28. Dalton
28
DALTON
I try a hundred ways to get off shift early, but Booker is on a rampage about Fitz being late and takes it out on us all. I don’t cut loose of the hospital until well after eleven that night.
Nadia has been oddly silent other than to confirm that nobody has knocked on our door again.
She doesn’t think they entered the apartment because when she left the bathroom, Catzilla was sleeping on the sofa. If strangers had invaded for even a minute, she wouldn’t have come out for hours.
The lights are all on, though. She’s stayed up waiting for me. I’m not the least bit fatigued due to the anxiety over our predicament, so I’m ready for us to stay up and figure out our next move.
I unlock the door and open it slowly to watch for errant kittens.
Ferris pokes his white head in the crack but he appears to be acting alone. I scoop him up and slip inside.
“He got away from me,” Nadia says. She sits cross-legged in the middle of the room, surrounded with cats. They are wired, jumping over her legs into the valley in the middle, then leaping out to circle around her back.
I drop my pack on the sofa and settle next to her. Ferris crawls along my leg, clawing my scrubs. I’ve been finding tiny holes in all my workwear. “Come here, you little beast,” I tell him and lift him away to curl into my hand. He’ll be too big for this trick soon.
Something about the room feels off. I glance around and realize all of Nadia’s luggage is lined up in the space between the bed and the dresser.
“Did you find a new place?” I ask. Happy anticipation of her answer makes my chest expand.
But her hesitation flips the switch. My chest tightens, and my throat constricts. I let out a slow breath. “What is it?”
She won’t meet my gaze, keeping her eye on Pumpkin, who has plopped down in her lap. “I’m going home. All the way home. To my parents.”
Shock thunders through me. “In Boulder?”
“Yes. I already went to the office to talk with Evan. I told him we had a big argument about the cats and broke up. I turned in my key and said you would be staying, no pets. He didn’t charge me any fines or anything, which was nice, because he could have.”
It takes a few seconds for everything she’s said to sink in. “You turned in your key? You’re giving up?”
“If you have trouble with rent on your own, I can probably help, especially when I start working. I know you said when we got this place that it was more than you wanted to pay.”
“No, I won’t let you do that.” My stomach feels like it’s lined with concrete. Vagus nerve stimulated. That mind-body connection is fierce. The unease gets worse as I ask, “Did you already take a job with your family?”
“No. Max has promised not to tell Uncle Sherman that I’ve left LA.”
“Your cousin knew before me?” My whole body buzzes. Calm down , I tell my brain. Enough with the cortisol.
“You were busy. I didn’t want to upset you at work.” She shifts closer to me, resting her head on my shoulder. “I couldn’t think of any other way.”
“What happens to us, then?”
“I don’t know anything yet, Dalton. I’m going to let the kittens get bigger, then maybe my brothers will take one or two, and maybe some will stay with my parents. If I can bear to split them up.”
“Then you’ll come back?” I wrap an arm around her waist.
“Maybe? I have some reckoning to do with my family.”
So she might not.
The word love hasn’t come up much since I said it the first time. I have occasionally whispered it to her again in the dark.
But I don’t think she feels it. That’s why this is easier for her.
It makes sense. It was fast. We dove into this like teenagers.
Or I did.
Mama Cat leaps off the sofa to move to the cat bed, drawing the kittens. They abandon us to see if she will let them have milk. She’s been trying to wean them. They’re old enough.
I pull Nadia to my lap. “I’m not going to let you go.”
She turns to straddle me, smoothing my hair off my forehead. “It’s not a breakup. I’ll do whatever I can to get back here.”
That’s something, at least. “I’m stuck in LA. I can’t transfer to a new hospital mid-internship.”
“I wouldn’t let you do that, anyway. This is so new for making life changes.”
She means us. I get that. It’s just that I feel like I’ve loved her all my life.
“Hey,” she says. “We’ll be all right. Would it help if we planned a little? When can you transfer?”
“After a year. So next summer.” It’s only fall.
“That’s not long.” She kisses my forehead.
“Without you? That’s an eternity.” I hold her more tightly.
“We’ll make it.” Her words are warm against my ear.
I take in everything about her like it’s the last time. The smell of floral shampoo in her hair. The fit of her head against my neck. I run my hands from her waist to her hips, committing the feel of her to memory.
She presses her mouth to my cheek, and I turn, settling my lips on hers. The kiss deepens quickly, and soon we’re undressing, shirts falling to the carpet in a whisper, skin to skin.
She’s warm and soft and I want to memorize everything about her, to make sure there’s nothing I missed. The crook of her elbow, the back of her knee, the wisps of hair over her ear.
I’ve never used the phrase make love before. It seems like something out of my grandparents’ era. But those words rise up as I pull her panties down. I want to infuse her with everything I’m feeling, make an impression on every part of her body.
We’re told as doctors that every system has a role. Endocrine. Respiratory. Digestion. Vascular. But the more I see people, the more I help them move from illness to recovery, the surer I am that every cell is imprinted with each experience. We’re not made of parts. We are the whole of them together.
When I kiss her belly button, she sucks in a breath. And when I slide a finger inside her, her hips move with me, her memory aligning this experience with the ones from our history, a miracle of nerve endings and conscious thought and automatic response.
Past. Present. Will there be a future?
I kneel over her, using my free hand to touch everything, ribs, breasts, neck, shoulders. I cup her chin and kiss her again, wanting to sear her senses, to create something every part of her body remembers and misses, and hopefully, drives her to come back to me.
She gasps, already shifting upward toward climax. I slide over her and slip inside, touching her all the while. Her hands clasp my back, and each of my cells is infused with her.
A tear glimmers on her cheek, and I know emotion has overtaken her, a mix of signals. Exultation and despair. Connection and the preparation for loss. She feels something for me. Her body shows the signs.
Even with the sadness, she still tightens around me. I ignore the stinging in my own eyes and move with her, more deeply and in sync with her movements.
We arrive at the pinnacle together, her words crying out in the room we will soon no longer share. I wish this moment would never end, that we could remain clutched together until the planet ceased.
But then she starts weeping, and I draw her close. Her upset gives me hope that our bond will be strong enough to weather this.
We lie side by side, arms so tight that we are bundled as one, until at last she pulls away. “I’ll sleep here tonight and leave in the morning. It doesn’t make sense to go now.”
I nod. We check on the cats, all snug with their mother, and go through our night routine that has become so familiar.
Then we curl together beneath her blue ruffles and my Optimus Prime, and sleep our last night in the same bed.