Page 31 of Clinically Awkward

“Good. Because I can’t handle any more chaos this week.”

My phone buzzed again.

Vivian: Also, I had a really good time on Saturday. We should do it again sometime.

I stared at the message.

We should do it again sometime.

I had concert tickets. I had two months to figure out how to give them to her without making it weird. I had two months to figure out how to be her friend while also maintaining a respectable co-worker relationship, and for the love of God, not let Julien find out.

I was so screwed.

“Meeting adjourned,” Julien said, gathering his things. “Everyone, go do your jobs and try not to get arrested.”

“That was ONE time,” Fitz protested.

“It was THIS MORNING.”

We filed out of the conference room, and I checked my phone one more time.

Vivian: We should do it again sometime.

Yeah.

I was definitely going to hell.

But at least I would have good seats.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Quinton

For years, I had built emotional walls so high they needed their own zip code. Dating was a spectator sport—something other people did, while I excelled at ghosting before things got earnest. Vulnerability? I would sooner admit to liking pineapple on pizza. Somewhere between mastering the art of dodging feelings and earning my unofficial title as Most Emotionally Constipated, something tectonic shifted.

Or rather, someone did.

My life didn’t just get better. It snapped into Technicolor, as if someone had cranked up the brightness on a black-and-white sitcom. And the startling, slightly alarming truth? I knew exactly whose fault it was.

Vivian Darcy.

It wasn’t gradual, like the slow erosion of defenses by time or boredom. Vivian bulldozed through with her relentless honesty and chaotic charm, wielding a pen in one hand and an argument in the other. I found myself rooted in the clinic hallway, clutching a patient chart as camouflage, watching her debate Nathan on the question of iguana-based emotional support. Her ponytail swung with every emphatic gesture, and Nathan’s face was the picture of someone reconsidering all their life decisions.

“Ester provides critical emotional support,” Nathan declared, clutching his clipboard like a flotation device.

Vivian didn’t miss a beat. “Ester is a reptile with a brain the size of a peanut. She doesn’t recognize you as a sentient being. You’re basically a mobile heat lamp that provides occasional lettuce.” The pen doubled as a gavel—case closed.

Nathan sputtered, “That’s hurtful and reductive.”

“That’s biology,” Vivian shot back, eyebrow arched, as if the laws of nature personally backed her up.

I should have been working. I had three patient files, two referrals, and a consult with Hayden about a conspiracy-theorist octogenarian convinced the government was after his knees. Instead, I was grinning like a fool, soaking in the spectacle of Vivian eviscerating Nathan’s iguana delusions.

She made me laugh—loud, embarrassing, soul-deep laughter—and forced me to consider, for the first time in a long while, that maybe life wasn’t just something to survive. She challenged every gloomy worldview I so carefully curated, and under those fluorescent clinic lights, with chaos swirling and pens waving, I realized: this was what it felt like to let someone in. To trade grayscale for the whole messy, brilliant spectrum.

This was a problem. Not the smiling part—though frankly, that was alarming enough—but the fact that I had somehow morphed into the sort of person who actually looked forward to weekends.

Me. Quinton Wesley. The guy who once spent Saturdays as a one-man existential crisis, cycling through podcasts about the futility of ambition, alphabetizing spice jars, and pondering whether my plants would prefer to be watered or simply given the freedom to die.