Adam sat numb through the rest of the lecture, trying to focus but internally calculating what grades he needed to achieve for the rest of the semester to wipe out the awful seventy-seven. He’d be okay, but he couldn’t afford another slipup like this one. And the Perez scholarship only added to the pressure.
A year’s tuition would make a
huge
dent in the crushing student loans Adam would graduate with. People tended to think that upon graduation from med school, guys like him walked into instant practice and made half a million a year.
If only that were true. Instead he would slave away as a resident for under 50k for three years first. Then he might take a modest step up from there. But unless and until he took on a lucrative specialty, he wouldn’t make much money—especially since he’d be paying staggering amounts in malpractice insurance premiums.
The seventy-seven screamed, “Loser! Loser!” at him, without mercy. “Backslider!”
He was furious with himself. It wasn’t a matter of innate competitiveness or wanting the status of graduating at the top of his class. His grade-point average was crucial to getting into the best specialty programs for oncology later on.
Adam wanted to learn from the top professionals in the country, and those doctors wouldn’t bother with a slacker, a guy who couldn’t even master the basics. His whole future was at stake—and this time he was on his second chance. He didn’t kid himself that he’d get a third.
He looked down at the awful number on the test again and felt not only that he’d let himself down, but had dishonored the memory of his grandfather.
He shoved the test deep into his backpack, his undergrad college ring clinking against the now-clean plate from the cheesecake—he’d washed it in the men’s room.
His morale sank even lower as he realized that he had to schlep the damn plate to the dean’s office, preferably while beautiful psycho-Nikki wasn’t there. He didn’t kid himself that Margaret had given him the plate.
Though the sound on his errant cell phone was turned off for class, he felt it vibrate in his pocket. Adam ignored it. The last thing he needed was to have a chat with someone in the middle of da Silva’s lecture.
Moments later, a muted ding signified that someone had sent an email. It was followed by four others.
What?
Who needed to reach him this badly?
Adam eased the phone out of his pocket and peered at it, holding it carefully out of sight and under the desk that he sat at. His eyes widened, threatening to fall out of their sockets.
Dev had sent pictures.
Pictures from the bachelor party.
And what pictures they were…
Nikki, exploding out of the cake. Nikki, bending over him, her breasts hanging only inches from his face. A close-up of his face, fixated on those breasts.
Then a close-up of Nikki’s backside as she straddled him to inspect his nose. A close-up of the, er, underside of that same backside, G-string disappearing into her…ahem.
The last photo was a full-body shot of her walking him out the door, her arm around him while he held ice to his nose.
Adam closed his eyes. He didn’t want to look at these, and Dev needed to lose them immediately. They weren’t in the least bit funny. He deleted every picture and started to email Dev back to tell him to do the same, but looked up to see Dr. da Silva frowning at him. Shit.
Adam slid the phone into his pocket and forced himself to concentrate. Most of the time, if ignored, Dev would find someone else to annoy.
THE NEXT MORNING, Nikki was working her way through a stack of filing when the door to the dean’s office opened to reveal Adam, sheepishly holding her clean cake plate.
“Hi,” he said, squinting at her suspiciously, as if he expected her to lob her keyboard at him.
“Hello,” she said coolly. “Did you enjoy the cake?”
He patted his stomach and rolled his eyes upward to indicate total euphoria. “Oh,
maaan.
That was the best cheesecake I’ve ever had. I do need to give Margaret back her plate, though.” He held it up.
Margaret’s door was firmly closed.
“It’s my plate,” Nikki said evenly. “And I made the cake.”
He eyed her dubiously. Clearly, he thought she was lying. “Whatever you say, Nikki.” But he placed the platter on her desk.
“Why do you think I was so mad that you got it?” she reasoned. “Why do you think I said that Mags
couldn’t
give it to you? It wasn’t hers to give.”
He shrugged, still looking unconvinced.
It
did
sound a little nuts to imply that someone had done what Margaret had done. It wasn’t normal. But then, with each year that passed for Nikki, she learned more about the strange psychoses of the human race.
She sighed and dug a card out of her purse. “Here you go. This is my mom’s bakery. She makes the exact same cake—that’s how I learned to make it. Give it a try and you’ll see.”
Adam took the card. “Thanks.” He shifted from foot to foot like a kid in the principal’s office. “Look…I really do want to apologize, again, for the other night.”
She held up a hand, palm out, and shook her head.
“No, listen to me. Please.” Adam cleared his throat. “We had a test yesterday morning. A tough one. I was supposed to supply the notes for my study group. But because of, you know, the whole weekend, I didn’t get them together. And the phone the other night— Well, that was them. My study group. I was horrified that I’d forgotten about the notes, about the meeting, about
everything.
So—not that it makes it any better, really—that’s what happened. It wasn’t that I was, uh, taking a call from another woman or something.”
His eyes behind the wire-rimmed glasses were intense and guileless. She believed him.
“
Is
there another woman?”
“No.”
Really? Truly? No other women, for a guy
that
hot?
“So,” he continued, “I’m sorry. I really am.”
“It’s okay,” she said, surprising herself. “And I probably shouldn’t have, uh, reacted the way I did.”
His lips twitched. “The beer down my crack was a bit much.”
“You should have seen me trying to get it out of the carpet.” But the corners of her mouth tugged up in response to him.
“So did the exam go okay?” she asked.
“No,” he said gloomily. “I got a C on it, and nobody in my group seems to be speaking to me, so I don’t think they did well, either.”
She felt a surge of pity. “I’m sorry.”
“I can’t believe I forgot—”
“Why do you think you did?”
Adam looked startled, then embarrassed. Red spread across his chest where his shirt revealed the skin, then crept up his neck and suffused his face.
“Why?” He rubbed at the back of his neck. “Well, because I was thinking about you.”
It was her turn to blush. “Really?”
“No. I always buy flowers for girls I’m not thinking about.”
“Well, what do you think about me now? After the beer down the butt crack and all?”
“I think that the next time we see each other,” he said seriously, “I should leave my cell phone in the car.”
Nikki laughed, and found that once she started, she could not stop. He joined her.
No doubt irritated by the noise, Margaret opened the door to the reception area and stuck her bony nose out.
“Oh,” said Nikki, doing her best to be sober but failing miserably. “Adam came by to give you back your cake plate. He says you make the best cheesecake he’s ever tasted.”
“Yes, ma’am, you do.” Adam said it with a perfectly straight face, as he picked up the platter and handed it to Margaret. Of course, he may not have made up his mind on whom to believe.
“Why…thank you.” Margaret’s mouth worked and she carefully avoided looking at Nikki. “I’m glad you enjoyed it, young man.” A vein at her temple throbbed. She snatched the plate and backed out again, closing the door behind her.
Adam raised an eyebrow.
Nikki raised one right back at him. “I can recite the recipe by heart,” she said. “Ingredients—twenty-four ounces of softened cream cheese, four eggs, one egg yolk, three-quarters of a cup of sugar—”
“Wait,” he said. “How do you get only the yolk out of an egg?”
“Magic.”
“No, really.”
“Ancient Chinese secret.” She grinned at him.
“Yeah? I saw a book once with some ancient Chinese secrets in it. Those people got into some amazingly contorted sexual positions—” he stopped at the look on Nikki’s face “—which of course I would
never
ask you to try,” he finished lamely.
“No, of course not,” she agreed. She kept a smile on her face as she spoke her next words, to soften them a little bit. “Because despite the fact that you’re hot, I’m not interested in being a booty call when you have an occasional spare half hour, okay? Sorry.”
14
ADAM STARED AT HER, nonplussed. He rubbed at the back of his neck again. Hell, was he blushing for the tenth time today?
“
What?
I never meant— That is to say, you’re
not.
I don’t think of you that way.”
Nikki looked down at her desk, then up at him again without responding.
“I want to take you out on a real date sometime. You know, dinner and a show.” As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Adam could have shot himself. Where was he going to get the money to take her out to a nice place? And more important, where was he going to get the time? Wasn’t the C on his test warning enough to stay away from her?
He shoved that thought out of his mind. The money he could borrow from Dev, but the time he’d have to steal from other days. If he studied one hour later from Monday through Thursday, maybe he could justify a four-hour date on Friday.
“Does it give you a stomachache to ask a girl to dinner?” Nikki asked.
“Huh?”
“You just got this pained expression on your face.”
“I did? No. Of course not. I was thinking of…of a paper that I have due.”
She shook her head.
“So how about it?” he asked. “A date.”
“Frankly, if you’re thinking about a paper even while you’re asking me, then it’s not a great idea, Adam. And you know I’m not supposed to fraternize with students.”
“Oh, come on, Nikki. Give me another shot.”
“Look, Adam,” she said, lowering her voice. “I need my job and we shouldn’t even be talking about this here. Margaret is only a few steps away behind a thin door. Yes, she’s on the phone, so she can’t hear us, but still…this is crazy. I’m playing with fire and it needs to stop, and stop immediately. This isn’t
like
me.”
“What isn’t?”
She blew out a breath. “Being around you does something odd to me. I’m not sure how you do it, but you somehow remove all my filters. I don’t have sex with men I barely know. I don’t yell at people. I certainly don’t throw food at them. And yet, in the past few days I’ve done all of those things.
Why?
”
He lifted his shoulders, unable to tell her. “I like the fact that you’re uninhibited.”
“Well, I don’t. Clearly you’re not good for me. And I’m not going to lose my job over you. I’m sorry.”
“You won’t.” He found himself arguing with her. “We’ll keep it away from the office. I promise.”
“It’s a bad idea,” she repeated.
“One date,” he insisted. “If it’s lousy, then I promise I’ll back off.”