Chapter 5
Chapter Five
Brax
I was an idiot, and not just because I’d chosen to follow Mia outside into a snowstorm. I felt like I’d just swallowed my heart whole, where it was now lodged in my throat and obstructing my breathing. A state I almost never occupied except when I was a foot away from her.
Which was why I tried never to get close enough to smell her hair, stare at her pretty, full lips, or see all the emotions that flitted in her eyes—confusion, wariness, and maybe even a little bit of shock.
Accompanying her home was my worst nightmare. She was from, I had no doubt, Happy Family, USA, and I was the poster child of…well, I’ll spare you the details, just to say I survived—I did better than survive, actually. But that didn’t mean I ever talked about my past, except in therapy. Or wanted to be reminded of how I’d grown up. Or be thrown into a situation where I had to pretend I was used to affection and unconditional love, and people who always had your back.
I’d had my own back for as long as I could remember. And if I tended to keep my distance, it was because the people who were supposed to love me had kept their distance from me. It was my greatest survival skill. And Mia was threatening it.
“Come again?” she asked, her eyes blinking behind thick, dark lashes. My whole body felt funny, numb and tingly, like when your arm falls asleep. Maybe I could blame it on the blustery cold, but all sorts of weird things happened to me around her. Like muscle twitching. And sweating—I never sweated. I had the reputation of being cool under pressure, always.
“I—yeah.” I swiped a hand through my hair, which I discovered was already wet from the falling snow. “You’re not taking Drake.”
In retrospect, I could’ve possibly phrased that just a tad differently. She crossed her arms and huffed. “And you have an opinion on this why ?”
Just then, two of our favorite patients made their thirtieth pass of the day around the ward. This time, Pedro was pushing Bianca, which was kind of cute. They spotted us outside and put their faces up against the glass, clearly thinking that shivering out in the thick of snowmageddon was some sort of new game.
I lowered my voice. “You want him with your family?” Okay, that didn’t come out right either. I’d made him sound sort of like the bubonic plague.
“Why wouldn’t I?” She’d stabbed a pen through the complicated bun at her neck. Today she wore her glasses, which she sometimes did post-call. With the glasses on and tapping her foot, she looked like a schoolteacher. A really hot one. She crossed her arms from the cold. “He…um…he wouldn’t say please and thank you.” Oh, come on, Braxton, you can do better than that. “He wouldn’t keep his big feet off the furniture.” And the third reason, I kept to myself: He’d spend the entire time trying to get you into bed.
“Brax! Geez!” She gave me an incredulous look. My face heated. Did I actually just say that out loud?
“I appreciate the big-brother talk,” Mia was saying, “but I can figure this out on my own, thanks. And you can tell that to Gabe too. ” She started to walk away, to get out of the frigid cold. Good thing, because if she had any idea how non -big-brotherly my thoughts were, she’d be running instead.
If I were on a cardiac monitor, my pulse would be continuous bleeps. “Look, I don’t know exactly what’s going on, but I’m your friend. Friends help friends.”
She did a one-eighty and faced me, her jaw slightly agape. I might’ve just shocked her for the second time in five minutes. Except I’d just managed to shock myself even worse. I was basically begging her to let me to do the thing I hated most in the world.
Her brows knit down with concern. I could see the clouds of worry in her eyes. And the doubt and mistrust. Both of which I’d caused.
But right now, I genuinely wanted to help.
She narrowed her eyes. “Why are you so eager to help me?”
I should have asked that very question before I opened my giant mouth. “Families are important.” I tried to visualize what a family Christmas would entail. I’d sip a little hot chocolate, bring Mom D’Angelo something nice, hang out with everyone around the tree.
Who was I kidding? The only Christmas tree we’d ever had was the one I’d bought when Jenna was eight and I was twelve. It was right before we’d gone into foster care for the first time. I’d wanted her to remember that I loved her. That we were brother and sister, no matter if we were separated—which, it turns out, we were.
“I’m off until the twenty-sixth, just like you,” I said, sounding my most convincing. “And I don’t have any call until after Christmas. I promised April Green I’d cover for her if she went into labor, but she’s not due until January first. So I’m free as a bird.”
“I don’t need your help,” she said, but something in the way she said it made me wonder if she meant it.
Why was I forcing this? I’d be lying if I said I knew the answer. But damned if I was going to let that asshat go.
From behind her glasses, her astute, sharp gaze assessed me, and I quickly looked away, suddenly knowing the reason. It was right in front of me, in the form of that honest, shrewd, intelligent gaze drilling me down.
I’d failed Mia in a lot of ways, but I wouldn’t now. Not when she needed me.
I saw that in her eyes. And that made it impossible for me to do anything else.
“Given our history,” she said, “you would not be the best candidate.”
I nodded, acknowledging she was right. I was the one who should be running away as fast as possible instead of standing here, freezing my butt off, pleading with the last person on earth I would ever want to be alone with again. Then why wasn’t I?
Because Mia was a good person. A great person. And the story, while a little bit messy, sounded like something someone would do who really loved their mom. “I heard you needed a fake boyfriend.”
“Yes, a fake boyfriend. I—exaggerated to get my mom through chemo. She’s doing okay now, but she wants to meet him.” She eyed me suspiciously. Snow had settled like a white blanket on her hair and her nose and had melted on her eyeglass lenses. She looked completely adorable.
“Well, I’m sure you’d want a really cute one.” I spread my arms wide to demonstrate that I totally fit the bill. “I can definitely handle cute.” Outside, I was being my usual charming self. But inside, my stomach was flipping pancakes.
“Stop trying to make light of this.” She frowned and sounded irritated. Which threw me, because usually, my attempts at humor made her laugh. “This isn’t a joke.”
I held up my hands. Guess my charming self wasn’t so charming after all. “Okay, sorry. I just want to help.” That calmed me for a second. Because it was exactly true. “What’s the fake boyfriend’s name?”
Before my eyes, she turned as red as Rudolph’s nose.
Wow, that must be a doozy of a name. “Is it Alfonso? Reginald? Obi-Wan Kenobi?”
“Brax, okay?” She threw up her hands. “His name is Brax.”
What? It took my brain a second to catch up. “You named your fake boyfriend after me?” Or did she just really like my name?
She shifted her weight and looked uncomfortable. “I told my mom about you when we were dating last summer. But right when we broke up, she’d just been through surgery and was about to begin chemo. So I pretended that we didn’t.”
She seemed to be bracing herself for my judgment. But I got how the whole thing happened, and I wasn’t about to judge. What I really got was how much she loved her mom. “Okay, so all I have to do is be myself.” Despite my cut and dried logic, I got a warm feeling in my chest. Mia had told her mom about me while we were dating. What did that mean? That I’d been important enough to mention?
“You have to be yourself times ten .” She stabbed the air with her finger. “Make that times one hundred . You have to be a wonderful, kind human being who is completely and totally in love with me!”
Ouch. I was going from feeling flattered to reeling from the fact that she didn’t think I was that great a human when she added, “And stop looking at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you pity me.” She turned away, fists balled.
Mia, who was an empath, a sensitive and loving soul who usually read me as accurately as a cell phone clock, couldn’t have been more off course. I put a hand on her arm. “It’s not pity.” Even now, I could feel something between us—a pumping in my veins, a stirring in my blood, a heat all through my limbs that I could not rid myself of, no matter how hard I tried.
What was I doing?
Jumping off a bridge without a bungee cord, that was what. Still, I had to help her. It was that simple. “Look, no matter what you think, I am your friend.” I stepped forward to show my resolve, but getting closer to her made me see the freckles she tried so hard to hide, and that made me soften even more. “And I have your back. Besides, I’m really good at Christmas carols, decorating, and eating delicious home-cooked dinners.” And shooting the bull. Because I had no concept of what normal families did, except from the Hallmark Channel, which Gabe sometimes forced me to watch. “So…okay?”
Pedro and Bianca were now thumping on the glass. Pedro caught my eye and gave me a thumbs-up, which, fortunately, Mia didn’t see.
Her jaw was so set, I could tell it was killing her to get the words out. “There are requirements,” she said.
“Go ahead,” I coaxed.
“Fine. Be wonderful to my mom. No, more than wonderful. Amazing to my whole family.” She poked me in the chest for emphasis. “And attentive to me. The best damn boyfriend ever. Minimal shows of PDA are expected.”
I frowned. “What are you considering minimal?”
She counted on her fingers. “Sitting next to me. Smiling at me a lot. Kissing me—on the cheek.” Maybe she noticed my brows shoot up because she said, “Don’t worry, my parents are pretty straitlaced. They’d never put us in the same bedroom.”
That was exactly what I’d wanted to hear, yet a strange disappointment spread through me. Little did she know that holding her hand and kissing her wasn’t going to be the problem; keeping the PDA minimal, however, was. I managed to shake myself out of my testosterone-driven male fantasies and tried to be the man she needed me to be.
And then I felt a little nagging pull in my stomach. Brunner and his all-but promise of that BCP job. “Look, for these next few days, I think we should table any discussions about the job.”
“Agreed,” she said cautiously. “There’s nothing we can do about that now anyway.”
Honestly, I didn’t want to think about what Brunner had said. It was cringy; it made me uncomfortable. But would it be worth ignoring it to land the job of a lifetime? To use the leverage that came with the job to make things better? At some point, I would have to sit down with Mia and talk it all out. But for right now, tabling the discussion for the holiday seemed like the sane thing to do. “When do we leave?” I asked.
“When are you off work?” she asked.
“I have to round on Saturday.” Christmas was Tuesday, and we had to be back to work the day afterward. I could survive a long weekend, right?
“Saturday afternoon it is.” She looked both relieved and worried, skeptical and accepting of something over which she had very little choice. Her face was like an emotional map, with every feeling flickering across it—all of which I could read too well. I smiled encouragingly, to let her know I had this. Then I held out my hand. “Shake?”
She looked at me like I’d lost touch with reality. After all, it was a whiteout and we were shivering. She lightly tapped my hand, didn’t shake it, as if that was all she could bear to do—as if the thought of taking me was so unpleasant, she could barely stand it. Then she turned to head back to the ward.
I grasped her hand before she could get away. She looked startled, like my hand was a giant alligator that had just clamped down for a tasty chomp. As for me, I was feeling a lot of things I couldn’t even process. Like how in awe of her I was that she would love her family so much to do something so obviously distasteful. “Look, there’s no reason for this to be awkward. We’re over what was between us.” Weren’t we?
Then suddenly, she gripped my hand quite solidly. She looked me directly in the eye and spoke in her senior resident voice. “My only concern is my mother. Your ego is larger than I thought if you’re still worried about something that happened six months ago.”
Then she dropped her hand. “See you at three on Saturday.”
I nodded, chastened. She hadn’t been obsessing over our old relationship. This was all about her mom. “I’ll pick you up,” I called as she left.
I came in from the cold, stood in the hallway, and pulled out my phone. “Jenna?” I said when my sister answered.
“Braxy! Guess where I am?” She only called me that ridiculous name when she was really excited, and I could tell that she was.
“Where are you?” I rubbed my arms, hoping to get some feeling back after being outside for so long. I shook the layer of snowflakes off my now-wet hair.
“In my ob/gyn’s parking lot,” Jenna said. “Aiden and I just came from our ultrasound. It’s a girl!”
“It’s a girl,” I repeated, letting the fact sink in that my baby sister was having a baby. Which I already knew, but honestly, it still hadn’t really taken hold in my brain. “Jenna, I—wow. I mean, congratulations.”
“Aiden just left for the office. As soon as I get back to work, I’ll send you pictures. Everything’s looking great and…and she’s so amazing!”
I chuckled at the fact that she was obviously in total and complete love. “I’m really happy for you two.” And relieved, from a doctor’s point of view, that all was well.
I could hear rain pattering on her windshield. At least it wasn’t blizzarding in Philly like it was in Madison. “So when are you getting here?” she asked.
I hesitated. Despite everything Jenna and I had been through, we’d never spent a holiday apart. “That’s what I was calling to tell you…something came up.”
“Work?” I heard the disappointment in her voice. “Please don’t tell me you’re taking extra call for somebody again.”
“No, nothing like that.” I took a breath while I figured out what to say. “I’m going to go home with a friend who needs some help.”
Silence now filled the formerly chatty space. “A friend?” Jenna finally asked.
“Yes, a friend,” I said carefully. That was all I was going to say. I mean, there wasn’t that much more to it, was there? Okay, maybe there was. But I wasn’t about to discuss it now with my baby sister.
Who turned out to be relentless. “Okay, I have one question. Is your friend a woman?”
I sighed, wondering if I could make my beeper go off so I could escape the rest of this conversation. “Yes, but it’s not what you think?—”
“Okay, let me get this straight,” she interrupted. “You’re going to help a ‘friend’ by going to her house for Christmas.”
“Yes.”
“And that’s all you’re telling me.”
I considered that. “For now, yes.”
“Well, okay, then. I’ll accept that for now . But I’ll miss you terribly.”
“I’ll miss you too.” Could I hang up now before I confessed too much?
“But promise me something.”
I braced myself for what I knew was coming. She was the younger one, but so much wiser. “You believe in yourself in so many ways, but you never give yourself a chance in relationships.” Her voice cracked. “Maybe it’s time for you to recognize the gem that you are.”
“Hey, I’m the big brother,” I said weakly. “I give the advice, right?”
“Not this time,” she said firmly. “Since you’re not coming to see me, I get to say what’s on my mind. Promise me you’ll think about what I just said.”
“Okay, I promise. Now get to work so you can send me those pictures. Talk to you soon, okay?”
“Okay. I love you.”
“Love you too. Tell Aiden hi.” My sister had it together. I was so proud of her. I wanted to say all this, but I ended weakly, “And Jenna…thanks for understanding.”
After I hung up, I stood there thinking. I’d just chosen going home with Mia for the holiday—actually insisted on going—over seeing my sister, my only family. But Mia was a friend in desperate need, right? It didn’t have to mean anything else. I didn’t want to admit that what Jenna said had struck a chord.