Chemistry Pt. 09

Author's note: this is the ninth installment in a ten-part series.

~

Someone is knocking on the door. It is bright in the room, daylight. I roll over and feel my body report with incredible pain. I hurt everywhere. My back, legs... my head.

The knocking comes again. It reverberates in my head as a throbbing ache as I roll to my knees and then pull myself slowly off the floor, using my chair and desk as a scaffold.

"Amir!" someone yells through the door. It is a woman's voice. "Amir, are you in there? Open the door!"

I hobble over to the door and open it. I see two campus security officers standing there, a man and a woman. My RA is standing behind them. I blink a few times, trying to clear the pain from my head.

"Are you Amir?" The female officer says.

"Yeah."

"Can we come in for a minute?" She has an expression of exaggerated concern on her face. So does the male officer. My RA looks pissed off.

"Um, sure," I say, backing up into the room. They follow me in. I know that I should probably be concerned that these people are here, but the pain in my head and body is overwhelming and all I can think about. I must have pulled a muscle or pinched a nerve or something, sleeping on the floor.

I see the officers look around my room, taking in the general disarray and lingering on the broken monitor next to Pete's desk.

"How are you doing this morning, Amir?" the male officer asks.

I look at him, not really knowing how to answer. For a moment I think I am going to be sick, but then the sensation subsides. I attempt to swallow, but I have no saliva in my mouth. My throat is incredibly dry.

"Um... could I get a glass of water or something?" I say, finally.

The two officers look at each other and then turn to look at the RA. He rolls his eyes and says, "I'll get him a bottle of water." He leaves.

"Are you feeling OK, bud?" the male officer asks me. "Why don't you sit down?"

I sit down slowly onto my bed and a sharp pain shoots up from my legs. The dizzy, nauseated sensation returns.

"I... don't feel great." I say.

The two officers look at each other again. "We got a few calls from people who are concerned about you, Amir," says the female officer. "One of your chemistry instructors? And your friend..."

"Mahan," the other officer says. He pronounces it 'may-hen'.

I grimace, thinking about what information these officers might have been told about me.

The RA comes back and hands me a bottle of water. I open it and take a sip. It feels amazing in my throat, but hits my stomach hard. I take a sharp breath and hold it, trying not to puke. I look at the people standing in my room. They are all looking at me. I consider telling them everything. What do I have to lose at this point? But then I think about Jamie, the fact that he threatened my family. I take another sip of water.

"Amir, we'd like to take you to see a doctor," the male officer says, looking hesitantly at the other officer as he speaks.

I shake my head. "No," I say. "I'm fine, I just have a really bad headache. And I need to, um... get ready for class." I look at the clock. It is a little after eight AM. I have algorithms in an hour.

"Well, you can go to class after we take you to student health, buddy," the male officer says.

"You really need to be seen by a doctor, today, Amir," the female officer says. She has dropped the friendly tone.

"Where are your shoes?" the male officer asks. He kicks some of the debris on the ground to find my shoes, picks them up and puts them by my feet.

"Socks?" he says. I shake my head. All my socks are in the laundry. I sigh. It doesn't seem like I have any choice but to go with them. I bend to put my shoes on and wince with pain, then move very slowly to put my feet into each shoe and tie the laces.

"Here we go," says the female officer and she grabs my arm, helping me to stand. I let the officers guide me out of the room. I hear the RA shut my door and walk back down the hallway toward his room, muttering.

~

Riding in the security car to student health, I watch the buildings of campus slide by. My head is still throbbing, but the water is starting to help, and I am not feeling as nauseated. I haven't felt pain this intense since my leg injury in high school.

At the student health building, the officers help me out of the car and walk with me into the building. I sit down in the waiting area while the two of them talk with the receptionist. They speak for a long time, but I am not close enough to hear what they were saying. There are a couple of other students waiting. There is a girl in the corner, coughing repeatedly into her elbow, and there is a guy, sitting directly across from me, nervously tapping his leg.

I can't help but notice that the guy is tall... beefy, maybe some sort of football player. He's wearing a tank top that shows off his broad shoulders and massive upper arms. He is wearing shorts, and I can see part way up his thigh to where... I feel the stirrings of an erection, but I am immediately jolted by a sharp pain. Fuck.

The officers are back, and they sit down on either side of me. I feel like a suspect at a police station. I start to wonder if I am in some sort of trouble. I watch the big football player get called in to be seen. I watch the shifting of a large-looking mass in his shorts as he gets up and walks across the room, the mounds of his ass bulging. I shift uncomfortably in my seat, trying and failing not to watch, not to imagine myself pressed up against him from behind, my hands on his his ass, my cock...

"Amir?"

A female nurse is standing in a swinging glass door calling my name. I swallow and try to stand up, but the pain is too great. The male officer helps me stand up, and I walk over to the nurse, slowly. I see her exchange a look with the security officers and she tells them it will be fine, they can wait for me here in the waiting room. I can sense that they don't want to let me go unaccompanied, but the nurse whisks me through the door and closes it on them before they can protest.

She leads me through a series of hallways and into an empty exam room. She has me step on a scale to take my weight and then asks me to sit up on the exam table. "Are you hurt?" she asks, acknowledging how stiffly I am moving.

"I slept weird, I think," I say. "I might have pulled a muscle or something."

"The doctor will take a look," she says. "Can you take off your jacket, please? We need to get your blood pressure."

I am still holding the bottle of water so I put it down behind me on the exam table. I unzip my jacket and she helps me shuck it off my arms since I have trouble twisting around to remove it. If she notices how filthy my T-shirt is -- Mahan's T shirt -- crusted with dried sweat and other fluids, she doesn't give any indication. She puts the blood pressure cuff on my arm and takes my blood pressure. The sleeves of the small shirt ride so far up my arms that they don't get in the way.

"A little high, but not horrible," she says, smiling, as the air hisses out of the cuff and she unstraps me. She hangs up the cuff and then takes my temperature. After that, she taps for a while on the computer. Light is streaming in through a narrow frosted window behind me. Everything seems bright and cheerful, except for a sense of terror that is brewing in my belly. I can feel my anxiety rising as she taps endlessly.

After an eternity, she speaks again. "Amir," she says, typing and looking at the screen, "is there anything in particular you want to tell me as to why you're here today?"

I am smoothing the ridges in the brown corduroy of my pants with my fingers to try to keep my hands from shaking. "I don't know why I'm here," I say.

What can I say? That there is someone trying to destroy my life? That my thoughts are being infiltrated by some sort of malicious program that Jamie installed in my brain? Anything I say will just lead to more problems. What's more, I am starting to fell paranoid about this situation. Did Mahan really call security on me? Why did the security officers bring me here?

The nurse looks at me for a moment, and then says, "That's fine. But just know that we are here to help you. You can trust us. Dr. Andino is really nice, so don't hesitate to tell him anything that's on your mind, OK?"

I nod. Trust them? Everyone I've seen today has been hiding something from me, it seems. There's no way that I can trust any of these people.

She stands up from the computer and walks to the door. "The doctor will be in to see you soon, just sit tight," she says. She leaves and shut the door.

~

There are posters up on the walls about sexually transmitted infections, the meningitis vaccine, how to protect yourself from influenza. My vision is fuzzy, the words on the posters blur in and out of focus as I try to distract myself from the pain.

I finish the bottle of water and toss it at the waste bin in the corner of the room, but I miss and the bottle goes rolling across the floor. I push myself off the exam table to fetch it and pain shoots up my spine. I hobble over to the bottle and reach down, but I can't really bend, so I fall to my knees in order to keep my back relatively straight. I grasp at the bottle and toss it into the trash.

I am trying, in vain, to get back up to my feet when I hear a knock on the door. The doctor comes in. "Amir?" he says, surprised to see me kneeling on the floor.

"Sorry, I dropped something," I say, and try again to get up, but the pain is too much.

The doctor bends down to help me stand. I feel his strong hands grab my biceps and pull up, forcing me to lean into him. As I stand, my cheek and shoulder grind into his chest -- I smell him, a fresh soap smell mixed with the faint scent of cologne. His body is firm and muscular against me. When I am finally standing, I see that he is a bit shorter than me, brown skin, neatly trimmed and gelled hair, clean shaven, dark features. He helps me back to sit on the exam table.

"I think maybe I hurt my back," I say, apologetically.

"That's OK, do you want to lie down?" he asks.

"No, I think it's better if I sit."

He stands back, giving me a chance to fully take him in. The guy is built, but not overly jacked. Under his white coat, he's wearing a light gray button-down shirt tucked into dark pants. The clothes fit him beautifully, and I imagine what his body must look like underneath. It's the body I would have killed for, back when I was playing soccer, lean and muscular, like a panther.

He sits on the stool and starts speaking to me while typing on the keyboard.

"Amir, my name is Dr. Andino and I am an internal medicine resident here at the university hospital. I'm here to give you a general evaluation, but we are also calling one of the psychiatric interns to come over here to give you a mental status evaluation," he says.

I look at him but I don't reply.

"Do you understand what that means?" he asks, training his eyes on me. There's a faint shadow on his cheeks and jaw attesting to his ability to grow a beard like mine -- dark and thick -- but also his ability to keep it in check, maintain this exquisite level of grooming. He is demonstrably together. I move my hand through my unruly beard, trying in vain to smooth it into a semblance of order.

"It means you think I'm nuts," I say.

He smiles. His teeth are brilliant, white, and perfect. He says, "No, Amir, nobody thinks you're nuts. But we are concerned that you might be having a psychiatric episode and we want to help you feel better."

Fuck. How am I going to get out of this?

"How long is this going to take?" I ask. I look at the clock on the wall -- it's quarter to nine. "I have class in 15 minutes."

He frowns at me. "It might take a while, to be honest," he says. "But don't worry about your classes, Amir. This is more important. We can always reach out to your professors to let them know..."

"No," I say, quickly, cutting him off. "Please don't tell my professors about this. I'm not crazy. I'm just... exhausted... stressed, and like... not sleeping enough."

"Amir, again, nobody thinks you're crazy. We just want to help you. How long have you been feeling this... exhaustion?" he asks, seamlessly. The guy is slick.

He wheels the stool away from the computer and toward me, coming to a stop a few feet in front of me. He looks at me, expectantly. My heart starts to beat faster.

"Um..." I try to think back, but all I encounter is a wall of fog. "I'm not sure, maybe a week or so?"

"Hmm, and around the time that this started, did you experience anything abnormal, like a fall, or a blow to the head? Any sort of accident?"

I think about seeing Jamie in the locker room that day, the instant sexual reaction I had to him.

"No, nothing like that," I say.

"How about partying, Amir? Have you been drinking more than usual or using drugs?"

I swallow, nervously. "No, not really," I say. "I guess I drank at a party..." When was that, even? I think about the party and Nadiyah, and then about Tim. Tim's hand gripping my cock. "... like, a few days ago, but not, like... more than..."

He interrupts me. "Look, I'm not here to bust you, Amir, OK? Don't worry. I'm just trying to get more information," he says, smiling.

His smile is disarming. He's incredibly... handsome. The word pops into my head. It occurs to me that this is the kind of son my parents would kill for. A handsome doctor. I look at his hands, which are resting on his lap. His left hand crossed casually over his right.

"What about drugs?" he asks. "Have you been taking anything? Again, I'm not asking in order to get you into trouble."

"No, I don't do drugs," I say.

"Never?" He looks at me for a long moment, raising his eyebrow.

"I mean, I smoke weed... have smoked weed, in the past. Last year, at the beginning... fall semester, but not since then. Definitely not recently." I sound like I'm floundering, guilty.

"OK. I believe you, but I want to let you know, Amir, that we might ask you for a urine sample to confirm that there aren't any drugs in your system. Are you OK with that?" He stands up and moves over to the wall, picks up the ophthalmoscope.

"Yeah, I guess," I say.

"OK. Look at me please." He shines the light in my eyes, moves it back and forth across my field of vision. Then he checks my ears. As he moves close to me, I catch another whiff of his scent, see the precise cut of his hair around his ears and at his collar. His skin is smooth and it almost seems to glow against the white of his coat. I feel my erection swell, in spite of the intense pain.

He puts his hand under my chin and says, "Look up please." He shines the light in my nostrils.

"Open your mouth, stick out your tongue." His demeanor is calm and efficient, but there is an edge of dominance in his voice.

"Say 'AAH'", he says. I feel a hard edge of pleasure in complying with his directions, being under his control.

"Take your shirt off, please," he says.

I pull up on the bottom of Mahan's filthy blue shirt and lift it over my head. I ball the shirt up and toss it onto a chair along the side of the room. I look nervously at the doctor to see if he'll react to the fact that I am filthy and must smell terrible, but he doesn't react at all, aside from a quick glance at my naked torso.

He unwinds the stethoscope from his neck and fits it into his ears. Then he steps toward me and places the diaphragm firmly against my chest, over my heart. He puts his other hand on my back, gently. It feels warm. His touch is electrifying against my skin. I become acutely aware of the pounding of my heart in my chest. He moves the diaphragm to a few points around my chest and gives me a look.

"Is your heart rate normally this elevated?" he asks.

"N-no," I stammer.

"Don't be nervous," he says, and he winks at me. Then he moves the diaphragm lower, pressing it into my abdomen. He reaches around to place it on my back and asks me to breathe in and out, moving in zig-zag pattern across and down my back after each breath. When he presses the diaphragm against my lower back, he bends down slightly, and rests his other hand on my thigh.

My leg reports with pain at his touch, but I feel my cock harden even more, and see that it is bulging under my pants, running like a fat tube along my inner thigh. I see the doctor see it, too. I look at his face, mortified that my penis is so obviously erect. He purses his lips slightly and gives my thigh a light squeeze, indicating he's done listening, before standing up and unhooking the stethoscope from his ears.

"OK, I'm gonna have you lie back, buddy," he says.

I start to protest, but he puts his hands on my shoulders and guides me to lie back onto the cool paper. As I feared it would, my cock juts up obscenely in my pants. I move to cover it with my hands, but he grabs my wrists and lays them down at my side.

"Hey, relax, it's fine, Amir," he says.

I swallow hard and close my eyes, burning with embarrassment and the excruciating pain radiating from my lower body.

I feel him press his fingers hard into my abdomen. I wince.

"Aside from your back pain, does this hurt?" he asks.

"No," I say and he continues to probe further and further down toward my waistline. My cock begins to throb and flex, involuntarily, as continues to push on my stomach. I hear his calm, measured breathing as he presses his hands against my body.

Then I feel him stop, suddenly.

"Amir, it looks like there is some dried blood along your waistline," he says.

He goes to the counter at the other end of the room and pulls a pair of latex gloves from a box. I sit partway up and look down at myself. There is a dark, brownish-red streak where the doctor had edged my pants down, just slightly, over my hip. I run my fingers over the streak. It feels crusty.

"Do you have an injury?" he asks.

"No, I don't... I don't think so," I say.

"I'm going to help you stand up," he says.

He takes my hand and shoulder and helps me stand on the little step at the base of the exam table. He sits on the stool and wheels himself up to sit in front of me. His face is pretty much level with my cock, which is still hard.

"Amir, can you drop your pants for me, bud?"

"I'd rather not." I avoid his gaze. I want desperately to get out here -- away from this room.

He looks at me sternly. "Look, I'm concerned that you may have an injury in your groin area, Amir. I need to check. Please don't be embarrassed... about this," he says, nodding at my erection. He smiles up at me and says, "Believe me, it's normal."

I wince again with embarrassment, but then comply, undoing the buckle on my belt and the buttons of the fly of my pants. When a few of the buttons are undone, the doctor pulls down on the sides of my pants. They get jammed up on my thighs as he tries to shimmy them down, so I undo another few more buttons of my fly, which allows him to pull my pants down past my ass and hips. The dirty underwear I'm wearing are black, and when the rim of my pants comes down past my cock, it springs up with renewed vigor upon being partially freed. The whole scene is just intensely mortifying, and I feel my face turning red-hot.

The doctor doesn't even appear to notice my penis, though. He seems more concerned with the streaks of blood running down my leg. He scrapes at the blood with his gloved thumb. The blood is only partially dry, with a slightly gummy texture to it.

He reaches up and hooks his fingers over the elastic of my underwear and starts to pull down, but I grab his hands.

"Don't," I whisper.

"Amir, let go," he says. There is undeniable authority in his voice.

I release his hands. He pulls the elastic down and I hear him take a sharp breath in alarm when my cock swings out toward his face. I gasp, too.