Chapter Two
Two
Alice walks toward the hospital, blankly following Nolan’s mom, who is apparently named Barbara but insists that Alice call her Babs.
Alice personally would rather be called almost anything other than Babs, but, sure.
To each her own slightly infantilizing nickname.
His Aunt Sheila is absolutely booking it inside, and Alice and Marie are practically running after them to keep up while the men park the car.
Alice almost balks at the entrance to the hospital. She hasn’t been in one in over a decade, not since she was nineteen, and she’d honestly hoped to never cross the threshold of Portland Grace, or any other hospital, ever again.
But here she is, about to go in not for her own dad, but for someone she’s never really met.
Or, well. For his family, she guesses. For Babs and Aunt Sheila and sweet Marie and the two boomer men she’s still struggling to tell apart.
She takes a deep breath—one last breath that doesn’t smell like sterile plastic and antiseptic—and she forces herself inside.
They ride up to the fourth floor, and Aunt Sheila bolts out of the elevator before the doors are fully open.
“Alice, what’s your last name?” Marie asks as they breathlessly stride out of the elevator in a futile attempt to catch up. “I need to find you on Instagram.”
Oh definitely no. Alice’s Instagram is basically a graveyard, but it has a suspicious lack of Nolan on it. “I don’t have one,” she lies, resolving to delete her account at the first opportunity. “But it’s Rue. Like rue the day.”
“Alice Rue.” Marie scrunches up her nose. “That’s so cute I almost hate it,” she says and Alice, for the first time today, laughs.
“Hey, we can’t all be Altmans,” she says, and Marie grins, pretending to flip her hair. The move is slightly compromised by the two different colored Crocs she’s wearing, but something about her energy is infectious anyway.
God, Alice would love to be an Altman.
Marie links her arm with Alice’s, which makes Alice almost stumble in surprise.
She doesn’t have what one might consider friends and she’s so painfully single she seems to have hallucinated an entire relationship, so it’s been a minute since she’s touched anyone.
Marie doesn’t seem to notice, still grinning as she says, “Well, none of us are going to rue the day we met you, I’ll tell you that much. ”
Alice laughs again but this time it’s fake, high and way too loud.
Alice is going to rue the day she was fucking born, that’s for sure.
She’s moderately confident that Nolan doesn’t have any social media, but now she’s paranoid about it.
She’s spent many hours searching for Nolan on Instagram without finding him—she’s not a stalker, she’s simply insanely bored at work and also maybe very lonely—but what if he does have one?
Alice is clearly not going to be on it, and, shit, what if there’s another girl pictured?
Oh god, what if he really has a girlfriend?
How did a simple, private little crush get so complicated? It’s enough to make her regret maybe saving his life altogether.
Marie pulls her down the long hallway, and Alice tries to repress the flashbacks dancing between her eyes, the way her gorge is rising at the familiar fluorescent lights, the steady whirs of the machines, the squeak of comfortable nursing shoes on linoleum.
It’s all as familiar as breathing and she hates it with every molecule in her body.
“He’s in here,” Marie says, pushing Alice into the last room on the right.
The first thing Alice sees is Nolan in the bed.
He’s in a gown, with an oxygen cannula in his nose.
His hands are flat at his sides, and the blanket is tucked under his armpits, unnaturally smooth.
Purely by habit, Alice’s eyes flick to the monitors, but then she drops them.
His vitals are none of her business. Besides, she can tell the important thing from looking at him. He’s still not woken up.
He looks terrible, pale and wan under the thick black hair that Alice has always loved.
Something clenches in her chest. This is the man she’s been pining after for 751 days, and this is how she’s meeting his family, learning how his mom brushes the hair out of his face, how his aunt bustles around the room like it needs fixing.
This is her first sight of him outside of his tailored suits, and it’s all wrong. Nothing is supposed to be this way.
It becomes very clear, between one heartbeat and the next, that Alice absolutely cannot handle this.
Not him lying motionless in this bed. Not the hospital, not the loving mom, not the little sister hanging on her arm.
None of it. She can feel the old signs of a panic attack forming behind her eyes, signs she hasn’t felt in years.
The world is closing in around her; her chest feels too tight and her brain too swollen for her skull, just like when she was a kid, standing in this same building.
She turns on her heel, ready to flee, plan be damned, but she crashes straight into a wall that has a surprising amount of give.
“Oomph,” the wall says. “What in the—”
The wall is gripping onto her arms now, and the small part of Alice that isn’t consumed with panic registers that the wall is probably a person.
“Hey, are you okay?”
Certainly the most compassionate wall Alice has ever met, with a pleasantly gravelly voice, like the owner doesn’t use it much.
The hands on her biceps are big and strong, somehow holding her up but still gentle.
The wall smells amazing, a combination of cologne and a slightly feminine shampoo that cuts beautifully through the ubiquitous stench of hospital disinfectant.
A tiny corner of Alice’s mind clears, and she realizes that the wall is quite possibly the most stunning butch she’s ever seen.
She looks like Nolan—same coloring, same square jaw, same strong nose, same devastating cheekbones—but softer where he almost veers into hawkish.
Marie looks like Nolan watered down, but this person makes Nolan look like the one who is a faint copy.
She’s tall and solid, wearing an extremely stereotypical flannel shirt tucked into dark jeans.
“You okay?” she asks again, and the way her dark brown eyes bore into Alice’s is way too much for Alice’s poor bisexual brain.
“Yes,” Alice manages, shoving the panic as far down as she can. Each breath smells like butch now, and Alice closes her eyes for a second, letting it ground her. “Sorry. Yes.”
“Van, this is Alice,” Babs says. “Nolan’s girlfriend.”
Van’s eyebrows shoot up and she abruptly releases her grip on Alice’s arms like Alice’s sweater was about to burst into flames beneath her palms. “Girlfriend? Nolan?” She looks around, almost like she’s double-checking that she’s in the right room. “Seriously, girlfriend?”
Alice swallows. Van looks skeptical about all of it—the existence of a girlfriend and said girlfriend being Alice—and that’s very much a bad thing. Or, is it? Alice, lost in a butch haze, can’t quite remember if she wants to be found out or not.
“Isn’t it just like Nolie to keep such a sweet girl from us,” Babs says, shaking her head and patting her son fondly on the leg over the blanket. “He’s such a funny boy sometimes.”
Marie rolls her eyes. “Can you blame him, Mom? The last time he let you meet someone, you asked how fertile the women in her family are.”
Alice, still more than halfway to a panic attack, chokes back a laugh.
“What?” Babs says, for all the world like that’s a normal thing to have done. “It was only a question.”
“We hadn’t even ordered drinks yet,” Marie says with the kind of exasperation only teenagers can muster, and Alice finds her attention sliding away from the family drama and back to Van, like the woman is some sort of magnet.
Van looks at Alice again, like she’s taking an X-ray with her eyes.
Alice feels Van’s gaze slide over her reddish-brown hair, which after the night and day she’s had, and the number of times it’s been wet in the rain, is more oily frizz than careful wave.
Van’s eyes take in what must be dark exhausted circles under her eyes, dropping down to her body—twenty pounds heavier than Alice would like it to be—and her clothes, all of which were bought off bargain basement sales racks at least four years ago and are, in a word, uninspired.
Alice knows that she absolutely does not look like someone who should be dating any tenants of the office building, not to mention one as well-dressed as Nolan.
“Alice, this is Van, Nolan’s sister.”
Well, yes, Alice had guessed, based on the same-face situation, but still good to get confirmation. “Right,” she says, like maybe Nolan had mentioned having a sister during one of their many dates. Two sisters, in fact. “Van. Of course.”
“Van, honey, did you reach your neurologist?”
Van tears her suspicious eyes away from Alice, and Alice tries not to be obvious about her relief. She’s still only about an inch away from losing it, and being scrutinized by the hot butch doppelg?nger of her forever crush is certainly not helping to make any of this less complicated.
“Yeah, for a minute. She said basically the same thing as the one here.” She says a bunch of words in a row that Alice recognizes separately but has no idea what they mean when put in that order, and one that sounds like “hippopotamus,” which surely can’t be right.
Luckily Alice isn’t the only idiot in the room; everyone else makes confused noises until Van translates. “All we can do is wait and see.”
Babs sighs. “Oh, my poor boy,” she whispers, and strokes his hair.
Alice drops her gaze as Babs starts to cry. Fuck, she really shouldn’t be here.
Marie and Aunt Sheila both fold in on Babs, murmuring words of comfort. Van stays where she is, her hands scrunched into her front pockets like she doesn’t know what to do with them.
Alice obviously doesn’t know her at all—that’s kind of the whole deal about right now—but something about the clearly gay sibling standing so outside the family dynamic, so apart from the womanly display of grief but not out parking the car with the men…
damn. Alice is trying not to get any deeper in with this family than she already is, but Van’s very presence is gripping at the edges of her rib cage with something that feels an awful lot like maybe Alice was the one getting CPR.