Chapter Eleven
Eleven
As foretold, a blizzard descends upon the city.
I avoid the worst of it by the skin of my teeth, turning into my building’s garage just minutes after the first fat, wet snowflakes land on my windshield.
Onix, who is thirteen years old, arthritic, and doesn’t have any time for this shit, is greatly displeased by the change in the weather.
Ten minutes into our squinting hobble down the street and he’s done, employing all seventy pounds of his bulk to drag me back home.
The next morning the snow turns to hail and then to sleet.
I spend the morning in my office slouched in my chair, fending off sleep, watching my clinic appointments disappear from my schedule and googling inane things like “why did he ghost me” and “getting over a crush in your thirties.” I’m halfway through a video by a self-proclaimed feminist dating coach advising me to “teach myself to be disgusted by his disrespect” when my assigned medical assistant pops open the door.
I hurriedly silence my phone and place it face down on my desk like a guilty kid, but luckily, he doesn’t seem to notice.
“Your eleven forty no-showed, so I’m heading to lunch early,” he informs me.
“That’s fine,” I say, my words swallowed by a yawn. “I’m going to take a nap. Tell whoever’s covering you to wake me up if someone shows up.”
He nods and closes the door, and I’m alone again.
The exhaustion I’ve been fighting to get through my clinic day suddenly weighs heavy on my shoulders, and I slump forward onto my desk, nestling my head in the dark space made by my folded arms. My eyes flutter closed, and between one second and the next, I’m gone from the world—
—and waking, abruptly, to a new one. It’s all white: endless white walls, white sheets only distinguishable by the shadows in their folds under a gossamer white canopy.
I look down at my body and see white silk and delicate lace: a robe that might have once been worn by a 1940s starlet on her way to seduce her producer.
“I’ve missed you,” a voice says.
I snap toward it, my heart leaping as adrenaline surges within me.
I shouldn’t be surprised to find Julian here, now that he’s established himself as a recurring player in my dreams, but I am surprised to hear him speak.
He looks different today. Otherworldly in a way that makes me fight not to avert my gaze.
His eyes glow amber, like they had in the music room in Edison Mansion so many weeks ago, and his bronze skin seems burnished gold, a demigod stepping foot on Mount Olympus and becoming divine.
He tilts his head as he regards me, and I get the distinct feeling that I’m trapped, a fawn caught in a bear trap.
“Whose fault is that?” In this space, I don’t bother to hide my irritation. “You’re the one who ghosted me.”
Julian tilts his head. He looks pleased, and that annoys me even more.
“Does that mean you’ve missed me too?” he asks. His gaze drops to my chest, lingering on the nipples that peek through the thin white fabric of my robe. This is a dream, I have no reason to be shy, but I still cross my arms to hide them from view. Julian smirks. “Certainly seems like it.”
“Asshole,” I whisper.
Julian laughs. The sound echoes off unseen walls.
“Asshole, am I?” he says. “I’ve simply stopped performing, just as you suggested.”
I scoff, turning away. The motion makes my head swim, and I realize, with some horror, that this is the first time that my symptoms haven’t dissipated in my dreams.
The canopy over my head shudders, and suddenly my back is flat against plush pillows and Julian is crouching over me, his knees squeezing my hips between them, arms trapping me in a cage.
I’m very sure he’d been wearing a shirt a few seconds ago, but it’s gone now, leaving just a gleaming chest that I ball my fists into the sheets to keep from reaching out to touch.
As if he can hear my thoughts, he snatches my hand, places it on his abs, and tenses.
The muscles ripple under my palm, and the space between my legs throbs like he’s touched me there.
“I can make you all better, you know,” Julian promises. His voice is a low, sultry whisper. “Either here and now, or later, out there. Anywhere you want. Any way you want too. You just have to ask.”
“I…” I squeeze my eyes shut. “I don’t want that from you right now.”
Julian quirks an eyebrow, then lowers his hips into me, presses close until I can feel every inch of him against me, every ridge. I suck in a breath to keep from crying out and squeeze my eyes shut, enduring.
“Are you sure?” he teases.
The heat emanating from Julian’s body is both oppressive and soothing, like sitting too close to a hearth, and it turns my mind liquid.
The truth is that I’m not sure. Why shouldn’t I let Julian have his way with me here, insulated from reality?
It would be harmless, I think. And by the way it already feels now, even with thin layers of clothing still separating us, transcendent.
My hips rise to meet his, and he presses me closer, flattening me against him and dragging a sigh out of my throat.
I feel his groan at the nape of my neck, throaty with triumph.
“That’s right,” he says. “Give yourself to me.”
His voice is resonant, like there are five of him in the room, all speaking in haunting unison.
The words themselves are less seduction, more command, but I don’t have time to consider the strangeness of them, because suddenly his hands are everywhere.
Gripping my chin to open my mouth to him, tugging open my robe to roll my nipples between eager fingers.
He sucks at the skin at the base of my neck, draws the flesh into his mouth, bites down.
The pinch of his teeth makes me gasp, and desire drips down my body like slow-poured honey.
Suddenly, a voice, echoing in the distance.
“Sean?”
A sensation like ice water trickles down my back.
I know this voice. I hear it multiple times a week. It asks me about new cath lab equipment and always tips the baristas 20 percent at Brews and Beans and giggled through her vows at an ornate floral altar a few weeks ago.
Leila.
I am at work, I remember suddenly. I am taking a nap in the clinic right now.
I push Julian away with two hands against his chest.
“Wait,” I say.
Julian pulls back ever so slightly.
“Wait?” he repeats, and for a second, the air around us falls still.
Then, without warning, the bed bursts into flame.
The heat is instant and overwhelming. I understand, implicitly, that I am on fire.
But this is a different kind of burn, an overstimulation that leaps past pleasure and into agony.
The flames lap at the erogenous zones behind my thighs, arms, under my breasts like so many tongues, leaving sizzling trails of humming skin in their wake.
The rush of sensation is so staggering that I squeeze my eyes shut to stem the sensory overload.
“Tell me to wait again,” Julian croons. His voice comes from everywhere, a whisper in my ear, an echo in my skull. “Tell me you don’t want me right now.”
“I—” I try, but I can’t find the words. My body is twisting, writhing, both darting away from and arching into my own immolation.
I feel so good that a part of me, irrational but deafening, thinks that I will not survive this.
That the human mind is not meant to comprehend pleasure so all-consuming, that my brain cannot possibly translate the signals that my every minuscule nerve ending is currently sending.
Julian’s hands pry my thighs apart like a clamshell, his palms so hot I can see the red imprints of them behind my closed eyelids, and when he blows a gust of steam over my core, I finally wrench my eyes open.
The creature between my legs is obviously Julian.
It has Julian’s balanced bone structure, his full lips and dark, curling lashes, his broad shoulders and large, veined hands.
But the Julian I know doesn’t glow from the inside out like a hot coal.
His eyes are a warm, inviting brown, not the slit-pupiled amber that spear me like a flailing fish now.
And his tongue is a normal, human length, not this terrifying, alluring appendage that slinks out of his mouth and splits me down the middle.
“Say it,” this Julian monster says, in between languorous laps that sand at my sanity. “Say that you’re mine.”
The words he wants bounce around in my head, ring in my ears like they are the only ones I know. I’m yours I’m yours I’m yours, “I’m—”
“Dr. Sullivan!”
A bolt of recognition jolts me back into reality.
I snatch back my legs so quickly that I almost kick the creature in the face.
Within the next instant, Julian is human colored again, and he sits up to watch, stunned, as the scene around us falls away like a straw house in a maelstrom, white walls peeling in ribbons to give way to the drab gray cabinetry of my office.
Just before he disappears, he turns back to me, nostrils flared, eyes dark, and I’m not sure whether it’s lust or rage that I see on his face.
There is a hand on my shoulder, shaking me, and then the world I had with Julian is gone, blown away like a candle flame.
“Sean?” Leila repeats, her tone high with rising concern.
I blink up at her, disoriented, my ears still ringing and skin still buzzing. For a second, I see the creature again, its unblinking stare, the way my mind went blissfully blank in its grasp.
But it’s just Leila, and she’s stifling a laugh.
“Must have been a good nap,” she says from behind a parted hand. Her diamond glimmers on her finger, and an old, hateful part of me tenses at the sight of it.
“I’m tired, what’s new,” I say grouchily. “What are you doing here? I’ve never seen you in clinic.”
Leila holds up a rolled-up set of hospital-issue scrubs.
“Brandon used all his scrub machine credits and said he had an extra set here. I’m just running them up before his next case,” she informs me.
Instantly, my hackles lower, and I feel the burn of embarrassment. No more monster smut for you, I think, because did I really just have a sex dream about a long-tongued lava man in the middle of the work day? A terrifying thought occurs to me: God, what if I made…sounds?
“Sorry,” I say, stretching to cover for my grimace. “I’m a bit of a grump when I first wake up.”
Leila assures me that there is “nothing to worry about, I’m the same too,” and I comfort myself with the knowledge that her grin would be a bit more knowing if she’d caught me moaning in my sleep.
I’m getting ready to shake my computer awake to check my schedule when Leila lays a gentle hand on my shoulder.
“I heard about the missed STEMI,” she says. “I’m so, so sorry about that.”
Julian’s expression crosses my mind, more sheepish than I’d ever seen him look: We should be taking things slow.
“Yeah, well,” I grumble, last week’s bitterness returning. “Things happen.”
Leila’s expression darkens.
“But they shouldn’t, and it wasn’t okay,” she says. “Don’t worry. I’ve talked to him about it.”
I’m not sure if I’ve ever heard Leila sound so…irritated. Trouble in paradise already?
“Thank you?” I say.
“No, thank you for covering him,” Leila says. “Oh! And for asking Winona about the recital. I know Sophie was nervous about inviting me, and she told me you helped convince her.”
At this, I stiffen. I can’t help but feel like Leila is bragging, though I can’t conceive why.
Maybe it’s the insinuation that Winona had put up any sort of resistance to having her there, or the overdone, puppy-dog pout she’s giving me now.
She’s always felt genuine to me, but right now, I can’t help but feel taunted.
“It didn’t take any convincing,” I insist. “We share an interest in making the kid happy, after all.”
“Of course,” Leila says sagely. Then her grip tightens. “Have you heard from Julian lately?”
I tense.
“No, I haven’t, and I’d rather not discuss it.” I sound snippy, but as a woman scorned I think I’m allowed it.
“Oh, well, I was going to tell you that I’m worried about him,” Leila says.
“He ghosted me for dinner last week, and he wasn’t answering, like, any of my texts and calls, so I got worried and reached out to Ritika.
Apparently, he’s not well. She had to cancel all his meetings this week—which, like, never happens by the way, that man would work through a hurricane—but he’s refusing to go to the hospital. ”
Oh.
I can’t remember the last time I felt this embarrassed; maybe when I said someone’s residency potluck dish looked like compost and turned to find the cook standing behind me.
“He’s sick?” I repeat.
Leila nods, chewing on a thumbnail, and I wonder whether the haughtiness I’d felt from her was actually nerves.
“He does this. Pushes himself past his limits. Putting himself in danger like this is so unnecessary—” Her voice cracks, and she gives me an apologetic shrug. “Sorry. I just…He’s like a big brother to me, and I just wish he would treat himself with a bit more care.”
I remember, abruptly, that Leila’s actual big brother is no longer with us—that there’s perhaps a reason why she’s visiting me now that goes beyond socializing.
“I’ve been wanting to stop by his place to check on him, but I have to drive to Evanston a bunch this week to prepare a demonstration I’ll be doing with one of the interventionists there for SCAI,” Leila says, confirming my suspicions in the next breath.
“And honestly, Brandon doesn’t like the idea of me going over to another man’s house alone, and I’m trying to respect his wishes.
So…I was hoping to ask a favor. Since, you know, Jules is important to both of us. ”
The concern that I have for Brandon being maybe a bit more controlling than I like is only trumped by my horror at the image of Julian sprawled out, half dead, on his couch.
“You want me to go check on him,” I say.
“Please,” Leila says.
It’s a no-brainer, even if it ties my stomach into twists. Despite everything, my traitorous heart beats faster.
“Of course,” I say.