Chapter 6
Carrie
I came out of the ward on crutches built for someone three inches taller than me, which felt about right for the day I was having.
Every step was a negotiation. Every swing-through sent a dull pulse up the ankle, wrap and painkillers notwithstanding.
The nurse had walked me through the technique — weight on your hands, not your armpits, good foot, swing, repeat — and it had sounded extremely manageable coming from a woman standing on two working legs.
In practice I moved like a newborn deer doing it for a live audience.
The painkillers had started softening the edges of everything. Colors a notch brighter, sound a notch farther away, my thoughts coming through slow and thick. All I wanted was my couch, my borrowed dog, and for this entire feature-length disaster of a day to roll credits.
Then I saw him.
Matt. Still here. Still waiting.
He stood near the exit with his hands jammed in his pockets, holding the body language of a man who'd very much like to be elsewhere and had decided not to be anyway. Shoulders tight. Jaw set. Everything about him said discomfort.
He'd stayed.
I couldn't help it. I smiled.
"You're still here."
He looked up. Something moved across his face. Guilt, or embarrassment, or relief that I wasn't loading up to yell at him. Hard to say through the pharmaceutical fog.
"Yeah."
"I thought you left."
"I did. Almost."
I started over to him, working the crutches, hunting for a rhythm that didn't read as baby giraffe finding its legs.
The rubber tips squeaked. My good foot came down too loud.
He watched me struggle the whole way and did not offer to help, just tracked it with those blue eyes that seemed to take inventory of everything.
I reached him slightly out of breath, which was its own small humiliation.
"You're not as cold-hearted as you advertise," I said.
His jaw tightened. A muscle ticked near his temple.
"Don't give me the good review yet."
"You came back. You waited. That goes in the file."
"I figured I could pay you back."
"For what?"
"The dog. You helped it. I help you."
Oh.
So that was the framing. Not a man who'd stayed because he wanted to. A man squaring a debt, keeping the books balanced, settling an account so neither of us owed the other anything. Clean transaction. Nothing personal on the ledger.
I should have been let down by that. Should have felt the little drop of it not being about me.
Mostly I was just relieved I didn't have to reverse-engineer a way home alone. Didn't have to flag a cab and perform, for a stranger, the one-act explanation of why a woman was hobbling out of a hospital at night with a wrecked ankle and an apartment full of dog she hadn't had that morning.
"Well," I said. "Thanks."
"Yeah."
We stood there a moment, neither of us sure of the next line. The lights hummed. A phone rang somewhere. The doors swooshed open and shut on other people's nights.
"I should get you home," he said.
The rain restarted the instant we cleared the doors.
Of course it did. The universe had clearly committed to a theme, and the theme was Carrie, repeatedly, soaked to the skin.
Not a drizzle. Not the kind of light sprinkle you could power-walk through and mostly survive.
A full reissue of the earlier downpour, on us before we'd managed three steps toward the lot.
Matt cursed, low, and ran ahead. Left me under the overhang while he brought the car around. I watched him jog through it, shirt going translucent against his back, hair instantly flattened, and none of it appearing to register with him at all. He just moved. Pure function.
He pulled up, jumped out, and held the door while I attempted the logistical problem of inserting a body, two crutches, and one useless ankle into a passenger seat with wet, slipping hands.
The crutches clattered the doorframe. The ankle filed a complaint with every motion.
By the time I was in, we'd both been re-drenched.
"Does it ever actually stop raining in this city?" I said.
He almost smiled. Almost. The corner of his mouth moved up about a millimeter before it remembered itself and went back to the serious set he wore like equipment.
The drive was quiet, rain hammering the windshield, me feeding him directions in pieces. Left here. Right at the light. Third building down.
I watched him drive. Steady hands on the wheel. Jaw locked in that overthinking-something posture. And I still could not shake the sense that I knew this face. Not just from a gas station. From somewhere with a frame around it, somewhere that mattered.
I just could not land it.
We pulled up in front of my building and he cut the engine, and the silence came down with nothing in it but rain on the roof.
"I can help you inside."
"You don't have to—"
"I know."
He got out anyway. Pulled my crutches from the back, came around for me. The rain stayed relentless and we were soaked through again by the time we cleared the lobby doors, leaving a trail of puddles across the tile to the elevator.
The ride up to the fourth floor was silent and too close, the small box of it loaded with everything neither of us was saying.
I was aware of him beside me in a way I didn't want to examine.
The rain-and-cologne of him, the steady controlled breathing, the heat of all that tension coming off him like a radiator.
The doors opened on four.
We went down the hall, my crutches thunking the worn carpet, my keys jangling out of my pocket. And through the door, already, barking.
The apartment was exactly as I'd left it that morning.
Before the rain, before the dog, before the day picked itself up and walked sideways.
The golden retriever heard the key and lost his entire mind, that high, delighted register of an animal who'd been alone too long and had a lot of feelings about it.
Matt got me through the door, and the dog detonated.
Jumping, spinning, tail going hard enough to take the rest of him with it. He came at me like I'd been gone a decade, like I was the single most significant person in the known world, and licked my face, my hands, every reachable surface.
Then he registered Matt and reassigned all of it instantly. The man who'd snapped his chain. Who'd carried him in out of the rain. Whom the dog had apparently filed as the finest thing to ever happen to him, bacon treats included. Paws on the chest, tongue out, undiluted joy.
Matt stood frozen under the assault.
"Down," I said.
The dog did not so much as acknowledge the request.
"He really likes you."
"He doesn't know me."
"Dogs are good judges of character."
Matt looked at me, and something behind his eyes shifted, like the line had landed somewhere I hadn't aimed it, somewhere that didn't sit comfortably.
The dog wound down at last and parked himself at Matt's feet, gazing up with the full golden-retriever broadcast. You are my favorite, I would die for you, please note that I love you.
"I'll make coffee," I said, and started for the kitchen.
"You should sit down."
"I can make coffee."
"Carrie."
"I'm fine."
I was not fine. The ankle throbbed straight through the painkillers, the wrap had gone from snug to a tourniquet, and piloting my very small kitchen on crutches with a hyperactive dog threading my legs was, structurally, a fall waiting to happen.
I nearly went down twice.
Matt took the crutches out of my hands, gently.
"Sit."
"I'm not a dog."
"Sit anyway."
I sat.
He made the coffee. And I watched him move through my kitchen like he had the floor plan memorized, finding the mugs on the second cabinet, locating the sugar, going straight to the right drawer for spoons without a single question.
It was strange to watch. Domestic. Not a thing I'd have predicted from a man whose defining move, so far, was leaving rooms I was in.
"I don't get how you two bonded that fast," he said, handing me a mug.
"He's a good dog."
"He's not yours."
"He is now."
He sat down across from me and took a sip, and the bare edge of a smile touched his mouth as he watched the dog press into my leg.
First real one I'd gotten off him all day.
It rearranged his face. Softer, lighter, less a man carrying something heavy and more like someone who, under different management, might know how to sit still.
"You taking him to the vet?" he asked.
"I should."
"But?"
"But I just started a job. Taking a day off in week one isn't a great look."
"What do you do?"
Casual. Ordinary. The exact small-talk question anyone asks anyone. But something under his tone made me slow down on the answer.
"Media Strategist's Assistant."
"For who?"
"The White Hearts."
The shift was instant and total. His face went flat. The smile was just gone, like it had been switched off at the source. His hand closed around the mug hard enough that I genuinely reassessed the mug's odds, and he swallowed, once, twice, like the name had cost him, physically, on the way down.
"The White Hearts," he said.
"Yeah. The hockey team. I know it's not—"
"I have to go."
He stood fast enough to scrape the chair across the floor.
"Wait, what?"
"I should go."
"You just sat—"
"Thanks for the coffee."
He was already moving for the door. Already restoring the distance. Already leaving, the one thing I could reliably count on him to do, and I still didn't have the why.
And there it was again, that pull of recognition, the certainty that this face belonged to something I should be able to name. I still couldn't get it to surface.
"Did I say something wrong?"
He stopped, hand on the knob.
For one second I thought he'd turn. Explain. Tell me what I'd just said that had landed on him like a hit he hadn't seen coming.
He didn't.
"I have to go," he said.
And just like that, he was gone.