Story 36 of 100

Photo by Jakayla Toney on Unsplash

The Allergist.

I hung up on her twice before my better angels got the better of me.

To say that I suffer every day would be an understatement. I am in agony. My life is full of misery and torture. And yet this is the life I have chosen.

Let me start from the beginning. My name is Agnes Short and I am a nurse. I work in a doctor’s office, an allergist’s office to be more precise. People come here, and everyone is always sneezing or coughing, with running eyes and noses. And me? I happen to have just a touch of hypochondria. I don’t actually call it that. I call it being super sensitive, but I’ve heard other people call me a hypochondriac, and honestly, it’s hard to disagree with them. I am terrified of germs, to a very unreasonable degree, and every day I rub shoulders (literally) with supremely germy people.

Why do I do this, why do I put myself through this misery? There are some excellent reasons I tell myself to get through each day. For one thing, Dr. Vidalia is beautiful. I don’t throw this word around easily, especially around men, but if you’d ever see him, you’d understand. He has curly brown hair, and when he runs his hand through his hair in this absent-minded way of his, the curls wind up framing his face, he is beautiful. He has dark green eyes, and when he smiles, they crinkle in the corners, ever so adorably. He has full lips, and perfect teeth, and his wrists, oh, I melt. His fingers are perfect — he would have been a successful surgeon. I cannot believe his mother didn’t push him to become a surgeon with those fingers — long and slender, like a pianist’s, long and slender, yet strong and capable-looking. He knows sign language, too. I saw him “speak” to a patient, and his hands looked like two birds in flight, an elegant dance.

He has wide shoulders and they taper into a thinner waist line, and he has such a nice butt, some days it takes all of my willpower not to smack him on his perfect rear end at the conclusion of the day, you know, instead of a high five.

Anyway, he’s perfect in just about every way for me, except for one. Dr. Vidalia is gay. His husband is the luckiest man alive, to wake up every morning to the good doctor. So, I can look all I want (surreptitiously, of course, it would be creepy otherwise), but never touchy-touchy. It…