Chapter 9 What Are Friends For? #2
The door clicked shut behind her. Catherine didn't move closer exactly, but she was near enough that Theo could smell her perfume underneath something simpler, soap or whatever she used on her skin at night.
She was studying Theo's face with the same quiet focus she brought to everything, like she was reading something.
"You look like you were run over," she said.
It startled a laugh out of Theo, rough and fractionally undone. "By a bus. Then a train. Then another bus." She paused. "There was also a bike."
"How thorough." Catherine's mouth moved toward a smile without quite getting there. "What happened?"
Theo shook her head. She didn't have the words yet, or maybe she had too many of them and couldn't find the beginning. "Long shift. Bad ending." She swallowed. "I just didn't want to be alone."
It came out more plainly than she'd intended. No cushioning around it, nothing to soften the landing. She watched Catherine take it in, watched something move quietly across her face.
"Go sit," Catherine said, with a small nod toward the living room. "I'll make you some tea."
Theo dropped onto the couch and let herself sink into it, her bag sliding to the floor. She closed her eyes and listened to Catherine moving around in the kitchen, the tap, the kettle, a cabinet opening and closing softly, and let it all wash over her.
Her own apartment was fine, perfectly fine, but it never felt like this.
Like the air had settled into some kind of equilibrium.
It smelled faintly of lemon and something floral she'd started to associate purely with Catherine, and sitting there with her eyes closed, she felt herself become, incrementally, slightly less of a disaster.
Catherine returned with two mugs, then settled onto the couch with her legs tucked beneath her, a posture Theo knew she never allowed herself during the day.
"Chamomile," Catherine said, handing one over.
Theo wrapped both hands around it and took a sip. It was exactly right. She hadn't known what she needed until she had it, which seemed to be a theme with Catherine.
"Thank you," she said.
Catherine nodded, looking at her over the rim of her own mug, and didn't ask anything. They sat in silence for a while, and it was the comfortable kind, the kind that didn't require filling. Theo felt her breathing even out, her shoulders dropping by degrees.
"Do you want to talk about it?"
Theo turned the question over. Part of her wanted to. Morrison, the hallway, the way he'd looked at her when he said she'd burn out. But saying it out loud meant looking at it properly, and she wasn't ready for that yet.
"Not tonight," she said.
"Then we won't."
Just that. No gentle pressure, no asking if she was sure.
Theo had expected something more, a follow-up question, the kind of careful coaxing she'd have gotten from Natalie or Mary, both of whom loved her in ways that sometimes made it hard to just sit quietly inside a bad day.
But Catherine had accepted it and moved on, or rather didn't move on, just stayed where she was, letting Theo take up whatever space she needed.
After a moment, Catherine began telling stories from her tour. Small things, the kind of anecdotes that didn't require much response, which Theo recognized as its own kind of gift.
She listened, and somewhere between one story and the next she felt herself getting heavier, the cushions pulling her in, the warmth of the mug in her hands, the quiet of the apartment doing what quiet does when you've been running on adrenaline for ten hours. She closed her eyes just for a second.
She wasn't sure how much time had passed. Maybe none. Maybe minutes.
When she surfaced, Catherine was gone from beside her. Theo could hear her down the hall, a faint click, the faint rattle of a pill bottle, then a pause. A moment later, she was in the kitchen, filling a glass at the tap, swallowing something, setting the glass in the sink with barely a sound.
When Catherine came back into the living room and saw Theo’s eyes open, she paused. Just for a second, but Theo noticed. The brief stillness, the way her expression shifted, like someone recalibrating after being caught off guard.
"I thought you were asleep," Catherine said.
Theo made a decision in about half a second.
She let her eyes go slow and unfocused, blinked the way you did when you were coming back from somewhere, not when you'd been watching the whole time.
It was a small thing. But Catherine had been in her own apartment, doing something ordinary and private, and that was hers to keep.
"I was," she said, forcing her voice to come out slower than usual. "Sorry. Your couch is genuinely dangerous."
Catherine came back to her end of the sofa and tucked her legs up. "That's what happens when you don't let your mother choose your furniture." The corner of her mouth lifted. "Yours are completely impossible to sit on for more than ten minutes."
"I’m aware." Theo nudged Catherine's ankle lightly with her foot. "You were telling me something before I passed out. Something about a conductor you pissed off."
"I made him cry, actually."
"Of course you did."
Theo's eyes started going heavy somewhere around Catherine describing breaking her leg skiing at thirteen, the story drifting in and out of focus like something heard through a closing door. She tried to hold onto the thread of it. She almost managed.
Instead, she heard herself say, “I don’t want to go home.” The confession slipped out low and raw, Theo’s final defense collapsing beneath all she’d been carrying.
Something in Catherine softened, something tender breaking through her usual composure. “Then don’t. Stay.”
"I don't want to—"
"You're not." Catherine stood with decisive grace. "Wait here."
She disappeared into her bedroom and returned moments later with a blanket and pillow, both looking expensive and perfectly pressed. She set the pillow at one end of the couch and shook out the blanket.
"Lie down," Catherine directed.
Theo did, too tired to think about it, and Catherine draped the blanket over her with a quiet sort of care, tucking it around her shoulders, checking her feet were covered. It was such a small thing. It nearly undid Theo completely.
"I know I'm a mess right now," Theo said, looking up at her. "My attending, Morrison, he said—" She stopped. She didn't want to bring him in here, into this room, into this warmth.
Catherine sat on the edge of the coffee table. Close enough that Theo could see her clearly, even in the low light. "I don't care what he said. You're a brilliant doctor, Theodora. Whatever happened today, whatever he said, it doesn't change that fundamental truth."
The conviction in Catherine's voice made Theo's throat tight with unshed tears.
She wanted to believe it, wanted to accept Catherine's assessment over Morrison's, but doubt had burrowed too deep to dislodge with simple reassurance.
Still, hearing Catherine say it mattered in ways Theo couldn't fully explain.
Catherine rose from the coffee table and reached down to straighten the blanket, her hand moving slowly along Theo's side.
It was a small gesture, practical on the surface, but it was unhurried in a way that had nothing to do with straightening fabric, and it lingered just long enough that Theo felt it long after her hand had lifted.
“Sleep,” she said, the word somewhere between command and comfort. “There are clean pajamas folded on the bathroom counter, and a new toothbrush in the drawer beneath the sink. Use whatever you need.”
She paused. “And you know where my room is.”
Theo did. She lay there thinking about that for a moment, turning it over, whether it meant something or whether she was doing that thing where she looked for meaning in things that didn't have any.
She wasn't sure, and she was getting less sure by the second, her brain beginning to lose the thread.
The blanket smelled like Catherine, she noticed that somewhere on the way to sleep, and breathed it in without really deciding to, and that was the last thing she was aware of for a while.
* * *
When Theo opened her eyes, the apartment was silent, morning light filtering through Catherine's expensive curtains to paint everything in soft gold.
Theo blinked against it, absorbing her surroundings: Catherine's living room, Catherine's couch, Catherine's blanket still wrapped around her shoulders.
She pushed herself upright with effort, her neck protesting the movement.
She turned and saw that Catherine had left things on the coffee table for her. A glass of orange juice. A strawberry Pop-Tart on a plate. And a sticky note beside them, the handwriting a little more rushed than usual but still unmistakably hers.
Had an appointment. Help yourself to anything you need.
Come over for dinner tonight?
- Catherine
Theo picked up the note, running her thumb over the handwriting. The sticky note was pure Catherine, all efficiency, no fuss, addressing what needed addressing without emotional excess. It was the breakfast equivalent of a firm handshake.
The Pop-Tart, though, was significant. Knowing Catherine had bought them for Noah, and thought she was worth sharing them with.
And somehow that small thing made her think about when exactly this had happened.
The notes on the door becoming texts, texts becoming calls, calls becoming dinners, and somehow that becoming this.
Waking up on someone's couch with orange juice and a Pop-Tart waiting like she was expected, like she belonged there.
She couldn't find the moment it had shifted.
It had just sort of happened, the way things did between friends.
Except friends didn't quite fit right.
She paused with her key still in the lock and let the thought settle just long enough to press in before she eased the door open. Now wasn't the time to think about it. Not while she was high on a Pop-Tart and a crooked neck.
Later, she told herself. After a shower. And after she'd texted Catherine about the skiing story, because she still hadn't heard the end of it, and that felt like important unfinished business.