Free Escort (A Standalone Romance Novel) (New York City Bad Boy Romance) by Claire Adams

about
thirty seconds before I feel comfortable exhaling. Even then, I breathe out
into the sleeve of my sweater.
    The phone rings and Yuri answers it,
saying, “ Dr. Churchill’s office.”
    I take another puff and try to remind
myself that what I’m experiencing right now is a reality. I’m sitting in a
locked office with the assistant to my oncologist who just hooked me up with MJ
extract.
    “Okay,” Yuri says into the phone. “Grace
is still here, should I send her home or should I call down to…uh huh…uh huh…”
    I take another puff, forgetting my
still-low tolerance for the fact that what I’m doing really doesn’t feel like
smoking anything except candied strawberries, and I’m already starting to feel
less nauseated, less sore, less pained.
    “All right,” Yuri says, “I’ll tell her.”
    She hangs up the phone, gets up from her
desk and takes a seat next to me.
    I hold out the pen to her as I’m already
starting to feel the high coming on pretty strong, and she takes it.
    “He’s not coming in today,” she says. “I
guess he’s already called radiology and gotten you scheduled for tomorrow.”
    Her wrist makes an elegant series of
movements as she takes a long pull from the vaporizer and blows out a series of
— I guess they’re still called smoke rings if it’s coming from a vaporizer, but
I’m still pretty new to all this.

 
    “Where do you live?”
    I tell her and, apparently, we’re only a
few blocks from each other. In this city, that’s a pretty big coincidence.
    “ Wanna split a
cab?” she asks.
    “I thought you had work to do,” I answer.
    “It can wait,” she says. “Most of what I
was going to do, I guess Dr. Churchill already took care of, and I’d rather
know that you got home safe than stay here and sit on my thumb, you know?”
    It’s probably the pot, but I can’t help
but feel like Yuri and I are old friends who’ve just never really had the
chance to get to know one another.
    “All right,” I tell her. “It’ll be nice to
have some company for the ride home.”
    “Cool,” she says and takes another puff
before handing the pen back to me.
    “Oh, I’m good,” I tell her.
    “You sure?” she asks.
    “Yeah, I’m still a cheap date with that
stuff,” I answer.
    She shrugs and takes another puff before
going back to her desk and collecting her purse.
    “You wanna hear
something crazy?” I ask.
    “What’s that?” she responds, pulling a
small bottle of eye drops from her purse.
    “I’m actually kind of hungry,” I tell her.
    “It’s kind of nice, isn’t it?”
    “It really is,” I answer.
    Yeah, I just became pro-legalization.
    She puts a few drops into each eye and
then tosses me the bottle. I sit there for a minute, feeling the presence of
the spout while not feeling any cold or wetness on my eye before I realize that
the cap’s still on.
    I chuckle to myself as I unscrew the cap,
but I just sit there for another minute.
    “I really like your hair,” Yuri says.
“Where’d you get it?”
    With that question, we both start
laughing.
    “There’s a place down on twelfth,” I tell
her. “They’ve got some good stuff.”
    I finally get a couple of drops in each
eye and I give the bottle back to Yuri, who then helps me to my feet, asking if
I’m good to walk.
    I tell her I’m fine, and I take one more
look at the office, breathing in the weirdness of right now, before we walk out
the door.
    Yuri calls a cab from her cell phone, and
we sit on a bench out front while we wait.
    “So, what’s your prescription for?” I ask.
    “Oh, I really don’t like to talk about
it,” she says.
    “Why not?” I chortle. “You know all sorts
of disgusting details about me, how about a little reciprocation here?”
    “Did you know,” she says, “that it’s
actually against the rules to actually smoke as a method of delivery for this
stuff?”
    “What do you mean?” I ask.
    “Well,” she says, “I guess a lot of people
didn’t pay