Chapter Twenty. Duncan
Duncan lingered in the doorway to the Primrose bedroom with lungs like lead balloons.
Temperance had been asleep for nearly eighteen hours. That afternoon, he’d checked on her once an hour to make sure she was still breathing, indulging a little in the chance to look at her without worrying who noticed. On a normal day, she was in constant motion, and now that she was at rest, she almost looked like a different person. Her face was a visual poem—eyebrows arched like winter rye, the faintest scatter of pale freckles along the bridge of her nose. The sunshine flooding the room accentuated the lavender shadows under her lashes, and her eyelids were pink, like she’d been crying in her sleep. Her braid lay beside her, long and limp as a mooring rope snapped from a ship in a storm.
She looked terrible.
She was perfect.
The crack and whoosh of that tree limb as it swung through the air would haunt him for the rest of his life. It was surreal, a thing that massive moving so, so quickly.
And the sound of Temperance’s breath rushing out of her lungs. And the way his ball cap seemed to sail off her head in slow motion.
Her little whimper as he lifted her into the back seat of Harry and Rowan’s car.
He’d tailed them in his truck on the way to the hospital, barely keeping his shit together. His brain was overrun with the memory of how he’d sped down that same county road to get her to the hospital fourteen years earlier. It was a dark mark in his subconscious. Permanent ink bled through paper to stain the surface beneath. That night fourteen years ago, they’d triaged her to the ICU, and he hadn’t been able to go with her in case her immune system was suppressed. For days after, Duncan convinced himself he’d never see her again, and he would try to remember the way she looked before they wheeled her away. But the only thing his brain could manage was a memory of the blood-burgundy color of the nurse’s scrubs.
He didn’t see her again until weeks later.
He should have noticed the fucking tree limb. This property was his responsibility, and he should have hired someone sooner to prune away all the weak and dead wood from the bigger trees. If she’d been standing just a few inches to the right, a single step forward—
Goddamn it.
On the bedside table, her tortoiseshell glasses sat next to lip balm and a stack of empty Styrofoam cups from Nelson’s. A hairbrush threaded with a few strands of pale gold had fallen to the floor, along with a romance book with a colorful cover. He crouched to pick everything up.
“Duncan,” she said above him. Her voice was creaky.
The clock on the wall ticktocked a few times before he spoke. “How’d you know it was me?”
She didn’t open her eyes. “You sound large.”
“I have something for you. Hold out your hands.”
He gave her a new cup of Nelson’s ice, and she cradled it to her chest. “You’re the one who’s been bringing me this?”
“I know you,” he said, gently. “We’ll have to get rid of all this Styrofoam before Rowan gets home, though.”
“I had one of their refillable Whistle Wetter mugs. Last I saw, Grey was using it to catch tadpoles.”
Duncan dragged the wooden desk chair next to the bed and sat. The joints creaked under his weight. “What have you eaten today?”
She pointed to an empty Dr Pepper bottle on the bedside table.
“Glad to see you learned how to take care of a human body in all those years of med school and residency.”
Her smile was weak, but it was there. “Shut up.”
They sat in silence for a while. The air-conditioning unit outside kicked on with a loud hum. A warm malty scent from the floor vents rose from the kitchen below. It smelled like autumn, even though it was barely a week into June.
Temperance spoke again, just as he thought she’d fallen back to sleep. “You know what I always loved about your parents’ house when I would come to stay for the summers?”
“Tell me.”
“It always smelled like food.”
Duncan chuckled. “Really?”
“Those chocolate coconut cookies of your mom’s—”
“Christ, I hate those cookies.”
“—or your dad’s pineapple upside-down-cake pancakes—”
“Oh, god.” He groaned and sat back in the chair. “I’d forgotten about those. He hasn’t made ’em in years.”
“The Spanish ham croquettes, or that cheesy potato casserole Nate makes—”
Duncan dragged his hand over his mouth. “You’d better stop. I haven’t had lunch.”
“The lilacs, too. The way the whole house would smell like lilacs for a few minutes after someone came in the front door.” Quieter, she said, “I couldn’t even tell you what my parents’ house smelled like when I was growing up.”
“Ambition,” he said, and they both laughed.
Her belly growled.
“Dad’s testing toffee pudding recipes downstairs. I can bring you some—”
“No, no. It’s fine. And you don’t need to stay here with me, Duncan. I’m okay being alone.”
“Well. Maybe I’m not.” He laid his hand on the bed next to where her thigh rested under the blankets, careful not to touch her. Just enough to let her feel he was there.
She moved her pinkie alongside his. Duncan nudged a tentative finger under her palm and held his breath. She slid her own fingers through his, then they both squeezed and squeezed until his bones ached.
“Can you look at me?” he said.
She tugged at her bottom lip with her teeth and leaned her head sideways on the pillow, just barely. When she opened her eyes, the pale blue of her irises jerked sideways over and over again, as if tugged by an invisible string. She lowered her lashes quickly, making a frustrated sound in the back of her throat.
Duncan frowned. “What’s happening?”
“Hitting my head knocked some stuff around in my inner ear. My brain is getting weird signals about my equilibrium, so my eyes are trying to compensate.” Pointing to her face, she said, “Wild, right?”
“Does it hurt?”
“No, but it makes me nauseous.”
“You look like one of those scary vintage baby dolls with the googly eyes.”
Temperance laughed softly.
“How long will it be like this?”
“A day or two? A few weeks? Months?” Abruptly, she let go of his hand and sat up. She flipped back the sheets and lifted her legs over the edge of the bed. Her head hung between her shoulders. She clutched the quilt at her sides. The veins along the backs of her hands were ashen blue, her knuckles so white they were almost pearlescent. Her bare shins brushed against his jeans. “I’m disgusting. I’ve barely left this bed for two days.”
He scooted back in the chair to give her space. “Let me help you.”
For all that his identity was caught up in his ability to fix things, hers was rooted in the fact that she never needed fixing. This Temperance, though—she was small and brittle, and Duncan knew better than most that it was the fate of brittle things to break.
Like hell he’d let her push him away.
Eyes still closed, she stood and took small shuffling steps forward, and she wobbled sideways barely a foot from the bed. Duncan shot to his feet to steady her with hands around her rib cage, planting his feet wide for balance. When he adjusted his grip, his thumb brushed the underside of her breast through the thin cotton of her pajamas. Her hands clamped down on his forearms. They both froze.
“It’s okay. I can do this—”
“Let me help you, damn it,” he repeated. “Pretend I’m someone else if you have to—”
“Pedro Pascal?”
Duncan chuckled. “Wow, you jumped on that opportunity real quick.”
Her laugh was soggy and sad. She let her forehead rest against his sternum. “Okay.”
Relief made him lightheaded. Duncan led her to the bathroom with an arm around her back. While she brushed her teeth with one hand gripping the sink, he hung a towel and a washcloth within reach, and sat an assortment of shampoos and body washes on the floor of the walk-in shower.
She turned around slowly, drying her mouth on a towel. Temperance squinted at the wide-seated shower stool he situated in the center of the shower. “Where in the world did you get that?”
“You’d be amazed at the stuff we’ve found in that equipment garage.”
She twisted the end of her braid around her fingers. “Is it safe?”
Duncan stepped into the shower and sat down on the stool, hard. Then he gripped the handlebars. “Solid.”
Her eyes narrowed.
The stool didn’t budge when he wiggled his ass vigorously back and forth. The joints didn’t make a sound. “Hell, we could probably hop on this thing together and—”
“Duncan.” She pressed her lips tight.
“Sorry.”
She squeezed her eyes shut and tipped her head to the ceiling. “Please don’t say you’re sorry.”
He swallowed the next sorry.
She turned to hold on to the sink again and tried to undo her braid one-handed. Duncan moved behind her, gently lowering her hand away from her hair. “The whole point of me helping is for you to actually let me help.”
Temperance dropped her other hand to grip the sink, and Duncan got to work on the braid. It was a mess. A combination of restless sleep and sweat and sunscreen had felted the fine strands together in places, and in others, it was tangled and looped.
Every move they made echoed in the silent space of the bathroom. The snap of her hair elastic against his fingers. The scrape of his boots on tile as he shifted to support her. A faint squeak of her sweaty palms against the edges of the sink.
It took almost ten minutes to get the braid out. Free of the plait, her hair hung like rain-damp hay down her back. Duncan drifted his fingertips over the bump on the back of her head. Their eyes met briefly in the mirror over the sink, and her lips parted in a silent sigh. She went slack against him, and Duncan didn’t breathe. Her elbows socketed gently into the bends of his own arms, and the soft contour of her butt skimmed his upper thighs.
Every muscle in his body felt like it’d come loose from his bones.
“Hold on to the sink again.” He pressed a hand to her back. “I’m going to turn on the shower.”
The flow of water in the glass-walled space sounded like summer rain on a window. Steam swirled down from the ceiling and churned up from the floor.
Then she fidgeted with the hem of her tank top. “Close your eyes.”
“Temperance, I could sketch your nipples from memory, to scale—”
“Shhhh.”
“We’re alone. There’s no way Dad’s coming up here.”
“Malcolm is here.”
“He’s probably sleeping. That’s what vampires do during the day.”
“Ha ha.”
“Look.” He softened. “If I can’t see, how can I catch you if you start to fall?”
She grumbled, working at her bottom lip with the edges of her teeth. “Fine. But don’t take your eyes off my face.”
“Promise.”
Holding the sink with one hand, she bent sideways to push down her sleep shorts and underwear. They tangled a bit around her ankles when she tried to slip her feet free. Duncan caught her by her arm, and again, she met his gaze in the mirror as she kicked the clothes away. Stripes of pink lit her cheeks when she shucked the tank top over her head.
Duncan opened the shower door, and she stepped carefully inside, gripping the handles of the stool for stability before she sat down.
“Can you reach everything?” he said.
Her sigh sounded like she’d emptied herself from her lungs all the way to the ends of her toes. “Haven’t tried yet. Just enjoying for a moment.”
Duncan sat on the floor beside the sink with his arms hooked over his knees. A very lacy strip of underwear peeked out from the waistband of her sleep shorts.
He hadn’t made any promises to not look at those.
From the shower, another long sigh of pleasure.
He smiled. “Temperature good?”
“It’s perfect.” She swiped her hand through the condensation on the glass and opened her eyes just long enough to meet his. “I live here now.” A blob of bubbles was caught in her eyebrow, and another tracked down her jaw. She gave him a weak smile as the glass clouded over again.
Then she talked as she worked the shampoo through her long hair.
“In my last year of undergrad, I had to write a research paper for my history of medicine class. One of my great-great-grandmother’s contemporaries was named Jennie Smillie Robertson—she was Canada’s first woman surgeon. Her first love was a boy named Alex, but she chose medicine instead of a life with him. Didn’t think she could have both. Then when she retired in her seventies, she found him again. She married Alex.”
“That’s really sweet.”
The splash of water echoed off the tile as she squeezed out her hair.
“It’s not, Duncan. They only had ten years together before he died.” Her voice had a hard edge. She made another clear spot on the glass and exhaled a shuddery breath. “Ten years wouldn’t be enough for me.”
She closed her eyes, and her streaky little window fogged over again. Her body was a peachy blur. The curve of her back seemed the geometry of defeat.
After a while, Duncan left her to put clean sheets and pillowcases on the bed. She stayed in the shower until the water ran cold. He opened a towel for her, plush as a sweater and big enough that it wrapped around her twice. Temperance clutched it tight between her collarbones and turned to look up at him, pressing her back against the outer wall of the shower to keep her balance.
“Thank you.”
“What are friends for?” he said.
Her eyes flooded. When she pressed them shut, tears squeezed free and raced down her cheeks. The corners of her mouth turned all the way down, and her chin went wobbly. She bent at the waist and crumpled to the floor.
Duncan followed her down. He sat on his knees in front of her, vibrating with the restraint it took to not touch her. A sob made her shoulders heave. “I hate this,” she said.
Blood pounded in his ears, but he kept his tone gentle. “I’m going to hold you now, okay?”
When she nodded, Duncan leaned forward and cupped his hands under her elbows, tugging her gently toward him. She wept in his lap there on the bathroom floor, her tears and the wet of her hair soaking his shirt. She pressed her face into his collarbone, pounding the sides of her fist against his chest.
“Take what you need,” he murmured into her hair. It’s yours. All of it.
“This feels like when I got sick.” She sniffed—a wet, awful sound. “I lost control of my body, I lost you. It was my fault.”
“It wasn’t.”
“Would we have ended if I hadn’t gotten sick?”
He hesitated. “Probably not.” His thumb skimmed over the back of her hand.
“See? It’s my fault.”
“No. I have never blamed you. And thank god for that, because I’d have hated myself even more if I had.”
Her body jerked against his as she cried herself dry. After a while, she exhaled a steamy breath against his neck. Her body went lax and still in his arms.
“Hold on to me,” Duncan said.
She sagged into him, but her arms went tight around his neck.
“Good girl,” he whispered against her temple. He got to his feet, lifting her easily.
In the bedroom, he brought her clean clothes and turned his back while she got dressed on the bed. Then he tucked her in and kissed her forehead.
When she spoke again, her voice was small. “Maren and Nate made it. We could’ve.”
Duncan sank to his knees beside the bed. He carefully considered his words. This was it. This was the start of the conversation he’d ached to have with her for months, and as it always seemed to be for them, the timing was absolute shit. They couldn’t do this now, not with her at less than a hundred percent. Not when she might regret it or play it off later as a moment of weakness—to herself or to him. He’d waited too damned long to chance it not being perfect.
“They were ten years older than we were,” Duncan said. “They had degrees, they had jobs, they had resources. We had nothing.”
“We had each other.”
“What about when your parents inevitably found out about us, and cut you off? Either you wouldn’t have become a doctor, or we’d have started our lives together with half a million dollars in student loan debt. I couldn’t do that to you.”
“We’d have figured it out,” she said.
“‘Figuring it out’ is not a plan. It’s stalling. Love is delusional at eighteen. It feels eternal because the eighteen-year-old brain is incapable of actually seeing that far ahead.”
“I’m a pediatrician, Duncan. I know how adolescent brains work.” She laid her hands over her eyes. “You decided for us. You stripped away my agency at a time when it was the only thing I had. You didn’t even give us a chance.”
“I tried to fix it—you didn’t let me fix it—”
She didn’t let him finish. “Have you ever wondered why I started doing all those wild things? The skydiving, the marathons, all the other crap I’m supposed to be too fragile for?” Her bottom lip was tucked tight against her teeth. “I get to be reckless and chaotic and messy, and people fucking congratulate me for it. It’s mine. Nobody else gets to decide.”
Finally, some fire in her.
“You’re none of those things,” Duncan said.
“Yes. Yes, I am. I am all of those things sometimes. I wonder if you’ve ever really seen me like I thought you did. If it was really me you loved, or if I’d gotten so good at pretending to be perfect for my parents that it bled over into how I behaved with you.”
Duncan drifted his thumb over the back of her hand. “I’ve always seen you, Temperance. Maybe what you see as reckless and messy—I see it as brave. And real.”
“Don’t.” A sob slipped loose. “It’s easier when we’re mean to each other. You, me, like this—I never wanted to feel like this again.”
“Never is for cowards.”
“I’m okay with being a coward.” Her voice was hoarse.
“Says the woman who skydives out of hot-air balloons.”
Her chin quivered. She started to speak again, then turned away. Tears came faster now, streaking from the corners of her closed eyes.
“Tell me,” Duncan said. He held his breath until she spoke again.
“One of my early jumps, my chute lines were twisted. It’s pretty common, but some are harder to fix than others. Some, you have to cut your chute away and use the backup. But I panicked. I forgot everything I knew, and a few seconds passed where I actually thought I was going to die.”
Duncan couldn’t breathe.
She met his eyes. This time, they didn’t waver. “It was you, Duncan. You were the only thing in my mind when I was falling. And you’re still who I want whenever I’m scared or sad. When I do something special, or accomplish something hard, you’re always the first person I want to tell. It’s always you.”