8. Chapter 8
Nick
Thursday runs clean for once. No traumas after two, a hernia that behaves, and I'm out of the building by six-thirty for the first time in a month, standing in a grocery store with my phone in my hand like a man defusing something.
Her text from an hour ago sits on the screen.
Then: Not flowers. She'll say something about the flowers and I'll have to hear it for a year.
I put the phone in my pocket and push the cart.
I haven't shopped for anyone in three years, so it takes me a full lap of the store to remember how a person does it.
I buy the good bread from the bakery rack, still warm through the paper.
Three cheeses, one soft, one hard, one I pick because the label says it won an award in a country I've operated on citizens of.
Grapes. Olives from the bar where you scoop them yourself, which I do badly, dripping brine down my wrist while a woman with a toddler watches me fail.
Prosciutto, sliced thin, from a deli guy who asks if it's for a date.
"It's for an interrogation," I tell him.
"Extra quarter pound," he says, wrapping it. "Trust me."
At her building I take the four flights instead of the elevator, out of respect for the last time, and I hear them before I knock.
Two women laughing on the other side of the door, and something in my shoulders unwinds hearing it, because a man walking into that laugh isn't walking into a firing squad.
Then Dana's voice comes through the wood, clear as a bell.
"—all I'm saying is, if he brings flowers, I get to say the thing."
I knock.
The laughing cuts off. Feet cross the floor, the deadbolt turns, and Sarah opens the door in jeans and a soft green sweater with her hair loose and a wine glass in one hand, and I forget the bag in my arms for a second, because I've seen her in scrubs, in a black dress, in my shirt, in nothing, and jeans on a Thursday beats all of it in a way I couldn't defend to a committee.
"Hi," she says, biting down on a smile.
"Hi."
Behind her, at the counter, Dana leans sideways to see past her, openly, no pretense at all, and looks at me the way I look at scans.
"He brought a bag," Dana reports to the room. "Not flowers. A bag."
"Food," I say, holding it up.
"He brought food." Dana sets down her glass. "Okay. Come in. You may enter."
Sarah steps back to let me through, and as I pass her she rises up on her toes and kisses my cheek, quick, casual, like we've done this a hundred times, and the ease of it hits harder than the kiss.
Her apartment has changed since the night I left it in the dark.
The boxes are gone. There are plants on the windowsill now, a green throw folded on the couch arm, three framed photos on the wall by the kitchen, and a full charcuterie situation already spread on the coffee table that my bag is about to embarrass.
Dana comes around the counter with her hand out. She's small, sharp-eyed, ponytail, the kind of grip that means something.
"Dana. Best friend. Original owner of that green dress, which I want noted for the record of history."
"Nick. I owe you for the dress, then."
"He said it fast, folks." She points at me while looking at Sarah.
"He talks fast under pressure. Noted." She takes the bag out of my arms, sets it on the counter, and unpacks it item by item, holding each one up like evidence.
The bread gets a nod. The olives get a nod.
She holds up the award cheese and reads the label with her eyebrows going higher.
"Sarah."
"I see it."
"He panic-bought the fancy one."
"I did," I say. "There was a woman watching me at the olive bar. I lost my nerve."
Dana looks at me for a second, then laughs, and Sarah exhales at the sink like a doctor watching a rhythm come back on the monitor.
We end up in the living room, me in the armchair, the two of them on the couch, the food spread between us, and for a while it's easy in a way I'd forgotten rooms could be.
Dana tells the story of the dress, which involves a wedding in college, a red wine spill, a dry cleaner who performed a miracle.
Sarah argues two details of the story from inside a couch cushion she's slowly disappearing into, feet tucked under her, glass balanced on her knee.
I eat prosciutto and watch her laugh in her own home, and I could do this for a living.
Then Dana refills her glass, settles back, and crosses her legs, and the temperature changes about half a degree.
"So," she says. "Nick."
"Here we go," Sarah says into her wine.
"You're her boss."
"I am."
"That's a mess."
I nod. "It is."
Dana blinks. She glances at Sarah, then back at me. "Huh. I had a whole thing prepared for when you defended it."
"I wouldn't waste your thing. It's a mess. She moved her whole life for this program, the power runs entirely one direction on paper, and if it goes wrong she pays more than I do. Anything I say to dress that up would be a lie, so I won't."
The room stays quiet. Sarah has gone still on the couch, watching me over the rim of her glass.
"Tomorrow morning we're disclosing it to her program director," I say.
"Her idea, both of us in the room, before it can be found instead of told.
Her evaluations move to another attending.
After that it's gossip, which she'll pay for too, and I hate that part more than I can make useful conversation about.
" I put my glass down on the coaster because her table is nice and mine isn't. "You've known her since she was eighteen.
I've known her three weeks. I'm not going to sit in her apartment and tell you I deserve the benefit of the doubt.
I'm telling you what I'm doing, so you can watch whether I do it. "
Dana holds my eyes through the whole thing without moving. When I finish, she looks at Sarah for a long moment, some channel between them I'm not on, and Sarah answers whatever the question was with the smallest lift of her shoulders.
"Okay," Dana says finally, reaching for the bread.
"Two things. One, that was a good answer, don't let it go to your head.
Two—" she tears the loaf with her hands, no knife, an animal "—if you hurt her, I know where the hospital keeps you, and I've seen every episode of every crime show. I know about fibers."
"Understood."
"He says understood." She points the bread at Sarah. "I like him. This is terrible. It was so much easier when your taste was bad."
"It was one bad taste."
"It was a ring in a sock drawer, babe."
"Dana," Sarah says.
"I'm done, I'm done." She isn't done. She stays another hour past the bread, past a second bottle they don't finish, telling me stories Sarah keeps trying to confiscate.
The library fine that followed Sarah across two states.
The night before the MCAT when she alphabetized her entire kitchen at three in the morning.
A karaoke incident that gets shut down by force, Sarah's hand physically over Dana's mouth on the couch, both of them fighting like sisters, and I lean back in the armchair with the last of my wine watching a whole life I wasn't there for get handed to me in pieces.
At the door, Dana hugs Sarah hard, whispers something in her ear that turns her pink, then stops in front of me with her coat on.
"She calls me after," she tells me. "Whatever happens tomorrow with the director. She calls me. Make sure she remembers."
"She'll call you."
"Okay." She looks at me one more second, then nods, decided. "Goodnight, Nick who brought food."
The door shuts behind her. The apartment goes quiet the way a room does after a good loud night, dishes on the coffee table, one lamp on, and Sarah leans back against the door with her hands flat behind her, watching me from across the room.
"Well?" she says.
"I'm in love with Dana."
"Everyone is. It's a public health problem." She pushes off the door, crosses to me slowly, takes the wine glass out of my hand, and sets it on the shelf without breaking eye contact. "You told her about tomorrow."
"She'd have gotten it out of you by Saturday anyway. I saved everyone the middle step."
"You told her it's a mess."
"It is a mess."
"You told her you've known me three weeks." Her hands come up to my chest, flatten there, slide slowly up to my shoulders, and her voice drops out of the banter register into the other one. "It felt longer than three weeks from the armchair. You sat there all night looking at me like—"
She stops herself. Her thumb traces along my collarbone through my shirt.
"Like what?"
"Like I was already yours."
I take her face in both hands and kiss her, slow, tasting the wine on her, and she melts up into it with a sound that finishes whatever the night started, her fingers curling into my shoulders.
When we break she stays close, forehead against my jaw, breathing me in, and past the top of her head I can see the three framed photos on the wall by the kitchen that weren't there three weeks ago.
Her and Dana in a booth somewhere. An older couple on a porch, her coloring, her smile, the parents I haven't asked about yet.
The middle frame is empty. Glass, backing, no photo, hung anyway.
"You have an empty frame on your wall," I say into her hair.
"I know."
"That's a serial killer move, Sarah."
She laughs against my throat, then leans back to look at me, arms staying looped around my neck.
"It came in a set of three. I hung all three the day the boxes finally went out, because I was sick of blank walls, and I figured the year would fill it with something.
" Her eyes move over my face, down to my mouth, back up.
"It's been three weeks and I already know what goes in it.
That's the part I wasn't going to say out loud. "
Something turns over in my chest, heavy, changing the shape of everything under it.
"Say it out loud."
"No." She smiles, slow, and walks backward out of my arms toward the hallway, pulling her sweater over her head as she goes, dropping it over the back of the couch without looking, standing there in the lamplight in her jeans. "Earn it."
I'm across the room before the sweater settles.
I catch her at the bedroom doorway, spin her back against the frame, and kiss her the way I've been not kissing her all night in front of company, one hand fisting into her hair, the other flat against the small of her back pulling her into me, and she gives it back with interest, tugging my shirt loose, her nails dragging up my spine underneath it hard enough to leave a report.
We make it to the bed in pieces, her jeans, my belt, her laughing once when I trip out of my own shoe, then the laughing stops, because I put my mouth on her throat and work down slow, her collarbone, the curve of her breast, taking my time at each stop until her hands stop being playful in my hair and start pulling.
"Nick."
"You said earn it."
"I meant—" Her breath breaks as I move lower, my hands sliding under her hips. "I meant generally."
"I'm being thorough. It's on my evaluations."
Whatever she says back dissolves, because I settle between her thighs and set about the earning, patient, listening to her the way I've learned to, every catch and pull of her telling me where to stay, and when she comes apart it's with her hand clamped over her own mouth, mindful of the neighbors, her whole body bowing off the bed.
I work back up her body while she's still shaking, and she pulls me down and wraps around me, ankles locking behind me, and when I push into her we both go still for a second, forehead to forehead in the dark, adjusting to the fact of it.
"There," she breathes, like I've answered something.
We move slow, then not slow, her hips rising to meet mine, my hand braced against the headboard so it stops announcing us to the building, her nails writing on my back, and it builds long and hot until she breaks a second time with my name in her teeth, dragging me with her, and I bury my face in her neck while it takes me apart in waves.
After, we lie tangled in the lamplight from the hall, her head on my chest, her fingers tracing something idle over my ribs. Below the window a car passes on the street, its light sweeping the ceiling, gone.
"I need to ask you something," she says quietly.
"What?"
"Have you ever been in a real relationship before."
"Yes. Her name was Claire. We were engaged fourteen months.
" Sarah's fingers go still on my ribs, listening with her whole body.
"She wasn't wrong about anything, that's the part that took me years to say right.
I missed her sister's wedding for a liver that came in at midnight.
I missed Christmas Eve twice. She'd cook and I'd get paged, so she stopped cooking, and I told myself that was her giving up instead of what it was, which was her hearing me choose work over and over.
" The ceiling has nothing on it but the dark.
I say the rest to it anyway. "She left on an ordinary Tuesday.
No fight. She'd packed over three days and I hadn't noticed, which she said was the whole point, and she was right about that too.
So I decided the job was the marriage. Cleaned out the second closet. Three years."
Sarah lifts her head off my chest. In the low light from the hallway her eyes move over my face slowly, and whatever she's reading there, she doesn't flinch from it.
"And now?" she says.
"Now there's a woman who works the same hours I do, in the same building I do, who watched me lose a kid through a stairwell door and came down the stairs anyway.
" I push her loose hair back from her face, tucking it behind her ear, my hand staying at her jaw.
"Claire needed me home by seven, and she deserved someone who could be.
You needed me to say a kid's name at a bar.
I keep turning it over, looking for the catch. "
"Maybe I'm the catch."
"Maybe you're the frame," I say, and her breath goes out of her all at once, because she knows exactly which frame, the empty one, hanging on her wall in a set of three, waiting for the year to fill it.
She doesn't say anything. She puts her head back down on my chest, over the heartbeat, her arm tightening across me, and we lie there in her small warm apartment with Dana's laugh still somewhere in the walls and tomorrow morning sitting out in the kitchen with the dishes, patient, waiting to be faced.
"Eight o'clock," she murmurs, halfway to sleep. "Whitfield's office. Wear the gray tie."
"I don't wear ties with scrubs."
"Tomorrow you do." Her voice drags, soft at the end. "You're meeting my program director. It's practically meeting my father."
"Then I'll bring cheese."
She laughs against my chest, small and slow, her breathing going long underneath it, and I lie awake a while after she's under, my hand moving in her hair, doing the one kind of math I never learned in eleven years of training.
The kind where the answer's a person, asleep on your chest, and every number in the building comes second.