Chapter 15
“Hello, my name is Hope. I’ll be taking care of you today.”
I had a routine: say hello, ask how their day had been, then get to the critical information. Has anything changed in your medical history? Are you allergic to anything, like latex? Is anything bothering you today? How is your home care? Do you floss once a day and brush twice a day?
Thankfully, it all came rushing back to me like riding a bike, and I breezed through the questions.
Jonathan was a nice young guy who worked at the local marina.
He loved fishing, and when I didn’t have an instrument in his mouth, he was talking about all the different species of trout he’d caught that summer.
The hour passed faster than I expected.
I had just finished cleaning and was removing my gloves when Jay stepped into the room to do the exam.
“Morning, Jonathan,” he said in that smooth, professional “dentist voice” that made my fingers start to go numb.
I had to remind myself that this was the same guy who went to the knitting club and made homemade Cocido.
Humanizing him helped a little, and I managed to calm the numbness in my fingers.
He checked the chart, gave a quick nod of approval, and then turned his attention to the patient. “Let’s take a quick look here.”
My stomach tightened. The exam was the part where the doctor checked my work. It was always my least favorite. I busied myself pretending to tidy the tray while he leaned over the chair to inspect the patient’s mouth.
“Looks good,” Jay said after a moment, tapping the screen to add his notes. “You’re doing a great job keeping things clean, Jonathan.”
I inwardly sighed. He didn’t say my X-rays were horrible, he didn’t comment on my cleaning, and he didn’t critique my notes. Nothing.
“Great teamwork,” Jay added casually as he pulled off his gloves and smiled at me.
Macey popped her head in. “I can take him up front for you,” she said with her usual cheerful energy.
“Thanks, Macey.”
I felt extremely relieved to be done with the first patient and, with a little sigh, started toward the tray table to clean up my instruments when Jay’s voice suddenly startled me.
“Hope.”
I froze and turned. I thought Jay left to examine another patient, but maybe he’d come back to tell me something I’d missed.
He was leaning against the doorframe, arms crossed, a faint smile playing at his mouth. “You can breathe now. You passed the test.”
I rolled my eyes at him. “I wasn’t holding my breath.”
“Sure you weren’t.” He smirked, taking a step closer. “You tensed up when I walked in the room.”
“I did not,” I said, but even I could hear the defensiveness in my tone.
He tilted his head, clearly enjoying himself. “Relájate, Amapolita,” he said softly. “I don’t bite.”
He called me little poppy again. And though I wasn’t usually one for nicknames, I couldn’t deny the way it made me feel.
His accent was so smooth it sent my stomach into somersaults.
It was a very different feeling from the anxiety that tied my stomach into knots.
This feeling wasn’t all that undesirable.
It sort of felt like I was on a rollercoaster.
He’s your boss. And a dentist. My inner voice reminded me of what he was, and it was like cold water running down my spine.
“Don’t you have somewhere to be? A patient to numb? Or a root canal to finish?” I said, grabbing a disinfectant wipe and trying to look very busy.
He left the room to see his next patient, his faint chuckle echoing down the hall.
The morning went by in a blur, and before long Macey was switching out with Tyler. They were both wonderful assistants—probably the best I’d ever worked with—but I kept telling myself there was no way it would last long.
I passed Jay a couple of times during exams, but after that first patient, he mostly didn’t say much to me.
He was quick, never making me wait longer than ten minutes for an exam, which was a little surprising.
In the past, I’d waited thirty to forty minutes on average for a doctor to come in at Sunshine Dentistry.
He spoke to patients in a calm, soothing voice that seemed to put them at ease, even as he told them their teeth were decayed and needed to be replaced at a cost of thousands of dollars. Somehow, they still left smiling.
The women especially seemed to bat their eyelashes at him and giggle at his every word. It was blatantly obvious they found him attractive.
Despite fighting the constant urge to roll my eyes and accidentally dropping an instrument tray on the floor at one point, I made it through the morning unscathed. I even started to allow myself a few moments to think the impossible.
Maybe this could work?
It wasn’t until my very last patient that things took a turn for the worse.
Melva McMullin. Age seventy-two. Medical alerts: high blood pressure, arthritis, and a latex allergy.
Tyler took her X-rays and kept up pleasant small talk. Everything was fine until I stepped into the room.
“Mrs. McMullin, this is Hope,” Tyler said cheerfully. “She’ll be taking care of you toda—”
The woman squinted at me with intense scrutiny and a hint of what appeared to be disgust.
“I’m sorry, but who are you?”
Tyler went silent, his jaw falling open, clearly not expecting the sudden outrage in her voice. I hadn’t expected it either, and I hesitated before answering.
“I’m Hope, the hygienist here today. I’ll be cleaning your teeth—”
“No, you won’t,” Melva snapped, backing away from me as if I had the Black Plague. “Where’s Brooke?” she demanded, turning to Tyler.
“Brooke is no longer here, Mrs. McMullin. She moved to Texas,” Tyler explained quickly. “Hope is our newest hygienist, and she’s wonderful.”
“I don’t want to see anyone but Brooke,” the older woman said angrily, her voice loud enough that I was pretty sure the rest of the office could hear everything that was going on.
“I assure you, Mrs. McMullin, Hope is just as good as Brooke—”
She rudely lifted a hand to stop him, her ugly leather purse hanging from the crook of her elbow. I worried she might try to injure one of us with it if things escalated any further.
“Don’t you try to assure me, young man. I don’t want to get my teeth cleaned by anyone but Brooke. She’s been cleaning my teeth for seven years. Why did no one bother to call me and tell me she was replaced?”
“We left messages for all of our patients in case they wanted to reschedule, but some never returned our calls,” Tyler tried to explain.
Melva looked ready to continue her rampage when Jay stepped into the room.
“Excuse me. Is everything all right here?”
Melva didn’t skip a beat. She turned on him immediately.
“I was uninformed about Brooke leaving, and I refuse to see this girl,” she said, gesturing to me with a sharp wave of her hand, practically spitting the words.
I flinched, my fingers starting to tingle and my tongue going numb. I hated confrontation. This sort of verbal attack brought back memories of Dr. Pike and my father all too quickly.
“Mrs. McMullin, I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” Jay said firmly. “You’re insulting my staff and making my other patients uncomfortable.”
“Leave? You have the audacity to—”
“Mrs. McMullin,” he interrupted, his tone firm.
“Brooke is no longer here. And if you insist on not letting Hope clean your teeth, I must ask you to leave. Hope is our new hygienist, and she will be staying. If you don’t wish to see her, that is your personal decision, and we can remove you from our records.
Please return to the front desk now. Shelby will see you out. ”
The woman huffed and stormed out into the foyer. I could hear Shelby trying to calm her, but it was futile. Soon, the front office door slammed, and everything went quiet.
“Can I see you in my office, Hope?” Jay asked, his jaw clenched.
Ugh. That was horrible. I barely said a word and let poor Tyler and Jay take the brunt of that woman’s anger.
I was shaking slightly when the door to his office closed behind me.
“Are you all right?” Jay asked.
I wasn’t expecting the sincerity in his voice. His hand came to rest on my shoulder, and he looked down at me with genuine concern in his eyes.
“I’m fine,” I said quickly, even though embarrassment burned in my chest. That lady was the one who lost it, not me. Why did I feel embarrassed?
“I’m sorry she said those things to you,” he said, his jaw tightening again. “It’s not how I wanted your first day to go. I really want you to be comfortable here. We’re kind of a family—”
“Look,” I said, exhaling sharply. “I really appreciate what you did for me back there, but you don’t have to start in on the ‘we’re family’ stuff, okay?”
I knew I was being harsh, but Melva had hit a nerve, and I didn’t have the patience for placation.
“I don’t want a work family. I don’t need camaraderie and all that. I’ll do my job, you get your production, I get a paycheck, and we both get what we want.”
His jaw hardened, and at first I thought he might be angry. Then I realized I may have actually hurt him. His brow furrowed.
I swallowed, a twinge of guilt settling in my chest.
“I know you said you want to change my mind, to show me you’re different, but…” I hesitated, searching for the right way to phrase it. “I know how these things go. People promise nice things and then they… don’t follow through. So let’s just not get in each other’s way.”
I was pushing him away to protect myself. I recognized self-sabotage, plain and simple. I’d done it a few times in my life. A tiny, traitorous voice inside me whispered, stop, but the louder voice insisted that I protect myself.
I turned back toward the door. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I should get back to work.”
I reached for the door. But before I could open it, Jay spoke again.
“Hope.” His voice stopped me in my tracks. It was firm, commanding, yet somehow gentle.
I stilled, slowly turning to face him.
“You don’t get to decide that I’m pretending,” he said, his intense eyes locking on mine.
“You can choose to keep your distance,” he continued.
“But don’t put words in my mouth and don’t assume who I am.
I meant what I said when I said I want to change your mind.
I want this to be a place where you can breathe again. Whether you believe that or not.”
My throat tightened. Woah. I wasn’t expecting that.
He stepped closer.
“You’ve been tensing up all day. Holding your breath when I walk in the room,” he murmured. “I don’t want you to do that here. Not with me.”
I was two seconds from scoffing and saying something like I’ll breathe however I want, thanks, or you don’t get to tell me what to do. After everything my father had done to control me, I was more sensitive than ever to anyone trying to dictate how I should live.
But if I were being completely honest with myself, the way Jay said it didn’t feel like my father’s control.
My father demanded obedience. Demanded perfection. He wanted me to bend to his will so he could be satisfied.
But Jay’s intensity didn’t feel like a power grab.
It was something else. Something I hadn’t felt in years.
Guidance.
He didn’t seem to want something from me, but something for me.
He stepped a little closer, his eyes still fixed on mine. “Now I want you to be done for the day. Don’t worry about cleaning up—Tyler and Macey can handle that. Just grab your things and your paperwork from Shelby up at the desk, and I’ll meet you at the truck. We’ll fill it out on the way home.”
I nodded, unable to speak, and slipped out of his office. I felt shaky as I walked up to the front desk, noticing my cheeks were warm.
Somehow, his refusing to let me shove him away in that conversation felt more intimate than going over to eat dinner at his house, or having him at my cabin fixing broken appliances.
I grabbed my paperwork from Shelby and walked across the parking lot to find his truck unlocked. I climbed into the passenger seat and sat in silence for a moment.
He was my boss.
And a dentist.
But those repeated mantras I’d been telling myself the past few days were starting to lose their impact.
A few minutes later, he came out of the clinic doors, crossing the parking lot toward me, hands in the pockets of his scrubs.
I knew something was different after that conversation in his office. But I couldn’t put a name to it. And I definitely wasn’t ready to acknowledge it.
But it was there.
I sucked in a deep breath. And slowly let it out.