34. Greer
Greer
It happens on a Tuesday.
I’m finishing up forty-eight hours of call and he picks me up. I can barely see—between the bleary eyes and the sun rising against the crisp fall morning—everything’s impossibly bright.
But he’s impossible to miss.
Foot kicked up against the bed of his truck, waiting for me while it idles there with frost still inching over the windows somehow. Hair askew, waves sticking out every which way from under his hat—turned backwards—and I can see the number nineteen stitched along the hem.
It’s a good day then, if he doesn’t want to disappear.
I wish they were all good days. He’s beautiful and bright and the world would be lucky to know him.
Sweater pushed up his forearms, he holds out a coffee. Not the hospital coffee. One from my favourite shop near my house.
He grins, our fingers touching when I take it. My heart does that thing it does when he touches me—it beats and stretches outside the lines I’ve erected around it.
But there’s a phantom twinge under my right rib cage, and my heart shrinks back behind its bars.
He leans in, and he whispers good morning when he tugs on my ponytail.
“Good night, actually.” I blink behind the lid of my coffee cup.
“Noted.” He smiles at me again, one hand reaching behind him to open up the door and the other opening for me.
I snort. I shake my head like he’s being absurd, but I take his hand anyway. “I’m not that tired.”
He makes a tsking noise. His other hand plants firmly on my low back and I find myself leaning in, like I might very well topple over without the steady support of him, when I step up into the truck. His words are warm against the back of my neck. “How many surgeries? How long were you on your feet?”
“No longer than you during a game.” I tip my chin up and put my seat belt on.
It’s a lie. It’s been a long forty-eight hours and I don’t think I’ve been this tired since my first year of residency.
Beckett shakes his head and shuts the door behind me.
I take a sip of coffee, head against the window, and I watch him round the truck, throw the door open, and take one step up with one of those long, muscled legs. He did it all unassisted, and I think he does most things like that—all alone—but sometimes I wish I could hold his hand and lift him up, too.
One hand finds the wheel, and his fingers tense there before he drums them against the leather. He turns to look at me as he puts the car in drive. “Greer?”
“Beckett?” I answer, but my eyes are already closing against the window, edges of my usually screaming brain fuzzy with sleep.
His voice is low—and even though I can’t see him, I know a muscle in his jaw ticks, that his right thumb taps the steering wheel, and he tenses his kicking leg. “I don’t think we’re friends.”
There they are, those words out there in the ether.
But I shake my head. He’s wrong. He’s the most important person in the world to me. I know it’s not what he wants to hear, but it’s all I have.
My brain can barely whir to life in warning, it’s so tired, hardly tipping upwards towards the sound of his voice, hardly able to stamp down on the too-big beats of my heart that push against its lines. But one tiny alarm bell sounds from a distant shore, and I tell him the truth as I know it, what’s still keeping me safe. For now. “No. I think you’re my best friend.”
Beckett laughs—deep and real and magical and wonderful and maybe sort of sad.
I feel one hand reach over and tuck a loose strand of hair behind my ear. “If that’s your story. Go to sleep. Dream of faeries.”
I’ll dream of you , I think.