And her lips.  Perfect bow-shaped lips.  Teeth that showed when she smiled.  She had one tooth in the front that was a tiny bit crooked.  Just enough to not be perfect.  Cheeks with just a hint of color.  A dimple in her right cheek.  Not in her left.  Just her right.  Her hair wasn't long, wasn't short, wasn't straight, wasn't curly.  It defied description.  It was perfect.

Jordan's thoughts were interrupted by a whirring noise.  She turned and saw the little remote control car roll into the room, travel across the floor and stop about a foot from her feet.  There was a manila envelope duct-taped to the top of the car.  Written on the envelope in Edison's scrawl were the words Dossier of Dr. Amy Stewart.

Jordan peeled the envelope off the car and opened it.  Inside were several pages of paper.

"What's all this?" Jordan called out.  She knew Edison had to be somewhere close by.

Edison leaned in the doorway with the monitor sunglasses perched on top of her head.  She froze when she looked at the wall.  "A better question is, what is that?" she said, jabbing a finger at the wall.

Jordan followed Edison's stare and gasped.  She had painted Amy.  A large blue portrait of Amy on the wall.  She hadn't even realized what she'd been doing.  She raised her left hand and took a gulp of wine.  She choked.  “It’s an illustration I’m working on.”

“Uh huh,” Edison said.  “It looks like a blue Amy if you ask me.”

“I didn’t ask you.”  Jordan waved the papers in the air.  “You Googled her?”

“I found out a bunch of stuff."

"Oh?" Jordan tried to act only mildly interested while her heart pounded.

Edison looked at Jordan's mug taped to her hand.  "Ingenious."

"I know, right?"

Edison took another coffee cup off Jordan's drawing table, poured the dregs of Jordan’s early morning coffee into an old paint can and filled it to the brim with wine.

Unable to look at the dossier, Jordan put the envelope on her desk.  "Are you going to tell me what you found out?  She’s a murderer?  A black widow?  An angel of death?  A Lorena Bobbit?"

Edison took a drink then said, "About what you'd expect really.  She's thirty years old – you were right on the nose.  Grew up here.  Got her medical degree in San Diego, interned in Phoenix, practiced two years back in San Diego and then came here.  She graduated at the top of her class, has some awards of excellence – I couldn't understand what they were for, medical mumbo-jumbo of some sort.  Get this - she volunteers at the free clinic downtown.  She works for free.  That’s like sick and wrong.”

"Wow."

"Yeah, wow.  She sounds too good to be true, huh?"

Jordan drank.  "What do you mean?"

Edison eyed the painting on the wall, walking from one side of the room to the other.  "Spooky.  It's like her eyes are following me everywhere I walk."

Jordan drank, nervously waiting for Edison to drop the bomb.

Edison took another drink.  "A person can't be that good, you know.  There has to be a skeleton or two in the closet."

"I suppose you've found out what these skeletons are?

"I did find out that she's living with another doctor."

"Living with?"

"It's a guy.  A damn good-looking guy, too."  Edison extracted a printed photo from the dossier and showed it to Jordan, saying, "Here's a picture of them together.  They went to some formal gala together a couple of months ago.  His name is Dr. Jeremy Blevins."

Jordan recognized him right away.  "I ran into him."

"When?"

"At the hospital as I was walking out the door.  I literally ran into him as he was coming in."

"Well, I'm afraid your romance with the doc was short-lived.  She's already taken."  Edison did not look sorry or afraid.  She looked gloating.

Jordan picked the brush back up.  She had her back to Edison, but she could hear the smile in her voice as she said, "You'll have to Kilz that first or it'll bleed through."

Too bad I can't Kilz her face from my mind, Jordan thought.  She took a drink and stared at Amy's blue face and didn't hear when Edison left the room.  Jordan decided not to take Edison’s advice about the Kilz to paint out Amy’s face.  Instead, she kilzed the bottle of wine and left the portrait on the wall.  Blue Amy staring down at her would serve as a reminder.  A reminder to never again allow herself to fall for the true love myth.


Banana Peel

 

"Hey, sexy lady,” a smarmy voice said.

Amy looked up from her desk and quickly closed her laptop.  Her heart sank when she saw who was leaning in the doorway of her office.

Meet Chad Dorring.  Ladies’ man extraordinaire.  Suave, sexy and single.  Metro-sexual.  He was the heartthrob of the hospital.  If he hadn’t chosen to be a doctor he would have made an excellent soap opera actor.

Chad stood in the doorway of Amy's office with a leer on his face.  Or maybe it was a smile, not a leer, Amy thought.  Maybe his smile only resembled a leer.  Either way, it was creepy.  Like how chimpanzees show you their teeth and you think they're smiling and so cute, then suddenly they're attacking you.

Chad raised one eyebrow in a suggestive manner and asked, "What're you doing later?"

Amy assumed the eyebrow raising was supposed to suggest that she was doing him later.  The thought of it made her want to gag.

"Are you okay?" he asked. He walked uninvited into her office and plopped down in a chair.  He stretched his long legs out in front of him.  He looked like a cat toying with a mouse – like he could sit for hours in front of a cabinet waiting for the mouse to innocently poke its head out so he could rip it off.  "You look a little sick."

"Hello, Chad, won't you come in?  Have a seat, make yourself right at home," she said with ultimate sarcasm.  "And, no, I'm not sick.  You just surprised me is all." She drummed her fingers on the desk, hoping her gesture conveyed her impatience and he would excuse himself and walk away never to come anywhere near her again.  Well, the never again part might require something more extreme than tapping her fingers.

It didn't happen.  Chad smiled instead.  He made sure to give her his toothiest smile - the one with the high-wattage bling factor.  When he did that to the nurses, Amy swore she could smell sex pheromones emanating from every pair of panties in a two-block radius.

And then, as if to compound matters, there was that cleft chin.  Amy abhorred that cleft in Chad’s chin.  All the nurses drooled over that cleft, but Amy thought it made his chin look like a tiny little butt on the end of his face.  She must be the only woman in the world immune to his cleft and good looks.  She'd seen all the nurses fan their faces and pat their hearts when he walked by.  Amy wrinkled her nose like she smelled something stinky anytime he was near.  To tell the truth, she was sick of Chad and tired of all good-looking male doctors.  What she wouldn't give to work with a measly, shrimp-y, ugly doctor with a wart on his chin instead of a cleft.

Chad gestured to her closed laptop.  "Did I catch you looking at porn?"

"What?  No," she said quickly.  Maybe too quickly.  Saying it quickly like that made her look guilty.

Chad laughed.  She hated his laugh.  It wasn't genuine.  It sounded like the canned laughter in a sit-com.  She knew Chad had probably carefully cultivated the tenor and rhythm of his laugh.  It was designed to charm a woman out of her panties.  Well, it wasn't going to work on her.  Not again.

Amy had been with Chad once before.  Once.  It was when she was new at the hospital, and didn't know any better.  Chad had shown her lots of attention those first two weeks.  He showered her with his cleft, his laugh, his toothsome bling.  He asked her out for a drink and she tried to say no, but he made it impossible.  And, maybe the truth was that she might have been a little bit lonely.  Okay, a lot lonely.  She met him for one drink that turned into four or five or who the hell's counting and next thing she knew she was too drunk to drive and they were sharing a cab and sharing his bed.

The sex was unremarkable – at least the parts she remembered.  Not that she was all that well versed in this particular human diversion, but she didn't have an orgasm that was for sure.  Why did she keep chasing that elusive orgasm?  She knew it wasn't something physically wrong with her – she could give herself one.  Was it a mental deficiency on her part?  Or perhaps emotional?  Maybe it was due to the poor performance of the man.

When Chad was kaput, he rolled off her. She jumped up and grabbed her clothes on the floor.  She dashed for the bathroom, but it was dark, and she was still half-drunk and she didn't see the used condom he had thrown on the floor until it was too late and when she stepped on it, she slipped, fell and conked her head on the hard wood floors.  While she was unconscious, Chad rushed her to the emergency room and when she came to she was wearing only a T-shirt and her undies.  Why the hell didn't he dress her in proper clothing first?

The doctor, she didn't know him, thank God, asked her what happened and she told him the first thing that came to mind:  She had slipped on a banana peel.  Oh, she could kill herself for saying that.  Who slipped on a banana peel outside of a Three Stooges movie?  It didn't take long for the rumor to circulate around the hospital that she had hooked up with Chad and slipped on a “banana peel.”

This all happened months ago but the rumor still hadn't died completely.  Was it still called a rumor if it was mostly true? She had become a running joke of the hospital.  She kept finding banana peels in the trashcan in her office and nurses giggled at her over the tables in the lunchroom while they exaggeratedly peeled a banana.  Once in the cafeteria she had walked away from her table to get a Sweet'N Low and when she came back there was a banana peel on her tray.