Chapter Eleven #3
“How’d you know I was in med school?”
“You mentioned it after I exorcised the demon from Debra.” Everything from that afternoon is a blur. “How far did you get?”
I close my eyes, tilting my chin toward the sky as he smears the balm over my leg. “Year three. I started rotations and did one in a pediatric office and the ER.”
“You dropped out,” he states the obvious.
“With barely a year until graduation.”
“Why?” His curiosity is surprisingly genuine while lacking judgment.
I swallow, grateful he’s too busy shuffling through the first aid kit for gauze and medical tape. He finds it and begins wrapping the wound.
“I don’t know,” I lie, biting my lip as he tightens the bandage. “Ow.”
“I’m sorry,” he says. This, too, is surprisingly genuine. It feels deeper than the moment, like maybe he’s also sorry for snapping at me for ruining our cover, or for leaving me in the first place.
The stillness of dawn blankets us. With one more cursory look at his workmanship, he zips up his backpack and stands. I let him help me up, testing my weight on my leg. It hurts, but I’ll manage.
“What’s the report?” he asks, handing me my jeans.
“Not too shabby,” I say, taking them. “Though your bedside manner could use some work.”
A brief smile grants me a flash of his white teeth. “Noted.”
Standing makes the reality resurface that I’m half naked in front of him. His eyes linger on my body, but when he catches my stare, he clears his throat and looks toward the sky.
I try to wiggle back into my jeans, but it’s hard to bend my leg with the bandage.
“Oh shit,” I say, nearly toppling over. His hands grab my hips, the warmth of his palms against my bare skin making me stave off a shudder.
I can’t help thinking about all the places he’s touched me in the past thirty minutes, leaving fingerprints on my skin.
First my waist, then my leg, and now my hips.
He only releases me when I start to tug my pants over his grasp. He steps back quickly, as if he hadn’t realized what he’d done. I meet his eyes as I button my jeans. He’s the first to rip his gaze away.
“Put this back on,” he instructs, grabbing my dagger and sheath from where I dropped them. I do, then follow it with my boots, which I prop on the wooden rail to tie.
“We should get going,” he says gruffly, shouldering my duffel. I go to take it from him, but he sidesteps me. “I’ve got it. The nearest town is probably a few miles, maybe more. Let’s hope we find something drivable there. It’s a long way to Beliar, otherwise.”
He starts walking in the direction the train zoomed off in. Though the burn to thank him for patching me up rises in my throat, I can’t force the words out. But the silence is too pressing and loaded with a question I can’t choke back.
“Melinda said you’re grieving someone, too. Who?”
Luke’s body goes so still I’d assume rigor mortis was setting in if he wasn’t standing. The quiet makes it feel like we’re the only two people left in the world.
“My brother.” He breathes deeply, like admitting it out loud is difficult. With his back to me, I can’t see his face, but I can hear the pain behind his words. “He’s not dead. But he might as well be. What about you?”
With the adrenaline leaking out of me and my knee throbbing, I’m powerless to stop myself from obliging. “I’m grieving the old me. The one who used to be in med school. Who had friends, and a fiancé, and a life, and parents.”
He looks at me. The tenderness in his gaze, like he’s sorry for who I was and who I am now, makes tears clog my throat. Understanding passes between us, giving me the courage to continue.
“And then she lost her parents, and realized the life she thought she wanted as a doctor didn’t appeal without them being alive to see it happen, and her fiancé thought she was throwing her future out, so she threw him out, and then all her friends sided with him, so they left her, too.”
It’s not the full truth, especially using a word as cavalier as lost, but it’s easier like this. To talk about me like she, some poor unfortunate girl I don’t know.
“I’m sorry,” he says, low and even and so sincere I want to break eye contact, but some greater force won’t let me. “You didn’t deserve that.”
My humorless laugh cracks the quiet like an egg smashed against the pan before its guts spill onto sizzling heat. I start walking, brushing past him. “Maybe I did. Maybe that’s what you get when every choice you make is for someone else. To keep them happy, or proud, or calm, or—”
“Safe?” he offers.
I turn, taking in the way his jaw clenches and his chest rises and falls with his breath. He gets it. I don’t know how, but he does. I nod. “But the second I couldn’t keep up the show, it all fell apart. And when I got off the stage, I realized I have no idea who Brie Benson actually is.”
Luke’s shoulder brushes mine as he matches me step for step. There’s a comfort in the gesture that I don’t want to dissect, even as he glances at me as if he’s really seeing me and says, “I’m starting to realize neither do I.”