one of my patients went to the hospital or saw another provider, I received a report about the incident. I also had patients who needed to update their medical files which needed to be reviewed at the end of the day.
I ignored them for now, knowing I would have time after my house calls to get the boring paperwork portion of my job done. It made for long hours, but as the disaster with Kiss-Met had perfectly highlighted, I didn’t have anyone to go home to, anyway.
Depressingly.
That brought to mind startled, blue-gray eyes behind tortoiseshell glasses. I scowled at the memory. Dr. Coldwell. Doctor she may be, but expert in her field, she is not. I couldn’t believe she had actually run from me. What kind of professional did that? For that matter, what kind of professional did such a shitty job in the first place? Heat simmered in my blood, and I threw my bag onto my desk more forcefully than I’d meant to.
I had half a mind to march back to that building and hunt her down again if only to vent my frustrations. At first, I’d wanted to know what software they were using and why they claimed to have someone with a doctorate making matches, but oh no. They did have a doctor. She was just incompetent.
And pretty. Really pretty. Absurdly, devastatingly cute, in fact. If I hadn’t been so livid with her, I probably would have been brought up short by those bouncy, shoulder-length curls and blinking, animated eyes. Fortunately, my rage had carried me through, and I hadn’t let the fact that she had a bright ring of yellow around her pupils stop me from threatening her.
Stop thinking about her eyes.
Bringing myself back to the present, I threw a few paper records into the side pocket of my medical bag and then snatched it back up to take it to the supply room. I had two elderly patients who needed lidocaine injections in arthritic joints, one disabled patient who was due for a bi-yearly checkup, and a few hospice patients for my rounds this afternoon. Fortunately, that didn’t usually require a multitude of supplies, and that was what made my at-home initiative so doable, really. There were so many patients who needed at-home care, and all it took was a provider who gave a damn.
I headed down the hallway, passing exam rooms as I went, and scanned the supply list I’d printed out along with my patients. As I passed by the rounded desk at the nurses’ station, Harper gasped from where she sat in front of one of the computers. “Cal! I just got an email.”
I paused mid-step. “Okay?”
“From Kiss-Met.” Her eyebrows bounced suggestively above her monitor screen. “They’re changing the proctor for the speed dating session tonight.”
I hated speed dating. Or… I hated the idea. I’d never actually been to one, but they sounded atrocious. Wasn’t that basically what we did in college? “Hi, my name is Cal. I like birdwatching and photography. Yes, unironically. Sure, I’ll get the check.” My entire undergrad had been one blur of speedy dates that either ended in a one-night stand or with one party more interested than the other and a resulting awkward text later. I’d gotten to the point where I couldn’t remember how many partners I’d been with and how many dates I’d been on, but I was definitely more of an expert at dating than abysmal Dr. Possibly Blind in Both Eyes for Missing Obvious Facts Coldwell.
Medical school had brought a couple of long-term girlfriends into the mix, but we had all been doctors. We’d all been too busy to give the time and attention to the other person they deserved, and in the end, my interest in the practice of dating had fizzled out before I’d completed my residency.
I leaned on the desk and peered at her monitor. “So?”
“ So ,” Harper replied with a flare of her fake lashes. “It’s the doctor . She’s going to be there organizing this entire fucking event. How does that make sense? ”
My eyelids cinched together. “Really. They listed Dr. Coldwell as the proctor for the event?”
“Yes.” Harper clicked the link, and then she let her fingers hover over the black keyboard. “I can’t decide if I want to go out of morbid curiosity or if this is a terrible idea all around.”
A devious smile crept up to my eyes. “RSVP for me. I’m going to pay Dr. Coldwell a visit.”