Chapter 34
LAINE
I'm leaning against the nurses' station, half-heartedly reviewing charts I've already reviewed, when my phone buzzes in my scrub pocket.
Then buzzes again. And again.
I pull it out.
Reid
LAINE
LAINE ARE YOU AWAKE
obviously you're awake you're at work
ok so I just went to the kitchen for leftover pizza and BLAKE WAS ASLEEP AT THE TABLE
just sitting there. Head on his arms. Pencil still in his hand. Like a crime scene photo
I didn't see him and I turned on the light and he sat up SO FAST and I screamed
like actually screamed. Full horror movie scream.
and then HE yelled because I scared him and then I dropped the pizza box and now there's pizza on the floor and he's looking at me like he wants to kill me
I clap my hand over my mouth. My shoulders are shaking. The laugh is building and I'm biting down on my fingers trying to keep it in because it's three AM and the hallway is dead and if anyone sees me right now I look absolutely unhinged.
Another buzz.
Blake
I was working.
That does it. Reid's twelve frantic texts versus Blake's three dry words — it cracks me open. A laugh escapes through my fingers, loud enough to echo off the linoleum, and I have to turn my face into my shoulder.
One more buzz.
Reid
he's eating the floor pizza Laine
he picked it up and he's eating it
I live with an animal
I type back with shaky fingers:
You guys are the best. Go back to sleep.
Reid
he says goodnight but in a grumpy way
I press my phone against my chest. Close my eyes.
Warmth spreads behind my ribs, filling in all the places that used to just sit there, empty and waiting.
I can picture it so clearly it almost hurts — Reid in his boxers, hair going six different directions, standing in the kitchen doorway with his hand on his chest like he's clutching imaginary pearls.
Blake at the table, bleary-eyed and irritated, eating pizza off the floor because of course he is, because spite is a perfectly valid meal plan.
The light on over the table. The rest of the house dark.
Home. That's what it feels like. They feel like home.
God, I've got it so bad.
"That's a good smile."
I jump. Danielle — one of the night aides, twenty-three, perpetually chewing gum — is leaning over the counter with a stack of charts. She's looking at me with that knowing, gossipy grin that I'd normally find endearing but right now makes my skin prickle.
"What?"
"That smile." She nods at my phone. "Tell your boyfriend I said hi."
"Will do," I say.
I shove my phone in my pocket. Stare at the empty nurses' station.
Boyfriend.
Whatever. It's nothing. She was being nice.
I should chart. I should check on room four. I should do literally anything except stand here getting weird about a word.
So naturally I follow Danielle.
She's restocking the supply closet in bay two, humming something I half-recognize, sorting gauze pads like she's done it eight hundred times. I grab a box of gloves off the cart and start stocking the other side because I need something to do with my hands.
"Slow night," I say, tapping on the wood rail lining the hall. Don't want to tempt fate.
"The slowest. I've reorganized this closet twice." She blows a bubble with her gum. Pops it. "I started ranking the doctors by attractiveness out of sheer boredom. Don't tell anyone."
"Who's winning?"
"Dr. Okafor. Obviously. Those hands." She fans herself with a package of tongue depressors. "But he's married, so. The tragedy of my life continues."
"Devastating."
"Right? My love life is a complete — okay, so I was seeing this guy Marcus for like a minute? And he had this thing where he'd only text me after eleven PM, which — I'm not stupid, you know?"
"You're not stupid."
"I am not. So I told him to lose my number and he hit me with the 'you're overreacting' and I screenshot the whole thread and posted it on my story."
I laugh. "You didn't."
"Hundred percent did. My followers had opinions." She shakes her head, zero regrets. "Anyway. Dating cleanse. Just me and my Netflix and my peace of mind."
She says it like it's nothing. Like narrating her entire romantic life while sorting gauze at three in the morning is just... what you do. No editing. No calculating who's listening. Just Danielle being Danielle, out loud.
"What about you?" She looks at me sideways. "You've been all smiley lately. The boyfriend's treating you right?"
Just say it.
It's right there. Right there. I could say it the way she'd say it. Casual. Easy. Actually, there are two of them. Yeah, I know. It's a whole thing. She'd probably think it was amazing. She'd want pictures. She'd want to rank them alongside Dr. Okafor.
"He's good," I say. "Yeah. Things are good."
Great. Cool. Nailed it.
Danielle smiles and goes back to her gauze pads and I go back to my gloves and we work in quiet for a few minutes. She hums. I stack boxes and think about how a twenty-three-year-old can post screenshots of her DMs for the whole internet and I can't say a number out loud in an empty hallway.
I walk back to the nurses' station. Room four is stable. Room seven is sleeping. The monitors do their thing and the clock says 3:38 and I've got three and a half hours left in this shift.
Boyfriend. She said it twice and I didn't correct her either time.
It's not her fault. She doesn't know. Nobody here knows except Jamila and she doesn't count because she's a vault and also she's easy. Jamila was the safe one.
This is different. This is work. These are people I see every day, people who know me as Laine the nurse, Laine who's finally settling down, Laine who had a boyfriend, and seems to have another one.
I pull out my phone and look at Reid's last text.
Reid
he says goodnight but in a mean way
I close it. Put it away.
My feet are moving before I've decided anything.
Down the station. Past the med cart. Joyce is charting at the far end, reading glasses on, pen moving in that steady, unhurried way she does everything.
I pour two cups of the terrible coffee. Add the pound of sugar Joyce pretends she doesn't use to her cup, then walk over and set one next to her elbow.
I don't know what I'm going to say. I don't have a plan. I have a word stuck in my head and sugar coffee and whatever this feeling is that's sitting on my chest.
Joyce looks up. Her eyes move over my face.
She takes her glasses off. Sets down her pen. Picks up the coffee and takes a sip that makes my teeth ache in sympathy.
"Okay," she says. "Sit down."
I sit.
Not gracefully. I sort of drop into the chair next to her and wrap both hands around my coffee cup.
Joyce waits.
She's so good at that. The waiting. Thirty-five years of nursing and marriage and probably every hard conversation you can think of, and the woman has turned silence into an art form. She just sits there, sipping her sugar bomb, not rushing me. Not filling the space.
Which is terrible, actually, because now I have to fill it.
"So," I say.
Joyce sips her coffee.
"I need to — there's something I haven't—" I stop. Take a breath. Try again. "You know how you asked me a few weeks ago if I was seeing someone?"
"Mhm."
"And I said it was new and I didn't want to jinx it?"
"I remember."
"Okay. So." I stare into my coffee. There's a film on the surface. Gross. "It's not that new anymore. It's actually pretty serious. It's been serious for a while and I should've told you sooner but I didn't know how to — I mean, I knew how, I just—"
I'm rambling. I can hear myself rambling. My mouth is doing the thing where it just keeps producing words because stopping means getting to the point.
Joyce puts her coffee down. "Laine."
"Yeah."
"You look like you're about to confess to a crime."
"It feels like that. A little. Which is — that's part of the problem, actually, that it feels like that, because it shouldn't feel like—"
"Breathe."
I breathe.
Joyce tilts her head. Patient. Steady. "Start with the easy part."
"There is no easy part."
"Sure there is. Who is he?"
I look at my coffee. The film. The fluorescent light reflecting off the surface.
"It's Reid."
The silence changes. Not a lot. Just enough that I can feel it shift, feel Joyce recalibrating behind those calm brown eyes. She doesn't move. Doesn't flinch. But her hand comes off her coffee cup and folds over the other one in her lap.
"Reid," she says.
"Yeah."
"Reid Garrison. The paramedic."
"Yeah."
Joyce is quiet for a moment. "Laine, the last time we talked about Reid, you were crying in the break room."
"I know."
"You told me it was over. You told me he'd hurt you. That the whole situation was—"
"I know what I said."
"—toxic. That was the word you used."
I close my eyes. "Joyce."
"I'm not attacking you. I just want to make sure I'm understanding what's happening."
"It's different now. He's — things are different. He's good—we're good— and it's not the same as before, it's really not—"
"Okay." Her voice is careful. Not cold. Just careful like she doesn't want to spook me. "How long?"
"Few months."
"And he's treating you right."
"Yes. God, yes. He's — yes."
She nods slowly. Picks her coffee back up. Sips it. I can see her working through it — not judging, just turning it over. Joyce doesn't do snap reactions.
"All right," she says. "So you're back with Reid. And that's the hard part? Telling me that?"
I stare at my cup.
"That's not the hard part."
Joyce waits.
Just say it. You said it to Jamila. Jamila didn't blink. Okay, she blinked a little bit. But it went ok. Just open your mouth and say it.
But Jamila is Jamila . Jamila lives in a world where things like this make sense. Joyce is — Joyce is my work mom. Joyce has been married to Harold for thirty-five years. Joyce goes to church and makes banana bread and held my hand after my first code and what if—
What if what? What if she's awful about it? Joyce?
That's the thing though. That's exactly the thing. If Danielle thought I was weird, I'd get over it by lunch. If Joyce looks at me differently—
"There's someone else," I say.
Joyce goes still.
"I'm not cheating. It's not — Reid knows. Everyone knows. It's all — we're all in it. Together."
"Together," Joyce repeats, brow furrowing.
"His name is Blake. He's Reid's best friend. They were in the Marines together. He's the one who — when Reid's brother died, Blake was the one who got Reid through it. They've been — they're family. They live together. They've lived together for years."
Joyce is looking at me very steadily. I can't read her face and it's making my hands shake.
"And you're... with both of them."
"Yeah."
"At the same time."
"Yeah."
"And they both know."
"It's not — Joyce, it's not some secret. They're not competing. It's all three of us. It's a — it's like a—" I don't know what it's like. I don't have the word. "It's real. It's a real relationship. With both of them."
Silence.
I want to fill it. I want to explain and justify and lay out the whole history — how it started, how it works, how Blake looks at me, how Reid holds my hand, how the three of us fit in ways I didn't think were possible. I want to build a case. Present evidence. Make it make sense.
But I'm out of words. I used them all getting here and now I'm just sitting in this terrible chair under these terrible lights holding this terrible coffee and waiting for Joyce to say something.
She takes a long sip. Sets the cup down. Folds her hands.
"That's complicated, Laine."
"I know."
"I'm not saying that to be ugly. I'm saying — that's a lot of moving pieces. And the last time Reid Garrison was in your life, you were a mess, honey."
"This is different."
"You said that."
"Because it's true."
Joyce looks at me, full on squinting. The way she looks at patients when she's deciding whether they're telling her the truth about their pain level.
"What changed?"
"Everything. He — the stuff that happened before, with Blake leaving, and Reid falling apart — that's over.
Blake came back and they worked through it and Reid got help and—" I push my hair off my face.
"I know how it sounds. I know it sounds like I went back to a bad situation and made it more complicated. But it's not that."
"Then tell me what it is."
"It's—" My voice catches and I hate it. "I'm happy, Joyce.
I'm actually, genuinely happy. And I know you watched me be miserable and I know you're worried and you should be, I'd be worried too.
But I come home in the morning and Blake is making breakfast, smiling at me, so happy to see me, and Reid texts me at three in the morning because something funny happened, and they — they take care of me.
Both of them. And I take care of them. And it works. "
My eyes are burning. Crap. Crying over my love life at work is so not a good look.
"I just—" I wipe my nose with the back of my hand, cause that's so much better than crying. "Danielle asked about my boyfriend. Singular. And I said 'he's good' and I meant both of them and I couldn't even — I just let her think—"
"Hey." Joyce reaches over and puts her hand on my arm. "Stop for a second."
I stop.
She's quiet for a long moment. Thumb moving over my forearm in slow strokes.
"I'm not going to pretend I understand how this works," she says. "Because I don't. Thirty-five years with one man and some days that's more than enough."
I almost laugh. Almost. I can't really imagine it, getting tired of my guys. But I'm lucky enough to get 35 years into a loving relationship, I'm sure I'd get there.
"But I've watched you the last few months. And something changed. You stopped running on fumes. You started eating lunch again. You smile at your phone like a crazy person and you hum during your rounds and you—" She squeezes my arm. "You look like someone who landed somewhere."
My throat is so tight I can't talk.
"So I've got questions. And I'm going to ask them, because I love you and I watched you fall apart once and I don't want to watch it again.
But me having questions doesn't mean I'm not in your corner.
" She looks at me over her glasses even though she already took them off.
Force of habit. "I'm always in your corner. Even when you make it complicated."
"I always make it complicated," I manage.
"You really do, Dear." She pats my arm. "Now. Tell me about Blake."