Chapter One #2
Alice nervously tucks a piece of hair back behind her ear. Goodbye, enough money for semi-regular haircuts from those hairstylists in training. “Mr. Brown, I—”
“You left the building unattended!”
“There was an emergency,” Alice says weakly.
She’s not sure why she’s even trying. Brown is a fucking asshole and always has been.
He won’t give a shit about how she low-key might have saved someone’s life.
All he cares about, as he has said repeatedly, is her ass in her chair all night.
He even tried to tell her not to go to the bathroom when she first started working here, which, like, on a ten-hour shift? Yeah, no.
“A tenant, Nolan Altman, he collapsed, and I had to give him CPR,” she says, and out of the corner of her eye she sees the lost family all snap to attention and start to rush over to them.
“I don’t give a shit—” Brown starts to say, but the woman in the trench coat and nightgown interrupts him with a loud cry.
“Oh my god, it’s you!” She reaches over the desk and grabs Alice’s face in her hands, which is so startling that Alice forgets to recoil, allowing the woman to get a freakishly strong grip on her cheeks. “You saved my baby boy!”
Oh god. Oh god.
“Oh,” Alice says, managing to slide her head back and out of this woman’s hands. “No, I just—”
“They told us at the hospital that you saved his life,” the woman sobs, grasping at Alice’s hands now, giving them a superhuman squeeze.
“It’s so romantic,” the college student gushes. “Saved by your girlfriend.”
Okay, honestly, what the fuck? Alice chokes. “Girl—what?”
“Oh, don’t worry, sweetie, the cat’s out of the bag!” the nightgown woman says, patting her firmly. “No need to keep it a secret anymore—the EMT told us that his girlfriend saved him, and that’s you!”
What the actual hell is going on? Alice had always assumed that the Grey’s Anatomy rumor mill was exaggerated for TV, but maybe it’s all true? Fucking Corey J. the EMT!
“No,” she says firmly, needing to nip this in the bud. “No, there’s been a misunderstanding.”
The nightgown woman, who Alice figures must be Nolan’s mom, has somehow come around behind the desk and Alice finds herself enveloped in an enormous mom hug.
The woman is round and soft, and the feeling of being pulled into her makes something bereft and primal rise up inside Alice’s chest, an echo of a cry she’d learned to ignore years ago.
The words catch in her throat, just for a second.
“You should be proud of your employee,” the other older woman says to Brown, looking at him a bit shrewdly. “She single-handedly saved the life of one of your most successful, um…” She stops for a second, clearly searching for the right word. “Clients?”
“Tenants,” Alice hisses at her, and the woman takes the suggestion much too loudly.
“Tenants, who happens to be her boyfriend, and my nephew.”
“Oh,” Brown says, awkwardly shuffling his feet.
Alice can tell that he’s not quite sure how to go about firing her in front of this family, especially now that one of the men is vigorously shaking his hand and the mom is sobbing all over Alice’s favorite shirt, babbling about how Alice is a hero.
“Err, right,” Brown finally says, backing away from the desk. “Uh, good work, I guess.”
“I—thank you?” Alice gingerly pats Nolan’s mom on the back.
She’s torn between needing to clear up this whole girlfriend thing immediately and wanting to wait until Brown’s out of earshot.
The family angle is definitely the only thing keeping her employed right now, and she’s not about to look a gift horse in the mouth.
“Come back to the hospital with us,” Nolan’s mom says, tugging at her. “He’ll want to see you when he wakes up.”
“Oh no. No, no, no,” Alice says quickly.
He certainly will not want to see her when he wakes up.
He doesn’t know her name, and probably couldn’t pick her out of a lineup.
She’s pretty sure he doesn’t spend all week breathlessly waiting to catch sight of her.
She can’t imagine how weird it would be to wake up after an aneurysm or whatever this was and see the loving faces of your entire family plus someone you can barely place.
Also it’s a hospital. Alice doesn’t do hospitals, not anymore.
She absolutely cannot go with them, but Mr. Brown is still standing there, staring at her. “My shift isn’t over,” she says weakly.
“I’m sure your boss can cover for you,” the shrewd woman who is apparently Nolan’s aunt says, something almost evil in her eye.
She’d clearly heard Brown gearing up to fire Alice, and she’s obviously not having it.
Alice quickly slots her into the category of “chaotic good” and can’t help but like her. “Right, Mr…. ?”
“Brown,” he says quickly. “Robert Brown.”
“Mr. Brown,” the aunt says smoothly. “I’m sure you won’t begrudge letting, um, this lovely young woman visit her boyfriend in the hospital with us.”
Please, lady, Alice thinks, make it more obvious you don’t know my name.
“Of…of course not,” Brown stutters. “I can, uh…I guess I can sit here until the day-shift girls come.”
“Girls?” the college student asks, her head tilted.
“Do you employ children here, Mr. Brown?” He stares at her, obviously not computing, and Alice tries not to laugh.
She wishes she were actually dating Nolan.
His family is clearly hilarious. “Because if they’re adults,” she goes on, eyes narrowed now in a clear challenge, “I think the word you’re looking for is ‘women.’ ”
“Uh, right,” he manages, surrendering to whatever is happening right now. “Women. Right. Well, Rue, off you go.”
He clearly can’t get rid of the family quickly enough, and Alice is too stunned to come up with an excuse to get out of this hospital visit that doesn’t include yeah, no, we’ve never actually spoken, please blame Corey J.
the gossiping EMT. She’ll have to break it to them outside, or in the car or something.
Maybe at the hospital, like right outside the doors so she doesn’t have to go in?
Nolan’s mom pulls her out of the building and neatly shoves her into an enormous SUV that’s been parked in front of a fire hydrant this entire time.
Alice finds herself wedged between the mom and the chaotic aunt in the middle row of seats, while the college student clambers over her to sit in the back row and the two men who Alice can’t tell apart settle into the front.
“Listen,” Alice tries to say, but they’re all talking at once, their voices overlapping as they finish one another’s thoughts in what seems like three different simultaneous conversations, all over the thumping sound of the windshield wipers. “I’m sorry, I don’t know how it got to this point, but—”
“It’s okay,” Nolan’s mom says, absently patting her cheek while the men in the front debate the fastest route to the hospital.
“We didn’t know about you either, sweetheart.
But that’s our Nolie, isn’t it? Such a private boy!
He’s always kept his girlfriends as far away from us as he could. Worried we’d scare them off, I bet!”
“No,” Alice says for what feels like the millionth time.
She’s not sure when the right moment to dump this news on them is, if there even is a right moment.
It’s definitely not now, when they’re halfway through the drive to the hospital, the college student aggressively shouting directions from the backseat and the driver resolutely ignoring them, but this seems to be spiraling very quickly out of control.
Alice waits for a red light and once the car has come to a stop she takes a deep breath and, in a miraculous second of quiet, says in her loudest, clearest voice, “I’m not his girlfriend. ”
She expects that to be that. She’s ready to tell them everything—well, maybe not everything.
They probably don’t need to know about her stalkery crush on their comatose son.
She’ll tell them it was all a misunderstanding, a literal game of telephone gone wrong from the dispatcher to the EMT to them, and hopefully it’ll be a funny part of the story they tell one another in the years to come, once Nolan is awake and healthy again.
But that’s not quite what happens.
“Oh sure, Marie’s told us all about that,” Nolan’s mom says, waving a dismissive hand. “Labels like that are for old people, or something, I don’t know.”
The college student, ostensibly Marie, leans forward, her face now way too close to Alice’s. “They’re outdated,” she says, a long-suffering tone in her voice. “I keep telling you, Mom, we’ve progressed beyond the need for labels and binaries, like, as a society.”
Alice wants to scream. She’s as bisexual as the next person, but this is not some highly evolved plea for implied polyamory or whatever. She literally does not know this man!
“But whatever you call it,” Nolan’s mom says, talking smoothly over her daughter, “knowing that he has you in his life made all of us breathe easier this morning. We’re always so worried about him being alone and working so much.”
“Oh god,” Alice mutters. Great. This is just great.
The mom wraps her arm around Alice and pulls her into a side hug as the SUV barrels down the narrow street.
Alice feels like she’s in one of those inspirational videos where an orphaned animal is adopted by a mom of another species; she knows this isn’t her mom, not anywhere close, but she can also feel herself going limp and submissive in her grasp.
Once again, she fails to respond quickly enough to tell the truth.
“He had someone there for him,” the chaotic aunt adds from Alice’s other side. “Knowing that he had someone he loved there with him in those last moments—he’s going to wake up, I know he is, but if he doesn’t—well, that’s a real comfort to us.”
Fuck.
Fucking fucking fuck!
What the fuck is she supposed to do now?
Say, Sorry to break it to you, but if your beloved son/nephew/brother dies, the last person he ever saw was a complete fucking stranger?
He spent his nights working by himself in his office and he died in the lobby, completely alone except for the receptionist who didn’t properly know how to perform CPR?
“Is he—is he going to wake up? What did they say?”
“We don’t know,” one of the men says from the front seat. “They said we have to wait and see. Maybe Van will know more when we get back. She was going to make some calls.”
Alice takes in a deep, shuddering breath.
Okay, she can handle this.
If he wakes up, she’ll be able to drop the bomb on them because they’ll be so elated that he’s alive that her lie won’t even register on their radar.
And hey, maybe he’ll be so grateful to her for saving his life that they’ll fall in love for real, the lie forgotten, and this will end up being the most overdramatic meet-cute in the world.
Right? Alice has read romance novels; she knows how this shit works.
And if he doesn’t wake up…well. Is letting them believe this white lie really that bad? Letting them think he had company and comfort in his last weeks, last moments?
“This is kind of awkward,” she manages to say, Nolan’s mom’s arm still around her. “But he never actually told me any of your names.”
Not a lie, technically.
Marie laughs out loud, and Alice steels herself. She can do this. Just until he wakes up.
Or doesn’t.