Chapter 4
Garrett’s already got my chart open when the nurse walks me back.
“How have you been?” he asks, not looking up right away.
“Fine,” I say, too fast.
He looks up then, and something in his face tells me he doesn’t believe me for a second, the way an adult doesn’t believe a kid who says he definitely brushed his teeth.
He doesn’t call it out. He just lets the silence sit there a beat too long, like he’s giving me the chance to say something truer if I want to.
I don’t take it.
“You’ve been thinking about last week,” he says, not unkind, just observing. “It’s written all over your face, Tyler.”
“That obvious?”
“To me.” He doesn’t elaborate. He just sets the chart aside like the conversation’s already ended, and moves on to the practical part of the visit, checking the prescription’s working, asking about the pain levels, whether I’ve had any more bleeding, and I answer every question like a functional adult even though the whole time I’m aware of exactly how close he’s sitting, exactly how calm his hands look resting on his knee.
“Physically you’re healing well,” he says finally. “The hemorrhoid’s resolving. We could probably skip a follow-up exam altogether at this point.”
Disappointment drops through my chest at that, an actual physical sensation, sharp enough that I nearly say something stupid out loud before I catch myself.
“But,” he says, watching my face like he clocked that reaction too, “I’d like to check anyway. Given everything.”
“Given everything,” I repeat.
“Given everything,” he agrees, and there’s nothing clinical left in his voice at all.
“Let’s take a look,” he says, and I get undressed and get back on my side on the table, and this time I don’t brace the same way. This time some part of me is already anticipating it.
He works careful, slow, narrating less this time, like he already knows I don’t need the reassurance as much. His free hand rests against my hip, thumb moving in a slow, absent circle that has nothing clinical about it at all, and I wonder if he even knows he’s doing it.
“Relax for me,” he says, and the word choice, for me, lands different than it would have a week ago.
When he finds the spot again, deliberate, unmistakably deliberate this time, I don’t fight the reaction. I let my hips move. I let the sound come out of me, low, involuntary.
He doesn’t comment. He just finishes the exam like it’s nothing. When he finally withdraws and peels his gloves off, he doesn’t immediately turn away to write anything down. He just looks at me for a long moment, in no hurry at all, the kind of patience a younger man would never have.
“You don’t have to be ashamed of that,” he says.
“Is it?” My voice comes out rough. “Normal, I mean.”
“For some people.” A pause, weighted, deliberate. “For you, clearly.”
I can’t name what happens in my chest when he says that, only that it’s the thing that finally breaks something loose. I don’t decide to move. I just do, off the table, into his space, and I kiss him.
He doesn’t pull back. His hand comes up to the back of my neck like he’s done this a hundred times, sure where I’m shaking and graceless, and he kisses me back slow, deep, controlled in a way that makes my knees actually go weak.
He tastes like coffee. His hand is warm on the back of my neck, and I can’t remember the last time I felt this unsteady about anything.
When he finally pulls back, his eyes are dark, but his voice stays even. “You should go.”
He says it like an offer, an out, a door held open for me to walk through if I want to.
I don’t want to.
“I don’t want to,” I say out loud, which surprises me as much as it seems to surprise him.
He studies my face for a long moment, like he’s checking the words against something deeper, making sure I mean them and not just the heat of an exam room after hours.
Whatever he finds there must satisfy him, because he reaches past me and flips the lock on the door without ever taking his eyes off mine.
“Then we should probably talk about what that means,” he says, measured, “before either of us does anything we can’t walk back.”
“I don’t want to walk it back.”
“I know.” A ghost of a smile, careful, like he’s still weighing something. “I just needed to hear you say it twice.”
His expression shifts, some careful control easing just slightly. “Then don’t.”
He kisses me again, and this time there’s nothing careful left in it at all.
His hand slides from my neck into my hair, and mine finds the front of his shirt, fisting the fabric like I need something to hold onto.
He backs me gently against the exam table, not pushing, just close, close enough that I can feel how steady his heartbeat is even now, even with my mouth on his and his hand in my hair.
“That’s a lot of years between us,” I breathe against his mouth, not even sure why I say it out loud.
“I know how old I am, Tyler.” A ghost of dry amusement in it, and his mouth finds my jaw instead, easy. “Does it bother you?”
“No.” It comes out faster and more certain than I expect. “I don’t think it does.”
“Good.” His mouth finds mine again, slower this time, less urgent, like he’s decided he doesn’t need to rush toward anything. “Because I’m not interested in apologizing for something that hasn’t done anything wrong.”
I pull back just enough to look at him properly, both of us breathing a little unsteady. “Have you done this before? With a patient, I mean.”
“No.” He says it plainly, no hesitation, no defensiveness either. “Never. I’ve been doing this job for almost twenty years and this has never once happened to me before you sat down on that table.”
“Why me?”
He considers the question like it deserves a real answer instead of a line.
“I don’t fully know yet. Something about the way you held yourself together in that first exam, trying so hard not to let anything show.
I recognized something in it. Maybe that’s all it was at first. It’s become considerably more than that in the last hour. ”
I can’t quite place how much that answer settles something in me, some part of me that’s been braced this whole time for him to treat this like an aberration, a mistake, something to be managed rather than actually wanted.
His mouth tastes like coffee. I can still feel his hand on my neck. I don’t know what I am right now, standing in an exam room with my dick still hard from a checkup twenty minutes ago. I know I want more.