The Man Who Saved Me

Chapter 6

Shonali looked at the number on the screen of her phone as she took a break. It was a slow hour and she had been on her feet, making conversation with customers, for three hours.

Damn Carlos, thought Shonali.

She had just been getting used to the idea that she’d had a one night stand with Adam Catten, doctor and savior.

It wasn’t so bad, was it?

He was a nice guy, and a dreamboat. Nothing wrong with having a one-night stand with him.

She wasn’t healed from her last crappy relationship that had left her feeling like a particularly aggressive dog’s chew toy quite often.

It made sense that if she wanted intimacy and connection, which everybody needed as far as she could see, she’d have a one night stand with a good man.

He was both good and good in bed.

It was the perfect combination. It was what most people aimed for and never got.

So why had she been mooning around for a week, badly enough that Carlos had taken things into his own hands out of what seemed to be sheer exasperation?

Carlos had gotten in touch with Ricky and sent her Dr. Dreamboat’s phone number.

Now Shonali had no excuse to not call him, except…

Well, she didn’t want to be too thirsty, did she?

The man could’ve come by any time he wanted.

So he might have been too busy saving lives and other such things that might be more important than calling her, but then, if he was so busy that he couldn’t even call the woman he’d had s*x with, what was the point of her calling him, either?

If he didn’t have the time to call her, why would he have the time to talk to her if she called him?

Still, if he’d managed to make time to get a tattoo, she did think he could probably manage to find a way to call her, too.

Or come by, even for a minute.

Hell, her business was in the directory. She was listed everywhere. He could easily have found her number and called her.

So he must have just not wanted to call her, which she found extremely strange, unless he had missed his true vocation – being a porn star.

If that pleasure had been fake, he could easily make millions as a porn star.

That sent her on another tangent. She wondered how he’d feel about wearing the stethoscope during a shoot.

She wouldn’t mind being a nurse.

Nurse outfits were sexy.

“Shonali!”

Shonali snapped out of her reverie guiltily and looked up.

“Malia? When did you get here?”

“About three minutes ago. You were just standing there with an extremely goofy look on your face. You have got to snap out of this, girl! Seriously, either you’re okay with having a one night stand with the man or you’re not. You can’t keep pretending you’re okay with it when it’s obvious you’re not. Will you call him already? I know Carlos got you the damn number, so what excuse have you got now?”

Shonali shifted guiltily.

“Thirsty,” she mumbled.

“Then get a damn bottle of bloody water.”

Boy, Malia was pissed off. She only swore that much when she was truly pissed off.

“I don’t want to be thirsty.”

“Then drink… Oh, that. Well, you are thirsty for him, my girl. You’re just not letting him know it. How is that helping you? Are you any less pathetic because he doesn’t know you’re pathetic? And heaven help me if he’s just as bad as you are and moping around. Look, call the damn doctor, ask him what’s up, see if he wants to meet you for dinner or something. After you get a good meal out of it, jump his bones again. If he doesn’t call you after that, you know it’s a lost cause.”

That solution was so typically and practically Malia that Shonali couldn’t help but grin.

“Really?”

Malia huffed a sigh.

“Why not? You already slept with him. You had a good time. So if you do it again, you’ll probably have a good time again. So what’s the big deal? You can’t mope any more than you’re doing now, so what’s the downside, exactly?”

When she put it like that, it did seem pretty ridiculously simple, thought Shonali.

“But I don’t know what I want.”

“You want to fu*k his brains out is what you want,” corrected Malia.

Shonali chuckled.

“Yeah, but that’s the easy part. Mal, you know I’ve been obsessed with the man for a very long time. This can’t be healthy. I just got rid of Fred. I don’t want to jump into something else now.”

That made Malia pause for a second.

Then she shrugged.

“If he doesn’t want anything with you, then you can’t jump into anything, can you? Look, Shon. It sounds to me like you think there was a real connection there. You’re just holding on to the hope that there was because you don’t want to be wrong. But you don’t seem to want to move on, either. So you got rid of an asshole. So what? The world is full of assholes. Doesn’t mean that you can avoid them altogether. You’ve got to hope that you learned from it and you can recognize assholes now. I think you’ve learned from it. Don’t you have that much faith in yourself?”

Malia did have a way of cutting through every layer of bullsh*t you could possibly come up with, thought Shonali, ruefully.

“I don’t know. That’s the thing, I don’t know. I can think I’ve learned, and I can think I can probably handle whatever he says. But what if it just was a one night thing to him? I wouldn’t resent him for it, but it was more for me, Mal. I can be okay with never seeing him again, but that doesn’t mean that it will be a one night thing for me. I’ve been emotionally invested in that man for so long, in such a complicated way. I don’t know if I want the fantasy to be shattered. Look, I spent the perfect day with him, and shared something very important with him. It was like a day out of all of those dreams I weaved when I was in therapy and recovering. I don’t want to ruin it by making it something ordinary. It doesn’t matter if he has decided it’s ordinary now. I don’t want to know it.”

Malia was quiet for a moment.

“And what if it wasn’t ordinary for him?”

Shonali shrugged.

“Then he could’ve called me.”

“He is a doctor who is on call for trauma cases. He was probably busy, Shon.”

Shonali shrugged again.

“Then what can I hope to achieve by calling him at all? If he has no time for a phone call, he has no time for dates. If he has no time for me, what is the point of getting in touch with him at all? This way, I have the perfect memory. I would just be ruining that.”

Malia shook her head.

“He’s human, too, Shon. You’ve built him up to be so much more. Maybe he’s having the same misgivings you are. Maybe he feels like he took advantage of you – you must have made it pretty clear that you had a case of hero worship going on. He probably felt a bit uncomfortable about sleeping with you, knowing that. So he might think that you regret it. Or he might just be a jerk. I don’t know. But you might also be giving up reality that could be worth more than your fantasy. Are you sure you want to do that?”