Chapter 3 #2
I sit down at the kitchen table, easing aside a hockey magazine and the Uncrustables box.
Oliver has followed me and is now sitting at my feet with his chin resting heavily on my knee, shedding and drooling onto my tailored trousers with the quiet, relentless dedication of a man doing his life's work.
I open my leather notebook to the first page, where I have written, in my precise, surgical handwriting: CONTINGENCY FRAMEWORK: KAPOOR ENGAGEMENT (REV. 1).
Casey sets a mug in front of me, drops into the chair across the table, and peers at my notebook. His eyebrows go up. “You titled it.”
“Organization is the foundation of any successful operation.”
“Sure, but you titled it like it's a NATO mission briefing.” He leans back, his massive frame making the kitchen chair creak dangerously, and takes a sip of his coffee. “Alright, Doc. Lay it on me. What are the rules?”
I take a steadying breath. Somewhere between the circling of the block and the Goldendoodle assault, my pulse has settled into a rhythm that is merely elevated rather than arrhythmic. I can work with elevated. I have performed surgeries at elevated levels.
“Rule one,” I begin, clicking my pen with a precision that I hope conveys authority.
“Public displays of affection will be controlled and strategic. We will present a united front of confident, understated intimacy. Hand-holding when observed. Proximity in social settings. Brief, appropriate physical contact when necessary to sell the narrative.”
Casey nods, his face serious. “Define 'brief, appropriate physical contact.'“
“A hand on the arm. A touch to the lower back in a crowd. Perhaps...” I force the words out like I'm dictating a surgical plan. “An arm around the shoulder in group photographs.”
“Okay. What about a hand on the knee? Like at dinner, under the table?”
My pen skips. “Why would you need to touch my knee under the table?”
“Couples do that,” he says, with an expression of such guileless sincerity that I cannot determine if he's being helpful or deliberately trying to end me. “It's, like, a thing. The under-the-table knee touch. Very standard relationship behaviour.”
“Fine. Knee touches. Noted.” I write knee touches in my notebook.
Then I cross it out. Then I write it again, more firmly, because crossing it out felt like an admission of something.
Casey, across the table, takes a slow sip of his coffee, watching me over the rim of the mug with the placid attention of someone waiting to see what I do next.
His mouth, when it leaves the rim of the mug, is wet, and pink, and I look at it for half a second longer than is strictly required to confirm that yes, he has a mouth, and then I look at my notebook with the focused intensity of a junior resident being observed during their first lumbar puncture.
“Rule two. Terms of endearment. We need to establish an approved list and use them consistently.”
“So what am I calling you?”
“Something plausible. Something my family would expect from a partner.”
Casey taps his chin, eyes crinkling with a thoughtfulness that looks suspiciously like barely restrained delight. “Babe?”
“Adequate.”
“Honey?”
“Acceptable.”
“Sweetheart?”
My pen stops. The word hangs in the air of the cluttered kitchen, soft and round and too intimate, and I can feel the capillaries in my ears dilating in a way that is categorically not blushing because I am a thirty-three-year-old neurosurgeon and I do not blush.
“Perhaps we can revisit the endearment list,” I say, with tremendous dignity.
“Schnookums?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Pookie?”
“Casey.”
“Love muffin?”
“I will end this arrangement right now.”
He grins at me, wide and bright and devastating, and I have to look down at my notebook because my chest is doing something structurally unsound. Oliver chooses this moment to sigh heavily against my leg, a warm, contented exhale that I feel through the wool of my trousers.
“Rule three,” I continue, with the grim determination of a minesweeper.
“Sleeping arrangements. We will almost certainly share a suite.
Possibly a shared bed, knowing my mother's tactical approach to hospitality. We will maintain appropriate physical boundaries during sleep. I will construct a dividing barrier.”
“A pillow wall.”
“If you want to call it that, yes.”
“I'm a restless sleeper,” he says, and something in his voice shifts, becomes quieter, more careful. “Fair warning. I run hot, and I tend to... migrate.”
“Migrate.”
“In my sleep. Toward heat sources. It's a hockey player thing.
We're like human furnaces, and if there's something warm nearby, I'll just sort of... drift.” He shrugs, and the casual gesture does not match the very un-casual way he is watching me.
“So the pillow wall might have a structural integrity problem.”
I am picturing it. I am picturing the pillow wall, and the migration, and the warm bulk of him drifting across the bed in the dark like a slow, incoming tide, and I have to grip my pen until the plastic creaks because my body has just generated, without consultation, a vivid and unhelpful image of his arm settling across my waist.
“I will reinforce it,” I say. My voice is admirably clinical. My pulse, by contrast, has filed a formal complaint.
“Rule four,” I press on. “Our cover story. We began a private relationship approximately eight months ago. We kept it discreet because of workplace considerations and because I value my privacy. You proposed two weeks ago, over a quiet dinner. We have not yet told anyone at the hospital.”
“Where was the dinner?”
“I... what?”
“The dinner where I proposed. Where was it? Your mom's going to ask, Arjun. Your aunties are definitely going to ask. We need details.”
He's right. Of course he's right. “Fine. Suggest a venue.”
“Scaramouche.”
I look up. Scaramouche is not a casual suggestion. It is one of the most elegant restaurants in Toronto, perched on a hillside overlooking the city skyline. It is exactly the kind of place someone would choose for a proposal if they wanted it to be perfect.
“You know Scaramouche?” I ask, and I am not successful at keeping the surprise out of my voice.
Something passes across Casey's face. It's fast, barely a shadow, there and gone. “I've walked past it a few times. Looked nice. Seemed like your kind of place.”
He has walked past Scaramouche and thought of me. I file this information into a category I am resolutely not examining and move on.
“Scaramouche. Fine. You proposed at the end of the meal. I said yes. We had champagne. The ring is being resized.” I pause. “We will need a ring.”
“Already on it.”
I blink. “You... already have a ring?”
“No, I said I'm on it. I'll handle it. Leave the ring to me.” He waves his hand, and I notice, not for the first time, that his hands are enormous.
Broad palms, thick fingers, calloused from years of hockey and currently stained with traces of blue Dermabond that he apparently cannot fully remove.
They are the complete antithesis of my own hands, which are narrow, dexterous, and manicured to surgical standards.
I do not think about his hands. I think about rule five.
“Rule five. Our backstory of personal knowledge.
We need to know enough about each other's lives to be convincing under scrutiny.
My mother will test inconsistencies. My Auntie Sunita is essentially an intelligence operative.
I've prepared a dossier.” I pull a USB drive from my coat pocket and set it on the table between us.
“Comprehensive family profiles. Behavioural patterns. Known alliances and rivalries. A glossary of Hindi phrases you may need.”
Casey picks up the USB drive and turns it over in his fingers. “You profiled your own family.”
“I performed a comprehensive threat assessment.”
“You made a scouting report of your relatives.”
“The analogy is... not inaccurate.”
He laughs. It's that deep, booming laugh I can hear from three floors up, the one that echoes through the ER and makes the nurses smile and makes me grip my clipboard so hard the plastic flexes.
In this small kitchen, it fills every corner.
Oliver's tail starts wagging again, thumping against the table leg.
“Alright, so I'll memorize the dossier,” Casey says, tucking the USB drive into his sweatpants pocket. “But you need to know stuff about me too. Fair's fair.”
“I know the relevant professional details.”
“Professional details aren't going to cut it when my fake fiancé doesn't know my middle name.”
“What is your middle name?”
“James.”
Casey James Welling. I write it in my notebook and the pen moves of its own accord, the letters coming out with an uncharacteristic fluidity.
“Born in Huntsville, Ontario. Cottage country,” he continues, settling back in his chair with his coffee mug balanced on his knee.
“My mom's Brenda. She's up there by herself now; dad passed when I was sixteen.
Heart attack, real sudden. She runs a small gift shop on the main street and organizes basically every community event within a sixty-kilometre radius.
She's... she's the best person I know.” He pauses, and for a moment the golden-retriever-sunshine dims, just slightly, into something warmer and older and more private.
“She's going to want to meet you, by the way. Probably already planning the trip.”
“Noted.” I write down Brenda. Huntsville. Gift shop. Then, after a hesitation: best person he knows. Father deceased.