Bad Case of Loving You Read online

  Bad Case of Loving You

  Laney Cairo

  Matthew is a medical student, trying to ignore his various roommates’ wild parties and get through his classes. Andrew is his instructor, a doctor at a prestigious British hospital. They’re not supposed to be attracted to each other, but they can’t deny their undeniable chemistry. They come together with a heat that surprises them both, and through doctor’s strikes, dealing with Andrew’s teenaged son, and hospital red tape, Andrew and Matthew learn to live, and love together. Is their relationship just what the doctor ordered?

  * * *

  Matthew Blake is near the end of his medical degree, too busy for a relationship, or even for sex, and struggling to survive his clinical placement. Andrew Maynard is his tutor, sleep-deprived and gorgeous, determined to educate his medical students and resist Matthew.

  Against a background of industrial action at the hospital, they connect, and discover that Matthew, with his cock piercing and long slender hands, understands exactly what Andrew wants and knows how to give it to him.

  BAD CASE OF LOVING YOU

  by Laney Cairo

  Prologue

  “Hey, Mattie!” someone shouted across the crowded bar. I waved a hand at the group of familiar faces, but kept on pushing my way through the crowd.

  It was a good night; the bar was packed and loud, music booming down the far end, lights strobing in time with the music, but I wasn’t there to dance, either. This was my last night of freedom before classes started again, my last chance before the final semester of my medical degree to get really, thoroughly laid, and I didn’t plan to go home alone.

  There were some hot guys there. I bought a lager and found a place near the dance floor to have a really good look around. I was wearing my cuff, just to make sure whoever I picked up knew.

  It took a little bit of time, and I shook my head at a couple of the men who cruised past me, but the man with the goatee caught my fancy, and when he brushed past, I snaked my hand out and caught his wrist.

  This was the test. If he pulled away and scowled at me, then he wasn’t right.

  He didn’t pull away; instead he let me tug him across so he was pressed against me, his shoulder against mine, and I leaned forward and pressed my face against the side of his shaved head.

  He smelled good, of beer and cologne, and he said, “Want to get it on?”

  Outside the pub it was raining, and I zipped up my jacket.

  “You got a place?” he asked, and I nodded.

  “This way.”

  It was only a couple of streets. He walked along beside me, solidly built in his leather jacket, and I said, “My name’s Matthew.”

  “Jake,” he said, and I indicated with my head that the house with the booming stereo was mine.

  The housemates were sprawled in the living room, draped over couches and on the floor, eating pizza and sinking lagers, and I ignored their craned heads and partly audible whistles, and led Jake up the stairs.

  My room was stark, just a mattress on the floor, a pile of textbooks, and a wardrobe with my few clothes stuffed in it, but Jake didn’t say anything, just began to take his clothes off as soon as I’d slid the bolt on the door shut.

  Jake stripped off quickly, revealing a solid body with close-cropped body hair which was pleasantly bristly to touch when I ran the palm of my hand across his chest. He was hard already, thick-cocked and tempting, and I dropped my jacket on the floor and dragged my T-shirt over my head.

  He made a pleased sound at my nipple piercings, and I smiled knowingly and unzipped my jeans.

  “Oh, yeah,” he whispered, dropping to his knees in front of me.

  I had condoms in my back pocket, and I fished one out and ripped it open. It took a little bit of work to roll the latex over the beads of my apadravya piercing, but I’d had plenty of practice, and there was a knack to it. Top bead first, then hold the bar steady with my other thumb and slide the latex over the bottom bead, and then down my cock.

  Jake was endearingly keen, taking all of me in at once, eyes closed, and I let him suck me for a few minutes, just until I was good and worked up, then I said, “On the mattress, on all fours,” as I kicked my jeans off.

  There were latex gloves beside the bed, stolen from my clinical placement last semester, and I ripped a pack of them open and knelt behind Jake.

  He was waxed, tidy and clean, and I ran an experimental fingertip down his crack, just to see him twitch. “How many do you take?” I asked, reaching for the lube.

  “Three,” he said. “There’re poppers in my jacket…”

  I reached across with my unlubed hand and shoved his jacket across the floor toward him, and slid my index finger in without warning.

  He jumped, his body clamping around my finger briefly, and I could feel myself smiling as he gasped. I pulled back, pushed a second finger in, making him squirm, and then added the third. There was sweat beading up his back, and his shoulders were hunched over now, his face pressed against the mattress.

  It was such a turn-on, finding a man who got off on being touched like that, and I watched Jake scramble to get the lid off the little brown bottle of poppers and shove it against his nose, timing the twist and jab of my fingers to his snort.

  Jake slumped forward, gasping, and held the bottle over his shoulder with an unsteady hand as I pulled my fingers out roughly and slammed my cock into him.

  The fumes hit me, and I turned my head away; if I had too much, I wouldn’t have the control I needed to fuck Jake through the mattress.

  He was pliant, the bottle rolling across the bare boards of the floor, his mouth slack and eyes closed, gasping with each thrust of my cock into his arse, each drag of the big bead of my piercing through his body.

  His hand was shoved under his hips, jerking at his cock, his shoulders tense, and I gritted my teeth and held back, waiting for his shouts and the thick smell of come over the amyl before I groaned and let go and fucked him hard, as hard as I could, until I came, too.

  He left, ten minutes later, taking his poppers with him, and I stayed where I was, too fucked to move except to drag my sleeping bag up to stop from freezing. The housemates were partying downstairs, shouting over the pounding music, getting their last bit of fun in before semester started, too.

  It was all work from here on, until after my final exams.

  Chapter One

  When the lift door eventually opened, it was five centimetres lower than the floor, and I helped the orderly lift the wheelchair out over the step, holding my breath so as not to get a noseful of the patient in the chair. Avoiding stench was probably the most important thing I’d learnt so far.

  That, and how to lie about why I was late.

  “Lift broke down,” I said apologetically as I slid into the only empty seat around the Formica table in the staff room.

  Everyone muttered sympathetically. That was what made the excuse so useful; the lifts broke down all the time and we all got stuck in them. In fact, I was already late before the lift doors jammed, and it was entirely my own fault for sleeping in.

  All right, not quite everyone was sympathetic. Dr. Maynard was looking at me dubiously, but I kept my innocent face on and took out my stack of index cards.

  “As I was saying, before Mr. Blake decided to honour us with his presence, expect to be asked to give a précis of any of the patients we see on today’s rounds. Take notes, engage your brains. I’m not here to actually teach you anything; you have to do that yourselves. My only role is to stop the nurses from murdering any of you for messing with their ward,” Dr.

  Maynard said, a flash of wry humour on his face. I wasn’t sure how long he’d been over here, but he hadn’t lost his American accent as far as I could t
ell.

  All of a sudden, he looked human and kind of attractive, in a worn-out, entirely fuelled by caffeine way that I completely identified with. He stood up and led us med students out onto the ward, and there was a certain amount of jostling as we sorted out the pecking order.

  The middle-aged woman with a buzz cut sitting at a PC at the nurses’ station said, “JesusfuckingChrist,” as Dr. Maynard walked up.

  “Good morning to you, too, Jane,” Dr. Maynard said sweetly, smiling at her. “You’re the CN today? Ready for rounds?”

  “Unfortunately,” she said, presumably not swayed by his charm. “Let’s do this. Just stop the kids from breaking anything.”

  “What’s a CN?” the tiny Asian girl beside me asked in a whisper.

  “Clinical nurse,” I murmured back. “Shift coordinator.”

  Nevins, who I knew from anatomy labs, said, “She Who Must be Obeyed.”

  We shuffled along behind Dr. Maynard, pens and index cards at the ready, then all packed into a cubicle around a bed holding a shrivelled-up old woman.

  “How’s the pain, Mrs. Mac?” Dr. Maynard asked loudly, bending forward over the old woman.

  “Can’t complain, doctor,” she said, and Jane rolled her eyes expressively. The old girl obviously did complain. I reached forward and took the folder out of the rack at the foot of the bed.

  “You can’t do that,” Nevins whispered, but I ignored him, opened the folder, and scanned the obs chart and the meds sheet quickly.

  I jumped when Dr. Maynard said, “Perhaps Mr. Blake could tell us the pertinent information about Mrs. McDonald’s pain management regime?”

  Jesus Christ. There was a trick here. I looked through the oxycodone entries. The old dear was PRNing to the max.

  Every three hours…

  There it was.

  “Um,” I said. “Her analgesics’ frequency drops off during visiting hours. She’s going five hours at least between doses in the afternoon.”

  Dr. Maynard nodded approvingly and I knew what a pet dog felt like when he dropped a soggy stick at someone’s feet.

  “And?” he said.

  And? What else was there? Oh, impact on management, of course.

  I flicked through the file to her nursing admission. Mrs.

  McDonald lived alone, with her family dropping in every couple of days to check on her.

  “The patient might have a better quality of life in a less isolated environment. Living with other people in a hostel, perhaps.”

  “I’m not going to no fucking old age home,” Mrs. McDonald said. “You can all just fuck off.”

  There was a snigger from my fellow students, and Dr.

  Maynard’s eyes were twinkling at me when I looked up at him. I closed my mouth quickly, kicking myself for having walked into that trap.

  He patted Mrs. McDonald’s hand. “We’re not going to put you in a home, Mrs. Mac,” he said. “I was thinking of you going to live with one of your daughters.”

  “They’re monsters,” Mrs. McDonald said. “They won’t let me have my ciggies.”

  “Seems to me that you can’t have had many cigarettes stuck in a hospital bed,” Dr. Maynard said. “And you don’t seem to be suffering too badly. How about I talk to your family and we see what we can work out?”

  Mrs. McDonald harrumped and tucked her bedding around herself more securely with hands wizened by arthritis. I looked at the medication chart again. Yep, the old bat was on nicotine patches, that was why she wasn’t having cravings.

  Dr. Maynard nodded at Jane. “Page me when the Mac clan comes in to visit, and we’ll do a family conference.”

  I put the folder back where it came from and we moved en masse into the next cubicle, all the students scribbling notes frantically. DAP. Data, assessment, plan. My scrawl was illegible.

  The rest of the round was all like that. We took turns being idiots, though Nevins was the biggest idiot, making a patient cry by pumping the blood pressure cuff up too far.

  In the staff room afterward we sat around, trying to look insignificant, while Dr. Maynard explained to us exactly how we had stuffed up and handed out follow-up work.

  “I want a ten-minute presentation on these patients. I want to know what’s wrong with them, and how we can get them back on their feet.” He allocated us a patient each and I kind of expected to be given Mrs. McDonald, but he gave me the teenage girl with renal insufficiency instead. I was relieved; I had some hope of charming the girl into talking to me.

  We all dreamed of making some kind of earth-shattering breakthrough in a case, like Amy Tsien had last year. She’d found a neurological deficit from aminoglycoside ototoxicity that all of the medical specialities team had missed. It had earned her an A for her major case study, something that was supposed to be impossible.

  I wasn’t the only one thinking along these lines, because Nevins said, “Is this assessable?”

  Dr. Maynard stared at Nevins for a moment as if he was something nasty that had been spilt on the floor. “It is now,”

  he said. “And for asking that question, I can tell you the best mark you can hope to get is a C. Now all of you, get out of here, and let me do some real work.”

  There was a coffee and loo break before we were due in anesthetics and we stood eagerly as Dr. Maynard collected together his papers and files.

  As we left, Dr. Maynard said, “Mr. Blake? A moment, please?”

  I looked wistfully across the ward as my fellow med students in their short white jackets and shiny new stethoscopes bolted for the dodgy lifts. “Yes, sir.”

  “I want you in on the Mac family conference. Have you got a cell phone?”

  I nodded and scrawled my number on the notepad he pushed toward me. He looked less tired now, and really rather attractive with his strong jaw and faded blond hair, and I wished for a moment that I was giving him my number in a bar somewhere.

  “Thanks,” Dr. Maynard said, and I nodded and practically ran for the stairs. No way was I going to risk the lifts when there were exactly seven minutes for me to get a coffee in.

  Chapter Two

  The Mac clan was as argumentative as Mrs. Mac herself, and the family conference was loud and boisterous, but I didn’t sense any underlying hostility. It seemed this was just the way the whole family related to the world.

  It had ended satisfactorily, with Mrs. Mac eventually pointing one gaunt hand at the short fat daughter and announcing she was going to live with Our Sheryl and they could all shut up.

  Matthew Blake leaned against the wall of the elevator, looking frazzled, like most students did, and I smiled at him.

  “You okay?”

  He smiled weakly back. “Yeah, though I think my head hurts now. Are all family conferences like that?”

  I shook my head. “That was a good one. I never doubted that the kids would do the right thing. It was just up to Mrs.

  Mac to decide who could look after her best.”

  “What’s a bad one like?” Blake asked, and he went up a little in my estimation. Most med students would have been too overwhelmed from the family conference to try and extract additional information from it.

  “Sometimes families refuse to look after an aged parent.

  Sometimes bad things happen.” The elevator door opened and Blake got out, too, following me to the cupboard that the hospital deigned to call my office. Another point for the kid.

  He could have just stayed in the elevator.

  “Bad things?” he asked as I nodded to the permed ogre, who was technically the general medical secretary, and unlocked my office door.

  He followed me in and I collapsed down into my squeaky chair and ignored the blinking light on my phone. If someone really wanted to talk to me, they’d use my pager. “Yeah, bad things.” Blake sat down on the plastic garden chair that was the only other thing to sit on apart from my desk, which was covered in textbooks and coffee cups and Xeroxes.

  “We had a patient a couple of years ago. I can’t remember wha
t his exact complaint was; basically he was confused and failing to thrive. He was underweight, so we asked his family to sit with him for meal times, just to encourage him to eat.”

  I must have looked grim because Blake said, “What happened?”

  “The nurses noticed something. Every meal, whoever was supposed to be feeding him was eating his meal for him.”

  “Elder abuse?” Blake said, frowning. “How could they do that?”

  The concern on Blake’s face touched me, made me really look at him for the first time. He was lovely: clear-skinned, dark curls, long elegant hands. God, it was usually only the female med students I looked at like that.

  “Sometimes love and hate and power all look the same,” I said. “Kinship betrayals are the worst kind. He went to an old age home, where at least he’d get something to eat. There wasn’t much else we could do for him.”

  “But that won’t happen to Mrs. Mac?” Blake asked, biting at his bottom lip.

  “My assessment is that she seems to have plenty of power in the family. Of course, I might be wrong there.”

  The cogs were whirring in Blake’s head. Welcome to the world of general medicine, sweetheart; there’s no easy surgical answers here.

  Blake nodded, and he still looked worried.

  “All any of us can do is be aware,” I said. “You just learned something that I doubt the rest of your intake have figured out yet.” I smiled at him and then opened my desk drawer, taking out a bag of candy and offering it to him. “Gummi bear?”

  He took one and shook his head in disbelief. “You keep sweets in your desk?”

  I pointed at the box of Kleenex on the desk. “Standard teaching aides. Gummi bears and tissues will fix most things.”

  My pager was whirring away on my hip as Blake left. I propped my feet on my desk, switched my monitor on, and logged into the mail server to retrieve the pages. Post-it notes festooned the monitor; I added two more to the collection as I listened to my messages. Med school questions about assessment. A message from my ex about our son.