Chapter 16
AREK
Icouldn’t stop touching my cheekbone.
It was Monday morning and I was standing at the bathroom mirror, shaving, and my free hand kept drifting to the spot where Mac’s thumb had been.
There was nothing there. No paint residue, no mark, no physical evidence that anything had happened.
I’d washed my face twice since he’d touched me, and the skin was normal and completely unremarkable, yet my fingertips kept finding it.
Stop it. You’re a forty-five-year-old physician. You’ve been touched before. A man wiped paint off your face. That’s all that happened.
Except that wasn’t all that had happened, and the part of my brain that diagnosed things for a living wouldn’t stop running the differential.
Mac stepping forward instead of pointing, instead of letting me handle it, which would’ve been the normal between-friends response.
His thumb, rough with calluses, had been precise and unhurried.
The pressure had been deliberate, not the quick swipe you’d give a buddy with mustard on his chin.
And his hand had remained after the paint was gone, his eyes on mine, something behind the blue that I couldn’t name and couldn’t stop trying to.
It had lasted a second, maybe two, but it had been enough to change everything. Or nothing, depending on how much I trusted my own judgment, which right now was approximately zero.
I finished shaving, got dressed, and checked on the boys, who were getting ready for school. Breakfast was the usual chaotic affair with me cramming in a fried egg sandwich before hurrying off to the clinic.
The clinic was its Monday self, humming with the energy of a new week beginning. Janine had the schedule up and the waiting room was filling, the usual start-of-week rush of people who’d spent the weekend cataloging their symptoms and were ready to present them for professional review.
I put on my white coat and became Dr. Jacobson. The smile went up, the warmth came online, and I walked into Exam Room 1 to see my first patient with the smooth competence of a man who had absolutely no internal crisis happening whatsoever.
The morning was busy. Mrs. Callahan was back with her husband.
His blood pressure had spiked over the weekend and she wanted reassurance, which I provided along with a gentle reminder that anxiety about blood pressure could itself raise blood pressure, a feedback loop she did not find as interesting as I did.
After her, a five-year-old with a rash, then a teenager with a sprained ankle from a skateboarding incident, then Dave Stamoulis, this time about his back.
Dave was building a collection of orthopedic complaints like some people collected stamps.
At lunchtime, I ate half a granola bar before catching myself and putting it down.
Instead, I went to the breakroom fridge and pulled out the leftover chicken and rice I’d deliberately packed this morning.
Apparently, Mac’s admonishment to eat a full meal had more effect than a fellow physician telling me.
I sat down and ate an actual lunch at an actual table like an actual human being.
It was annoying how good it felt to sit down and eat good food, something that wasn’t wrapped in foil and devoured in three bites.
I was finishing the rice when Fir appeared in the doorway with his tea. “Is that real food?”
“Don’t start.”
“I’m not starting. I’m observing. With approval.” He sat across from me with unhurried ease. “You look different today.”
“Different how?”
“I’m not sure yet.” He sipped his tea. “Good different, I think. But unsettled.”
I pushed the rice around the container. Fir had this patient, steady, immovable quality that made deflection feel pointless. It was like lying to a lake. The surface would just absorb whatever you threw at it and remain calm. “Unsettled is accurate.”
“Want to talk about it?”
“Not especially.”
“Okay.” He drank his tea. He didn’t leave or push. He just sat there, ready for whenever I did want to talk.
The silence lasted about forty-five seconds, which was forty seconds longer than I could comfortably tolerate silence. “Mac painted my porch yesterday.”
“I heard.”
Of course he had. As if something like that would ever remain a secret in Forestville. “He showed up at eight-thirty in the morning with paint, brushes, sanding tools, everything. I didn’t ask him to. He just showed up. Because, and I’m quoting here, my porch was an embarrassment.”
The corner of Fir’s mouth twitched. “He wasn’t wrong.”
“He wouldn’t let me help. Told me to sit down and drink my coffee.
Then he taught Jules how to paint the spindles, and they worked side by side for two hours without talking, and Jules—Jules, who doesn’t let anyone in—asked if they could do the second coat next weekend.
He’s… He’s special, Fir. So special, and I… ”
I’d said too much. The words had come tumbling out with the pressure of something that had been sealed too long. I shut my mouth and looked at my rice.
Fir set down his tea, and when I dared to look up again, his eyes were warm and steady and held no judgment whatsoever. “You have feelings for him.”
My throat tightened. “Yeah.”
“Since when?”
“Since your exam room. Since you told me I couldn’t be his doctor.
Since I sat next to him while you sutured his hand and knew that what I felt wasn’t professional concern.
” I took a breath. “Maybe before that, since the festival, when he had the episode and I talked him back, and my hands wouldn’t stop shaking for an hour afterward.
I don’t know when it started. I just know it’s here and not going away. ”
Fir nodded slowly. “Thank you for telling me.”
“You already knew.”
“I suspected. There’s a difference.” He paused. “I didn’t want to presume. It wasn’t my place to name it before you did.”
“That’s very restrained of you.”
“I’m a restrained person. Usually.”
I pushed the food container aside and leaned back in my chair.
“It doesn’t matter what I feel, Fir. He’s given me no indication that he isn’t straight.
Whatever I’m reading into his behavior is projection.
I’m lonely and touch-starved, and I’m seeing things that aren’t there because I want them to be there. ”
Fir was quiet for a moment. He turned his mug slowly on the table, a habit I’d noticed he had when he was choosing his words carefully. “Can I tell you what I see? Not as your colleague, but as your friend.”
The word friend landed with a weight that surprised me.
I’d been keeping Fir at arm’s length all this time, calling him a partner or a colleague, respecting his friendship with the established Forestville group without letting myself fully into it.
And here he was, using the word like it was a settled fact, like it had been true long before I’d acknowledged it. “Yeah, tell me what you see.”
“I see a man who moved to a mountain to be alone but keeps coming down. For you. He came to the basketball game because your son asked him to, and he sat in a gym full of noise and people, which likely cost him significantly. He showed up at your house to paint your porch because he couldn’t stand the thought of something you cared about going untended.
And during the hand injury, when I was suturing him, you had your hand on his arm.
He wasn’t looking at your hand, Arek. He was looking at your face. The entire time.”
I frowned, processing. “What are you saying?”
Fir leaned forward. “I don’t presume to know what Mac feels since I’ve only spoken to him a handful of times. But I’ve been a doctor for twenty-five years, and I’ve watched people in vulnerable moments, and what I saw on that exam table was not a man looking at his friend.”
The breakroom was very quiet. The fluorescent light buzzed. Somewhere in the clinic, Janine’s phone rang and was answered.
“I could be wrong,” Fir said. “And even if I’m not, Mac may not know what he’s feeling yet. From what I understand, this would be new territory for him. That requires patience.”
“I have patience.”
He cocked his head. “You have the appearance of patience. Actual patience, the kind that means sitting with uncertainty and not trying to manage the outcome, is much harder for you.”
The accuracy of that stung. “You don’t pull punches.”
“You have enough people in your life who tell you what you want to hear. I’d rather be the one who tells you what’s true.” He said it without heat, without apology.
“What if I’m wrong, Fir? What if I’m reading things that aren’t there, and I ruin the best friendship I’ve ever had?”
“That’s a real risk, not gonna lie.”
I sighed, though I appreciated his honesty. “Encouraging.”
“But here’s what I’ll also say. You asked me once when I knew, with Tomás.
” He paused, and something softened in his face with that tenderness that appeared whenever he spoke about his husband.
“I knew when I realized I was rearranging my life around him without deciding to. When I caught myself listening for his voice in a room. When the best part of my day was whatever part he was in.” He looked at me steadily. “Sound familiar?”
It sounded so familiar it hurt. “Yeah.”
“Mac keeps coming down the mountain,” Fir said again, quieter now.
“I’ve watched that man avoid every social gathering, every community event, every human interaction he could possibly avoid for over a year, except for the one time he showed up for Thanksgiving dinner.
And now he’s at basketball games. He’s at your dinner table.
He’s on your porch at eight-thirty on a Sunday with paint.
That’s not friendship as usual because he doesn’t do those things for Fraser.
I don’t know what it is, and he may not either, but I think you have reason to hope.
And I think you already know that, and it scares you. ”
“It terrifies me,” I said. It came out raw and honest, and I didn’t even try to soften it with a joke.
“Good,” Fir said. “The things worth having usually do.”
The afternoon patients arrived, and we went back to work. The conversation didn’t resolve anything, but something had shifted, like a bone clicking back into place after being slightly misaligned. The weight was still there, but it was distributed differently now, carried by two instead of one.
Fir knew, and he thought I had reason to hope. Was he right?
Allowing that thought in was a whole new level of terror, but it wouldn’t stay out. As I saw patient after patient, my brain kept circling back to that one thought, to that one word. Hope. Did I have reason to hope?
When I parked in my driveway and got out, I stared at my house, at the warm gray of the porch that looked a thousand times better than before. Had Mac come down the mountain to paint my porch…or had he come down for me?
I could hear the boys arguing in the kitchen over what they wanted for dinner, but I put my bag down and took off my jacket.
And instead of going to the kitchen to start managing dinner, homework, and the evening routine, I sat on the porch step and didn’t do anything.
Didn’t check my phone. Didn’t make a list. Didn’t think about patients or groceries or permission slips, or the thousand things that usually filled every empty second.
I just sat there, on my freshly painted porch, in the quiet of a late afternoon in Forestville, and let myself feel the hope without trying to manage it.
It was terrifying.
It was the best I’d felt in months.