Chapter Four
Four
Alice doesn’t seem to be fired. The day-shift receptionists ask her incessantly about what happened when she shows up to relieve them, but Mr. Brown doesn’t make an appearance. She’ll take that as a win.
Being alone in the lobby after everyone else leaves seems eerier tonight.
It had freaked her out for her first week or two of the job, until she got used to being the only awake human on the entire block, completely unprotected should some sort of murderer come on a receptionist-killing rampage.
But tonight Alice can’t stop thinking about the fact that if she were to have a clot in her brain, no one would find her until morning. She’d die completely alone.
It’s not like she wouldn’t be alone if she had a coronary at home either, but she spends most of her time at home asleep, so it’s not where she does most of her existential rumination on the fleeting nature of life.
Alice tries to pass the time like she normally does—alternating between mystery and romance novels, watching cooking competitions on her phone, half-heartedly flipping through the community college bookkeeping course list for the millionth time—but none of it holds her attention.
It feels like hundreds of years pass before the front doors open a few minutes after six in the morning. Alice looks up, ready to greet whatever white-collar breadwinner hates sleeping, but the words catch in her throat, because the person striding inside is unmistakably Van.
It’s almost déjà vu. How many times has Alice seen Nolan walking in those doors, wearing a nearly identical face?
How many times has she breathlessly watched him cross the empty lobby, wondering if he’s going to nod to her this morning, or maybe even say hello?
How many times has she watched the way the fancy lights glint in his thick black hair?
But of course, Van isn’t wearing a bespoke suit and dress shoes polished to a shine.
She’s wearing dark jeans and a green quilted jacket, and what look suspiciously like work boots.
Instead of a briefcase or bag, she’s carrying two coffee cups, and she’s not walking toward the security turnstiles, but instead heading directly to Alice.
“Hey,” Van says as she approaches the desk. Her voice is quiet, but it still echoes off all of the marbled surfaces.
“Hi,” Alice manages to say, wondering if this is some kind of apparition her brain has invented to cure her of boredom.
“You, uh…” Van looks nervous. She’s shifting from foot to foot, and she doesn’t meet Alice’s eye. “You didn’t text.”
“Oh,” Alice says softly. She’d stared at Van’s business card for probably an hour around three in the morning, memorizing the way it read Total Body Physical Therapy above Vanessa Altman, DPT, all in a sort of inoffensively bland peach color.
She’d input Van’s number into her phone, but no. She had not texted.
“I didn’t have your number,” Van explains, carefully placing one of the coffee cups on the desk between them. “But I figured I might find you here.”
“Good guess.” Alice looks closely at her. Van looks haggard. Alice wonders if she slept at all, if something has happened to Nolan. She wonders where Frank is.
“I, um, I brought you some tea. Herbal, ’cause I know it’s almost the end of your night.” She nudges the cup closer to Alice, and Alice’s heart does a flippy melty thing that she decides not to think about at this particular moment.
She’s not supposed to have anyone behind the desk, ever, but she gestures to the spot next to her. “Do you want to sit?”
Van nods, walking around the ridiculously large desk and perching on the high stool next to Alice.
She moves like she’s used to being a bull in a china shop, like she’s always about to break something, which confuses the hell out of Alice because so far Van seems to be the most careful, gentle, body-aware person she’s ever met.
“Thank you,” Alice says softly, taking a sip of her tea. It’s chamomile and something else soothing…lavender, maybe? There’s honey in it, and it’s the perfect temperature. “This is amazing.”
Van takes a sip of her own drink, something almost bashful in the tilt of her head.
“I didn’t want to overstep,” Van finally says, and Alice is reaching out before she can stop herself. The instant her hand closes over Van’s wrist, Van’s entire body stills.
Two of Alice’s fingers have landed on the cuff of Van’s jacket, and the other two on the smooth skin of the back of her hand. It’s not possible but Alice is pretty sure she can feel Van’s thudding heartbeat.
“You didn’t,” Alice says, staring hard at Van’s face until Van finally turns to look at her. “Really.”
A slow smile grows across Van’s face, but it doesn’t start at the corners of her mouth.
It starts with a softening of her eyes, and it seems to almost float down her face, smoothing her cheeks and easing a muscle in her jaw, before her lips finally tug up, and Alice catches a hint of dimples.
She’s so pretty that Alice can barely breathe, although in fairness some of that is probably from the feeling of Van’s skin under her fingertips, the scent of Van’s body slowly filling the sterile space behind the desk.
“Is there any news on Nolan?”
Something shutters behind Van’s eyes. She drops her gaze again, reaching for her coffee with the hand Alice was just touching. “No,” she says quietly. “No change. I was there all night.”
“I’m sorry,” Alice says, and it’s only when Van looks at her a little weird that Alice realizes that’s a strange thing to say about your own boyfriend. She tries to correct. “You must be exhausted.”
Van nods. “I was on my way home to sleep, but I wanted to see how you were doing.”
Jesus fucking Christ. This was a terrible idea from the start—not that it was even Alice’s idea—but the deeper she gets with Van, the more Van thinks about her and takes care of her, the harder it’s all going to get.
She absolutely cannot keep doing this. She can’t.
Alice gathers her courage, takes a deep breath, and starts to bail.
“Van, I need to tell you…things with me and Nolan, they weren’t…
” She trails off, not sure how to say it.
It’s only been twenty-four hours but that already feels so impossibly long to have kept the lie going.
She tries again. “I don’t know how to say this… ”
“It’s okay,” Van says, and this time she’s the one putting her hand on Alice’s arm. It’s a fleeting touch, she doesn’t leave it there like Alice had, but it messes Alice up just the same. “I don’t need to know the details.”
Alice huffs out a breath. Why won’t any of these damn Altman women let her finish a goddamned sentence? “That’s not it.”
“Look,” Van says, and there’s something harder in her voice than Alice has heard before.
“Nolan and I have never seen eye to eye on…well, a lot of things. But how he treats women, that’s always been, um.
” She scratches at the back of her neck, clearly trying not to badmouth Alice’s boyfriend right in front of her.
“A difference,” she finally says. “But you—knowing he finally got his shit together enough to be with someone like you—that’s…
” She bites her lip, takes a sip of her coffee, runs a hand through her thick hair.
“Honestly it’s the first thing I’ve admired about him in a long time. ”
Fuck.
“And my mom, she’s so happy to meet you. For real. She’s always believed, deep down, that Nolan is, like, a good guy who will settle down with a nice girl like you, get married, give her grandchildren, all that shit.”
She grimaces at Alice, and Alice hears everything she isn’t saying.
The way Babs must have put all of her eggs in Nolan’s basket, never expecting her gay daughter to have those things, to give her those grandchildren.
Marie’s too young and Van’s too queer, so it all fell on Nolan. Who is now an inch from death.
“And now you’re here, and she’s like, he did it! We’re so close!” Van twists up her lips a little bit. “Everyone is so pleased he finally ended his eternal fuck-boy phase. Honestly, if he weren’t in a coma, I think they’d be throwing him a Welcome to Monogamy party.”
Alice tries to laugh, but she’s pretty sure she sounds more like a dying farm animal.
Eternal fuck-boy phase? Great. Simply, absolutely the best. Of course Alice’s fake-boyfriend ends up being quite possibly the biggest player in the world.
Alice isn’t exactly anyone’s dream girl, she knows that—poor, uneducated, sarcastic as shit, unwilling to laugh at jokes that aren’t funny, not hot or skinny—and Nolan is sounding less and less like someone who’d pick her for her winning personality.
It doesn’t matter, not in the grand scheme of Nolan’s life, or even in the delicate balance of maintaining this fiction for the family, but if Nolan wakes up, the odds that he falls madly in love with her are getting slimmer and slimmer.
And making the truly wonderful situation worse, now not only are his parents and his aunt thrilled that Nolan settled down with her, but Van is too?
Even Van wants to believe this absurd fantasy, that her fourteenth-floor brother found himself in a relationship with a dowdy, impoverished receptionist?
Even Van feels closer to her brother and more settled knowing that he had Alice these past few months?
Fuck Alice’s entire fucking life.
After only a few more minutes, Van leaves to get some rest, and Alice spends the rest of her shift with her head in her hands, trying to figure out how she—a person who prides herself on being realistic, responsible, and pessimistic—landed in this absolutely ridiculous scenario.
It’s certainly the most out-of-character thing she’s ever done, going along with this ruse that can only end in loss and disappointment.
Besides the shame of inventing a romance out of a single scrap of eye contact, Alice is now full of information about Nolan she never wanted, and she’s starting to feel something beyond embarrassed—ashamed, maybe, or even disturbed—about the enormous crush she’s been harboring for so long despite knowing nothing about him except that he never stopped to chat with her.
Would Nolan ever have seen Alice as anything other than a frumpy ornament in his otherwise pristine lobby?
If she’d gotten another job, would he even have noticed she was gone?
She wonders why he regularly comes into the office in the wee hours of the morning; she’d daydreamed that he was deeply dedicated to some clients in Japan or something, but maybe he was running away from one-night stands, preferring to leave after sex rather than have an actual conversation with a human woman.
She wonders what his days are like, his nights.
His friends. The women he actually dates.
She should have walked away from this mess immediately, hopped out of the moving SUV if she’d had to.
It’s always mattered to her that she stick to her guns, be fiercely independent, so she tries not to think about how easily swayed she’s been by Aunt Sheila’s snark, Marie’s hope, and Babs’s soft hugs.
How little it took to make her stay and lie.
Stuck behind her desk, lonely and exhausted, she definitely tries not to think about Van at all.
She doesn’t want to think about Van’s kind smile, her understanding eyes, her broad shoulders and long legs, her gentle touch, her dykey outfits and cologne, her enormous dog, or her beat-up station wagon.
She’s trying not to get too deep with Van in particular, but apparently that message hasn’t traveled from her brain to her body, because her fingers type out and send a text before her shift ends. I’m going home to sleep, but could you come get me on your way back to the hospital this afternoon?