Nick
Dr. Mehta is a clever woman.
She walks into the room, takes one look at my face, one look at the door Sadie just closed behind her, and in the small silence that follows I can see her do the arithmetic.
Her eyes narrow a fraction in assessment.
She’s a woman who has spent twenty years reading people across an exam table, and I am letting her read me because I want something from her.
"Mr. Zhirinovsky." She sets her tablet on the counter and washes her hands before lifting the edge of the gauze on my arm and examining the line of neat black stitches. "Your incision is healing remarkably well. Remarkably. Who did your closure?"
"A private doctor. Friend of the family,” I add, but don’t know why.
She re-tapes the gauze with quick clean motions, makes two notes on her tablet, and then looks up at me meeting my eyes directly.
"Sadie is new here," she says.
I don’t say anything. I keep quiet and wait for her to say what she means.
"She came from my old practice. She is excellent at her job. She has had a very…arduous time of it lately."
I hold her gaze.
Dr. Mehta is quiet for a long moment, then she closes the cover of her tablet and slides it under her arm.
"Keep the stitches dry for another three days," she says. "Come back in a week if you want them removed here. But I’m sure you’d rather utilize your family friend."
"Thank you, Doctor." I roll my sleeve down, link the cuffs and stand, reaching for my jacket.
"Mr. Zhirinovsky."
"Yes."
"She walks home. Fourteen blocks. I don't like it, especially at night."
I give her a small nod, and she gives me a smaller one back, then she leaves the room and closes the door behind her with a soft click.
Dr. Mehta just handed me something and I'll make sure she never has cause to regret it.
I shrug my jacket back on. The pain in my arm is a dull throb I mostly ignore, because there is something more immediate to attend to, which is a blond woman who walked out of this room with her face pale and her pulse visible at the side of her throat.
She knows.
She knows it was me, and she knows it in the way a woman knows something her body has been telling her for a week that her mind has refused to hear.
I thank the front desk, declining the appointment card they try to hand me because I have no intention of making another one.
I walk out of the clinic through the front entrance and turn left on the sidewalk.
I walk the length of the building to the alley that runs behind it because she is not a woman who takes her breaks in a break room full of other people when she has just had the ground taken out from under her.
She's on the back step.
Her knees are drawn up and her arms are wrapped around them, and she has a juice box in one hand and a bag of candy between the thumb and forefinger of her other. Her eyes are closed.
The alley is empty otherwise. There’s a dumpster and a fire escape. A strip of pale April sky tries to squeeze between the buildings.
I stop six feet away from her.
Her eyes open.
She looks at me the way she looked at me in the sedan, except now there’s no blood on her hands and no broken glass between us. Her chin is up. Her mouth is a careful straight line. The juice box is trembling a little in her grip and she moves her hand, as if she'd rather I didn't see.
"You shouldn't be back here," she says.
"I know."
She swallows, putting the juice box down on the step beside her. She folds her hands in her lap, and looks up at me with the blue eyes I have thought about every single night since the accident.
"How long have you been watching me?" she asks.
"Sadie."
"Just answer me," she sounds resigned, tired, and I instantly regret the way I went about this.
I take one step closer.
"Since the accident," I confess.
"The elevator?"
I nod, unable to take my eyes from her. Somehow, she is so much more beautiful than I remembered.
"The groceries?"
I nod again.
Her breath catches on that one, and I understand with a precision that goes all the way through me that the groceries are the one that hurt her. Scared her, even.
"The blueberries," she says.
"You looked at them for a long time,” I say it with a shrug, try to minimize it.
"How could you know that? How could you possibly know that unless you were there?"
"I wasn't," I say. "But I have people."
She laughs.
It’s not a real laugh. It’s a laugh that’s trying to keep her from crying, and it sits in the air between us for a second, thin and bright.
"You have people," she repeats. "You have people who follow a woman through a grocery store."
"I have people who watched you through a grocery store one time, because my people are thorough and I asked them to be."
"Mr. Zhirinovsky."
I wonder if she uses my full name in a bid to gain some kind of control.
"Nick," I say in response.
"I'm not calling you Nick." She stands up.
It’s such a small, quick movement. She is a foot shorter than me and she takes up the alley anyway. Her hands are fists at her sides. Her pulse is still visible in her throat.
"I don't know what you think this is," she says. Her voice is low and even, the same voice she used in the sedan. "I don't know what you think I am. I helped at a car wreck and that’s all. You don’t get to follow me to a new city and fix my elevator and buy me groceries and show up at my clinic pretending you need stitches checking. That’s not normal. I don’t deserve to be frightened in my own home. "
That’s the crux of it. It tracks, when taking her ex into consideration. I should have been more mindful of that.
"It wasn’t my intention to frighten you," I offer, but it sounds weak even to my ears.
"Then what was your intention?"
"I wanted to help you. Like you helped me. I wanted to see the woman who didn’t flinch when she was threatened."
Her mouth is half open ready to whip out a retort, but whatever she was going to say next falls away from her. I can see her trying to get it back and not being able to.
"What?" she demands, frowning.
"When I put my hand on your jaw. When I put my hand on your throat. You didn't flinch. Every person I have ever touched like that in my life has flinched and cowered. You looked at me and you told me your name. You were the calmest thing in that wreckage, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. I came here today because I needed to know whether I’d imagined it. "
She looks at me for a long moment, and I watch her face as she tries to process what I’ve said.
I take another step closer.
There are two feet between us now. I can see the faint freckles on her nose. I can see the thin white scar at the bow of her top lip, the one that I noticed in the sedan. I can see that her lashes are damp at the corners even though she hasn't let a single tear fall.
"Have dinner with me," I say.
"No." The word comes out on a huff of disbelieving laughter.
"Sadie."
"No. Mr. Zhirinovsky, no. I don't know you.
I don't know what you do or who you are.
I don't know what kind of man has people, and I don't want to know. I came here to start over. I came here to have a quiet life and a job I am good at, and I won’t. I won’t.
" Her voice catches. "I won’t be available for whatever this is. "
"Dinner," I say. "One hour. A place with other people in it. You pick it. I'll be where you say, when you say, and if at the end of that hour you want me to leave you alone, I'll leave you alone."
"You won't. You're standing in an alley behind my workplace. You fixed an elevator in my apartment building. You had a man watch me in a grocery store and then sent up the groceries I couldn’t afford. You are not going to leave me alone because I asked you to over a dinner roll."
I take the last step.
There’s only a foot between us now. I can feel the heat of her temper coming off her in the fresh, spring air.
I have to put my hands in my pockets to stop myself from touching her.
"Sadie," I say, low. "What are you afraid of?"
Her eyes move over my face.
"I’m afraid that I'm not afraid of you," she says.
The words are out before she can stop them. I can see her wince at her own voice, see the moment she wishes she could reach out and catch the sentence and pull it back into her mouth, but she can't.
My hand comes out of my pocket before I have given it permission, and I lift it, slowly, to brush my knuckles along her jaw.
The same jaw. The same place. I barely touch her. The edge of my index finger finds the soft skin below her ear, and her breath stops, her eyes go wide and dark and, once again, she doesn’t flinch.
"Sadie."
"Nick."
It's the first time she's called me it willingly.
Something in me that has been wound tight for too long goes very still.
"One dinner," I say. “You have my word that I will leave if you want me to, and my word is not a small thing."
Her throat moves under my knuckle as she swallows. I follow the motion with my eyes but keep my hand exactly where she let me put it.
"One dinner," she says, a little breathless now in a way that makes parts of me wake up after a long time of dormancy. "And when I ask you to leave me alone, you leave me alone."
"Okay."
She steps back.
My hand falls to my side. There’s a faint pink blush creeping over her neck, and I know I am going to think about that exact shade of pink until I see her again.
“The diner on Chandlers at eight,” she says, then turns and enters the clinic through the back door, taking her candy and juice box with her.
I walk back down the alley the way I came, and I don't look over my shoulder even though every part of me wants to.