My Ex, My OB-GYN

My period had been on strike for two months, so my mom suspected I'd fallen in love and gotten myself knocked up. So she took me in to see a doctor.

And the doctor on duty turned out to be the exboyfriend I'd dumped two months ago. His face gave away nothing, and his voice came out cold. "Get on the table.

Shirt up, pants down." Then, when I didn't follow instructions fast enough for him, he reached over and pulled my waistband down himself.

But once the curtain was closed, he took off his glasses and leaned down over me. "We never even finished that night.

So how are you two months late?" Chapter 1 I ran into my ex at the lowest point of my life. Of course I did. Honestly, it had started a few minutes earlier, out at the front desk.

On the selfcheckin screen, the "Today's Provider" field filled in with a name: Matthew Radcliffe. My brain crashed for a few seconds. No way it was that much of a coincidence.

I clung to a little wishful thinking anyway.

There are a lot of hospitals in Los Angeles and a lot of doctors inside them, and two people having the same name is a perfectly normal thing.

Then I walked in, our eyes met across the room, and the hope I'd been holding on to finally died.

He was clean and plain, in the kind of white coat that makes patients trust whoever is wearing it.

He was an attending OBGYN at Northgate Medical Center, newly appointed associate chief of the department that year. The knuckles stood out sharply on the hand holding his pen.

If that wasn't my ex, who was it? His tone was strictly business. "Lauren Hutchins, is that right? What's been bothering you?" Wonderful.

Two months broken up, and he could run into me with nowhere to dodge and still act like we had never met. Ruthless.

Although, to be fair, what I'd said the day we broke up was about a hundred times more heartless than anything in his voice right now.

My exact words were: "Matthew, after today, unless you're flat on your back in a hospital bed begging for one look at my face, maybe I'll do you the favor of coming by." And now I'd gone and jinxed it.

We really had met again in a hospital. Except he was the one holding the knife and I was the thing on the cutting board. He was the attending physician.

I was the patient waiting to hear her sentence. So much for doing him any favors. His next opening was three months out, and I never could have gotten in on my own.

My mom had watched his cancellation list for three solid weeks before a slot finally freed up.

He wasn't in our insurance network either, so my mom put down her card and paid the full selfpay price without a word of debate, more than double what it would have run us in network.

Four figures, gone. On our way in, I'd heard a group of women coming out of his office talking about how goodlooking the attending was, and how TikTok hadn't lied for once.

Skip the prescription, they said, just walk out with the man's phone number. That face was devastating. The kind of face that makes you want to stick around another few decades.

At the time I'd been genuinely curious. Do all the men with that name look like that? Let me see for myself, then. Well, now I'd seen. Devastating was exactly the word.

Except the word was describing my situation, not his face.

I can normally talk my way out of anything, but from the second I stepped into that exam room, my mouth felt like something else had moved into it and taken over.

My mom, meanwhile, had no idea there was anything running under the surface between me and Matthew. She launched into my symptoms at full volume. "Dr.

Radcliffe, she hasn't had a period in two months. Either she's pregnant or she's sick, so you have to check our Lauren over properly!" Is anyone hiring tunnel diggers?

This level of awkward, and I could have dug my way through that floor with my toes alone. "Of course, ma'am.

Let's take this one step at a time." Truly, the man was a healer to his bones. So warm. So reassuring.

Except I could see exactly what he was writing on the intake sheet on his clipboard: "Patient possibly pregnant, menses delayed.

Not enough that she lined up the next guy before the last one was out the door, she got herself knocked up with somebody else's kid inside of two months…" Hey. Hey.

Is that second half really going in my chart? "Do you have a boyfriend?" Chapter 2 It's a routine question in a gynecologist's office, especially when your period is the reason you're there.

They always ask about your history. Before I could open my mouth, my mom jumped in. "She does, she does!

And our Lauren and her boyfriend are so good together, they're crazy about each other!" "Has she taken a pregnancy test?" "Not yet.

The second somebody canceled I dragged her right in.

Do you have any idea how hard this appointment was to get?" My mom got there first again. "I see." On the surface Matthew looked perfectly calm, but I had already felt the danger coming, and I could see it clearly.

The hand holding the ballpoint pen was squeezing so hard the knuckles had gone white.

The tip of the pen was bent to a seventydegree angle, pressed down hard enough to tear through three sheets of paper. No — hey. Get it straight, man.

That's my intake sheet, not a Death Note. "So there's a good chance she's pregnant?" My mom sounded hopeful. I scrambled to my feet. "You know what, I feel fine now.

I've actually got a feeling my period's about to start any second." I knew exactly what Matthew was like when he got possessive, and I knew that if I stayed in that room I was finished.

My mom shoved me straight back down into the chair. "What are you talking about, sweetheart? Do you know how long I waited for this appointment?

We finally got in, so whatever is wrong with you, you tell the doctor." Right then it felt like there were thorns in my back, something lodged in my throat, and needles under me in that chair.

Matthew finally switched to a considerate tone. "Lauren might be more comfortable if you stepped out for a moment, ma'am." The light came on for my mom, and she headed for the door. "What's there to be embarrassed about?

I'm your mother. I've seen it all." Do you have any idea what kind of man Dr. Radcliffe is? In bed he's an absolute animal! He only looks like a saint.

If my life were a movie, the genre would be disaster, and this was the moment that deserved a long, slow tracking shot.

I watched the exam room door swing shut, and to me it looked like a guillotine blade coming down.

My mother, the only audience for the two of us and our little scene, was finally out of the room, and Matthew stopped pretending.

He set down the pen that had never been writing in my chart at all.

The cold, buttonedup doctor, the one with a pair of eyes made for flirting hidden behind silverrimmed glasses, sneered. "Not bad, Lauren Hutchins. Really impressive.

Who's the father?" "Two months since we broke up, and you already have a baby." "That unknown number wasn't lying about you.

You really are a—" Matthew stopped himself cold. "Forget it. From here on out, you go your way and I'll go mine. You're here for an exam.

It has nothing to do with me." His voice had gone grim and cold. I had no idea what he was talking about. What text? And what was I, exactly? Had he fallen for some scam message?

As God is my witness, my heart had been nothing but pure where Matthew was concerned. Granted, before I met Matthew, I did have a bit of a wandering eye.

The first time Matthew and I met was neither romantic nor dramatic.

I'd finally turned in a client project the night my deadline hit, so I called a few friends and we made plans to go see a male revue.

Then our navigation app did us dirty and sent us to the wrong address, pointing us at a quiet bar that made its cocktails by hand. We didn't look too closely. We just walked in.

The place had real style, but my taste runs strictly ground level, so after one look around I ordered vodka and Red Bull.

Chapter 3 As luck would have it, that bar was called The Blue Hour, Matthew was one of its investors, and he happened to be there that night.

When he brought our drinks over, he added a thoughtful little warning. "You don't want too many of these.

Caffeine and alcohol together will run your heart rate up…" By then my friends had already gotten a round into me and the room was tilting, so all I registered was a gorgeous man standing in front of me.

I spun around, grabbed his hand, and shrieked, "Holy crap, the dancers at this place are hot! How much for one number?" "Look at this hand. Look at these abs.

The quality here is unreal." I was too far gone to remember it myself, but according to my friends I didn't just put my hands on him, I also tried to get an arm around his waist and kiss him.

They wanted to sink through the floor and pretend they had never met the village idiot standing next to them.

The next day, once I'd sobered up and found out what I'd done, I was mortified.

But I still wanted that face, so I went back to the bar to corner him, shameless, claiming I was there to apologize, and then I couldn't stop myself from tugging at his sleeve and sizing up his chest.

After a dozen straight days of me ambushing him, Matthew finally hit his limit and pinned me in a corner. "Lauren Hutchins, are you here to apologize or to cop a feel?" I gave him a shameless little snicker. "If you're going to be with me, you don't go to places like that and order a man off the floor." "And you don't keep an eye out for other goodlooking guys either.

Can you manage that?" Matthew was negotiating terms. "Absolutely. From now on my heart belongs to you and nobody else," I swore.

The night I met Matthew was actually my first attempt at getting a thrill out of a male revue, purely for the novelty of it.

Then, by pure chance, I ran straight into exactly my type, and after that nobody else ever registered.

I was the one who said the cruel things when we broke up, but the breakup itself was Matthew's idea.

The reason he gave me at the time was that the hospital kept him too busy, he didn't have enough hours to spend with me, and he shouldn't be holding me back.

What kind of garbage reason is that? Of course I had to leave him with something vicious. If I was going down, I was going down with style.

But now, somehow, I'd turned into a woman who "gets around," and it had something to do with a text message? There was more going on here than I could see.

The reason I hadn't gone looking for Matthew in two months was that I wanted my freedom. It wasn't until after we got together that Matthew told me his actual job was medicine.

The biggest problem with a boyfriend who's a doctor is that he manages everything you do. Other couples walk around holding hands and order an iced boba on a hot day.

Matthew would stop me, explain that one cup like that would spike my blood sugar straight through the ceiling and do real damage, and then hand me a cup of ginger tea.

When I ordered delivery, I liked strong flavors. Extraspicy fried chicken, barbecue burritos, that kind of thing.

He would lay out for me, point by point, exactly how much each of those raised my risk of one disease after another. It scared me enough that I canceled the order every time.

So when he proposed breaking up, I thought it came out of nowhere.

At the same time, I thought about how I could finally run wild through the fried food, the latenight food truck skewers, the icecold beer, the crawfish, all of it, a paradise.

No more holding my nose through the teas and supplements Foxglove Apothecary put together for him.

The vicious things I said were a performance, a way to keep him from showing up and catching me at a food truck at two in the morning.

For two months, the public version of me was an emo disaster in my Instagram stories every day, posting one heartbreak song after another, including but not limited to "Someone Like You" and "All Too Well." The private version of me, with nobody left to manage her, did every single thing on the list.

Chapter 4 I worked my way through every microwave meal and frozen dinner the supermarket near my place had.

Cold things, scalding things, greasy things, I shoveled them all in, and I stayed up all night doing it. Which is how I landed myself in a hospital.

The plan had been to eat my fill and then shamelessly worm my way back into a relationship with him. And then, of all the places to run into him, it was here. Which reminds me.

If I'd had any idea I was going to see my ex today, I would never have worn the My Melody cartoon set under my clothes.

My Melody's enormous eyes sat right on the soft front of my chest, and the effect was pure comedy. Which was exactly the look I was going for. But here's the thing.

Every time I used to see Matthew, I dressed with strategy, doing everything I could to make sure his eyes couldn't leave me.

Lace trim and bows, silk that hugged everything, beaded thongs. If it was hot, I wore it.

If he found out that this was what I actually liked, my dignity would be… Compared to how hard my heart was pounding, Matthew's voice, when it came, was a cold instruction. "Get on the table.

Shirt up, pants down." I had made up my mind. I was not letting go of my clothes. "There isn't an inch of you I haven't already seen.

What is there to be shy about?" When talking me into it didn't work, Matthew just reached over and did it himself. No, absolutely not. I writhed like a maggot