Owning Corey by Maris Black

since I’ve always been the top dog around here, and now I’m being nosed out by the new guy. But it’s even more than that, because he’s my friend, and I have the unsettling impression that he’s being exploited.
    Why should that even bother me?
    Corey saunters up to the door of the nurses’ station, grabbing the top of the doorway easily with both hands and leaning in like he owns the place. Everything he does is so effortless, so laid back, those sharp blue eyes the only indication of the intensity beneath the cool facade.
    “Hi, ladies.” From his mouth, the simple greeting sounds like flirting. In fact, most everything that Corey does or says is like flirting. He’s a walking flirt factory.
    “Hey.” The skinny brunette nurse holds a hand for him to shake. “I’m Fran, and this is Tabitha.”
    Tabitha, a buxom redhead with freckles, takes her turn to shake his hand.
    “Nice meeting both of you,” Corey says. “Have either of you seen Dr. Hardy around? He was supposed to meet me in the ambulance shack or the doctor’s lounge, and I can’t seem to find him.”
    Tabitha hooks a thumb in my direction. “He’s charting around the corner there. Come in and make yourself at home.”
    “Anytime,” Fran adds suggestively, and Tabitha jams an elbow into her side.
    Corey spots me and smiles. “There you are. I’ve been looking all over for you.” He comes to sit beside me, and I find myself feeling a little agitated that he didn’t wait in the doctor’s lounge like I asked.
    “I’ll be ready in about two seconds. This is my last patient.”
    “No problem, Doc.” He kicks back on his stool, hanging onto the edge of the desk for balance. “I was beginning to think you’d forgotten about me.”
    I fix him with a stern look. “How could I forget about you with all these goddamn nurses drooling over you like dogs in heat? Any minute, I’m expecting them to start backing their asses up on you and whining.”
    Corey bursts out laughing. “I think somebody’s jealous…” He lets front legs of his stool back down and grabs that absurdly ticklish spot just above my knee, clamping down hard with his fingertips in a move my mom always called a nervous breakdown . I drop my pen and instinctively struggle against him, trying in vain to push his hand away, but he’s too damn strong. It takes a total of about ten seconds for both of our stools to topple, spilling us onto the floor. Corey narrowly manages to keep his footing, but I end up flat on my ass with a hard thud, and I can attest to the fact that the commercial grade carpet in this place does nothing to cushion a fall.
    Corey quickly pulls me to my feet, and I clutch desperately at his scrub top, trying to regain my balance. For the second time since we met, we’re both laughing so hard we can’t even stand up straight.
    “What the fuck just happened?” I howl through peals of laughter.
    Then it occurs to me that we’re not alone. Fran and Tabitha are standing on the other side of the charting table staring at us with their mouths hanging open. When we make eye contact with the two of them, we stifle our laughter and attempt to look respectable again. It’s difficult to straighten up with the belly cramp I’ve got from laughing so hard.
    “Sorry, girls,” I say. “I lost my balance.”
    Corey snorts and nearly loses it again. “Ben and I have been bad boys, acting up at your nurses’ station. I think I got a scratch on my hand. Can one of you nurses look at it? Maybe put a band-aid on it?”
    He leans his big body across the desk and holds his hand out toward them, looking adorable and contrite. They both scramble to have a look. Fran takes his hand in both of hers. “Where is it, hon?”
    “Right… there.” He points to a barely visible spot on the top of his hand.
    “Get a band-aid, Tab,” she tells her friend, who hustles to the closet and returns promptly with a box of band-aids with pictures of dinosaurs on them.
    “Really?”