Chapter 34
HARD COUNT (LIZ)
Iwake before the alarm because my body has already decided this day matters.
I lie still in Leo’s bed, staring up at the dim gray-blue ceiling. Our bed, if I’m being honest. Over the last few weeks, I’ve moved out of the guest room in quiet increments until my things stopped looking temporary.
The air conditioner hums hard against the August humidity pressing at the windows. New York in late summer is mean, swollen with heat and ready to snap.
My first day.
Orientation, logistics, introductions, the long administrative march into the life I’ve spent years trying to claw my way back to.
Excitement sits high in my chest. Under it, something sharper.
Pressure. The old fear that if I stop moving for even a second, everything I built will reveal itself as caffeine, nerve, and brute force.
The bedroom door is open. Light spills in from the kitchen.
Coffee. Blender. Leo.
I walk out barefoot in his T-shirt and find him already dressed for camp, black shorts, dark fitted T-shirt, hair ruffled from sleep. He turns at the sound of me, and the whole room changes. The way he looks at me makes the kitchen feel smaller.
“Morning, Flash.”
Sleep roughens his voice and makes one word feel more intimate than it should.
“Morning.”
He turns the smoothie toward me, then my coffee. “You need fuel.”
“You say that as if I’m heading into battle.”
His mouth shifts. “You’re going to med school orientation in Manhattan in late August. Close enough.”
That almost makes me laugh. My nerves are sitting too high for it. I reach for the coffee instead and take a sip, then another, letting the taste steady me.
He watches me for a second. “You nervous?”
“I’m fine.”
He comes around the island and stops in front of me. “Look at me.”
I do. His hand settles at the side of my neck, warm and steady, his thumb under my jaw.
“You deserve this,” he says.
The objection sticks on the way up. “What if I walk in there and realize I’m way over my head?”
“Then you sit down, listen, and do it anyway.” His hand slides to my waist and draws me closer. “Because this is yours.”
I’m too full of feeling to trust my mouth. “You keep looking at me as if you plan to keep me.”
“I do plan to keep you.” He says it without smiling, and something in his face tells me he knows exactly how loaded that sounds.
The kiss he gives me is slow and sure, enough to leave me flushed and my breathing uneven by the time he lifts his head.
He glances toward the windows. “It’s brutal out already. Finish that. The car will be downstairs in thirty.”
I blink. “The what?”
“Your car.” He says it with maddening calm. “The train’s a mess in this weather, and you don’t need to start your first day sweaty and disheveled.”
I hate how fast relief arrives.
I think about objecting. Arriving calm instead of half drowned in sweat feels less like luxury than mercy.
He takes my empty smoothie glass from my hand and sets it in the sink. “Go get dressed, Flash.”
And because the city outside is sweltering, because his mouth is still fresh on mine, and because arguing about kindness feels like splitting hairs when I’m already wired with first-day nerves, I turn and head for the shower.
We come downstairs together, hand in hand. The doorman gives us a discreet good morning, and Leo opens the door to the waiting sedan as if this is the most natural thing in the world.
Outside, the air is already thick enough to wear. “I’ll see you tonight, Flash,” he says, bending to kiss me once more.
The kiss is brief, but I carry it into the car with me anyway. Then he turns toward his Range Rover at the curb, already shifting back into that camp-focused, controlled version of himself that seems to sharpen by the day.
I slide into the back seat. The air conditioning hits first, cool against the backs of my knees and the damp heat gathering at the base of my throat from the short walk outside.
The seat is soft. The space smells faintly of leather and linen.
Through the window, I watch Leo get into his SUV and start the engine.
Outside, the city is sweating. Men in shirtsleeves hurry past with giant iced coffees. A woman walking a dog stands at the curb, fanning herself with one hand while glaring at the poor animal as if the weather is somehow its fault.
I sink back for one dangerous second and let myself enjoy it.
More than that, if I’m honest.
My phone buzzes in my lap before the driver has even pulled away.
MARCO
First day, Doctor Hotshot
Please don’t scare your new colleagues
I’m rooting for you
I smile before I can stop myself.
LIZ
I’m freaking out
His reply comes instantly.
MARCO
You’re going to crush it
Call later
I tuck the phone back into my lap just as it starts ringing again.
Mom.
I answer on the first ring. “Good morning.”
“Are you heading to NYU?” my mother asks. In the background, I hear cupboard doors and dishes. “We wanted to wish you luck on your first day.”
My father’s voice cuts in behind her. “Are you nervous?”
“Yes.” Lying to them has always been pointless. “Also excited. Also a little sick.”
“That sounds correct,” Dad says.
The driver eases into traffic, the city unfolding outside in bright, simmering strips of light. Delivery trucks. Scaffolding. Steam rising from nowhere visible.
Mom asks what I’m wearing, whether I ate, whether I have my charger, whether I remembered my paperwork. I answer all of it until she reaches the question she has clearly been circling.
“So,” she says too casually, “you’re in a car. I assume coming from Brooklyn?”
I turn toward the window, forcing my voice into obedience. “I’ve been staying with Leo.”
“Are we going to meet him soon?”
I hate that she can still embarrass me from another continent. “I’m not discussing this on the way to orientation.”
“Mm.” I can hear the smile in her voice. “So it’s like that.”
“It’s not—”
“Liz. You’re living with him. That’s not fake anything.”
“Mom.”
“I’m just saying. We’d like to meet the man with good posture you’re not fake-engaged to.”
Dad makes an amused sound and despite myself, I almost laugh.
Mom comes back, gentler now. “I only mean we’re happy for you. Truly. And curious, because you sound different when you talk about him.”
That catches me off guard. “Different how?”
“Settled,” she says simply.
The word lands quietly. I look out the window until the emotion underneath it does too.
My father comes on more clearly then. “You don’t have to explain anything before you’re ready. Just go have your day. One thing at a time.”
One thing at a time.
Very Leo, I think before I can stop myself.
“I will. I’m almost there.”
Mom comes back on. “Call us later. We want details. Real details, not your edited version.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“And Liz?”
“Yeah?”
“We’re proud of you.”
I look out the window until it settles.
“Thanks, Mom.”
When the call ends, I keep holding the phone for a moment, staring at my reflection ghosted faintly in the tinted glass. Beyond it, Manhattan sharpens block by block, all stone and glass and humidity already building in the seams.
The sedan glides over the bridge, smooth as breath.
No subway platform baking under fluorescent lights.
No damp strangers pressed shoulder to shoulder.
No juggling my bag, my folder, my coffee, my nerves.
Just cool air, clean upholstery, and the surreal comfort of arriving composed instead of wrung out before the day has even begun.
The driver turns on First Avenue, and NYU medical buildings begin to gather around me in banners, glass, and students moving in bright purposeful streams. By then, the nerves are back in full force.
The sedan slows at the curb.
For one last second, I sit in the silence and press my palm over the folder in my lap.
Four years. A different name. A life built from scratch.
Then I reach for the door handle and step out into the heat.
This one I built for myself.