Stray by Natasha Stories

had broken every dish in my cupboard except the bowl that was in my hand when Mrs. P knocked on the door. A sob escaped me though, and suddenly her thin old arms were around me, and she was saying, “There, there, let it out dear.”
     
    And the floodgates opened. I slumped into her arms and cried all the tears that hadn’t come when Greg and I broke up. Then I cried the tears of anger that Megan elicited, and finally I cried the tears of betrayal that my friends couldn’t tell me my boyfriend was cheating. The low-down, miserable, son-of-a-bitch. Finally, I had no more tears and Mrs. P was soaked to the skin on the shoulder I’d literally cried on.
     
    “Feel better, dear? Can you tell me what that was all about?”
     
    I did feel better, strangely enough. And now that I’d accepted the truth and let out my grief, the anger flooded in to replace it. “Yeah, it was about a sorry bastard of an ex-boyfriend and a slut of an ex-girlfriend who’s about to marry him. I just found out all my friends knew they were cheating behind my back before we broke up, and no one had the balls to tell me. Sorry.”
     
    “Oh, my. Well, I think you have a good reason to be upset, and I’m sorry. Would you like me to make you a cup of tea?”
     
    I laughed. “That would be great, except I seem to have broken all my cups. Thank you for coming to check on me, Mrs. P, but I think I’d like to be alone. I need to clean up this mess, and then I’m going to bed.”
     
    “That seems like a very sensible plan, dear. Do let me know if I can do anything for you. You seem like a lovely girl. You deserve a better boy.”
     
    Girl, boy, how odd. I was pushing thirty. But maybe to Mrs. P that was very young. She had to be seventy if she was a day. I showed her to the door, assuring her that I’d be fine. Sighing, I started the task of picking up the shards of crockery. What I needed was a hot, sweaty, one-night stand. Something to take my mind off the picture of Greg and Dani that was turning my stomach and make me feel alive again. I could have a date with Bob, but what I really wanted was six inches or more of hard dick. I wanted to be fucked hard and left wrung out. And I knew just the man to do it, if only he didn’t have a girlfriend. Jon Miles.
     
    Maybe they had an open relationship, maybe that’s why he started hanging around me. If I could have just one night with him, would it scratch my itch? Could I forget him after I had him just once? Would he even respond to my advances? I tossed and turned for what seemed like hours when I finally went to bed, finally drifting off with the decision to at least take him up on whatever he next invited me to do.
     
    ~*~
     
    The woman staring back at me from the mirror looked closer to forty than thirty. Every minute of my rough night showed in the bags under my eyes, the wan skin and the hair that was in knots from tossing and turning all night. I needed to pull myself together before I went to work, but it was the last thing I wanted to do. If I ’d been less conscientious, I would have called Megan to close the clinic so I could take a sick day. But then my superstitious nature kicked in. If I faked being sick, it was sure to turn into a real illness, and then I’d be short a sick day. I dragged my aching body into the shower and went about reconstructing a reasonable facsimile of myself.
     
    Fat lot of good it did. When I got to the clinic, I was twenty minutes late and Megan was annoyed, as usual. A walk-in had been waiting impatiently for me to take a look at her son’s ball python. Snakes weren’t my least favorite type of patient, but they weren’t my most favorite, either. I motioned the woman back to the examining room reserved for everything except dogs and cats and took the small ball of reptile in both hands.
     
    “What’s he been doing, or not doing, that has you concerned?” I asked her.
     
    “Well, actually, I’m not sure it’s sick. But, it keeps crawling