Waiting Room Shifting Novels & Stories

We sit. The waiting room is quiet and beige and full of the particular hush of a place where enormous things happen on a schedule. A woman across from us is much further along than Michaela.. eight months, maybe more, her hands folded on top of her stomach with the specific patience of someone who has been carrying this for a long time and has stopped noticing. A man beside her is looking at his phone. I am aware that from the outside we look like them.

When Marcia arrived at Jeff's office door, the bench outside was already filled with pregnant women waiting in line. She glanced at his office door, which was still closed. Marcia found an empty seat and sat down. Before long, more and more people gathered in the waiting area. When Jeff finally appeared, the noise in the room increased noticeably, with everyone urgently requesting to be seen by him first. Marcia thought to herself, Although this man is a bit unpredictable and unreliable, at least his medical skills are beyond reproach.

Regina’s POV I shifted in the plastic chair for the hundredth time. These waiting room seats were designed by someone who’d never actually had to sit in one for hours. The back support hit all the wrong places, and the armrests were too narrow. The surgical waiting room was different from the regular hospital waiting areas. Quieter. More serious. Families huddled in small groups, speaking in whispers, checking the time every few minutes. Alexander had been in surgery for three hours.

After the war between humans and shifters, an alliance was formed to keep the peace. The price? Daughters of the human nobility had to choose a shifter as their mate. The first half-blood born from this union would become the new ruler, ensuring that peace would last. As the eldest daughter of the Morrison family, I was the first to be chosen. But right after I chose the wolf Alpha, Calvin, I saw a vision on our engagement day. Because I failed to conceive after six months, Calvin locked me in a cage, determined to use me as a vessel for his pure bloodline. After I finally gave birth to the prophesied hybrid, my sister, Trina, appeared, claiming she wanted to take care of me. But the truth

I stepped up out that restroom, but I damn sure wasn’t bout to go mingle with the rest of the party. Nah, I ducked straight into a blind spot in the cut, slamming my back flat against the wall. My eyes stayed glued to the far end of the hallway. Sure enough, two of Gabriel’s ice-cold hitters were posted up, leaning real casual-like, but their hands were buried deep inside their coats. They were just waiting on the drop. Seconds later, the restroom door creaked open, and Stacy strutted out.

The forty-second floor lobby is in motion when we arrive. This is how it always is at seven-fifteen — the early shift already four hours in, the day-shift people arriving, the particular organized momentum of a machine that does not wait for the men who own it to begin. Security, reception, the associates’ section through the glass wall already populated, screens lit, phones beginning their first calls of the morning. I come off the lift and the floor adjusts. Not dramatically. Not the way rooms adjust in films — not heads turning, not conversations stopping.

(Lisa's POV) The hours dragged on. Every minute stretched into an eternity, each second ticking by with an unbearable weight. The waiting room felt like a prison. I couldn't escape it. The walls seemed to close in around me, and the silence became too loud to bear. I clutched my hands together in my lap, twisting them as if I could somehow wring out the anxiety that had soaked into my very bones.

Someone whose mind had fractured and was simply running on autopilot. "You need to let them work," the nurse said, more firmly now. "She needs room to breathe. You need to come with me." The waiting room was aggressively normal. Beige walls. Uncomfortable chairs. A television playing morning talk shows that nobody was watching. Magazines from six months ago fanned out on a table. The kind of room designed to be institutional and forgettable, except that it was where lives changed. Where people waited to learn whether the person they loved would survive or die.

While working with Bram, this was the first time he asked this. "No, Doc." "When finished wait for me in the parking lot, I have something to talk about." Today the hospital is filled with patients, whether in the polyclinic or the emergency room. None of the nurses and doctors could sit still. Everyone is busy with their respective tasks. The clock is already showing the number two. The morning shift nurses are already getting ready to go home. Yes, shift changes occur at two o'clock in the afternoon. But not with Savira, being a nurse in the emergency room meant that her return schedule was often delayed because of patients who came suddenly at the shift change.

The waiting room of the New York Center for Reproductive Medicine was quiet. It was a silence different from the NICU, different from the courtroom, different from the penthouse at 3:00 AM. It was the silence of held breath. Aurora sat in a plush velvet chair that was clearly designed to comfort people who were in the process of being told they had run out of time. She smoothed the fabric of her trousers. She checked her watch. 2:14 PM.