Throwback Thursday: ‘Love for Sale’ by Conor Powers-Smith

He was stunned when she walked into the room, but that was nothing new. In his eighteen months at the practice, he’d met many stunning women, some even with personalities. But this was more; he wasn’t just stunned, but transformed: hollowed out and filled in again in the interval between heartbeats, though that interval was noticeably shorter, now, than a moment before.

In order to believe in something as silly as love at first sight, he would’ve had to abandon a lifetime of cruel lessons and hard truths. So he did.

“Ms —” He groped for the name the receptionist had pronounced over the intercom not thirty seconds before, the name he must have read ten times that morning while going over her medical history. Dates and statistics and incidents from the file bobbed like fireflies through his mind — he smiled at the thought of the adventurous twelve-year-old who’d broken her arm falling from a tree, and been very brave, he was sure, as the bone was set, and very patient, he somehow knew, as it healed — but her name was not among the swarm of facts; or, if it was, it remained dark.

She didn’t help. Instead she smiled, amused more at herself than at him, as if his forgetfulness were a product of her own intrinsic forgettability.

“Have a seat,” he said. “Please.”

She moved across the office and folded her slender frame into one of the two chairs in front of his desk with careless grace, as if draping her empty clothing there, the long blue skirt across the seat, the white blouse and blue silk scarf across the back.

No one moved to take the other chair, and no one stood in the doorway waiting to.