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Dr and Mrs Love
I returned to Allie’s side, coffee in hand, fear in breath and vomit still lodged in my nostrils. She looked like the porcelain swans my grandmother had on her whatnot, except horizontal and I worried that I might break her if I said the wrong thing.
“Y’know what I realized? This was all a set-up,” Allie coughed. “Love is a set-up. Every romantic comedy we watched growing up, we mapped it out perfectly.” The lovers were never meant for each other. There was always some big division that should’ve been the hint that they should’ve ignored each other.”
“Do you want any water, honey?” I asked.
“Then one of them, the dumber one, they’re just so dedicated. They don’t care that the other person is black in the 1940s. They don’t care that they prefer watching the Dallas Stars over Star Trek. They don’t care that the other person is a lowlife loser. ‘We can make it work!’” Allie mocked.
“So the lowlife loser is the smarter one?”
“Evidently.”
“Weren’t you the one who chased me?”
“Doctors are sexy, John.”
Doctors are not sexy. They are the most emotionally closed-off people one could meet, especially surgeons. A general practitioner at least has enough distance from a patient before they throw up at the carcinogens trapped in a black coffin that is…