Until Autumn - Sheridan Anne Page 0,26
wall right beside her head. “Huh,” I breathe. “I’ve been in this office for just over four years and have never noticed that before.”
“Yeah,” she grumbles, welcoming herself into my office as I walk to the door and fiddle with the AC. “You’re a man. Why am I not surprised?”
I stand in the doorway, blocking the only exit as I watch her stride right through to my desk in the other room and dump the four big folders right in the middle. “Tell me,” I say, knowing damn well that she’s listening to every last word that rolls off my tongue. “Did you come over here just to insult me a little bit more? I thought after last night, you’d have nothing left to say.”
“Ha,” she laughs. “Trust me, I have plenty more to say, and every time you open your mouth, I only find a few more things. But if you must know, I came down here to tell you that I came in early this morning and finished reading over every last policy and procedure in those stupid folders. I can recite them forward or backward if you wanted me to.”
My brows fly up. “Bullshit,” I say, my heart kicking into gear knowing that if she’s finished, I don’t have any more excuses to keep her away from me. “That’s impossible. That should have taken you at least a week to get through.”
Autumn grins wide and it makes something inside of my chest ache. “I’m a fast reader,” she tells me with a proud smirk. “But those procedures are seriously outdated, so I went to the liberty of circling all the ones that need to be reviewed. After all, this hospital has a high standard, and we can’t possibly have our policies and procedures letting us down, can we?”
I lean back against the doorframe, crossing arms over my chest as I realize that she’s throwing my bullshit from yesterday right back at me. I can’t help but find this the most exciting part of my day. “I guess I have a bit of work to do then,” I tell her. “I wonder if I have a disposable student or someone who needs to be pulled back in line that could spend the next week reviewing the changes …”
Autumn shakes her head, her eyes slowly widening. “You wouldn’t dare.”
I grin wide, teasing her. “Try me.”
“No, that’s bullshit. I’ve done my time for yesterday’s fuck-up. I want to see babies shooting out of vaginas.”
I can’t help but laugh as I push off the doorframe and walk through to my office. “I’m just fucking with you,” I tell her as she follows me through to my desk. “I don’t mean this to be offensive, but a review of the procedures would never be accepted by a student on her second day of her training program.”
Autumn nods and leans against the back of the chair opposite my desk. “I thought that much, which is why all I did was circle the ones that looked like they needed to be looked over.”
I nod and flip open the first folder before quickly flicking through the pages to find a yellow highlighted circle on nearly every page of the damn thing. “Holy shit,” I breathe. “This is going to take me weeks to get through.”
Autumn straightens. “You wouldn’t have to do it, would you?”
I shrug my shoulders. “I’m the most qualified. Who better to take it on? It’s either going to fall in my lap or Dr. Harding’s, and he has a family at home. And besides, he’d probably get halfway through and then put it in the hands of an intern who’ll fuck it all up.”
Autumn’s face falls. “I’m sorry. I figured some CEO or guy in a suit would have to do it. If I knew it would cause you all this trouble, I never would have—”
“Don’t worry about it. You were right to point them out. Don’t apologize for picking up on something that no one else bothered to.”
She gives me a tight smile and raises her head to meet my eye. “I mean … I could help you. It would probably help me in the long run, you know, really familiarizing myself with everything.”
A grin stretches across my face. “I thought you could recite the procedures backward?”
Autumn rolls her eyes. “Okay, so I might have exaggerated a little bit, but I’m a woman in a man’s world,” she explains as her eyes begin to sparkle with laughter. “Besides, you guys exaggerate