The Company Nurse: The Return

The following day, driving into work, I started figuring out how and when we could meet again. All I could think about was the near fumble in the back seat of the Jeep, her hand shoved down the front of her scrubs, working herself while her mouth was full of me. I could not believe how close I had come apart against her lips. The public place and the danger of it had been wonderful, and it had only sharpened the hunger. I wanted her arms around me. I wanted to taste all of her, not just her mouth, to find out what she tasted like when she let go, what sound she made with no parking lot to be quiet for. I spent the whole drive replaying the weight of her hand on my thigh, and by the time I hit the parking garage I had no idea what I would say when I saw her.

A week earlier I'd been a man with low testosterone and a syringe I couldn't bring myself to use. The wife took one look at the needle and went the color of the bathroom tile, not a nurse, not even close. Then the new job came with a nurse on staff, and Sally with her wild curly hair and her rolling Puerto Rican accent had made the weekly shot the best hour of my week. By last Friday it had stopped being about the needle entirely. It was about the way she looked at me, the way her hand lingered a second past the shot, the way she'd climbed into my Jeep like she'd been waiting for permission her whole life.

The texts helped. Thursday night, after everyone was down, Sally's name lit up my phone. You gonna be good for me tomorrow, papi? I read it twice, once for the words, once for the way she punctuated, the little smile she left at the end of a sentence. I felt like a teenager planning a date: what I'd wear, whether I'd say something that made her laugh, if her hand would find my thigh again. It always did.

Friday came. I walked into the medical wing with my heart doing something it hadn't done in years. Nervous and anxious, not sure what to expect: whether she'd act like nothing had happened, or throw me across the table and jump me. For a woman who barely cleared five foot two in height, she carried a will that could move a room; I'd seen it in the way she talked about her kids, her mother, Cabo Rojo, the way she handled the doctors like they were her patients too. The lioness was in there, waiting.

Sally was sitting at the reception desk when I walked in. When our eyes locked she lit up like a Christmas tree, bright and cheery, sitting up straighter, her focus narrowing to me until nothing else in the room existed. But there was another patient waiting in the chairs, and she went instant professional, the mask snapping down so fast I almost believed it.

"Can I help you?"

The voice that came back was all business, crisp and even. But for half a second, before she looked at the keyboard, her eyes caught mine and held, and the small private smile that crossed her mouth died before it finished forming, like she'd remembered we weren't alone.

I cleared my throat. "Yes. I have an appointment."

The keyboard clicked under her fingers, documents came out for me to sign, and she glanced at the other patient. "The doctor will see you now." She stood and escorted the patient into the other room, and I sat down to fill out the paperwork. The pen scratched. The clock on the wall measured the seconds, and I could hear my own heartbeat, and then the door closed.

Sally came sprinting around the corner. I stood up just in time for her to hit me at full speed, an embrace more like a tackle. Her breasts hit my chest, her arms locked around my neck, and her mouth found mine before either of us could speak. She kissed me hard, then held me tight for a second, breathing, then kissed me again, softer, like she was making sure I was real.

I bit her bottom lip, slow, playful. "Rico," she whispered, and then composed herself, tugging her shirt down where it had ridden up.

Sally motioned me into the other waiting room. The door clicked shut behind us and she was on me again, this kiss long and sensual, her hand at the back of my neck, her body pressed into mine until I forgot where I was. She pulled away first, afraid the doctor might walk in unannounced, and turned to the station to prepare the shot.

"Okay, we need to focus," she said, and her voice was all business now, but her hands were steadier than mine felt. "Need to get you ready for later."

"Later?"

She looked up from the vial, and that smile, the big one, the weapon, crossed her face. "You gonna behave, papi?"

"Depends who's asking."

"Your nurse." She turned back to the needle. "And maybe someone else."

The syringe came up to the light, the amber liquid tapped free of air, and I kept turning the word over. Later. As if Friday lunch weren't the only thing on the table. As if there was more coming, and she already knew it.

Sally talked while she worked, the way she always did: her kids, her mother and Cabo Rojo, the neighbor's dog that wouldn't stop barking, the words rolling out of her in that accent that made English sound like it was doing something fun. I could have listened to her read a spreadsheet.

"What are your plans for lunch? Anything exciting?"

"Nothing. Just the soup in the café." I replied

Sally pressed the wipe to my thigh and held my gaze. "You always stay here for lunch."

It wasn't a question. It was an invitation dressed as an observation. The air went thick. I could hear the clock on the wall, the hum of the fridge, my own heartbeat.

"Sally," I started.

"Shh. Shot first."

Sally pointed at the counter. I unbuttoned my pants, worked them down far enough to bare my thigh, braced myself on the edge, and she was all business, focused, her gloved fingers finding the spot with a nurse's certainty. The needle went in quick, the familiar burn spreading through the muscle, and out, and then the glove came off.

"You lookin' handsome for an old man," she said, pressing the wipe into my thigh with her thumb.

"I'm not old."

"Fifty is old, papi. But you hold it good."

Sally's hand stayed a second longer than the shot required. Her thumb traced a slow circle over the injection site, and my cock became very aware of sharing the room with her.

"Mm," she said, like she'd felt it. She looked up at me through those curls. "You think about me when you leave here?"

Every hour, I almost said. "Sometimes."

"Liar."

Sally laughed, that same belly laugh, and I wanted to climb inside it. But she didn't move her hand. She pressed her palm flat over the spot and leaned in close enough that her breath went through the thin cotton of my pants.

"You taste like coffee," she said, which made no sense: I hadn't had coffee in hours. Then her mouth was on mine, and it didn't matter.

Sally's mouth was all heat and push, her hand fisted in my collar. I had one arm around her waist and the other in that hair, finally, that wild curly hair, and she made a sound against my teeth like she'd been saving it up.

"Rico," she breathed. "You free for lunch?"

"Yes."

"Good. I can meet you at the pharmacy parking lot to talk."

Funny how she emphasized talk. The door of the medical wing shut behind me and the corridor gave me back to the second floor, and I walked it with the word still in my ear and two hours sitting out in front of me like a road with no markings on it.

At my desk the spreadsheet came up and stayed up. Columns of numbers, totals along the bottom, and none of it would hold still long enough to mean anything. Two blocks down there was a pharmacy with a lot that wrapped around the back, dead most of the day, and she had told me about it with her finger drawing on the air, unhurried, the way a woman gives directions to her own front door.

Half past ten. Eleven. The mail cart came through and the man pushing it said something to me and I answered with a sound. The clock in the corner of the screen turned over one minute at a time and every one of them was a small insult. My knee went under the desk. My palms went damp on the armrests. Every set of footsteps in the corridor pulled my head up, and not one of them was hers.

Talk. That was the part I could not get my teeth into. A woman who kissed a man the way she had kissed me did not need to sit him down in a parking lot for a talk. So the talk was one of two things, and both of them sat in my chest like a swallowed stone. She was going to draw the edges of this, tell me what it was and what it was not, and I would have to say out loud what I had to give. Or she had thought better of it since Friday, and the pharmacy lot was where the whole thing got set down gently, and I drove home to my wife with nothing but a memory and a needle on Fridays.

By twenty past twelve I could not sit still another minute. I took the stairs instead of the elevator because the stairs gave my legs something to do, and the garage came up at me warm and smelling of hot concrete and old oil, and I crossed it too fast and got in the Jeep and sat with the key in my fist before I turned it.

Traffic held me at the light on the corner, and the wait in the cab was worse than the wait at the desk, because now there was nothing to look at but the road between her and me. My reflection sat in the windshield, a man of fifty with his collar pulled loose and his hair going wrong, and I checked it twice anyway. The light changed. Two blocks, and I swung in behind the pharmacy and put the Jeep in the empty back corner and killed the engine, and the quiet came down all at once.

Anticipation had a taste by then, flat and metallic at the back of the tongue. I put both hands on the wheel and watched the gap in the buildings where her car would come through.

The blue came through it first, that shallow water blue, and the small flag on the bumper, and the rest of the lot went away. A pickup backed out of a row and took her from me for the length of one breath. When she came back she was closer, crawling, and every foot of asphalt she covered cost me something.

The SUV took the back lane at its own speed, unhurried, like a woman who knew what the man in the Jeep was doing to himself and saw no reason to end it. Her glass was black as mine. Nothing showed through it, no face, no hand lifted, only the shape of her behind the tint and the sun coming off the roof in a hard white glare. I leaned out over the wheel as if another inch of angle would give me more of her.

The SUV stopped two spaces over and then nothing happened at all. The engine ran. The brake lights laid two red coins on the asphalt, and the door stayed shut, and I listened to my own engine tick down and the buzz of the light stanchion above us and a cart rattling somewhere out in the front lot. The wait stretched past anything reasonable and I made myself keep still for it, the way you sit in a deer stand and let the thing come to you.

The door came open. Sally got out with her bag over one arm, the strap sliding up to her shoulder, and she did not cross the six feet between her door and mine in any hurry. Six feet, at her pace, the navy pants moving over her hips, the scrub top pulled snug across her chest, and her eyes on mine the whole way through the open window like we had the entire afternoon.

The passenger door came open and the smell of her arrived ahead of the rest of her, vanilla and clean laundry and under both of it the warm skin of a woman who had just walked out of a cold building into Florida.

"Hola, amor," Sally said, and dropped her bag into the footwell and sat.

I said hola back. It came out clunky, the h flattened, the vowels landing wrong, an American mouth setting the word down like a box it had no idea where to put. Sally heard it, and the corner of her mouth moved, and she let me have it.

Then she came in over the console and kissed me, and there was no joke in it and no time given to the greeting at all. Her hand found the back of my neck and her mouth opened on mine and she tasted of Bustelo and mint, and the kiss went on long enough that my hand came off the wheel and found her waist, and she made a low sound into my mouth and pressed closer.

I risked all of it. My hand went up her side, under the cotton of the scrub top, and closed on her breast, and Sally arched into the pressure and gave me the sound again, louder. The neck of the top was loose and the bra underneath was thin, and when I pulled at the fabric it slid aside without a fight, one strap coming off her shoulder, and her breast came free into my palm, warm and heavy, the nipple drawn tight and dark against the paler skin, and she never stopped kissing me and never put a hand up to cover anything.

The console made the rest of it impossible, a wedge of plastic and cup holders riding up between us, my mouth an inch short of what I already had in my hand.

One look around the empty back lot of the pharmacy, and she gestured at the back seat. We climbed over the console like teenagers, the Wrangler's back seat too short and too low, a seatbelt buckle digging into my hip, and none of it mattered.

This time I took her sneakers off myself, working the laces, then peeled her pants down her legs, over the curve of her ass, the navy fabric catching and giving. Her yellow lace panties made my heart jump an extra beat. When they came off, her shaved pussy was already slick, glistening, ready for me. I pushed her back, spread her legs, and lowered my mouth to her.

The first taste stopped me: salt and heat and her, the scent of her filling the close air of the Jeep. Her thighs trembled against my ears. I stroked my tongue in a straight line up and down and around, learning her, and she thrust her hips into my mouth, her breath coming in short bursts. I slid a finger between her lips and started to pump, cautious and gentle at first, afraid my nail might scratch her. But she kept whispering for me to go faster, harder, her hips chasing my hand.

Nothing but Spanish left her mouth then.

"Ay, papi. Sí. Ah, sí."

Sally's voice broke apart on the words, and something in me rose to meet it, the testosterone, or something older, that had been sleeping for years. Her sexuality was a tide, and I was drowning in it gladly. She placed her hand on my head, fisted a handful of my hair, and pushed my face deeper into her, riding my mouth like she'd been waiting her whole life for it. The cramped back seat made it hard to breathe, her thighs closing around my head, and I didn't care. I would have suffocated happily, buried in her.

Sally realized she was suffocating me and pulled my hair up, laughing, breathless, her face flushed and slick with sweat. "Come here, papi." She told me to sit down.

Sally went down over my lap instead, her knees landing in the footwell, and her hands found my belt. The buckle came loose, the button snapped open, the zipper ran down in one pull, and she had my pants shoved off my hips before I thought about helping her. Cool air came in at the gap and then her fingers hooked the waistband of my boxers and dragged them down and my cock came out into the light, hard and dark and wet at the tip, bobbing against my stomach with the engine still ticking under us.

Sally did not hurry once it was out. She looked at it the way she looked at a thing she meant to enjoy, head tilted, one hand wrapped around the base to keep it steady, and the smile she gave me had teeth in it.

"Look at that," she said. "All that from a little shot."

Then she straddled me like a jockey mounting a horse, her hand still holding me, ready to ride me with everything she had. This was going to be the first time she took my cock, the first time we were joined like this, nothing between us but heat. Sally slid her palm up the shaft once and gathered the slick off the head, spread it, and set me against her pussy and held me there, her eyes on mine. As I entered her I felt the instant warmth of her body, the quiver of her legs. There was a pressure of fight and flight, her cunt welcoming and resisting at once, her walls suctioning around me, gripping me like they had grabbed on for dear life.

When we were fully seated together, she exhaled a long, shaking breath of relief, a sound of pure euphoria, and moaned in response. She hugged me with everything she had and kissed me as she slowly rotated her hips, a slow circle that dragged every inch of her along every inch of me. The movement started slow, and then she began to speed up, her breathing quickening against my ear.

The afternoon sun beat down on the Jeep and the temperature inside climbed. Beads of sweat formed on my forehead, rolled down my temples. Her thrusts came faster, and I felt each stroke, each inch, the drag of her heat along my length, my hands full of her ass, her nails in my shoulders. I was starting to lose control, unable to slow the pressure building in my cock.

And then I realized I wasn't wearing a condom.

The thought landed between one stroke and the next, a cold spike through the heat, and my life flashed before my eyes. What am I doing? How is this going to end? The wife at home. The kids. The lies I was already living, the ones I was about to multiply. But my body refused to stop, and the pleasure wouldn't let go, and I could feel Sally starting to come, her moans climbing, her thighs shaking around me. "Ay, papi. Ah, sí." She said it into my ear like a prayer, and I came with her, deep inside her, exploded like a volcano, the fear and the pleasure colliding and the pleasure winning.

There was no turning back. The damage was done. That would be a tomorrow problem; right now I wanted to stay in the moment with Sally, her body wrapped around mine, our breath mingling, our sweat cooling on our skin. She slid off me and sat back, and a thin line of my cum followed her down the inside of her thigh and broke there, and I reached over and gave her a long kiss, slow and deep. She smiled, dazed and satisfied.

The middle console was a shallow tray of the usual Jeep junk, a tire gauge, receipts gone soft, a pencil chewed flat at the end, and a wad of thin napkins from the taqueria two streets over that had sat in the heat so long they had gone limp. I dug a handful out of it and the first one came apart in my fingers before it touched anything, white crumbs sifting down onto the seat between us.

Sally laughed at that, low and worn out. "Romantic, papi."

I handed her what still held together and kept the rest for myself, and we wiped each other down in the cramped heat, her thighs, my cock still wet and going slack, her palm, both of us smearing more than we cleaned. The paper shredded against skin and left little white patches stuck to her leg and to my knuckles that neither of us bothered to pick off.

Florida sun or not, the heat inside the Jeep had begun to give. Sally looked at her phone and made a face. "Lunch is over, papi." We scrambled to get dressed, her pulling up her pants, me doing up my belt, both of us laughing at the chaos, at the heat, at the sheer insanity of it, her yellow panties almost lost between the seats.

Sally climbed out of the Jeep and leaned back in through the door, her hair wild, her lipstick smeared, that big smile aimed at me like a weapon. "Next Friday," she said. "Same time." And she walked to her car.

I sat in the driver's seat with the engine off and the smell of her in the cab, and I knew I had a wife at home and a whole new set of problems, and that next Friday was already burning a hole in my week.