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  All Grown Up

  Blurb

  High school was hell for me.

  I was always the big girl. The ugly one. The nerdy one, who wouldn’t ever actually amount to anything and couldn’t keep any friends.

  Screw high school.

  I’m large and in charge.

  I’m a resident doctor at a prestigious city hospital. Men fall to their feet trying to get me to go out with them. Things aren’t just looking up for me, they’re already there.

  But when Jody Banks is rushed to my office, a stab wound in his arm—and still having that annoyingly handsome smile—I’m transported back to when he made fun of me.

  When he ignored me in the hallways.

  When he pulled my hair and told me it wasn’t his fault.

  When he spread photographs of me—photographs I thought were just for him.

  When he pretended we weren’t dating.

  And now he wants a piece of this, again?

  Yeah. Thanks but no thanks.

  No way am I ever hooking up with that guy again… no matter how good he looks, or how nice he smells… right?

  ALL GROWN UP

  LARISSA DE SILVA

  © Larissa de Silva, 2020

  All rights reserved

  This book is intended only for adult audiences.

  The events depicted within this work are fictitious. All and any similarity to any person, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Unless you know of any men like the ones depicted in these books. If you know of any similarity to any living person, I urge you to email me. If not for me, then for science. Or medicine

  CHAPTER ONE

  2019

  “You have to tell me how it was,” my best friend said.

  She was staring at me. It had been a quiet night in the emergency room and we had kept each other entertained with our old boyfriend stories, including our classmates from medical school, when we weren’t updating charts or checking on patients. Not that either one of us had ever had much time to successfully date one of our classmates. They were busy and we were busy, and most of the time, we were too busy to even hook up or have one-night stands with our classmates.

  Things weren’t quite as hectic after finally graduating, but it wasn’t like they got much easier. I was finally dating again and was finding it difficult to keep in touch with some of the men I was interested in. At least they seem interested in me, which was nice, but I could hardly remember their names. I didn’t particularly want anything serious—I didn’t have time for anything serious—but I did like to spend time with some of them.

  Not that I had found any single one who I could remember that well.

  She poked me on the shoulder. “Hey,” she said. “Are you going to tell me or what?”

  I smirked at her. “That’s inappropriate, Dr. Comely.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Oh, that’s how we’re doing this?”

  I laughed, shaking my head. “No,” I replied. “Unfortunately, there isn’t much to report. He was nice and he made me laugh, but I don’t know, there was some spark missing.”

  She lowered her voice to a whisper as she got slightly closer to me. “So you didn’t sleep with him?”

  I widened my eyes in mock shock. “I didn’t,” I replied. “I wanted to, but then chickened out. I didn’t want to take him to my house, because what if he was a murderer or something?”

  “But you didn’t worry about that before your date.”

  “No, I did,” I said. “I just didn’t exactly think he was going to murder me in front of everyone else in a restaurant. That would definitely put people off their food.”

  “And you think a murderer would care about that,” she said.

  I laughed. We were sitting in the back of the ER and she had pulled the curtain up between us. The small consultation rooms we had were frequently overloaded and while the hospital had been talking about building a new ER wing for years, it just didn’t seem to ever happen for one reason or another. That was why we had these makeshift, antiquated, curtain bays. They didn’t provide a lot of privacy, but they were better than nothing in a crisis.

  Thankfully, nothing like a crisis seemed to be happening on that quiet Wednesday night.

  Cam looked down at her tablet and sighed. “Do you know what happened to Mr. Hysinger?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “He got transferred to urology.”

  “Huh, weird. I think there’s a problem with—”

  She got interrupted by the loud footsteps of someone coming near us. We both turned around to see the senior nurse on shift, an older white woman jet black hair and thin eyebrows. Teri’s gaze darted between us before she decided that she didn’t care.

  “A young male has just come in,” she said. “Vitals are fine, but he got stabbed in the arm and the knife is, uh… moving.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “He’s moving it?”

  “No,’ she said. “It’s wiggling, like, when he moves his body. I don’t think it’s deep in there but I don’t want to—”

  “I got it,” I said. “Anything else?”

  “Late twenties or thirties, he’s lucid, I think there’s some sort of other injuries because he must have gotten in a fight, but he wouldn’t let me examine him thoroughly,” she said. “I asked him to take his clothes off, but he wouldn’t do it.”

  “Yikes,” I said. “Okay. Thanks, Teri.”

  “You’re welcome, Dr. Meyer,” she said, flashing me a little smile, which was the most approval I was ever going to get from her. “He’s in room three.”

  I nodded. I walked over to the room, looking down at my tablet to see the patient’s chart. My eyes skimmed over his name as I looked at his vitals, his age, and the description of his condition.

  I knocked on the door. “Come in,” a muffled masculine voice said.

  I opened the door and looked up from the tablet. Immediately, I felt like the floor had moved and I was going to be swallowed by the ground. I had never been a good actress, so I was trying my best to make it seem like everything was okay, even though everything was most definitely not okay.

  This wasn’t a patient. It wasn’t just a random patient, it was someone I knew, someone I had tried very hard to forget.

  And he looked better than he ever had.

  I only had a second to decide how I was going to react to the fact that Jody Banks was sitting on a blue chair in the corner of the room, was the boy who I had dated in high school.

  The one who had broken my heart.

  In high school, he had been lean and tall and beautiful, with broad shoulders and an easy athletic build. He was still lean, tall and beautiful, but he had worked on sculpting those muscles into a work of art, a black tattoo wrapped around his arm like a vine, all the way to his neck, and disappearing into the back of his shirt.

  He seemed taller, too, but I could tell that it was just because he was sitting up straight. He was looking at me, too, curious wide eyes that weren’t letting up. He licked his lips as I approached him, my gaze darting toward the floor. I didn’t want to look at him and I didn’t necessarily want him to think that I recognized him.

  Though I was a bad actress and I knew that, so the chances that he had recognized me were pretty high. “Mr. Banks?” I asked as I approached him.

  “You can call me Jody,” he said. I could hear the laughter in his voice. “What should I call you?”

  “Dr. Myer,” I replied, looking into his eyes for the first time as I put the tablet down on the table next to me. “What happened?”

  “I fell on my knife rack,” he said, flashing me a smile. I noticed his teeth. They hadn’t been fixed, and his canines, which had always stuck out a little bit, were perhaps even more visible now that he had grown into his
features. “It’s a problem. Dr. Myer.”

  “You fell on your knife rack,” I repeated, slowly. “How?”

  He blinked. “What do you mean, how?”

  “Did you slip?”

  “I… yeah, sure,” he said. “I slipped.”

  “And why was the knife sticking out?” I asked.

  “Well, I fell, knocking it over, and then… you know, it fell on the floor, and it was sticking out, and I couldn’t stop myself, so it stabbed me.”

  I bit my lips. “Do you know why you fell?”

  “Because I slipped,” he said. “The kitchen floor was slippery.”

  “Were you cooking?”

  He thought for a few seconds. “Yes,” he said, eventually. “I was.”

  “Great,” I said. “I’m going to send you for an X-ray. There aren’t a lot of veins or arteries where you, uh, fell on your knife, exactly, but I’d like to rule out anything that might mean you need surgery.”

  He winced, and for the first time since I had seen him in the office, he looked afraid. “Do you think I’ll need surgery?”

  I tried my best to keep my voice neutral. “It’s a possibility,” I said. “But it’s a slight one. I just want to be safe. Kitchen accidents are no joke.”

  He nodded. “Right.”

  “I would like to examine you,” I said. “Or I can get someone else to, if you’re more comfortable with that. Your injuries might be a little worse than they appear at first sight.”

  “You want to examine my arm?”

  “Your entire upper body,” I said. “Can I take off your shirt?”

  He blinked. “Sure,” he said. “I mean, I guess.”

  “Can you do it?”

  He looked down at himself then shook his head. “No,” he said. “I can’t.”

  “Right,” I replied. “Normally, our EMTs would cut it, but—”

  “This shirt is expensive.”

  “Got it,” I said. “I’ll be careful, then.”

  I walked over to face him. The shirt did look expensive, a button-up short-sleeve baby blue and light cerulean green shirt with white buttons that clung to his body. The V-neck white tank top under it at least made things a little less awkward, though not nearly enough. I grabbed the collar of his shirt with the tips of my fingers and took a deep breath as I focused on the shirt and not the man who was wearing it. I was trying to be slow, delicate, because I didn’t want to tug on the knife or make his injury worse.

  It was hard to do something like this carefully, especially when I could feel Jody’s gaze on me. He was staring right at me, never letting go of me, my manufactured calm no match for his quiet but resolute intensity.

  I thought it was probably better to break the tension and finally admit that we did know each other. That way, at least things might be a little more… manageable. Maybe not, but it was worth a try.

  “So,” I said as I undid the top button of his shirt, looking right into his hazel green eyes. “How’s your mom doing?”

  “Well,” he said. “Well, but disappointed.”

  “Good to hear. And your brother?”

  “He’s fine,” he replied. “He lives in Japan now, teaching English to rural children.”

  I smiled. “Good,” I said. “That seems like the kind of thing that would suit him. Is he happy?”

  “He’s happy he’s away from here,” he replied, shrugging his shoulders slightly, which made my fingers slip a little, and I ended up touching his skin for a split second. I moved away, the tips of my skin feeling as if he had just burned me.

  I didn’t want him to have touched me, certainly not when it seemed to have such an effect on me. I thought it wouldn’t—I was over Jody Banks, I had tried the entirety of my life to just forget about him.

  And, for the most part, I had.

  But he was sitting in front of me, vulnerable, and looking better than ever and I… God, I was useless in front of him, even though he was the patient, and even though he was the one who was sitting on the patient’s table and had a knife sticking out of his arm.

  I coughed and moved away from him. “Would you be more comfortable if I had another doctor do this?”

  He smirked, his gaze meeting mine. “I wouldn’t let anyone else do this,” he said. “So no.”

  I was almost done. His shirt was open and I had to tug his sleeve down so that it wouldn’t touch the knife, which was sticking out of his arm. He extended his left arm—the unharmed one—so I would be able to take his sleeve off. I moved behind him to get a better view of what I was doing. The fabric of his button-up had bunched up behind him, which meant that I was going to be able to have enough give to pull it down without hurting him. That was good, at least, because I didn’t want to tug on the knife and make his injury any worse than it already was.

  I walked around him, toward his right arm, and pulled on his shirt and moved it away, pulling the fabric away from his body and then slowly but surely pushing it down and slowly away from him.

  I finally got it away from his arm enough that I slowly managed to move it away from his body enough to avoid the knife. I held my breath as he grabbed his sleeve and yanked down as hard as he could.

  When it landed on the tiled floor in front of us, I felt like I could breathe again.

  CHAPTER TWO

  2009

  The day was sunny and warm, so Jody had opened the screened windows to let some of the air in. The living room at his house was normally chilly, drafts coming from several different doorways in the large Victorian house. We were studying, our books and notebooks in front of us, and it was getting late, so the weather was uncharacteristically nice. We had spent all of the afternoon together, another one of our study sessions that had taken a little too long, even though he seemed to understand the material just fine.

  He sighed and looked outside. “We should have been studying on the grass,” he said dreamily. “It would’ve been really nice.”

  “We would have studied even less than we are now,” I replied, suppressing a giggle. Our knees were touching under the chair and when he turned around to look at me, I couldn’t help but smile.

  I knew I was lucky, but every time my boyfriend looked at me, I felt butterflies fluttering in my stomach, making me feel a little like I was going to throw up. In the best of ways, but still.

  He looked up at me and reached over, grabbing my hands and squeezing them as his fingers intertwined with mine. He inched slightly closer to me, and I saw the ridges on his lips, the green and golden speckles in his hazel eyes shining in the sunlight coming in from the window. He pressed his lips against mine and I felt my heart flip in my chest. I felt like I was going to faint from happiness when he put his hand on my cheek and continued kissing me, hard, until I was losing myself in his lips entirely.

  He moved away from me and chuckled. “Stop,” he said.

  “Me stop? I wasn’t the one who kissed you,” I replied, then kissed him on the lips, hard, without giving him a break. I kissed him so hard that I practically knocked him off the chair, and as he wrapped his arms around my waist, his head tilted up. He was holding onto me hard and I could barely move even as I needed to breathe.

  He moved away from me for a second, still holding onto my hands as he jumped up to his feet. “What time is it?” he asked.

  I looked down at my watch. “Half past five,” I said. “Your parents will be home soon.”

  “Right,” he said. “Then we should make this as quick as possible.”

  I laughed, throwing my head back as he held me close to him. Our bodies were pressed up against one another’s and he was kissing me passionately, not letting me go at all. He was on me, and soon I was kissing him back, my hands on his chest, barely letting go of him.

  I was digging my fingertips into the fabric of his clothes and I could feel how strong and muscular he was under the thin layer of clothing. He was wearing one of those thin t-shirts that he wore to practice. It smelled like him, of his particular musk, which was bi
tter and earthy and sweet, and I could’ve kept smelling him for hours.

  I kissed him desperately, hungry, as he kept his hands around my waist. I could feel his lean muscular frame pressed up against the entirety of my body. I could feel how hard his heart was beating in his body, and my heart perfectly matching up to the rhythm of his. Fuck, he could have held me like that forever, and I would’ve felt like I was in heaven. It felt like I was in heaven, in any case, and I wanted to stay there for good.

  He kissed me hard, pressing against my lips as I found myself moving backward in the large airy dining room, barely noticing when I knocked a chair with my hip, and when he practically knocked the dining room table back. We were making a lot of sound, the way we normally did, and it was a little scary and very exhilarating.

  His mother or father would walk in the door at any second, and it was going to be a problem if they found out that we were doing something we were most certainly not supposed to be doing. He laughed as he pushed me playfully against the wall next to the doorway that led to his bedroom. He pressed his knee up against me, just enough to tease me, and he had me pinned up against the brick wall. With my arms pinned on top of me, our fingers intertwined, as he moved away from my mouth and slid his lips toward my neck.

  I giggled as his shuddering breath sent a shiver down my spine. He was kissing me hard, pressing up against me, his kisses making my muscles and body contract with pleasure.

  He moved away from me, pressed his forehead against me, and his eyes shone as he held my gaze. I looked down at his lips, which he was biting.

  “Do you want to do this? We don’t have to,” he said. “We don’t have to go any further than we have before.”

  “Do you want to stop?”

  “No,” he said. “But I don’t want you to feel like you’re doing anything you don’t want to do.”

  “Does it seem like this is something I don’t want to do?”

  He laughed, kissing me on the lips again. “Okay, but if it’s awkward or weird, we can stop.”

  I grabbed his hand and put it on my waist. “How about we start before we decide to stop?”