Doc Day Afternoon (NC-17) 2/4
ii.
“Do you think I’m not cut out to be a doctor? Is that it?”
“Whazzahuh?” Alex jerks her head up from the arm of the couch and blinks blearily at Justin, silverware clattering on her empty plate as it threatens to tumble off her lap. Again, it’s only Justin’s reflexes that keep it from crashing to the floor. She realizes that she drifted off to sleep almost instantly once she finished her breakfast-one of the most potent side effects of Alex Russo’s Patented Hangover Cure. And while her legs are still kind of loosely wrapped around Justin’s middle, they’re no longer locked at the ankle. (And, ow, her right leg is actually asleep from the knee down, where it's pinned between him and the couch.) He could easily have worked himself free at any time, probably without her even noticing. But instead he’s still sitting there, calmly, watching her…with this oddly intense, forlorn kind of expression on his face.
She reaches up to rub the sleep out of her eyes as Justin returns her plate to the coffee table, and tries to sit up. Belatedly she realizes how high her camisole is riding up after her slide down the arm of the couch-high enough to give Justin full view of her midriff and maaaaybe even a glimpse of underboob. Flushing, she hurriedly pulls it down and smoothes it out before he turns to face her again.
“You don’t think I’d make a good doctor?” he asks again, his voice strangely raw.
Alex blinks, and casts a quick glance at the television. Buffy and Angel haven’t done the deed yet, but it’s definitely heading in that direction, so that means she’s been out…what? Twenty, twenty-five minutes?
“Have you been sitting there thinking about that this whole time?” she frowns at Justin.
He barely shrugs his shoulders in response. “Do you or don’t you?”
“Well…,” Alex says, rubbing at her eyes again, if only because the intense way he’s staring into them is starting to make her vaguely uncomfortable. “I’m just surprised, I guess. I didn’t think you were serious. Haven’t you always said you wanted to build robots, or beat them at chess, or whatever? This whole doctor thing is kind of out of left field.”
He shrugs almost imperceptibly again, a gesture that would probably be lost on virtually anyone who wasn’t her.
“Up until last week, yeah. Robotic Engineering was totally going to be my major. But then I had College!Justin stuck in my head for a few days, and he just kept thinking-“ and here, he puts on College!Justin’s hippie voice-“’Robots are bogus, dude. They're just soulless machines, tools of ‘The Man’. It’s people that need putting together, broham.’”
“Yeah, please stop doing that voice,” Alex says, cringing.
“It just made me think that maybe I ought to reconsider my priorities, y'know?” Justin sighs. “He also pointed out that, statistically speaking, robots in science fiction tend to enslave and/or destroy humanity more often than they actually benefit us. Which, granted, is a stereotype I've been fighting against my entire life, but it’s not exactly an invalid point, either…”
“Justin,” Alex cuts him off with a sigh, before his whole nerd rant picks up steam, “College!Justin was kind of a douche. And by ‘kind of’, I mean he was a huge douche. Even I can say that, and I genuinely liked the dude. Besides, just because you’re a complete dorkus for robots doesn’t mean you can’t help people, too. You help people all the time!”
Justin raises an eyebrow at her.
“OK, so you help me all the time,” Alex amends. “But that counts! I am totally people!”
“Barely,” Justin says flatly, but he smiles ever so slightly as he says it. “So, you do think I could make a good doctor, then?”
“Um…well…” Alex trails off and looks away, staring blankly at the TV, worrying her bottom lip with her teeth. Justin watches her silently, his concern obviously growing by the second.
“Are you trying to think of a diplomatic way of saying ‘no’?” he asks softly after a moment.
“Huhwha? Oh no, sorry, just got distracted by the shirtless vampire,” Alex says, turning back to him. “Honestly, dude, you’d make a terrible doctor. I mean really, really bad.”
Justin’s mouth gapes open as he sits up indignantly. “I would NOT!”
“Oh, thank God!” Alex gasps, taking the opportunity to finally yank her right foot out from behind him. She grimaces as she crosses it over her left leg and tries to massage the life back into it. “Ow ow ow, pins and needles, ow!”
“I would be an AMAZING doctor!” Justin says, using that breathy, scandalized voice again, and despite the pain in her leg, Alex can’t help but smile a little.
“Dude, no. You so wouldn’t,” she says, wincing as she kneads her calf with both hands. “Seriously. You’d totally suck.”
Eyes wide, Justin sputters a bunch of random consonants at her, and she actually has to reach up to wipe the spittle off the tip of her nose.
“I’ll have you know,” he harrumphs, his voice getting more scandalized and breathy by the second, “that every career day aptitude test I’ve ever taken-“
“-probably hasn’t asked you about your sad little Fetal Pig story,” Alex interjects. “Or the Halloween Sorority Party Disaster 4 story. Or about that time you hyperventilated in health class in third grade when they tried to explain where babies came from. Or-“
“Hey, I’m not the one who almost tossed her cookies before!” Justin protests. “I sat through an entire hour of that documentary before you showed up, making detailed notes, and I didn’t even feel queasy once!”
“I was eating breakfast and still half in the bag!” Alex shoots back. “You were completely sober, and you still had to take motion sickness pills! And let’s just see how ‘detailed’ these notes are…”
Both of them reach for the legal pad on the coffee table at the same time, but for once, Alex is faster. She snatches the pad away from him, glances down at its contents, then looks narrowly at him and flips it over, as if demanding an explanation.
Justin doesn’t look, but casts his eyes down, locked on a birthmark three inches above her left knee.
“It’s…a mnemonic device,” he begins, “designed to help me remember-“
“IT’S A CRAPPY STICK FIGURE DRAWING OF CAPTAIN JIM BOB SHERWOOD FIGHTING GIRL SPACE PIRATES!” Alex shouts, throwing the legal pad at his head.
Justin dodges to the side just in time, and the pad sails harmlessly past…until it collides with the blue lamp on the bookshelf just behind him. They both wince as it falls to the floor with a crash.
“Oops,” Alex says, in a small voice.
“Yeah, we really should move that,” Justin sighs, glancing over his shoulder at the mess. He shrugs and turns his attention back to Alex. “You see, Alex, you may THINK they’re girl space pirates, but what your untrained mind doesn’t comprehend, is that they REALLY represent-“
“Don’t bullshit a bullshitter, Justin,” Alex mocks him, crossing her arms just beneath her breasts. (And the audible gulp she gets from him as it tightens her camisole against them is far more rewarding than she would have expected.) "I know you. You only ever doodle when you're trying to distract yourself. Let’s face it: you are WAY too squeamish to even THINK of becoming a doctor. And we haven’t even gotten into the whole prude factor, yet.”
“’Prude factor’?” Justin snorts. “What the hell are you talking about, Alex? I’m not a prude.”
“OHPLEASE!” Alex scoffs. She holds up one hand and starts ticking off fingers. “You shower in your gym shorts at school…you still take bubble baths to hide your shame from the world…you flip out if I so much as leave a pair of pantyhose hanging from the shower rod…”
“Do you have any idea how freaky it is to go the bathroom in the middle of the night, sit down, and find yourself staring at what you think is a shriveled littlle pair of legs dangling before you in the darkness?!” Justin shudders at the thought.
“How do you think you’re going to handle examining people, Justin?” Alex presses. “Naked people. Ladies! PRETTY ladies! What if that Channel 10 weather girl came to see you with a yeast infection, huh? What then?”
Justin flushes deeply, in his cheeks and behind his ears. “Well, I’m not really planning on being an OBGYN, sooooo…”
“Justin, c’mon!” Alex groans. “What if it was me?”
Justin makes a face. “Uh, Alex, if you’re trying to tell me you have a yeast infection, I really don’t wanna-“
She cuts him off with a kick to the side, and he grunts satisfyingly.
“Don’t be gross!” Alex snarls. “What if I came to you just for…like, an annual checkup, or something? Do you really think you could do it?”
Justin flushes again, even deeper this time, but he shrugs as if it’s no big deal. “Sure.”
“Oh, COME ON! Seriously?!"
“Yeah, why not?” Justin squeaks-and again, his eyes are darting everywhere around the room, landing on everything that isn’t her. “I’ve seen you n-naked before. Hell, we used to take baths together until I was, like, seven…”
“I was FIVE then! Justin, you can’t even look at me in my underwear now without freaking out!”
“Pfft, whatever,” says Justin, waving a hand dismissively. “I’m looking at you now, aren’t I?”
“Actually, no,” she says pointedly, swinging her legs off his lap and standing up. “But let's see what happens when you do. Observe.”
Watching him over her shoulder until she’s sure she has his attention, Alex reaches down and scoops her fork up off her plate on the coffee table. She presents it to him, dangling it from the end in her left hand. After he frowns at her, clearly bewildered, she turns her back to him, holds the fork out to her side at shoulder level, and drops it to the floor with a clatter. Then, her knees pressed tightly together, she bends forward at the waist-ever so slowly-to pick it up.
The sound of Justin hissing his breath in through his teeth as she presents to him is the single most gratifying sound she’s ever heard in her entire life. It makes her tingle in places she ought not be tingling.
She springs back up quickly, grinning from ear to ear, then spins on the balls of her feet to face him, casually tossing the fork back onto her plate with a clatter. If Justin was red before, he’s gone positively purple now, and he appears to have forgotten how to blink.
“I trust I’ve made my point,” she says evenly, flopping back down onto the couch next to him. "Prude."
“I-“ The word comes out as a croak, and Justin has to swallow a couple times before he tries again. “I sincerely doubt most of my patients will be doing the ‘bend and snap’ for my benefit, Alex. I don’t know if you’ve ever actually been to a doctor, but there it’s mostly ‘turn your head and cough’, really.”
Alex deflates just a little. OK, so he’s seen that movie, too. She still presses her advantage. “You really think you could examine me without popping something?”
Justin nods, and crosses his legs and folds his hands neatly in his lap, in what must be the least nonchalant way ever. (And, oh God, she was actually thinking more along the lines of a burst blood vessel or something, not…eyyuggh…but given that she’s the one who started this, she’s totally not going to show him how freaked out she is.)
“Totally,” he says. “All it takes is a little professional distance. Clinical detachment. Just like clearing your mind before casting a spell. I think I can manage that just fine.”
“OK then, you’re on.” Alex jumps up off the couch again, then reaches her hand back towards him. “Let’s go.”
Justin frowns at her blankly. “Go?”
Alex rolls her eyes, and holds her hand to her ear, thumb and pinky sticking out like a telephone receiver. “Paging Doctor Justin. Doctor Justin, to exam room one, please.”
Justin blinks, then narrows his eyes at her. The corner of his mouth twitches up in an unfamiliar smirk.
“Alex, are you…asking me to play doctor with you?”
Alex suddenly feels her cheeks burn, but keeps her expression level, her eyes steeled. “What’s the matter, Colonel Sanders? Chicken?”
And wow, there’s something she hasn’t said to him since she was, like, eight. But it still seems to do the trick, because Justin’s smirk disappears as his eyebrows knit together in annoyance.
“Ba-kwok!” Alex adds gently, taunting him.
“Fine!” Justin snaps, jumping up off the couch and stepping forward, glaring down at her. “Just let me get my med kit!”
“You have a-? Wait, look who I’m asking. Of course you have a med kit.” She thinks about it for a second, then chuckles.
“Lemme guess…is it, like, from a Captain Jim Bob Sherwood Barnyard Space-Vet Playset, or something?”
Justin stiffens, and juts his chin out at her in defiance. “I don’t have to answer that.”
“Noooooo, you don’t, Justin,” Alex sighs, reaching up to pinch the bridge of her nose. “You really, really don’t.”
“Just meet me in the lair in two minutes,” he growls, holding up two fingers for emphasis.
“Oh, I’ll be there,” she snarls back.
“Fine.”
"Fine!"
And with that, Justin turns on his heel and storms away, taking the stairs on the spiral staircase two at a time as he heads up to his room. Alex glares after him until he’s out of sight, then makes her way towards the stairs leading down into the Sub Station. Her stomach protests a little as she bounds her way downwards, and for the first time this afternoon, she curses rum and cherry Coke.
Because it’s so totally their fault she’s feeling nauseous again. Not at all a sick feeling that maybe, this time, she’s finally pushed things too far.
Or, y’know, a nervous thrill that, maybe, she’s finally pushed things just far enough.
Nah, it’s totally just the rum and cherry Coke. Totally.
Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV