Chapter 2: Kitt

Friday, November 18, 2022

“Are you sure I look okay?” Jade asked me.

I took my eyes off the road and admired her again. “You’re perfect, Jade.”

She was gorgeous. She reminded me of that song by Ricky Martin, “Livin la Vida Loca.” Skin is the color of mocha. That described Jade to a tee. I loved her skin, her eyes, her hair. I was pretty sure I was falling in love with her, but I wasn’t about to tell her those words and rock our love boat while we were still figuring out the balancing act of me, Jade, and Marcy.

Jade took my hand and squeezed it. Her eyes traveled down me, stopping at my new jeans. “You look hot. Thank you for letting me pick out your clothes.”

I shrugged. “You have great taste.”

“Want a blowjob?” she said, grinning.

“Now?” I asked. “We’re going to be there in four minutes.”

“I can be quick.” She had a wicked twinkle in her eye. Her lips are devil red. Her hand was already unzipping my jeans and fishing out my dick. “Traitor,” I muttered to my penis as it stiffened against my will. It wasn’t as though I didn’t want a blowjob. I just wasn’t mentally ready for it to happen in my car right then and there. But with Jade, I was learning to be a little more spur-of-the-moment.

My girlfriend jacked the length of my shaft a few times, then bent down and took me into her mouth. I forced myself to stay calm and keep my eyes on the road. “Don’t crash,” she mumbled through my meat. Then she giggled.

“Fuck me,” I groaned.

“Pretty much,” she answered.

Her head bobbed up and down my lap. Her tongue pressed firmly on the side of my cock while her lips formed a tight O. I kept telling myself to focus on the road, but it was difficult. I stopped at a red light, and a guy sitting in the passenger seat of a truck looked over at me. Then he slapped his buddy’s arm, and they both leaned over and laughed while giving me multiple thumbs up. I didn’t know what to do except return the thumbs up. The guy in the passenger seat rolled down his window and hollered, “Can I get in on that too?”

Jade popped off my dick and gave them the finger. “You wish!” Then she went right back to what she had been doing.

The enthusiastic fellatio continued all the way to the bar. And I came right as I was pulling into the parking lot. Jade sealed her lips around my cock and swallowed all my man milk, even licking me clean before sitting back up with a satisfied smirk. All I could do at that point was thank her.

We held hands as we walked into the bar called the Flaming Bush. A few people were outside smoking. Loud music assaulted us the moment we opened the doors. The bar was an open space with pool tables on one far side, some booths on the other, a broken mechanical bull, and a long semicircle bar that occupied much of the center space. Most of my work friends were playing pool, but a few sat at the bar.

“Want me to introduce you?” I asked Jade.

“Yeah!” she said excitedly.

Bethany spotted me first and was already making her way toward me. Her eyes darted between me and Jade. “Hi!” she shouted over the music. “You must be Jade. I’m Bethany.”

Jade shook Bethany’s hand. “Of course. Kitt talks about you a lot. It’s nice to finally meet you.”

“Does he?” Bethany asked, looking at me now. “Good things, I hope.”

“Nothing but.”

Bethany and I grew up together. We went to elementary, middle, and high school together. My earliest memory of her was from second grade in Mrs. Carter’s classroom. My mom had made me a turkey and cheese sandwich with onions because, at the time, I was in this onion craze. After lunch, Bethany tapped me on the shoulder and gave me a piece of Trident gum because the girl in front of me complained that my breath stunk.

“Here,” she had said, “this is good for your teeth. I’m going to be a nurse.”

For some reason, we became best friends after that. I saved that gum wrapper and several others for years, keeping them in a dresser drawer as a mark of our friendship. After high school came college and then nursing school. We were best friends until she started dating my roommate Bart in our sophomore year. I wasn’t mad at her for it, but it changed the dynamic of our relationship enough that we went from best friends to good friends and had stayed such ever since. Besides one bizarre night in our senior year of high school when she became my first kiss, our relationship had always remained purely platonic.

But there was no doubting how cute Bethany was. She had a classic girl next door look: straight brunette hair, white, olive complexion, a dimple on her left side when she smiled, and big brown eyes. She played softball in high school and college but had a more petite frame than many of her teammates. Her barely C-cup breasts seemed quite large on her slim, athletic figure. And because of that light olive complexion, she always looked at least a little tanned, even in the winter.

“Gum?” Bethany said, offering me a stick of Trident, the same kind she’d chewed since elementary school.

“Thanks,” Jade and I said as we each took a piece.

“Did you bring a date?” I asked Bethany as the three of us headed toward the pool tables.

Bethany gave me a look that said, “Are you kidding?”

I offered an apologetic shrug. Lots of men found Bethany pretty but a little intimidating. Not because she had a hard-edged personality. She was charming. Nor did she have an imposing stature. She was about 5’7”. It was because she was so innocent. As far as I knew, she’d never had sex despite being twenty-two years old. Neither she nor Bart has ever admitted to me the reason they broke up, but I suspected it had to do with him wanting to move faster than she did.

“I’ll have to tell you all my stories about Kitt,” Bethany said.

Jade linked her arm around Bethany’s. “I think we’re going to be great friends.”

A couple of my co-workers, Janiqua and London, were playing a game of billiards against Patty and Kelly while other nurses watched and chatted. Patty and Kelly were sort of the Mama Bears of the ICU. They were either in their sixties or nearing the age. They kept the rest of us in line by reminding us how much worse it was being a nurse thirty to forty years ago. At the pool table next to Janiqua and London, two ICU doctors were competing while more were ordering drinks at the bar.

“Where’s Dr. Granger?” I asked Bethany.

She rolled her eyes in that knowing way I hated. “She decided to switch shifts with Dr. Morris so he could hang out with his buddies.” She nodded toward the other table where Dr. Morris and a few others were shooting pool.

“That was nice of her,” I commented, trying to hide the note of deep disappointment in my voice. Then I turned to Jade. “We should hop in a game of pool, and I can introduce you around some more.”

Janiqua finished her shot and came over to us. Janiqua had only started in the ICU the year before me. She was a tall black woman, nearly as tall as me, with blue and pink extensions in her hair. She had a very pretty face. Many people said she looked like an even cuter version of Brandy. I had to look up Brandy to verify that comment, but it was true. She hugged me and then hugged Jade.

“Look at you!” She said to Jade. Judging by her over-the-top behavior, Janiqua had clearly had a couple of drinks already. “You are so cute! What are you doing with this guy?”

Patty and Kelly came over next and introduced themselves. Then London. London was the peppiest of all nurses in the ICU. She didn’t need coffee or alcohol to be in a talkative mood. Her bubbly, naturally flirtatious personality seemed to fill the room. I let Jade get swept up by the other nurses while I went over and talked to some of the doctors.

“What is up, Kitt?” Dr. Singh, a short middle-aged Indian doctor, asked as I approached.

“Cute date,” said Dr. Morris. “Where’d you meet her?”

“I tutor nursing and pre-med students as a side gig. It helps me pay off my student loans faster. She is one of my students.”

Both doctors smirked and nodded their approval. “Which is she?” Dr. Singh asked. “Pre-med or nursing.”

“Pre-med.”

Their smirks reminded me of the movie Meet the Parents and the stigma the main character deals with regarding male nurses. There was a certain amount of truth to that, especially between me and male doctors. For me, it was an easy choice. I never wanted to go to medical school. I never wanted to do four more years of school, followed by residency and a possible fellowship to work in the health field. I made good money as a nurse; I had minimal debt. I didn’t want to be approaching thirty and still in training. It was the right decision for me.

But some of the male doctors, and perhaps even a few of the female nurses like Patty and Kelly, couldn’t wrap their intelligent brains around the idea of a man who didn’t want to be a physician, no matter how many times I explained it. One of the ER doctors even went so far as to ask me if I was gay. When I said no, he asked me if I was in nursing for the pussy.

“Because doctors have no trouble getting pussy,” he informed me.

Fortunately, most of those conversations were behind me, but there was an unspoken awkwardness now. It started when I told Dr. Morris and Dr. Singh that Jade was a pre-med student. I ignored the change in their demeanor and switched the subject to the college football game between USF and Tulsa, playing on the TV mounted near the pool tables. We talked about sports for a few minutes. Dr. Singh was an unabashed Cowboys fan, so Dr. Morris and I mocked Jerry Jones’ poor decision-making as an owner. Dr. Singh told us all to fuck off in a good-humored way.

Bethany appeared by my side a few minutes later and slipped an imported beer into my hand, cap already removed. I took a sip and found that I liked it a lot. After a glance at the label, I clinked bottles with hers and thanked her for the drink.

“Jade is adorable,” Bethany told me. “I’m so happy for you.”

I scanned the bar until I found Jade between London and Janiqua. Somehow, she had gotten a drink, probably compliments of one of my friends who didn’t care about my date being nineteen. Our eyes met for a moment, and we smiled at each other. I turned my attention back to my longtime friend.

“Thank you. She is great. I don’t know how much legs our relationship has yet, but I’m enjoying myself.”

“And her being in another relationship isn’t an issue?” Bethany asked with a dash of skepticism. “I mean, it’s just hard to believe—”

“Not yet,” I answered. “Marcy is—she and I—” I couldn’t decide how to phrase my thoughts. “We’re all learning as we go, I guess.”

“Are you in an arrangement where you can also date other people?” She cocked an eyebrow at me and sipped her orange juice and vodka. “People you might work with, perhaps?”

Since my first day on the job in the ICU, I nursed a massive crush on Dr. Uma Granger. And the longer I’d gotten to know the doctor, the more I liked her. She was beautiful, intelligent, clever, and had a dry sense of humor that not everyone seemed to get, but I thought was hilarious. But what I liked most about her was her deep care for every patient. I’d never met anyone with as much empathy as Dr. Granger.

When we started our rotations during nursing school, Dr. Granger inspired me to join the ICU team and work toward getting my master’s degree in Critical Care. Our hospital was one of the few in the country that let new nursing school grads go straight into the ICU as part of their CCRN program.

Now that I worked with her, my feelings had only grown. Dr. Granger, however, was a consummate professional and would never date a colleague. Plus, she was several years older than me, and her work was her life. Bethany was the only person who knew about my feelings for Dr. Granger, and she kept my secrets. But now and then, she still enjoyed ribbing me about it.

“If something were to happen between me and Dr. Granger, she would have to make the first move,” I told Bethany.

“Maybe I wasn’t talking about Dr. Granger...” Bethany said, sipping her drink.

I followed suit with a sip of my beer. “Has someone else said something? Because I haven’t gotten any vibes from anyone at the hospital.”

Bethany squinted at me over the rim of her glass. What was she hiding? She clearly knew something I didn’t. But I wasn’t about to play games with her.

“Either spit it out or don’t.”

Bethany shrugged and walked away. She could be a little weird about our various relationships, not that they happened often. Jade was my first real girlfriend and the first person with whom I’d had sex. I’d fooled around with a couple of women in college, getting as far as blowjobs and fingering, but I was pretty sure Bethany hadn’t done that yet. As mentioned earlier, our friendship had suffered when she and Bart had dated in college, primarily because of her weirdness about the whole thing.

I put Dr. Granger and Bethany out of my mind and focused on having a good time with my girlfriend. Jade and I continued to mingle until a pool table opened, and then we played two rounds as a team. We lost both games, but neither had much experience, so I wasn’t surprised. What surprised me was how much everyone seemed to like her and how easily she talked to my coworkers. I was starting to think they liked her more than me.

We stayed for over two hours, then went back to my place. Jade was a little tipsy from having so many drinks pressed into her hand, but I knew I would be driving home and thus only nursed the one beer Bethany had bought me.

“I can’t wait to work in the hospital!” Jade said from the passenger seat. “I only have four more years to go!”

I shot her a sideways glance. “Four more years until you’re in medical school. Then four more years until your first residency.”

Jade sighed in a wildly exaggerated way. This was only my second time seeing her drunk. She became dramatic and talkative, up to a certain amount of alcohol.

“I’m so hungry,” she declared. “Maybe I can be an Intensivist so we can work together. Wouldn’t that be fun? We could sneak into the closet and have sex.”

“The closet?” I repeated. I tried to think of where two people could go to have sex without getting caught by our coworkers. It wasn’t as easy as it looked in films and TV shows. “Yeah. Okay.”

“Let’s go back to your place and fuck.”

“I thought you were hungry.”

“I am. You can cook. I’ll suck.”

“I thought you wanted to review for your anatomy exam?” I reminded her gently.

Jade giggled. “Getting naked is anatomy.”

“Oh boy,” I muttered under my breath.

By the time I got home, however, Jade had fallen asleep. I carried her up to my apartment and put her in bed. Once she was tucked in, I went to my couch and opened my laptop. My go-to websites when I surfed were eBay, Heritage Auctions, and cgccomics. I did not read many comic books, but I collected the first appearances of superheroes and villains. My collection at that time amounted to about three hundred comic books. My most prized ones hung on the wall of my apartment in custom display cases, preventing UV light from fading the covers. My most valuable piece in those days was a mint issue of Marvel Comics Avengers #57—the first appearance of the Vision.

I liked to check websites and see what was out there for auction or purchase. I also liked knowing what specific titles were going for. I was saving up for the first appearance of Sam Wilson, aka The Falcon, which was currently valued at nearly $10,000. Two things were stopping me. First, I hadn’t saved up enough money. And second, no one was selling one in good enough condition to make me want to buy it. Every few years, an issue of Amazing Fantasy #15 or Captain America #1 would be auctioned. I enjoyed drooling over them and fantasizing about owning them, but it would never happen. In a few days, the first appearance of Thor in Journey into Mystery was expected to sell for over half a million dollars.