He grunts—a laugh distorted by rigid posture, his posture rigid on account of the instrument up his nose. “Well. There’s sort of someone, but it’s complicated.”

I step back to avoid ramming this otoscope through his skull. “Complicated how?”

Nick dares to look at me. “She’s very unavailable.” He looks at the floor—and is he blushing? “Timing is a bitch.”

I rush to sterilize objects that will need to be sterilized again later, just for the excuse to busy my hands, just to protect them from doing harm. “We’ll run a standard STI panel, then.”

“That’s fine.”

“Nothing to be embarrassed about.”

“I’m not embarrassed.”

My back still turned to Nick, I fiddle with the HIV quick-test in my hands, fairly certain (but not certain) that it’s a run-of-the-mill cheek swab, nothing tricky, so I turn and say, “Open up,” and hold Nick’s jaw with one hand. With the other, I collect cells from the inside of Nick’s mouth. “That’s all there is to it,” I say. “You wait here.”

Grabbing my clipboard with Nick’s questionnaire, I take my leave. On the other side of the door, heat blooms from my gut to my chest, from my chest to my neck to the top of my head, and so I return to my lab to seek a hit of busy work, opiate of the agnostics.

Small as it may be, to me, my lab is a labyrinth—organized by Simone, navigated by Nurses Lindsay and Clem. Such a gruesome investment, way back when. Such a risk: my own in-office lab, a burden beholden to ever-shifting regulations, ever-expanding responsibilities, paperwork, fees, problems. My competition swore I’d regret it. Their doubts worked like double dares, and I doubled down. Big fat loan: approved. Construction. Applications. Drug rep courtships: fancy dinners, cross promotion. Nurses with business brains, cutting-edge training. Television spots, magazine features, branded products, patents, profits. Vanessa believed the lab would either ruin me or be the beanstalk to my jackpot—and to my seat among giants, I joked, and she said sure—so she filled a prescription bottle with dried pinto beans and wrote Magic Beans on the lid, and we put it on top of my bookshelf by the door, directly in my line of sight from my desk chair, virtually invisible from elsewhere. Day in, day out, busting my ass, then one day: jackpot and giants. I astonished myself and outraged the competition. Curmudgeons fought to stay in business. And here I am.