19. Stephanie
— ? —
Stephanie
For a week I couldn’t get him out of my head.
How was I supposed to work with the man, professionally and rationally, when my pulse climbed every time his name appeared in my inbox?
And underneath all of it ran the question I couldn’t outpace. Was that what he wanted, for us to try again?
Was that what I wanted?
My body had already turned in its answer on that beach. My mind was still filing the paperwork.
By the time I arrived on Nantucket to supervise the restoration in person, I was a knot of nerves and a feeling close to anticipation, the cab ride from the harbor winding me tighter with every turn.
When I climbed out onto the gravel drive and saw Kevin standing by the entrance, ringed by contractors and foundation staff, my heart executed a routine that would have medaled at the Olympics.
He wore a button-down with the sleeves rolled to the elbow, and I made the mistake of looking.
His forearms were on full display, and so were the tattoos I now knew by heart, ink I’d traced with my own fingers in the dark.
He looked unfairly good and completely absorbed in the clipboard in his hands, and the fact that he wasn’t even trying made it worse.
Then he glanced up and saw me.
His whole face changed. It softened and brightened at once, and it was the single most disarming thing I’d witnessed in years.
I looked away before I could do anything I’d regret.
The clinic was beautiful in its ruin. Three stories of 1870s brick, with arched windows and a wraparound porch that had weathered a century and a half of Atlantic storms. Standing before it, I felt the old familiar tug, the one that made me love this work.
All these rooms full of stories nobody had bothered to listen to.
“Ms. Pike?” One of my team members approached, holding out a hard hat. “We’re ready for the walkthrough whenever you are.”
“Ms. Coleman,” Kevin corrected from across the drive.
I turned and gave him the full weight of my glare. “We’re divorced.”
“Legally. Spiritually, I maintain hope.”
“Spiritually, you can maintain whatever delusions you want.”
My team member’s gaze bounced between us, and alarm settled over his features. “Should I… come back?”
“No.” I snatched the hard hat and jammed it onto my head. “Let’s do this.”
The walkthrough was supposed to be professional. It was supposed to concern load-bearing walls and electrical systems and all the unglamorous plumbing of historic preservation.
Instead it became three hours of Kevin and me arguing about very nearly everything.
“This interior wall has to come down,” he said, rapping the plaster with his knuckle. “The patient flow requires an open floor plan between the waiting area and the examination rooms.”
“This interior wall,” I shot back, “is original to the 1873 construction and features hand-carved molding that was likely done by one of the few Black craftsmen working in the region at the time. It’s historically significant.”
“It’s also structurally unsound. My engineer flagged it yesterday.”
“Your engineer is wrong.”
“My engineer has a doctorate from MIT.” His jaw was doing the thing it did in arguments he intended to win.
“Your engineer can have a doctorate from Mars for all I care. This wall stays.”
We stood on opposite sides of the contested wall, neither of us willing to yield an inch. The combined foundation and preservation teams watched from a safe distance, wearing the faces of people quietly placing bets.
“The whole point of this project is to create a functional medical facility,” Kevin said, his voice tightening. “I can’t help patients if they’re being crushed by falling plaster.”
“And the whole point of historic preservation is to maintain the integrity of significant structures. I can’t preserve history if you’re knocking down every inconvenient wall.”
“One wall. I’m talking about one wall.”
“Today it’s one wall. Tomorrow it’s the original flooring. Next week you’ll want to tear out the windows.”
“The windows are fine!”
I pressed a hand to my chest like he’d wounded me personally. “The windows are EXCEPTIONAL. They’re some of the best examples of Victorian glass-making on the Eastern Seaboard.”
“I wasn’t going to touch the windows!”
“You weren’t going to touch the wall either, until you decided patient flow was more important than craftsmanship!”
We were both breathing hard, faces close enough that I could see the flecks of gold in his irises. Frustration lived in the set of his jaw. So did want, because his gaze kept dropping to my mouth and dragging back up, and he wasn’t even pretending it wasn’t.
The two of us had always been this way, combustible and evenly matched, pushing each other harder than anyone else on earth could. I’d forgotten how much I missed it. I’d made myself forget.
“Fine,” he said through gritted teeth. “We’ll get a second structural opinion. Independent engineer. If they say the wall is safe, it stays.”
“And if they say it’s unsafe?”
“Then we find a way to preserve the molding while reinforcing the structure. Compromise.”
I studied his face for the seam of a trap. I couldn’t find one.
“Fine,” I agreed. “Compromise.”
The tension in the room ratcheted down a notch. Both teams exhaled in near-unison.
Kevin turned toward the back of the building. “The second floor still needs assessment. Can we continue, or do you need a moment to sharpen your claws?”
“My claws are always sharp. Can you keep up, or do you need a moment to nurse your wounded ego?”
He almost smiled. “After you, Ms. Pike.”
“That’s Ms. Coleman to you.”
“Make up your mind, gorgeous.”
I pushed past him and headed for the stairs, telling myself the heat in my face was from the hard hat.
The second floor was worse off than the first. Decades of water damage had warped the floorboards into gentle waves and painted dark blooms across the ceiling. I moved with care, testing each board before trusting it with my weight.
“Watch the section by the window,” Kevin said from behind me. “The joists underneath are rotted.”
“I know how to assess floor integrity, thank you.”
“Just trying to help.”
“Help by staying on your side of the room.”
I stepped forward.
The floor gave way.
One instant I stood on solid wood. The next my foot punched clean through a rotten board and I was falling, arms flailing for anything, a scream trapped somewhere below my throat.
Kevin moved faster than I would’ve believed a man could move.
He caught me around the waist, wrenched his own body beneath mine, and took the whole of the impact himself as we crashed down into the crawlspace below.
Dust exploded upward in a choking cloud. I heard shouting far above me and felt Kevin’s arms locked tight around my back, the solid heat of him absorbing every jagged edge so none of it reached me.
Then stillness, and my own heartbeat roaring in my ears.
“Steph.” His voice was urgent against my ear. “Are you hurt?”
I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t assemble a thought. We were tangled together in the dark, my cheek pressed to his chest, his hand cradling the back of my skull.
“Steph. Look at me. Are you hurt?”
I lifted my head. I could barely make out his face in the thin light falling through the ragged hole above us, but I could feel every inch of him, and every inch was holding me carefully.
“Still in one piece,” I managed, though my heart was pounding on my ribs. “You?”
“Fine.”
“Your hands are shaking.”
“That’s not from the fall.” His thumb moved once against my ribs before he caught it. “Did you hit your head? Can you move your legs?”
“Kevin. Nothing’s broken except my dignity.”
“Let me check.” He ran his hands along my sides and down my legs, and there was nothing suggestive in it. It was clinical and careful, a doctor’s hands cataloging me for damage. “Nothing broken? No sharp pain anywhere?”
“I promise I’m not injured.”
Above us, faces crowded the ragged edge of the hole. “Ms. Pike! Dr. Coleman! Are you alright?”
“We’re okay!” Kevin called up. “But we’re going to need a way out. The floor’s too unstable to climb.”
“On it! Give us ten minutes!”
The faces withdrew. Footsteps thundered off, and I heard shouting and the scrape of equipment being hauled into position.
Kevin and I were alone in the dark, in the dust, in the sudden hush.
“You can let go of me now,” I said.
His arms didn’t so much as loosen. “In a minute.”
I should have protested and shoved myself off him. Instead I let my head settle back against his chest and felt the slow, even thud of his heart beneath my ear, steadier than mine by far.
“You’re bleeding,” I said suddenly.
I’d felt it before I’d seen it, a wet warmth spreading against my palm where it rested on his forearm.
“It’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing.” I pushed upright, squinting through the gloom. There was a gash on his forearm, deep and ugly, blood running in a dark ribbon toward his elbow and dripping off the point of it. “Jesus, Kevin.”
“I said it’s fine.”
“You’re losing blood!”
“Head wounds bleed a lot,” he said, maddeningly calm. “It looks worse than it is.”
“That’s your ARM, not your head!”
“Same principle.”
I grabbed the hem of his shirt and ripped. The fabric tore with a satisfying shriek. His expression made clear the satisfaction was mine alone.
“That was expensive.”
“Bill me.” I wound the strip of cotton around his arm and cinched it tight. “Hold this. Keep pressure on it.”
“I know how to treat a wound.”
“Then why weren’t you treating it?”
“Because I was busy making sure you weren’t injured.”
The plain sincerity of it made my chest ache. He was bleeding into the dark, and his first and only concern had been me.
“I’ll need a tetanus shot,” he said, casual as anything.
“A tetanus shot?”
“The nail that caught me was rusty.”
I stared at him in horror. “Kevin!”
“I’m joking.” He almost laughed at whatever my face was doing. “I’M SORRY, I SWEAR I’M FINE.”
He leaned in and pressed a kiss to my forehead, warm and unhurried, and my brain short-circuited entirely.