Chapter 29 Annie
ANNIE
The medicine cabinet mirror tells me the truth before my stomach finishes its argument. I look like a person who has been awake for a month and lived every minute of it twice.
My skin has that dull, papery look you only see on med students in June and people who thought the Old West Fest sounded “fun,” but discover the Old West is not for them.
I brace my hands on the sink, breathe through the sour wave, and try not to curse the body I’ve depended on like a machine. “Come on. We can do this. As long as we don’t smell any fried food, we’ll be fine.”
It’s a carnival. What are the odds?
It might be morning sickness. It might be a virus. It might be exhaustion wearing a mask. Whatever it is, I’d like to get off this particular ride.
When I push back into the tent, Mac is already there with coffee. She’s beaming like a saint, holding out a paper cup with the little green stopper in the lid. “You get decaf.”
I stare at her hand and then at her face, and it’s a good thing our friendship has weathered finals and funerals, because the look I give her would get most people escorted from the premises. “Decaf,” I repeat.
She flinches a little. “You’re pregnant.”
“Sure, throw that in my face,” I agree, and then I lift the lid, inhale, and feel the betrayal hit my soul. “This is a sin.”
“Decaf is good for you. Internet says so.”
“The internet says a lot of things.” I take a sip anyway, because ritual matters more than content, and grimace at the flat, collapsing nothing.
“Also, there are studies that say moderate caffeine is fine in pregnancy, and since caffeine is thirty percent of my personality, you should be grateful I’m still speaking to you. ”
“Your personality survived residency. It will survive this.”
“It survived thanks to caffeine,” I mutter. I take another miserable sip and set the cup on the table like evidence. At least it tastes good. “I think that’s why I feel like death. I thought it was the past month, but it’s the lack of caffeine catching up to me.”
She snorts. “It’s been a day. You’ll get used to it.”
“I don’t want to get used to it.”
“Looks like I’ll be raising two babies.” She squeezes my shoulder and then goes to flirt with the lemonade stand guy for more ice—we’ve built an entire ecosystem out of mutual bribery and unserious flirting—and I take ten seconds to be unfairly angry at liquids for disappointing me.
“Shoot me,” I tell Jaden when he breezes in with two armfuls of bandage rolls. “She brought decaf.”
He stops, horror-struck. “We live in a fallen world.”
Mac reappears and salutes with a bag of ice. “You can thank me when your fetus gets into an Ivy League.”
“I’ll be lucky to afford their free public education.”
“Yeah, well. I have to get to my station. Good luck today.”
“Mostly cleaning and packing up,” Jaden says, shrugging. “Shouldn’t be too dramatic. Good luck out there with all those people.”
Since it’s the last day of the festival, the Wyatts will be gone by tomorrow. The tent will come down. The clinic will return to its regular hum of broken bodies and stubborn hope. Life will move on.
I’ll be stuck in the past, though. With a child whose father never comes to see them. A knot forms in my throat, and before I can stop it, my breaths come harder. I hate this. This is not what I wanted for my kid. Not ever. But I fucked up their life before they were ever even a thought, and—
“Annie,” Jaden’s voice snaps at me. He’s in my face with a bottle of water and a cold pack. “Drink this. The heat getting you?”
I blink up at him and take the bottle, chugging half before I remember I had too much coffee, and now my stomach is full of sloshing liquid. “Yeah. The heat.”
“Or is it the pregnancy by your ex’s father that’s doing it?”
“Can we not? Not right now?”
He sighs. “You know you can talk to me, right?”
I nod solemnly. “I know that—”
“I tell you everything.”
“I’m sorry you had to find out through my conversations with other people, but—”
“You thought I’d judge you?”
I shake my head. “I know we play things fast and loose, but I’m still your boss, Jaden. I don’t want to overstep and make you feel like I’m coming to you for free therapy.”
“That’s where you’re a ninny.”
I snort at that. “What?”
“I’d still hang out with you even if you weren’t my boss, Annie. I like hanging out with you. You get me in a way a lot of people don’t, and that’s rare. So, if you ever need anything—even free therapy or a babysitter or whatever—I’m here for you.”
It’s my hormones that make me cry. I’m sure of it. He passes me a box of tissues. “Thanks. God, this whole thing—”
“It’s a lot to deal with.”
I nod. “It’s the last day. Can we not deal with it for now? I’d like to work.”
“Whatever you need. But when you want to deal, I’m here for that too.”
“Stop making me cry.” I yank out another tissue.
He grins. “It’s important to feel your feelings—”
“Feel this!” I fling my snotty tissue at him, but it catches the air and hits the ground.
His grin goes wider. “And it’s important to work on your aim.”
I throw the tissue box at his head, and this time, I don’t miss.
He laughs, and we get back to work. That always helps. The tent finds its rhythm early—heat-sick kids, a bullfighter with a shin scrape he refuses to dignify, a grandmother with sunscreen in her eyes who acts like I did brain surgery when I fix it with saline and gentleness.
By midafternoon, the edges start to fray—the heat, the patience, the belief that people will drink water without being dared, me.
We tape more ankles and pop fewer ibuprofen because the supply is low and we’re saving what hurts less.
I cave and take a second decaf because I’d rather sip betrayal than nothing.
Jaden knows it’s getting to me when I start straightening the triage forms mid-sentence. “It’s almost over,” he murmurs when we pass in the aisle, one gloved hand brushing the other without meaning to. “Then we go home and sleep for a week.”
“Two days,” I say.
“Three,” he counters, because he knows if the number’s too big, I’ll ruin it by working.
Late afternoon dips its toe into evening, and we start packing what we can—consolidating partial boxes, rubber-banding the pens that migrated into every corner of the earth, collapsing the spare cot we didn’t need enough to pretend we did.
I’m elbow-deep in a bin of ACE wraps when the flap lifts and the tent gets smaller.
Brick.
Hat. Shoulders that I pretended not to watch when I was pretending I could be his doctor and not a woman with a heart that restarted when he walked into the room. He looks like he slept and didn’t. I can’t get a read on him, but that’s not my job.
He made sure of that.
“Doc.”
I turn my back on him. It’s petty and adolescent, and the only power I’ve felt in days. “Are you injured?”
“Can we talk?” His voice is careful, like he doesn’t want to spook me.
Too late. “I’m working, and I have nothing else to say to you. If you’re injured, you can stay. If not, get out.”
He’s quiet for a beat that feels like an hour. Behind me, Jaden coughs a politely fake cough.
“Annie,” Brick says. His voice rumbles through my spine.
Jaden clears his throat again. It’s not the polite version. It has unsaid words in it. I turn because I’ve trained myself to respond to that as quickly as possible. I expect a kid with a bloody chin.
I get Brick. On one knee.
It takes my brain a full minute to find the thread of the universe again.
He’s not playing. His hand isn’t on his hat like he’s joking about a thing men do when they don’t know what to do with their hands.
His face is open and wrecked and hopeful in a way that makes me want to kick him while he’s down.
How dare he look at me like that?
“I was wrong,” he says, voice rough. “I thought I was going to ruin you. I thought I was going to ruin the baby. I’ve been wrong before, but not like this. I got scared, and I told myself it would be better if you didn’t have an old man dragging you down. But that was a mistake. I’m sorry.”
My mouth is open. That’s all I know.
He keeps going, careful and relentless. “I thought I was too old for you. Too old to start over. Too old to make a family on purpose after I’ve been playing at it on autopilot for too long.
I’m not. I might be too old for a lot of things, but I’m not too old to tell the truth and live with it, and I want this life with you, Annie. ”
I hold the edge of the bin because I don’t trust the ground. I don’t have words for what’s swirling in my head.
Brick’s voice is steady, but there’s so much fear on his face that it breaks my heart.
“If you’re willing to give me a second chance, I want to take a second chance at parenthood.
At a life. At love. With you.” He pulls something from his pocket.
A stem of lavender, woven into a ring. “No proper ring shops at the Old West Fest, but I’ll replace it when you’re ready.
Marry me, Annie. I want to tie myself to you forever. ”
My body is a chorus of contradictions. My heartbeat is a drum. My throat is a closed door that opens. “Yes,” I say, and the word is too small to hold what I mean. “Yes.”
Brick lets out a breath that was holding his ribs together and laughs, just once, helpless. He stands and steps toward me the way you step toward a skittish horse—open palms, visible intentions. When his arms come up, I go into them like the easiest decision I’ve ever made.
Because it is.
“I love you,” he says into my hair, the words so quiet I almost miss them for my own blood. “I love you, and I’m sorry, and I will spend the rest of my life being boring in all the right ways if that’s what you need from me.”
“I don’t need you boring,” I say, laughing and crying at once. “I need you here with me.”
“Always.”
We stand there too long for a place that was built for triage, not epiphany. Then Jaden claps his hands once, shocking me back into the world. “Alright. Everybody out.”
Mac stands next to him, and I have no clue when she got here. She teases Jaden, “I told you it wasn’t over.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he grunts, passing her some cash.
“We were the subject of a bet?” Brick asks, smirking.
Mac grins. “Don’t worry. I had faith in you.”
Jaden rolls his eyes, grabs her hand, and pulls her out of the tent. “Let’s let these two have some privacy.”
The flap closes behind them, but I can still hear Mac when she says, “Privacy? Didn’t Annie tell you about the horse stalls?”
Brick laughs hard and kisses me harder. I melt against him, too swept up in the moment to think straight. His tongue slips past the seam of my lips, and he tastes like lemonade and the future.
I’m getting married to this man. This man that I hardly know, but I also know him in my bones. It’s impossible to explain and reckless, and I don’t care. I am so happy right now.
His hands slip beneath my ass as he picks me up and sets me on the nearest cot. “Those flaps don’t lock somehow, do they?”
“The toggles at the corners—”
“On it.” He races over, threads the toggles through the metal loop, then comes back immediately. “Won’t hold up if someone really wants in here, though. We’ll have to be quiet—”
“I don’t want to be quiet.” I pull him closer to me by his belt buckle. “I want you to make me scream your name.”
His voice is a hiss. “Fuck, baby.” That tone would have been enough to get me wet without the kissing that followed.
He tears at my scrubs, and I grapple with his clothes as fast as I can between biting kisses and curse words.
He pulls my hips forward, and I have a leg on either side of him.
But instead of thrusting in, he reaches between us for my clit and makes me mewl.
His head props against my forehead. He murmurs, “We’ve got years to make you scream my name.
And I plan to. But for tonight, how about we don’t announce our engagement through an arrest for public indecency? ”
I giggle. “No promises.”
“You’re gonna get me into so much trouble.”
“Turnabout is fair play.”
He slides a finger into me. “Why do I have a feeling you never play fair?”
“You’re an astute observer of the human condition, oh fuck, right there—”
He kisses me again while he lights me up. Everything in me goes tense, but I can’t stop. I’m trembling for his touch, and with my body, I’m begging for more. He says, “I like when you ride my finger like that. Like you can’t help yourself.”
“Can’t,” I whisper.
“Mm, good girl. But I need to feel it.” His finger slips away, replaced by something much bigger. As he works himself into me, I see fireworks. Might be the festival’s closing light show, or it might be the man in front of me.
But then I hear the booms, one after another.
“You wanna scream my name?” He gets a sinister look on that handsome face, then grabs my ass and pulls me off the cot, balancing us both as he stands with me on his cock.
I latch onto his shoulders for safety, but he has me tight in his grip.
He bounces me on the length of him, over and over, until I can’t see straight.
All that shaft on my G-spot, it’s too much, too good. I can’t breathe, I can’t—
“Scream for me, baby!”
I erupt on him, crying out his name while the fireworks explode overhead, one after another, until he growls through his own explosion, his lips locked on mine.