Chapter 3 #3
“Played hockey from age five through the OHL. Blew my shoulder out at nineteen, which is when I pivoted to medicine. Did my undergrad at McMaster, med school at U of T, residency right here at Lakeshore. I have a Goldendoodle who thinks he’s a person.
” He gestures at Oliver, who has now fully draped himself across both my feet and appears to be asleep.
“I eat terribly and I can't cook anything for one person that requires more than a microwave or a barbecue.
I'm a Leafs fan, which means I have a high tolerance for pain and disappointment. And I...” He pauses.
Looks at me with those warm blue eyes, steady and open and unguarded.
“I've been at Lakeshore for three years, and the first time I saw you, you were helping the short-staffed ER by stitching a lacerated ear back onto a screaming toddler with hands that were so steady they looked mechanical, and I thought, who on earth is that.”
The kitchen goes silent.
I should say something. Something appropriate and proportional, something that acknowledges the information without inviting further disclosure of this nature, because we are establishing parameters, not.
.. not whatever this is becoming, in this cluttered, warm, dog-hair-covered apartment that smells like coffee and peanut butter and something underneath all of it that is just Casey, and I cannot find the courage within me to put words to my thoughts.
“That is... adequate background information,” I manage. “Thank you.”
The corner of his mouth twitches. “You're welcome.”
I clear my throat, look down at my notebook, and realize I have written the word “mechanical” in the margin and underlined it twice for no discernible reason.
“Is there anything else?” I ask, snapping the notebook shut with slightly more force than necessary. “Any additional parameters you'd like to establish?”
Casey tilts his head. Oliver snores. The kitchen radiator hisses softly.
“Just one thing,” he says. “We should probably practice.”
“Practice.”
“Yeah. Like, the physical stuff. The hand-holding, the proximity, the whole united-front thing.” He sets his coffee mug down on the table.
“Because right now, Arjun, you're sitting in that chair like someone bolted your spine to it, and if we show up to your mom's estate and you flinch every time I get within arm's length, she's going to sniff that out in about four seconds.”
He is correct. I am sitting in this chair with the rigid posture of a soldier at a military tribunal, and my mother, who once detected that I had skipped a dentist appointment based solely on the way I was holding my jaw during a FaceTime call, will detect inauthenticity.
“What do you propose?” I ask, and my voice is admirably clinical.
Casey holds out his hand.
It is just there, in the space between us.
Palm up, open, resting on the kitchen table next to the Uncrustables box and his WORLD'S OKAYEST DOCTOR mug.
His fingers are relaxed, slightly curled, and there is a pale scar on his index finger that I have never noticed before, probably from a skate blade, a thin silver line that catches the grey light from the window.
“Start simple,” he says. His voice is gentle. Patient. Like he is approaching a frightened animal, which, if I am being perfectly honest with myself, is not an inaccurate assessment of my current psychological state.
I look at his hand. I look at my hand, resting on my leather notebook, the fingers long and precise and currently experiencing a micro-tremor that I am choosing to attribute to caffeine intake.
This is practice; a strategic rehearsal. This is two colleagues calibrating physical parameters for a professional deception.
I place my hand in his.
His palm is warm. Not warm like a normal human hand.
Warm like standing too close to a fireplace, warm like sunlight on tile, warm like the man is generating his own localized weather system.
I have, in the course of my career, palpated thousands of hands.
I have assessed capillary refill, checked radial pulses, tested grip strength in patients recovering from craniotomies.
I have, in other words, a robust and well-calibrated baseline for what a hand is supposed to feel like, and Casey Welling's hand has just rendered that baseline professionally useless.
His fingers close around mine with a gentleness that is at odds with their size, and his thumb settles against the back of my hand, right over the tendon of my extensor digitorum, and I can feel my own pulse against his skin.
His hand, calloused and rough, is twice the width of mine; my whole hand vanishes within it, leaving me feeling simultaneously silly and profoundly secure.
“See?” Casey says, and his voice is very, very quiet. “Not so bad.”
I look at our hands. His are massive, scarred, warm. Mine are narrow, precise. They look wrong together. They look like two hands that do not belong in the same sentence.
And yet, despite all this, they look as if they fit.
“No,” I say, and my voice is a whisper that I did not authorize. “Not so bad.”
Oliver snores. The radiator hisses. Outside, a streetcar rattles down Dundas, its bell clanging in the freezing February air.
Casey does not let go of my hand.
I do not pull it away.
My phone buzzes on the table. A text from my mother:
Darling, what is your fiancé's suit size? Tarun will need measurements.
Reality crashes back in.
“I need your suit measurements,” I say, pulling my hand free with a steadiness I do not feel. I flip open my notebook to a fresh page. Pen ready. Parameters restored. “Chest, waist, inseam, shoulder width, and sleeve length.”
Casey blinks, clearly recalibrating from the hand-holding to the suit measurements at whiplash speed. “Uh. Fifty-two chest? Thirty-four waist? I think? Honestly, most things I try on don't fit, so I've kind of given up on suits.”
“You've given up on suits.”
“The shoulders don't work. Nothing off the rack fits.”
I look at his shoulders. They are approximately the width of a compact car. I look back at my notebook.
“I'll have Tarun handle it,” I say. “He once tailored a suit for a Bollywood actor who gained thirty pounds of muscle for a role. He enjoys a challenge.”
“Is Tarun going to be okay? Like, emotionally?”
“Tarun is going to be ecstatic. He lives for spectacle.” I stand, tucking the notebook into my coat pocket.
Oliver lifts his head from my knee, looks up at me with those enormous, liquid brown eyes, and lets out a soft, mournful whine, as if I am abandoning him to a life of profound suffering rather than simply walking to the door.
I reach down and scratch behind his ear. The whine transforms into a groan of bliss. His tail thumps twice against the floor.
“I'll send you the flight details by tomorrow evening,” I say, straightening my coat, which now contains enough golden fur to construct an entirely separate dog. I pause. “I will require your number.”
Casey blinks. “Right, you don't have my number.”
“I have your pager. I have your work email. I have, on one regrettable occasion, your fax extension. I do not have your personal mobile number.”
“Doc. We've worked together for two years.”
“I am aware of the duration of our professional acquaintance, thank you.”
He is grinning at me. He pulls his phone from the pocket of his sweatpants, taps something as I dictate my phone number to him, and then my phone buzzes against my leg. I extract it. The screen reads: unknown number, 1 message. I open it.
“Now you have it,” he says.
I put my phone away without responding, because I do not currently possess the emotional bandwidth to engage with the question of why a grown man has chosen to personally introduce himself to me via Stegosaurus, or why I am going to save the contact under Casey Welling and not Dr. Welling, which would be the appropriate professional designation.
I will examine this later. I will examine all of it later.
I am at the door when he says, “Arjun.”
I turn.
He is standing in the middle of his chaotic kitchen, coffee mug in hand, Oliver leaning against his legs, grey morning light pouring through the window behind him like something from a painting that a very unfair artist made specifically to illustrate everything warm and good about the world.
“This is going to work,” he says. “I promise.”
He says it with such simple, total conviction that for a moment, standing in the doorway of his cluttered apartment with dog hair on my cashmere and the phantom warmth of his hand still printed on my palm, I almost believe him.
“Goodnight, Casey.”
“It's ten-thirty in the morning.”
“Goodbye, Casey.”
His laugh follows me down the stairwell, warm and huge and echoing off the old Victorian walls, and I carry it with me all the way to my car, where I sit behind the wheel for four full minutes with my hands at ten and two, staring at the frost on the windshield, trying to remember how breathing works.
I look down at my hand. The one he held.
I flex my fingers. They are perfectly steady. Not a single tremor.
For the first time in weeks, outside of the operating room, my hands are completely still.