ChapterThree
Layla
Iwas emotionally, mentally, and physically exhausted. I also had bruises on my arms and legs from trying to pull my family off Mark yesterday, and I was pissed. No, not merely pissed, that didn’t cover it. I was enraged.
“Whoa,” Evie gasped, coming to a stop just inside the room I worked in at Delicious Divas. “I’m not sure who put that look on your face, but I swear I didn’t do anything if it was me.”
After an hour of listening to the men rant and yell, I’d walked away from it all, locked myself in my house, and turned off my phone.
Unfortunately, I also had a landline, so I’d had to unplug them all and had taken the old fashioned one I had in my bedroom off the cradle. The noise from the receiver had driven me insane until I realized I could pull that one out of the wall, too. It’d only taken me three hours of screaming at it to make that realization, which meant I also had a voice like a ninety-a-day smoker today.
Fucking fantastic!
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
Hearing the rasp, Evie’s eyebrows shot up. “That’s sexy as fuck. Well, unless you’re sick, and in that case, stay the hell away from me.”
Waving a hand through the air, I looked at the screen on my computer, showing which appointments I had today so I could get what I needed ready. “I’m not sick.”
That’s all I had to say about it. I didn’t want to even touch on the very tip of the shitberg that was my life. I might be angry at Mark, he may have broken my heart, but I still loved him, and seeing the reactions of my family members had torn my heart in two.
How did you protect the person you were in angry love with while being pissed at the people you loved? It was an oxymoron of emotions if that could even exist, and I was hurting because of it. I was also sleep-deprived and hormonal.
In short, I was a dangerous woman today.
I heard the door close behind me and assumed Evie had left, but when I spun my chair around, she was sitting on the electric chair I treated most of my patients on.
“Wanna talk about it?”
I’d already covered that in my mind, but she was so sweet I couldn’t keep my shitty attitude in place. “No, but thanks.”
Tilting her head to the side, she stared at me for a moment. “I see heartache in those beautiful eyes, Layla. In all the time I’ve known you, I don’t think I’ve ever seen that.”
No, she hadn’t, but if she’d been here four years ago, she’d have seen devastation for the forty-eight hours it’d taken me to pack my stuff up and move to a different city. My family had been confused, but I’d told them I’d made a mistake and wanted to finish my nursing degree.
Fortunately, I hadn’t told any of them that I hated nursing with every fiber of my being—and I meant every fiber. I was okay with syringes and needles, they didn’t impact me at all, but put me next to someone with an open wound or in an operating room, and I wanted to scream or pass out. I was a pro at fake it ‘til you make it, though, so no one had been any the wiser. But the second I graduated, I’d moved straight into getting what I needed to be an aesthetic nurse and had also taken night classes to be an esthetician.
People looked at plastic surgery incorrectly, in my opinion. My cousin, Ariana, had gotten her breasts done and had a nose job years ago because she’d had body dysmorphia. It’d affected her mental health so badly that she’d contemplated suicide. That was the side of plastic surgery that people should base their opinions on.
For many, it changed their lives. Accidents that’d impacted someone’s appearance, surgeries that’d gone wrong and the person couldn’t look at their body, features that people hated so much that they wanted to die. Those were just some of the good that plastic surgeons brought to the world.
One woman I’d met had an A-cup sized breast on her left side and a DD-cup on the right. For a woman, something like that would be embarrassing and would stand out. Going to the beach, being in the pool, and everyday life would be impacted by it. Sure, you could stuff your bra or get a chicken cutlet, but what if it came out? What if you fell in love? Yes, the other person should love you for who you are and whatever way you come in, but more often than not, the patient didn’t love themselves and was reluctant to even open the door to let someone else do it.
People like that were what I based my small contribution to it on.
Absolutely, Botox and fillers were typically used to help with aging, but on the flip side of that coin, they also helped people who had issues they didn’t want or couldn’t afford surgery for. The non-surgical nose job—injecting filler to help even out bumps or fix what was bothering the person about their nose. Even though it wasn’t permanent and needed to be redone, it did the job, and the person didn’t have to have their nose broken and an anesthetic. Non-prominent/receding chins could also be fixed, as could jawlines. Botox was used for a plethora of non-cosmetic problems, too.
Surgeries could go wrong, and they were also terrifying for people and not always financially feasible, what I did wasn’t. There was some pain during it that I tried to help with numbing cream, but other than that, within a few days, they had the issue resolved, and all we had to do was maintain it with some upkeep here and there. Boom, job done.
Then there were the women who just wanted it to stop aging—I didn’t begrudge them that one bit. Some people were happy to let age do its thing, but not everyone was the same or wanted it to be as severe as it was. Hell, our bodies fell apart with age anyway. If we could change some of it, why not? I couldn’t say I’d do that when I was past the age of forty or fifty because I wasn’t there but never say never.
The one thing I wouldn’t do is give someone an excessive amount of filler or Botox. The over-inflated lips and plastic-looking face weren’t something I was happy to do.
And I got to use what I’d worked hard for and had paid a small fortune to achieve—my degree.
The added benefit being that I got to do that without having to see inside someone’s body or watch as their skin was sewn up. I also didn’t have to fight back the tears as I watched people say goodbye to their loved ones, both young and old.
I’d seen a woman give birth to a stillborn in my last year, and that’d cemented my determination to move into a more cosmetic line of medicine. I couldn’t hack ever seeing that amount of devastation, watching as someone’s months, if not a lifetime of their hopes and dreams, be taken away from them as they held the tiny body they’d carried inside them.