Who I Am With You (Imagination #10) - Staci Stallings Page 0,1

laughing to herself that prior to her shopping trip, she hadn’t even known what it was called. There had been a time she would have been humiliated beyond compare when she’d had to ask the salesgirl about the little tray thingy artists use to mix their paint, but she smiled at how the moment had come and gone with no one signaling to the universe that she didn’t know everything.

Swirling the blue with the white just a bit on the palette, she started midway down the canvas and twirled it down toward the bottom. Something otherworldly took over then as, in the safety of the confines of her room, she let herself remember dancing. She added some black to the other side of the palette and carefully painted the windows with their million pinpoints of light. It wasn’t professional. Maybe it wasn’t even very good. It didn’t matter. No one would ever see it anyway. No one other than her. And all she wanted to do was to try to capture how free she had felt, free to be herself and just live.

By Thursday the second, everything had returned to normal in Greg’s world. Work at the hospital was work, trekking from one side of the enormous building to the other and back again. In a strange way, he’d gotten so used to the job that he hardly even thought about it anymore. ER to radiology. Floor four pneumonia patient for lung X-rays. Another ER patient with a fractured wrist. He was in the little breakroom just off the radiology lab grabbing a cup of coffee when Izzy Cortez, one of the radiologists came in. Greg barely remembered her from one time he had gotten her something to eat, but she obviously remembered him.

“Well, look who it is,” Izzy said with a happy lilt to her voice when she saw him by the coffeemaker. “The miracle worker himself.”

Greg looked up, sure she was talking about someone else, and catching that she was talking about and to him, he ducked again. “Oh. I don’t know about that.”

Coming over, Izzy got herself some coffee. She was over 40 with dark skin and piercing dark eyes that were at once intense and full of mirth. “You know, word on the street is that we’re about to be two radiology techs down. Raymond is leaving next week for Houston.”

“Oh?” Greg asked surprised that Izzy would think to tell him that.

“Yeah, and maybe I misheard this, but Viv said that you are actually a tech.” Izzy took a drink of her coffee but never took her eyes off of him.

“Oh. Uh. Yeah. Kind of. I… have my Associates,” he said, taking a very timid drink.

“So, have you applied then?” Izzy asked, leaning back on the cabinet.

Greg shrugged. “Uh, I did when I first showed up, but they said they like to hire internally, and they weren’t looking for anyone at the time.”

Looking at him and narrowing her gaze, Izzy nodded. “Might be time to remind them, don’t you think?”

For the rest of the afternoon and most of the evening, Greg thought about Izzy’s words. He wanted to jump on it with both feet, but could he really do it? Could he hold down an actual job like that and still go to class?

He batted the idea back and forth, forth and back until he had been sitting for ten minutes over Clara’s lasagna that he didn’t taste as Clara, his ex-girlfriend, and Ryan, his current roommate and Clara’s new boyfriend, chatted away about the coming semester. Greg hadn’t heard more than three words of the entire conversation when Ryan suddenly stopped and looked at him.

“Okay, what is up with you?” Ryan asked. “You’re being way too quiet even for you.”

Blinking out of the thoughts, Greg looked down to find his plate almost empty. “Oh. Uh… just thinking about work.”

Clara gave him an uh-huh look as she took another bite of her lasagna. Greg well knew the things Clara thought she knew about him and Taylor so rather than give her a chance to ask, he jumped in with the real thoughts that had been streaming through his head.

“It’s just that, they’re down a couple of radiology techs at work,” Greg said.

“Radiology?” Ryan asked, not getting the connection.

“Oh, hey. Isn’t that what you wanted to do?” Clara asked at the same time.

Slowly Greg nodded and then heaved a sigh. He thought some more before shrugging. “Yeah. I just… now that I’m here and it’s really a