In six months, Gwen Johnston turns thirty, and when she does, she vows she'll have her life together. She'll no longer be jumping from one job to another, from one relationship to the next. A new, more mature, Gwen will have emerged. She's giving he...
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The next morning when Blake gets up at the crack of dawn to go for his run, I get up too. I putter around the kitchen making coffee and doing internet searches to satisfy my curiosity. Until now, I've resisted looking up Doctors International, but Blake is so committed to them, that I can't help digging a little deeper.
I've never loved a job the way that he seems to love his, and I'm not sure if it's the doctor part he enjoys so much or the travel or helping people in need. Could be all of it, I suppose. As I navigate around the website, I can't help wondering what else they do other than flying doctors all over the world.
The stairs creak, and Izzy clomps down, bleary eyed. I hold out a cup of coffee to her.
"Thanks. I'm so hungover. Why did we drink so much?"
Blake and I hardly drank at all, so the only ones with a hangover are her and Jeremy. Oddly, I don't miss that experience at all. Before this trip, I would have been in the thick of it right next to Izzy. Last night was fun enough without the excessive alcohol consumption. Who knew?
She closes her eyes and takes a deep sip. "You sleep with him?" She cracks one eye and peers at me.
"No." I glance at the bedroom. "But we slept in the same bed."
"For the first time? Or have you been keeping this bed sharing from me?"
"We've never shared a bed." A hotel room, a cabin, a tent, cottages, but we've never slept so close to each other. He stayed curled around me longer than I expected, but instead of finding the proximity suffocating, the firmness of him was comforting.
"So what happened last night?"
"The couch was old and uncomfortable."
"You're such a terrible liar."
"Nothing happened," I say with a shrug, trying to play it off. "We slept."
"Sure," Izzy says with a smirk. "You'll tell me the truth eventually. Have you heard anything more from all those schools you applied to?"
"Not really," I say. "Rejections or requests for more information. A few offered me a couple hundred dollars for a mature student scholarship, which isn't enough. To go back, I need the full ride." I run my fingers along the counter, pondering what I've just discovered. "Doctors International uses supply chain management grads to acquire their equipment and supplies."
Izzy's eyes widen to twice their size. "Did he ask you to work with him?"
"Well, no," I admit. "But if the point of this trip is to do something different..."
"The trip, yeah. But you're talking about when the trip is over. I thought you applied to the colleges to make a change? Graphic design." She points into the air on the final two words, as though she's reading them off a lit up sign. Gwen's life leads this way.
