Prescribed (The White Coat Series) Read Online Free Page B

hospital I worked at where I was stitching away at hearts and piecing them back together. It was an image that was so starkly different from the one we were both used to growing up that I couldn’t deny her the escape of just dreaming it. 
    “You can go into radiology. They sit in a dark room all day and look at cool pictures,” Ryan said, leaning back on a bland wooden dresser that rested next to my small bed. The air-conditioning caught his cologne in just the right way and drifted it over my direction, filling my senses with his masculine scent. 
    I thought of the possibility of being a radiologist and quickly dismissed it. As much as I respected them for what they did, I knew I needed a career that gave me constant interaction with people. Growing up, I felt the most comfortable when I had someone with me. I always sheltered myself with the people I loved and cared for and felt the happiest when I wasn’t by myself. It was a problem that leaked into my sense of what a normal relationship should be. The thought of being alone terrified me, so I tended to stick with people that didn’t have my best intentions at heart just so that I could be around someone. 
    I was sort of clingy in that sense. 
    I was also a very dependent person, which was something I needed to desperately try to work on. It was getting worse too. Especially with Eric. 
    Oh Eric. 
    “What made you want to become a doctor?” I asked, now genuinely curious. I was positive this guy could have made a killing by being an international male model. His jaw was just so impeccably chiseled and his hair so perfectly tousled. It was like looking at a cover straight off of a GQ magazine, hottest men in the world edition. 
    “The easy access to drugs,” he quipped, smiling mischievously at me. 
    I nodded my head over to the bottle of painkillers on my side table. 
    “So if I were to, let’s say, become best friends with you… you can get me those on the reg?” I asked, joking back. 
    “Might need to be something more than just a friend before I risk losing my license to practice and decide to make new friends in a jail cell instead.” 
    Woh, did he just flirt with me? I wasn’t even sure if I could call that subtle. I suddenly realized I didn’t really know how to flirt back, I was so rusty at the whole concept that I may as well have pulled out peacock feathers and strutted around, which wouldn’t even have worked, I would have just ended up attracting all the lesbian peacocks.
    I guess that’s what happens if you’re in a six year relationship with your fifteen year old high-school love. You end up losing all the abilities of finding someone else. I mean it’s not like I planned on finding someone else. Eric was perfect in every sense of the word. He was always edgier than me, getting his first tattoo on our one year anniversary. It was a graffiti heart on a concrete wall, it’s bright red paint dripping down off the gray background and onto his defined, tan shoulder. I loved it and almost got one of my own but wimped out last minute, too scared of passing out from the pain.
    So much for that, huh.
    He was also always into basketball, earning a full ride to UCLA based on his skills alone. The sport was a way of escaping for him. And he needed that escape. If I thought I had a rough life, I couldn’t even begin to place myself in Eric’s shoes.  
    He once told me a story about how his mom had to sell a mountain bike he had won in a contest just so that she could take her next hit of heroin. It wasn’t too long before Eric was put up for adoption. His younger life consisted of bouncing from home to home, trying to find the perfect family. He would tell me that by the age of nine, he had already given up, accepting the harsh reality that he may never find a permanent family. It caused him to start lashing out. He became more and more rebellious, testing the limits of whomever his guardian happened to be at the time. Finally, a year