It Takes Three (Doctor, Doctor 2)

It Takes Three (Doctor, Doctor 2)
Willa Okati
All rights reserved.
Copyright ©2020 Willa Okati

“You know what? Fuck it.” Geoff closed his book with a thump.

Not satisfying enough. He tossed it across the table, where it landed with a much better thump. “Fuck it,” he said again for good measure, and because that felt so good, he went on. This had been building for a while. “Fuck medicine. Fuck medical school. Fuck residency, fuck internships, fuck the student loan-shark industry, and while we’re at it, fuck the entire predatory insurance industry -- and don’t get me started on pharmaceuticals. Whose stupid fucking idea was it for me to be a doctor in the first place?”

Across the student lounge table from him, unruffled except for the lock of hair that’d been blown across his forehead when Geoff threw the textbook, sat a fellow student. Geoff didn’t know him except to speak to, to nod across the hall in lectures. Decent guy, seemed like, though his pan was so dead it was its own field of archeological study.

Witness his reaction: not a blink, not a flicker of change in the expression. “I’m guessing it was yours.”

What’s-his-face had a provincial-French kind of accent. Very manly, very redolent of vin du table made from actual tables, very much the kind of accent that went with a firm hairy chest and a taste for kink. Kind of ridiculously sexy, or would be under different circumstances. Geoff jabbed a finger at him, almost positive the guy’s calmness meant he wouldn’t get it bitten off or broken. Probably. “Exactly, so fuck me for being a fucking idiot. Fuck!”

Third time was the charm. Geoff flung his textbook across the room, where it bounced off the wall and landed broken-spined on the floor.

His table mate remarked, “The bookstore isn’t going to buy that back from you now. Stressed, are you?”

A fuzzy, tousled head popped up from behind an equally broken-down couch that had been placed with its back to the study tables. Dazed blue eyes stared blearily at them. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing to worry about, Ross, go back to sleep.” He turned to Geoff, examining him as coolly as a specimen floating in a jar. Which was what Geoff’s brain felt like, so fair go all around. “Aurélien.”

“Come again?”

“You can’t remember my name. That’s all right. It’s Aurélien,” Mr. Impassive -- okay fine, Aurélien -- said. Just as soothingly as he had to -- what was it? Oh wait, Ross, that was it. “And you’re Geoff. And it’s been a while since I took an abnormal psych course, but my informal diagnosis would be you’re suffering from stress.”

Geoff gestured wildly at the wreck of his textbook, an eight-hundred-page tome on every single thing that could ever possibly go wrong with the endocrine system. “You fucking think? The USMLEs are next week. Motherfucking USMLEs, Aurélien. ‘Aurélien.’ Did I pronounce that right?”

“Better than most Americans could.”

“I still don’t know what’s going on,” Ross said plaintively.

Aurélien sighed, then closed his book -- gently -- and stood, dusting who-the-fuck-knew-what off his neat polo and khakis. Mother of Mary and all the saints, he was the kind of guy who wore those unironically. “Come on, follow me. If you’re good and awake, you too, Ross.” Aurélien started to walk out, so calmly assured that they would follow him that Geoff kinda had to admire the guy’s balls. Not in the fun way, but Aurélien wasn’t hard on the eyes, so --

Hang on, back up. “Follow you where?”

Aurélien paused at the exit of the student lounge, and -- lounge? Who could lounge in a cut-down classroom whose walls were soaked in the despair of former students? If there was a more dismal hole on the college campus Geoff had yet to see it. “In search of refreshment, for starters.”

“Studying, remember? I do not need to get drunk right now.”

One of Aurélien’s eyebrows quirked gently. “No one said anything about alcohol, Geoff.”

Well, now he’d gone and piqued an interest. “Then where are we going? A coffee shop?” Geoff stood up, deliberately not brushing off the scraps of paper from sheets he’d ripped out of a ring binder. Mostly to see how Aurélien would react.

Aside from a mild wince, not profoundly. “You’re coming, then? Good. My next move would have been finding a jacket with extra-long sleeves or getting Ross to sit on your head.”

“What, now?” Ross asked, sounding alarmed.

“It’s okay, Ross, no one’s going to make you do anything like that. Unless you want to. That’s your choice. Refreshments, Geoff. A strict diet of vending-machine junk food and adrenaline do the body no favors. Let me show you the way to something better. You too, Ross.”

“Coffee only makes me worse,” Geoff warned him, thoroughly intrigued.

“Somehow that only makes me want to see that for myself one day, but noted. I wasn’t planning on coffee, though. You don’t need winding any tighter.”

Ross stood a good three or four inches taller than either of them, and now that he’d woken up and Geoff had had a chance to get a proper look at him, his face was finally recognizable from school news articles on every winnable academic award for the past couple of years. Currently, he looked and sounded about as lost as a babe in the woods. “Would someone please tell me what’s going on?”

“Got me,” Geoff said, patting Ross’s shoulder. Hmm, nice. Weirdly comforting in a way. Like patting a brick wall, but smoother. And warmer. “Aurélien? You want to share with the class?”

Aurélien smiled at that, the first time Geoff had ever seen him make an expression, and it did the most fucking amazing things for an already spectacular face. Well, shit. He sat back down and folded his hands before him. “You’d like the TLDR version? Very well. You need to get laid, Geoff, and after we are refreshed I propose to resolve that issue tonight. You too, Ross, if you’d like to come along.”