In the decade since she had graduated from college and came to work as a medical secretary at Andrew Rollins Memorial Children's Hospital, Maya could be sure that certain truths held, regardless of situation. Full moons meant strange and busy nights. A unit never has the proper amount of nurses. There are always too little or too many. If a patient is admitted at five you will see no paperwork until seven, regardless of how many times the records clerk at the referring clinic swears she faxed them. Most importantly if a pediatrician is young and handsome, and especially single, he is either cocky or gay. Always. They certainly believed they could have their way with anyone they wished, and for the most part, the belief went unchallenged. Maya herself had a few friends personally test this truth out first hand, and come up with it faithfully intact (even if their egos were not). Something about an attractive young doctor of small children gave him the impression that he was God's gift, not only to women, but also to humanity as a whole. It was as if the total package; looks, brains, compassion, and the ability to surround oneself with small and needy children and actually heal them; was too much marriage material for any woman to steel herself against. Usually this was actually true, but Maya wasn't buying it. That is until Dr. Colin Mainfield was hired as the newest attending on her floor. While she had long since become immune to the charms of a confident doctor, something about Dr. Mainfield seemed less contrived and condescending. Especially when he looked Maya straight in the eyes and said the only words coming out of a doctor's mouth that could have shocked Maya, "Can I do anything for you?"
Maya scanned his every move, dissected his every sentence for that hint- that inflection- that suggested he was better than her; that suggested that he thought she'd probably be good for one of two things, taking off orders or taking off her clothes. She could find no hint of that at all in Dr. Mainfield. This begged an entirely different question, what was his angle? What did he want, if anything? She couldn't bring herself to believe, to hope, that his motives for human decency were entirely innocent. She thought maybe it was sexual. Maya had to admit a part of her burned when she knew she would see him. She knew his tone and inflection when he spoke to her were all wrong for that particular motive, even when uttering the most innuendo-laden aside he sounded like an innocent schoolboy. She would actually find herself goading him on, but never reaching the point of lasciviousness. Sex might be important to him, but it wasn't what he seemed to be seeking. He most likely got it regularly enough, she thought bitterly. Through general conversation, she learned that his family was fairly well off, the owners of a popular, exclusive ski lodge in the Rockies. Which meant he wasn't looking for someone to pay off his med-school loans. She could usually jump straight from there to the "mother-figure" conclusion, except the man seemed unusually self-sufficient. Although he consistently made sure everyone on the staff was taken care of, from the director to the janitor, he never seemed to want anything himself. Every time he laid something down; a stethoscope, clipboard, coffee; he always remembered to clean it up before left. He needed no one to pick up after him. She almost found herself looking for ways to take care of him, some primitive female instinct fought hard against his ability to need nothing. She brought him food and drinks, and offered to run errands for him that had another doctor asked her, would have elicited a hearty laugh. She didn't understand him, and worse, she didn't understand herself around him.
Colin Mainfield was tall. He was the kind of tall you needed to bring your face up into the light to speak to. The kind of tall that defined masculinity, the kind of tall that made women prone to daydreaming, such as Maya, picture holding and placing an ear in just the right spot to hear his heartbeat. He had brown hair and brown eyes. These were traits that never would have attracted her years before, when blond hair, blue eyes, and a felonious rap sheet would have turned her head. Long ago, when she was young and naive and untouched by the burn of an evil man. She now thought dark hair and dark eyes seemed thoughtfully sleepy, sweetly sexual; a combination she found irresistible. He had eyes that belied his mischievousness. When he said something even slightly naughty they sparkled, making her feel that she liked what he was saying. His smile was wide and his lips slightly crooked in that way that made Elvis such a fantasy when he was young. They matched his eyes in their mischievous quality. He made her every nerve tingle, and she couldn't yet tell whether that was a good or bad thing. She found herself lost in reveries at work. She pictured him in various states of dress and undress and placed him in dozens of locales and in scores of positions. This embarrassed her to the point of holding her cards close to her chest, and she could see the surprise in his eyes when she behaved cool towards him to overcompensate for her smothering, sweltering desire to taste him.
That alone frustrated her the most. She had always held a high work ethic, had always considered herself the consummate professional in her behavior towards her co-workers, yet the thoughts running through her brain distracted her to the point that she could feel her work slipping. If he wasn't present in the hospital, she could function perfectly; yet when she knew he was in the building, occupying the same space and she, she found herself mentally playing games, such as "where could we go to be alone?" She had them entwined in each other in the elevator shaft, necking in the clean storage, ravaging each other near the now-vacant pharmacy. She thought of all the places where a couple of oversexed, underserved co-workers could have a private groping session.