Chapter 10 #2
“Sure. Let me text my dad so he can go straight home after his meeting. Thanks.”
He grinned. “You’ve needed to chill since Vance came in with his roof-pitch issues.”
She couldn’t argue that.
Connor turned out to be a great driver. He’d been using his dad’s SUV since his own car had been totaled and Peter drove a sheriff’s vehicle for work.
They parked and made their way to Breakwater, which was close enough to the harbor to catch the breeze on the outdoor deck. It wasn’t too crowded, and they found a table in the corner where the noise level was low enough to talk.
It felt a little date-like, but Meredith put that out of her mind. They were friends and co-workers, that was all. She ordered a glass of sauvignon blanc and Connor got a ginger ale.
“You didn’t drink at the Fourth of July party, either,” she noted.
“No, but the jerk who hit me did.” He ran his fingers through his too-long waves and sighed. “I never touch the stuff, actually.”
“Why’s that?” As soon as she asked the question, she regretted it. “Oh, I’m sorry. That’s probably way too personal.”
“Not at all. No issues, just a general career thing.”
“Dentists don’t drink?” she asked.
“Oh, plenty do—and a lot. It’s stressful knowing that every patient you have would rather be anywhere else than in your chair and they all expect you to send them to pain hell.”
She angled her head. She’d never thought of it that way. “I guess that is stressful.”
“For some. For me, the stress comes from wanting to be perfect.”
Their drinks came and as the server set them down, his words echoed.
“You want to be perfect?” she asked when they were alone.
“Maybe not quite as much as you do,” he teased, lifting his ginger ale to tap her wine glass, “but I respect the art of perfection, control, and never getting a B. Which, for the record, I haven’t.”
She toasted him back, eyeing him over the rim of her glass. “Showoff.” Except, he wasn’t. And that was…yep. Number fifty on a growing list of things she found attractive about the man.
“Anyway,” he said, “in dental school, you do these simulations—mock procedures on mannequin heads with fake teeth. Very…humbling.”
“At least your patient isn’t giving the armrest a death grip.”
He pointed to her as if to say she was exactly right. “I noticed that even one beer the night before would affect my precision the next morning. Not dramatically—maybe a millimeter. But in someone’s mouth, a millimeter matters. So I stopped.”
“In graduate school? That’s not easy when I suspect drinking with your fellow students is common.”
“Common? It’s an art form,” he said on a laugh. “But I tried that art in college and didn’t really like it. But now? My hands are my whole career.”
She watched his expression change from light to something like a bone-deep fear.
“Don’t worry,” she said quickly. “You’ll do the therapy, you’ll do rotations and residency next year, and you’ll be right back on track.”
“What?” He gave her a playful look. “You don’t think I’ll make it as your secretary?”
She laughed. “Admin. And I believe you have greater mountains to climb than the file cabinet at Acacia.”
He smiled, but there was enough sadness in his eyes that she knew he was very, very worried.
“Do you feel like you’re making progress?” she asked. “I know you go three mornings a week to PT. Is it working?”
He looked down at his right hand, back in the removable brace, and flexed his fingers slowly.
“Some days are good. I’m getting grip strength back. My therapist says the nerve is responding.” He paused. “But some nights my fingers still buzz. Like static. And my grip fades after about twenty minutes of sustained pressure, which is—not great, if you’re trying to do a two-hour root canal.”
“It will come back,” she said with the fervent belief that stating it would make it happen.
“But if it doesn’t?” He met her eyes. “Then I worked for two years to save the money and spent four years in dental school for nothing, and I have to figure out what else I’m good at.
” He said it lightly, but the weight underneath was unmistakable.
“I try not to think about that. But at three in the morning when my hand is tingling, it’s hard not to. ”
Meredith understood that particular brand of middle-of-the-night terror better than she wanted to. She knew the quiet hours when the life you’d planned dissolved into the life you actually had.
They let it drop and checked out the orange-tinged sunset and the mellow crowd, ordering a few of the appetizers they both liked, growing more relaxed with each passing moment.
“So, are you ever going back to Atlanta?” he asked, clearly ready to delve into backstories. Except hers was not something to share over casual drinks with a co-worker.
“Well, I still have an apartment in Buckhead, and all my stuff is there, so eventually I will.”
“But you’re in no rush.”
She shook her head, digging for a way to answer honestly without opening a can of worms that would ruin her mood and the lovely atmosphere.
“This project is going to keep me here a while,” she said vaguely.
Plus, she never wanted a man who respected perfection to know her sins. Talk about getting a B. Having a fling with a man she didn’t know was married, getting pregnant, and subsequently losing that baby in a life-threatening medical situation?
No. Not tonight.
“So you didn’t…leave anything or anyone behind?” he asked, tempering the personal probe with a slight smile.
“Just my apartment, favorite yoga class, and…” She sighed, something urging her to be honest with him. But how honest?
She took a sip and he waited.
“I had a bad year,” she finally said.
“How bad?”
She laughed softly. “Not going to let me off easy, are you?”
“I’m just…interested.”
Not curious. Not nosy. Interested. He made it sound like…attracted. So this little buzzy feeling went both ways? What was she going to do with that? She couldn’t lie about what happened, but she simply wasn’t ready to tell him everything.
“I made a choice that…cost me more than I expected,” she said. “A lot more.”
Connor waited. No pushing, no follow-up questions, but she could feel him listening intently. It reminded her of Dad and, boy, she liked that.
“I’m not ready to talk about the details,” she continued. “But coming here, burying myself in Lakeside, working eighteen-hour days? It’s definitely helping me…rebuild.”
“Spoken like an architect.”
She smiled. “Yep.”
“One who is about ten times smarter and more capable than Vance the Vile,” he said, then cleared his throat. “Kiddo.”
She laughed, so grateful he went light when it could have gone dark. “That’s Miss Kiddo to you.”
He leaned in, serious again. “Well, Meredith, we’re rebuilding together.” He lifted his wounded wrist. “To the reconstruction and healing.”
She touched her glass to his. “I’ll drink to that.”
When they finally got up to leave, the string lights were the only illumination on the deck, and the harbor was dark except for the dim glow of a few boats.
They walked to the parking lot, side by side, and there was a moment when the conversation paused. Not awkwardly. Just a beat too long, a look that held a fraction of a second more than it should have.
Connor broke it first. “Well, we made it through Monday. Who knows what the rest of the week holds, huh?”
She looked up at him and felt warmth rise in her face and was grateful for the dark. “Less of Vance and more of…”
“Good conversation,” he finished for her. “Come on, I’ll take you home.”
He tapped a playlist—no surprise, they both loved Noah Kahan—which filled the car with acoustic guitar and haunting lyrics. When they reached the Summer House, she hustled to open her door, not wanting to sit in the dark space alone with “Orange Juice” playing.
“See you tomorrow, Connor!”
He just smiled, a million unspoken words in his eyes, and she gave a weird little wave and walked to the house with a powerful realization she could no longer ignore.
This wasn’t about his hair or his hands or the way he looked in the late afternoon light.
She liked him. Actually, genuinely, in a way that went past the surface and into the part of her that she’d locked down after Trevor. The part that wanted to trust someone again and was terrified of being wrong.
The last time she’d liked someone, he’d had a secret wife in Chicago, and she’d ended up in an emergency room.
But Connor McCarthy was not Trevor Whitlock. He was a dedicated, funny, intelligent dental student who’d heal for a semester, go back to Gainesville, and…be a distant acquaintance, since his father and her aunt were clearly in love.
Still, she liked him and couldn’t deny that that felt good.