Chapter 2 #2
Arjun's composure is hanging by a thread so thin it's practically theoretical.
He still clasps his hands behind his back, and I know from prior experience watching him that his knuckles are white.
“My mother is attempting to arrange my marriage to a cardiac surgeon from London named Dev. She has hired an astrologer, booked a caterer, and invited eighty members of my extended family to an engagement dinner. I panicked. I told her I was already engaged, and I...” He swallows. “I named you as my fiancé.”
The supply closet is suddenly very small.
Or maybe I'm very large. Both of those things are true on a normal day, but right now the walls are actively contracting and all the air in the room has been replaced by the faint scent of citrus soap and the quiet sound of Arjun Kapoor admitting that he panicked.
Arjun Kapoor. The man who once performed an emergency craniotomy on a six-month-old during a Hydro One power outage using a headlamp and didn't raise his pulse above sixty. That Arjun Kapoor panicked, and when his brain reached for a name, it reached for mine.
“You named me,” I repeat, because my mouth is on autopilot while the rest of me is experiencing what I believe my fellow medical professionals would call sudden and traumatic shock.
“It was an impulsive, irrational decision driven by acute psychological distress and sleep deprivation,” he says, and he's talking faster now, the way he does when he's dictating surgical notes, like if he gets the words out fast enough they'll sound clinical instead of insane.
“I have not slept in thirty-one hours. Gabriel just eviscerated me about my interpersonal deficiencies. My mother was on a FaceTime call describing astrological compatibility matrices, and I looked out of my window and you were...” He stops.
Something shifts behind his eyes, just for a fraction of a second.
“You were there with the children, and the stickers. I said your name before I could stop myself.”
I stare at him.
He stares back at me.
A saline bag falls off a shelf and hits the floor with a loud, anticlimactic thud, and neither of us flinches.
Let me be very clear about what’s happening inside my brain right now. There are two tracks running simultaneously, and they’re both screaming.
Track one: This is insane. This is clinically insane.
This man, this beautiful, impossible, emotionally barricaded man, is asking me to pretend to be his fiancé in front of his terrifying aristocratic Indian family because he panicked on a phone call with his mother.
This is the plot of a bad made-for-tv movie.
This is the kind of thing that happens to people in romantic comedies, not to oversized Canadian paediatricians who peaked athletically in the OHL in their late teens.
Track two: He picked me. Me.
Of every person in this hospital, every person in his life, every name his panicking brain could have grabbed, he said mine.
Casey Welling. The loud, messy, too-big golden retriever who leaves Dermabond on the chart tablets and eats Uncrustables for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
He looked out his window, and he saw me, and he said my name.
Track two is winning. Track two is winning by a landslide, and track one never stood a chance.
“Okay,” I say.
Arjun blinks. It is the first time I’ve ever seen him look startled, and it does distracting things to his face.
His green eyes go wide, his lips part slightly, and for one unguarded second he looks young and stunned and so painfully beautiful that I have to look at the shelf of gauze to my left just to keep breathing.
“I... what?”
“I said okay. I'll do it.”
“You'll— Casey.” He says my first name so rarely that hearing it in his mouth feels like a physical event, like someone just pressed a warm hand directly against my sternum.
“You understand what I am asking. I am asking you to travel to Rajasthan, India, to my family's estate, and convincingly pretend to be my fiancé for three weeks in front of my entire extended friends and family, who are, collectively, the most formidable, intrusive, and strategically ruthless group of people on the Indian subcontinent.”
“Yeah, I got that.”
“I am not exaggerating when I say that my mother is essentially a warlord in a silk sari.”
“Sounds fun.”
“She has an astrologer on retainer.”
“Sure.”
“She will interrogate you about every facet of your existence, from your education to your financial portfolio to your exact birth time for celestial chart compatibility analysis.”
“I was born at 3:47 a.m. Mom had to be induced because I was ten pounds, two ounces. They thought I was twins.”
He stares at me, his mouth ajar, and I watch the gears in his brain try to compute the fact that I’m not running. I'm not asking for time to think about it. I'm not raising the seventeen extremely valid objections that any sane person would typically raise in this absurd situation.
Because here's the thing. The thing that Arjun Kapoor, with all his brilliant surgical intelligence and his meticulous risk assessment and his beautifully organized, catastrophically repressed emotional architecture, has not figured out.
I have been in love with him for two years.
Two years of watching him from across the ER floor.
Two years of memorizing the way he tilts his head when he's reading a scan, the specific sigh he makes when a resident disappoints him, the way his ears turn the softest shade of pink when someone catches him off guard.
Two years of finding excuses to be on the same cases, handing him coffee he didn't ask for, learning the way he takes it (black, scalding, in a mug he wipes down with an antiseptic wipe first because of course he does).
Two years of lying awake in my apartment with my dog Oliver's giant head on my chest, staring at the ceiling, knowing with total certainty that I’m gone for a man who looks at me like I'm a variable in an equation he hasn't solved yet.
And now that man’s standing in a supply closet, his composure in ruins, telling me he said my name when he needed a fake fiancé.
So yeah. I'm going to Rajasthan.
“Casey.” His voice drops, and there's something underneath the clinical control now, something raw and careful and barely audible, like a frequency only I'm tuned to pick up.
“I need you to understand that this would be strictly a strategic arrangement. There would be rules. Boundaries. This is not...” He falters, and his gaze drops to somewhere around my collarbone. “This is not a romantic proposition.”
Right. Obviously. Because the universe is a comedian with a mean streak, and the man of my dreams is standing close enough for me to count his eyelashes and asking me to pretend to love him, which is basically asking a fish to pretend to swim.
“Totally get it,” I say, and my voice comes out remarkably steady for someone whose heart is currently doing something that would concern a cardiologist. “Strategic arrangement. Fake engagement. Boundaries and rules. Got it.”
Something flickers across his face, too quick to catch, there and gone like a light behind a closing door. Relief, maybe. Or something else. Something that makes my chest ache with a hope so fierce it actually hurts.
“I will compensate you, obviously,” he says, straightening his shoulders and reaching for the armour I can see him rebuilding in real time, brick by careful brick. “For your time. The travel expenses. Any professional inconvenience—”
“Arjun.” I say his name gently, because I can see his hands shaking behind his back and I need him to stop talking about money before I do something deeply unprofessional in this closet, like pull him against my chest and not let go.
“You don't need to pay me. We're... I mean, we work together. We're friends. Right?”
The word friends lands between us like a scalpel on a surgical tray. Precise. Sterile. It’s inadequate for what it's trying to describe, and we both know it.
“Colleagues,” he corrects quietly, and the word is so careful, so deliberately chosen, that it tells me more than he probably intended.
“Colleagues,” I agree, because I will call this whatever he needs me to call it.
I would call this a CRA tax audit if it meant I got to stand next to him in Rajasthan and pretend that the most brilliant, most infuriatingly guarded man I've ever met chose me.
“Colleagues who are about to pull off the world's most high-stakes fake engagement. Easy.”
He looks up at me, and for one long moment, I see everything.
The exhaustion, the fear, and the loneliness that lives behind those green eyes like something that's been locked in a room for years.
And underneath all of it, something warm and tentative and almost unbearably hopeful that he probably doesn't even know is showing on his face.
Then he blinks, and it's gone, and he's the Dread Prince again.
“I'll send you a dossier,” he says, all business, pulling his phone from his coat pocket. “Comprehensive family profiles. Threat assessments. Behavioural predictions. You'll need to memorize it.”
“A dossier.” I bite the inside of my cheek hard enough to hurt so I don't smile. “Like a scouting report? Wait, did you just say threat assessments?”
“If that analogy helps you process the information, then yes. Like a scouting report. And yes, threat assessments. My family can be lethal, and you must come prepared for every eventuality.” He pauses, his thumb hovering over his phone screen, and glances up at me through his lashes in a way that is almost certainly not deliberate and rearranges my entire circulatory system. “Thank you, Casey.”
Three words. That's all. But he says them so quietly, with so much weight, that they settle against my ribs.
“Anytime, Doc,” I say, and I mean it with every oversized, too-loud, hopeless inch of me.
He nods once, crisp and military-precise, pulls open the closet door, and walks out without looking back.
I watch him go, that rigid, elegant stride, hands clasped behind his back, white coat settling around him like a cape.
The ER swallows him up in three seconds.
Nurses snap to attention. An intern visibly flinches. The Dread Prince is back in formation.
I stay in the supply closet for a very long time.
I stand there, surrounded by saline bags and boxes of nitrile gloves, and I press both hands over my face and breathe.
My pulse is a catastrophe. My hands are shaking.
I’m six-foot-three and two hundred and twenty pounds and I just got taken out at the knees by a hundred-and-forty-pound, when wet, neurosurgeon in a supply closet, and I’ve never, in my entire life, been this happy and this terrified at the same time.
I’m going to India. I’m going to pretend to be engaged to Arjun Kapoor.
I’m going to meet his apparently warlord mother and her retainer astrologer and his eighty strategically ruthless relatives and friends of the family, and I’m going to do it while hiding the fact that I’m so irreversibly in love with him that the word ‘pretend’ is a joke my body physically cannot tell.
I drop my hands and look down at my scrubs.
There’s still blood on my Stegosaurus. My fuzzy purple pen is still sitting at the nurses' station. There’s a holographic dinosaur sticker on my stethoscope, and somewhere in this hospital, a nine-year-old named Brayden is still drinking apple juice and showing off his scalp laceration to the nurse like a war wound.
And somewhere three floors above me, Arjun Kapoor is sitting in his pristine, silent office, typing up a family threat assessment dossier for the man he panic-named as his fake fiancé, and he has no idea what he's just done to my heart.
I pull out my phone. I have one text to send before I go back to the floor and finish my shift like a professional.
I open a message to my mom.
Hey Ma. Quick question. Totally hypothetical. How do you feel about India?
Three dots appear almost instantly.
India, the country? Or Indiana, the state?
The country.
I feel very positively about it! Why? Are you going to India?? Is this about a boy???
I stare at the screen. I stare at it for a very long time.
I'll call you tonight.
CASEY JAMES WELLING. DO NOT LEAVE ME ON A CLIFFHANGER.
I shove my phone back into my pocket, press my hands over my face one more time, and walk back out into the screaming chaos of the paediatric ER.
I have a fracture to splint, a vomit situation to manage, and only a few days to figure out how to survive being fake-in-love with a man I'm really in love with.
No big deal, right?