I have to say - and please don't take this the wrong way because I'm not a cruel person who likes to see people cry – but reading comments about people being moved to tears is the highest compliment I could have ever gotten. Thanks so much for the reviews and keep em coming.

Chapter Nine

"What do you think?" Bo said, using her palms to smooth out the pencil skirt and then the silk blouse she'd bought for her first day. She'd been surveying herself in the mirror, and had changed outfits at least three times. She wanted to look good enough to turn Lauren's head.

"I think Lauren must be a really good lady lover if you're going to all of this effort. That's what I think," Kenzi said without looking up at her. She was lying behind Bo on the bed, filing her nails.

Bo turned and stared at Kenzi with her hands on her hips, and Kenzi paused in her grooming under Bo's disapproving glance. "What?"

"I know you were never her biggest fan, but this is really important to me. I have to get this right, so tell me . . . do I need to change?" Bo asked, swirling around to look at herself in the mirror again.

"No, the twins look just fine. And hey, I was just kidding. I know this is serious. You go get her," Kenzi encouraged.

Bo couldn't quite believe that it had all fallen into place, not that failing were an option. She'd used her powers to convince the older guy on the desk that he simply had to march in and quit right that minute. She'd whispered to him that he wasn't appreciated where he was and convinced him that he should go and follow his dreams (whatever they might be). Of course she had let him think that he was going to be able to sleep with her if he did that. She'd felt guilty about it for about five minutes – knowing that he was sure to regret it as soon as he got outside - but it was easy to justify it when it was for the greater good.

Then there had been a few anxious days of looking out for the want ads, hoping that the old guy hadn't succeeded in begging for his job back. A few days later the advertisement was right there in black and white. The interview hadn't been too difficult to bluff and flirt her way through, and now she was about to go and start her first day. She had never been so nervous in her life. There was too much riding on it, and she knew that it would be near impossible to come up with a 'Plan B' if she were to be fired on her first day.

The manager Toby greeted her in the morning, undressing her with his beady little eyes. His perviness had certainly come in handy at the interview. Toby offered to introduce her around to the other staff before they opened and the first patients were due to come in.

When he led her towards the consulting rooms she felt a surge of anticipation that was almost unbearable. It had been impossible to get Lauren out of her mind after seeing her that morning, not that she had ever succeeded in doing so in the first place. But it had been difficult to not go to her place or to barge right in while Lauren were at work. This whole scheme required the kind of patience that she had never possessed.

She smiled her way through introductions to two of the doctors and a nurse. Bo was holding her breath, hoping that she hadn't been mistaken somehow; that Lauren hadn't just been filling in for someone that day or had already left the role.

"And this is Dr Lewis. She's new with us, just started a couple of weeks back," Toby said brightly as they stood in the doorway of one of the offices. "Dr Lewis, this is our new receptionist Bo Dennis."

Lauren was sitting at her desk with a mug of coffee, and Bo took in her profile as she turned towards the door. Bo watched the look of recognition and then the bemused smile that flickered across her face. Bo did her best to look embarrassed, wanting to appear modest and not as aggressive as she must have already seemed.

Again it felt like her heart couldn't take the sight of Lauren just looking at her and not knowing who she was. It was overshadowed by the flooding relief of just seeing her again. Safe and sound and looking utterly beautiful. Bo wanted to walk over and hug her close and never let her go; but seeing as she had to settle for looking and not touching right now she tried to take it all in.

"Hi Bo. And you can call me Lauren, Dr Lewis is my mother," Lauren said dryly.

"Nice to meet you," Bo said politely, unable to keep the smile from her face. "Your mother is a doctor too?" she stammered nervously.

Lauren grinned back at her. "No, I'm sorry, just trying to be funny. It's nice to meet you too."

"Oh." Bo laughed. The moment suspended for a moment as they stared at one another. Lauren was looking warmly at her, and she didn't want it to end. Reluctantly she turned to follow Toby back out to the reception area, Lauren waving at her as she left.

As the morning passed she tried to get the hang of the booking system and payment methods. There was a younger girl Casey who was in charge of training her, and Bo got along with her fine even if she were no Kenzi. She had always been good at learning on her feet. She wondered not for the first time what she might have been if she wasn't always running. Bar work was an incredibly portable profession where nobody cared who you were; it was the reason she'd never done anything else for money. At least not before she met Kenzi.

The most difficult part of the job was pretending to not stare every time Lauren came out of her office to call in a new patient. It wasn't easy to pretend that she didn't even know the person she'd been so intimate with. It was a strange feeling to know that she had seen Lauren naked, and at this point in time Lauren didn't even know it. Come to think of it, knowing what Lauren looked like under her clothes could never be a bad thing.

It was a busy practice and although she looked for opportunities to get Lauren by herself, there never came a time when Lauren wasn't with a patient or sitting in her office with the door closed. Bo kept having to remind herself of what situation they were in; because it even stung a little bit how polite Lauren was being. It was so irrational, but she felt like she were being ignored.

Days passed without her getting her chance. Each evening she went home exhausted with the emotional effort it took to pretend that she weren't blindingly in love.

Towards the end of her second week she finally managed to do it. Casey usually locked the building at night but Bo convinced her that she didn't mind staying to close up, seeing as Casey wanted to leave a little early. Just as she suspected Lauren stayed back later than the other doctors; obviously her obsessive quality when it came to work was an enduring trait. Bo locked up the file cabinets and switched off the computers with a racing heart – chances like this weren't going to be easy to come by and she had to make the most of them.

She adjusted her clothes, pushing up the girls for good luck and pulling out her compact to make sure her hair looked okay. She reflected that Lauren had always pulled these school-girly tendencies out of her.

Knocking on Lauren's door, she heard the muffled voice tell her to open it. When she did she observed Lauren's face and noticed the way Lauren's eyes trailed up her stockinged legs and then quickly up to her face. She had caught a few looks like that from Lauren and savoured every one, hoping that it would build into something more.

"Hi, I'm going to lock up, are you staying around or should we set the alarm?"

Lauren pushed back her hair and looked at her watch. "Oh wow, I didn't realize how late it was. No, you go. I'm going to stay back for a while and finish this up."

"Okay," Bo said. She couldn't help it, and found herself melting into a smile that may not have appeared all that professional. Lauren was wearing a shirt she could remember from before, one that looked exceedingly good on her. Lauren smiled back at her self-consciously, visibly swallowing nervously.

"Um, I wanted to talk you actually," Bo fumbled. "I wanted to say I'm sorry we didn't exactly start on the most professional of terms. I was so embarrassed when I realised where I'd seen you before."

Lauren shook her head, her eyes a little wide. "Oh no, don't worry about it."

"I hope you don't think I just go around trying to pick up women I don't know. I hadn't slept at all and maybe my judgement wasn't the greatest," Bo explained.

"Oh come on now, if a beautiful woman wants to ask me out before I've even finished my morning coffee, I'm not going to complain." Lauren said jokingly. "It's okay really, just forget about it."

Bo couldn't squash the leap her heart performed at the word beautiful. She knew Lauren was just fooling around in her self-deprecating way, but she still loved the way that sounded. "Okay, thanks. That's really nice of you." A beat, in which she told herself that she had to pull away before Lauren started thinking she were strange. Finally she turned to go.

"Hey . . ."

Bo stopped midway through closing the door, her hand resting on the knob.

"Would you like to get some dinner or something? I don't really need to stay. I mean . . . just as like . . ." Lauren blurted out.

"As co-workers?" Bo finished for her. "I'd love to."

They went to a diner close to the surgery, walking together in companionable silence. Bo wasn't sure what had caused Lauren's change of heart but she was grateful for it. She found that she had no idea what to bring up for conversation – it was becoming obvious to her how little she really knew about Lauren's life. It struck her that right up until that last night they had always kept one another at arm's length. Too many secrets.

As they settled into their meals they joked around a little, made small talk.

"So I hope you don't mind my asking about it, but you said that you just got out of a long-term relationship?" Bo asked once they'd run through some of the safer topics. They'd ordered a couple of beers, and she could no longer keep the question to herself. It had been on the tip of her tongue for the last half an hour.

"Oh, yeah," Lauren said, looking down and shrugging. "We'd been together for a long time. Ten years."

"That is a long time. I'm sorry," Bo said, and found that she actually meant it. "What happened?"

"We grew apart," she said, and there was a silence where Bo feared that she was going to change the subject, leave it at that cliché that told her nothing - but she didn't.

"We went to Africa together actually, so I could work. Turned out we fought a lot when we got there, things just went bad fast I guess. I think she was actually considering leaving me, but then she got sick. She was . . . in a coma for a long time. For years," Lauren was picking at the label of her beer.

"Jesus, that's awful. And so you brought her back here?" Bo said, encouraging her to go on.

"No. We moved her to a medical facility in Europe, the best I could afford, and I got some work there. I pretty much just worked and waited. I wasn't in the best place I guess . . . there were times I thought she'd never wake up. But then one day she did, and she was okay. It was like a miracle. We decided to move here to another new city to try to start afresh. But she felt like she'd already wasted so much time, and in my heart I guess I'd already moved on. So we parted ways not long after we got here. I took a little time out and then started looking for a job. Didn't seem like much point going anywhere else, and Nadia went back to her mom's. And . . . now you know my whole life story I guess," Lauren said sheepishly.

Bo put her hand on top of Lauren's. "It sounds like it's been really rough."

She was trying to work it all out in her mind. The Handmaidens obviously hadn't planted the types of memories they had been asked to. Having Nadia and Lauren supposedly living overseas by themselves for all of that time meant that nobody else but the two of them would know what happened between them, and there were advantages to that. But then what was the point of working out the details of all those implanted memories, if they weren't even going to use them?

She hated the Handmaidens for putting such ugly recollections in Lauren's brain, for leaving her with years worth of loneliness and heartache that might be even worse than what she had already suffered in her real life. It made her more determined than ever to give her back her real memories.

Their hands rested there for a moment, and then Lauren moved hers away. Bo looked at Lauren's long fingers – she knew what those fingers were capable of. She took a swig of her drink and tried to focus.

"And what about you?" Lauren said, trying to lighten the tone. "What's this I hear about you and wooden poles?"

Bo covered her face. "Ugh, Kenzi and her big mouth!" Lauren was looking at her with a lopsided grin. "I really don't have anything to tell you, I'm not that interesting."

Lauren raised her eyebrows, leaning forward in her seat, her eyes flicking down over Bo. "Somehow, I truly doubt that."

Bo smiled to herself and looked down at her beer, pleasure spreading through her at Lauren's flirtatious comment. She was trying to think of the right response - wondering if she might be able to get Lauren to come out for another drink afterwards - but then she caught Lauren's face turning serious again as though in regret.

Lauren looked at her watch. "Wow, I should get going. Thanks for keeping me company."

"You're welcome," Bo said.

Bo managed to keep it together for as long as it took for them to pay the cheque and to walk outside, saying awkward goodbyes. But when Lauren walked away, and she felt again the distance of being acquaintances between them again she let herself crumble, just a little.