Page 71 of Last Chance Love

He stared at me again, swallowing hard. “I…alright. Well, that makes sense. And, uh, how much of that was…necessary for you to be happy?”

Continuing was probably cruel, so I finally cracked a grin and leaned onto the counter. “Leon? While it’s true I’ve known some people who were into all that, I was never one of them. I’ve been fucking with you.”

The barely repressed tension in his shoulders disappeared instantly as he let out a long, slow breath. “Oh, thankGod. I was terrified you were some ultra-kinky, can only get off if you’re being choked and treated like a puppet.”

“Like a pup…” I stopped and remembered I’d said something about fisting. The image made me wrinkle my nose. “Alright. Fair assessment? No, you know what? That’s awful, and you should be ashamed of yourself.”

“Are you ashamed of making me feel like I’d just stumbled into a world of kink I wasn’t prepared for?”

“Not in the slightest.”

“Then you have your answer.”

I laughed, leaning forward and smirking at him. “So, how badly did you freak out when you woke up and saw I was gone?”

“Is there any point in saying I was perfectly calm and kept a level head?”

“Not really, no. I’m looking for the truth here.”

“Fine, I might have freaked out a little,” he admitted with a shrug. “After last night, we didn’t get a chance to talk. So, lo and behold, I woke up and didn’t see you there. I might or might not have had a small moment where I wondered if you had run out and decided to leave things where we left off before.”

“Where we left off before?” I wondered.

“You know, just the two of us…not talking. Well, we were talking, but we weren’t really?—”

“Talking.”

“Yeah,” he said with that shy smile he rarely pulled out and never in mixed company. “So, maybe I worried things were going to go back to what they were before. Which I realized I didn’t want. I made it happen before.”

“Leon, you didn’t make anything happen,” I said. “Now get your butt clocked in while we talk about super serious stuff, or we’re both going to get strung up.”

“God, are theystillmaking you watch over me?”

“Just in the professional sense.”

“That’s what I meant.”

I got up from the chair so he could punch in his login information. “They’re not used to having someone without much medical experience working in the clinic. They just want to make sure you don’t accidentally maim or kill someone over a mistake.”

“Oh yeah, all that lifting and sorting I have to do, that’s really going to kill someone,” he said as he took the seat.

I sat on the desk beside the keyboard. “You’d be surprised. Clerical errors potentially kill hundreds of thousands of people every year.”

“Hundreds of thousands?”

“Something around a quarter to a third of a million people yearly. Sometimes it’s the doctors' fault, sometimes a nurse's, sometimes it’s impossible to tell whose mistake or negligence caused a problem.”

“Geez, how do they stop that?”

I stared down at the tile floor. “They don’t. Not really. No system is perfect, and in the cracks, far too many fall in and never come out. Most of the time, it’s just a small thing, an error in coding, someone reads a bottle wrong, a machine screws up somewhere along the line. It can be so complex it’s hard to stop and usually downright impossible to punish.”

“Usually?”

“Well, yeah, how do you punish someone who typed in the wrong code after an eighty-hour week? Or more than that? Sometimes, all it takes is to punch in the wrong number or letter and forget to add something to the file for later use. Those things are just human error, and trust me, punishing those moments harshly is the fastest way to drive people out of the field in droves.”

He turned to look at me, chewing on his bottom lip. “Probably not the most comforting thing in the world to the loved ones who lose grandma because someone wasn’t paying attention.”

“And it won’t be a comfort to the people when they come in for treatment, and there’s no staff because they’ve all been fired, or refuse to work because they might lose everything for a mistake anyone, even the best trained professional, can make.”

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