The worst guy, p.1
The Worst Guy, page 1
The Worst Guy
Kate Canterbary
Vesper Press
Contents
Before you dive in…
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Epilogue
Also By Kate Canterbary
About Kate
Acknowledgments
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Copyright © 2021 by Kate Canterbary
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any forms, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the author.
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Trademarked names appear throughout this book. Rather than use a trademark symbol with every occurrence of a trademarked name, names are used in an editorial fashion, with no intention of infringement of the respective owner's trademark(s).
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Editing provided by Julia Ganis of Julia Edits.
Editing provided by Erica Russikoff of Erica Edits.
Proofreading provided by Jodi Duggan.
Ebook cover photography provided by Wander Aguiar
Ebook cover design provided by Sarah Hansen of Okay Creations.
Created with Vellum
About The Worst Guy
Eight weeks of forced proximity is a long time to hate someone you’re trying not to love.
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Sebastian Stremmel doesn’t need another headache. He has enough of his own without Sara Shapiro, the noisy new reconstructive surgeon, stomping all around his surgical wing with her chippy, chirpy cheerfulness.
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But Sebastian doesn’t usually get what he wants.
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No one gets under his skin like Sara - so much so a heated “debate” and an exam room left in shambles later, they land themselves in eight weeks of hospital-mandated conflict resolution counseling. Now they’re forced to fight fair…which quickly leads them to playing dirty when no one’s looking.
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They know it’s a mistake.
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They promise themselves it will never happen again.
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They swear they got it out of their systems.
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They didn’t.
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Author’s Note: Grumpy/recovering people-pleaser sunshine. Introverts attract. Enemies-to-lovers in the workplace. Banter, bicker, and button-pushing foreplay. Don’t tell the friend group, get jealous when the friend group tries to fix her up.
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Heat: rip her clothes off before you get the front door open.
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CW/TW: chronic illness, absent/negligent parents, history of disordered eating.
for the messiest girls
Before you dive in…
If you need some tunes to set the vibe, check out playlist for The Worst Guy on Spotify.
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Join Kate Canterbary’s Office Memos mailing list for news and updates, as well as exclusive extended epilogues, bonus scenes, and cake. There’s always cake.
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If newsletters aren’t your jam, follow Kate on BookBub for preorder and new release alerts.
Chapter 1
Sebastian
My dick was languishing.
I'd learned that word recently. Languishing. Not depressed but not thriving. Just drifting along, one unsatisfied day melting into another.
And—before you get the wrong idea—this wasn't a performance issue. I performed beautifully. I always rose to the occasion and I stayed standing until everyone was satisfied. Most mornings I awoke to find myself at full salute, wrenched out the quickest flash of gratification, and then went back to feeling nothing.
With the bitter aftertaste of that thought in my mouth, I kicked the bedsheets away and rolled my head to the side. Glaring out the window felt right, seeing as my view consisted of a brick wall and a hazy slice of early morning sunlight. I understood everything about that wall. Hard as fuck and not a damn good thing to be done about it.
Languishing, to be sure.
None of my usual vices did the trick. There used to be a time when the mere mention of college cheerleaders was enough to get me off. God, I missed being twenty-four.
Most people assumed my fascination with hardcore competitive cheerleading was about the skirts. It wasn't. Those competitions—the ones where they tossed small, weigh-nothing women into the air like permanent neurological damage was no big deal—chilled me the fuck out. Cheerleading was to me what true crime podcasts were to women with attachment issues. Also, I couldn't tear my eyes off the bases. There was something about their thick, powerful thighs. They all had them. Of course they did. You couldn't launch a lady into space without some rock-solid quads and they had them. Fuck, did they have them.
I wanted to live in a world of pear-shaped women and wear those thighs as earmuffs every night. Every damn night.
Wanting it didn't mean it would ever happen.
The primary reason for that was the gaping hole where my interpersonal skills should've been, the hole I was certain I'd had from the early days and which had widened over the years. I lived a solitary life and I liked it that way for reasons I was too hard and miserable to enumerate this morning. The fact I had a group of friends at all and they continued to request my presence was a curiosity I still did not understand. I assumed they'd adopted me as some sort of wonky mascot.
The secondary reason—not far disconnected from the first—was I didn't enjoy people and I really didn't like them in my space. If there were to be earmuffs in my life, I'd have to haul myself to the earmuff's apartment. That sounded great at first but I knew it would become a hassle. My work hours tended toward unpredictable—trauma surgery was a pain in the ass like that—and there were many days when I came home too fried to form words. As much as I liked the idea of a sexual relationship conceived without the requirement of speaking, I knew that wouldn't last. It couldn't. The day would come when I'd hear—barely, since her thick, glorious thighs would cancel out most sound—her ask about my day. Or, god forbid, she'd want to talk about feelings or the unholy curse of where is this going.
That led quite naturally to the final reason that nothing so miraculous would ever happen to me: I didn't know how to keep people in my life. I could give all the beard rides in this time zone but that didn't change the fact I was forty-two years old and didn't know how to make anyone stay. My mother was the only person who'd ever stuck around. My little sister Vivi too, but it wasn't as though she'd had much of a choice in the matter.
So, here I was, with my languishing dick and sudden apathy for collegiate cheerleaders with thunder thighs.
Not that my dick ruled my life. It did not. Hell, I didn't know who had the time to live that way. Maybe when I was in my twenties, grossly self-involved and capable of engaging in social activities after work, but I couldn't do that anymore. These days, my life went to hell if I didn't get at least seven solid hours of sleep a night.
Maybe it was wrong but I was more interested in chasing a good night's sleep than a partner for some earmuff action. Just didn't seem like there was any point, and I knew that didn't make sense. Not that any of this made sense. A lot of things were going right in my life these days. I didn't have any reason to be so…bored.
Things were finally, strangely good for me and I was more unsettled than ever. I hated that feeling. It was like my skin was too tight and the sun too dim and every passing minute a second too long.
Everything was off, and my dick, the original canary in this coal mine, had figured it out before I could.
Rude.
What the fuck did I have to be unhappy about? Why couldn't I be content with the handful of decent, functional things I had in this miserable, broken world? Why couldn't any of this be enough for me?
I shifted away from the window with a long, obnoxious sigh. Enough of that whining. I had to get ready for work. I didn't have time for this. Emergency surgery didn't care whether my dick was in high spirits or not—and that was why this was the gig for me. I didn't have to think about myself at all.
My life looked a little something like this: surgical on-calls, sleep, research, complaining about the weather in this dark, frigid marshland of Massachusetts, hunting for good avocados, college cheerleading, clinical care, death march running sessions with my part-time sadist friend Nick, hating everything, third-wheeling it with Nick and his wife because they were the only people who tolerated me on account of me vocally hating everything, migraines, and covering for other surgeons in my practice who, unlike me, went places, did things, and enjoyed the company of others.
And that was how I found myself working a twenty-four-hour surgical on-call shift because someone else in the practice was going to a wedding or vacationing or some other nonsense. When these storms of my own stupidity arose, I always swore up and down I wouldn't cover for anyone ever again, and then I prayed the last few hours wouldn't blow up into a massive shitshow.
Today was one of those shitshows but instead of waiting until the last hours of my shift to blow up, it started the minute I arrived. I was too busy to notice hunger, exhaustion, anything. Surgery had a way of putting those basic needs on the back burner.
All the same, the last hours were a damn mess. All of my residents and their interns were slammed, I couldn't find my fellow anywhere, and every time I cleared one surgery consult, another two sailed in. It was two hours past the end of my never-helping-another-colleague-again marathon shift and I was jamming through the last of my charts when I heard, "Stremmel? Is Stremmel down here?"
There were several reasons I hung out in the emergency department, but chief among them was I could always find a quiet corner where I wouldn't be disturbed. It was the noisiest, most hectic spot in the entire hospital complex but calm could always be found in chaos.
Except right now.
I knew that voice. It had been burned into my brain on a daily basis with all of her perky, peppy screeches of "Hello there!" and "Good morning!" and "Have a good one!"
My god. The last thing in the world I needed was a conversation with Sara Shapiro. I'd sooner fling my body into the Charles River and wait for nature to do its worst than willingly submit to a conversation with the reconstructive surgeon who lived in my apartment building while I was operating on zero minutes of sleep in a whole fucking day.
Maybe I was fragile as fuck but I required a full night of sleep and a protein-packed breakfast before daring to look her in the eye. I had to be prepared for her.
The exam room curtain clattered along its rod as Shapiro whipped it back. "Dr. Stremmel. I'd like a word with you."
With a quick glance starting at the floor, I took in her yellow sneakers, navy scrub pants, and t-shirt announcing Vaccines Cause Adults.
That much we could agree on.
I returned to my charting. "By all means."
"Did you staple a facial laceration?"
"I've been here since eight yesterday morning. I've stapled a lot of skin in that time. I'm going to need you to be a hell of a lot more specific."
She let out a huff, like the aggravated little noise that puppies made when you didn't give them the precise form of attention they wanted. "Female, age twenty-eight, orbital fracture and—"
"—a perforated bladder and internal bleeding from an MVA. Yeah." I'd worked on her and another case from that motor vehicle accident twelve hours ago. It felt like it'd been twelve days. "What about her?"
Sara's grip on the curtain tightened. "You stapled her face."
I pecked at the keyboard for a moment. I was shit at dictation and I didn't believe in using interns as scribes so that left me to write up my cases, which I did with the most specific, detailed notes to minimize the risk of a resident calling me in the middle of the night with a question. When I walked out the door, I was gone, and I wasn't letting anyone pull me back in until it was my time. "Sure did. She wasn't in a position to lose any more volume and it was my call to address the lac pre-operatively."
Sara huffed again, and though I didn't see it, it certainly sounded like she'd stomped her foot. I watched her push her black-rimmed glasses up her nose. She didn't wear the glasses too often which was for the best, it really was. They made her look like she was inspecting something and never pleased with her findings. Her blonde hair was up in a ponytail with a few loose tendrils trapped behind the arm of her glasses. Those wisps were darker than the hair swept up into the ponytail, almost brown. And curly. I went back to the keyboard.
"Do you have other questions or is this it?"
"You stapled her face," she repeated.
This time, a metallic whine sounded from the curtain rod. She was still yanking the damn thing, her knuckles shining back at me, bony and white, as her fist tightened on the fabric. Her hands were petite, her fingers slim. Perfect for plastic surgery, I was sure. She was the substantial, sturdy kind of small—short, compact, could probably beat the shit out of a punching bag—and she needed a step stool to reach the table in the OR.
I'd never noticed her hands before. We saw each other in passing all the time though it was usually her big, messy, blonde bun that caught my attention. Couldn't miss it. We moved in the same group of friends too though we rarely talked. I could tell she was a bruiser behind all that outward sunshine. She'd be nice as hell but she'd cut you if you crossed her.
Not that I cared.
I spared her a glance as I returned to my notes. One last case and this annoying conversation to get through before I was done with this place for three whole days. "I suppose this is an inefficient way of telling me that—as far as plastics is concerned—staples are not the standard of care for such a case."
"I'm telling you that your staples were clumsy and careless."
I jerked my head up. I wasn't annoyed anymore. Now I was pissed. "I doubt that."
"You doubt—" She stopped herself, her lips pressed tight together and her shoulders sharp like she wouldn't tolerate my response. She stood tall—or as tall as a little bit like her could—her feet anchored a shoulder's width apart in a stance that said fuck around and find out.
I gave her a solid minute to finish that sentence. When she didn't, I said, "I staple lacerations all the time. If we're able to clean it up, we do, but we're also aware they can wait until we've saved the patient from dying on the table to make their superficial injuries look nice. I'm sure you can agree it's more important to stop a hemorrhage or preserve organ systems than wait for plastics to put a face back together."
Her eyes flashed as she drew in a breath. "Do you know anything about skin? Or suturing? Or healing? Because—"
"Especially when there's an orbital fracture involved," I continued. "Isn't that the entire reason for plastics and reconstructive surgery? To put things back together after the life-threatening priorities have been sorted?"
"What the hell is wrong with you?"
"Many things, but my treatment prioritization has never been one of them."
She would've continued her tirade, of this I was certain, if she hadn't delivered another feral yank to the curtain. Instead of further debate as to the hierarchy of interventions with trauma cases—and whether I knew my shit—she tore the curtain from its clips and dislodged the rod from the ceiling in the process.
