17. Dr. Beck
Dr. Beck
Heroic. It’s a nice word. But not when it’s been sneered at you. Repeatedly.
I can’t help but bristle at words that hurt. Beside me, Brooke drops my hand, stands, and walks farther out on the ledge. She keeps going closer to the edge, and my heart dives.
“Brooke,” I whisper-call, trying not to alarm her. She is on the precipice, and you cannot survive a fall from this height.
Brooke looks over her shoulder with a crinkled brow and a frown, then plops down.
I approach slowly and ease down next to her.
I swallow. “Hero wasn’t a nice word in … uh … Addie’s vocabulary.”
Brooke brings her knees to her chest and wraps her arm around her shins.
She rests her cheek on her kneecap and fixes me with a wide-eyed gaze.
A wisp of pink-streaked hair escapes her braid, and I impulsively tuck it behind her ear.
She startles a bit at the contact, but then chews her lip.
I take it as a good sign that she doesn’t smack my hand away.
When she speaks, her response isn’t what I expected. “I don’t really like heights.”
“Ok,” I say. But then, because I’m not skilled at talking to pretty women unless they’re having a medical emergency, I state the obvious. “But you’re sitting at the very edge of a rock ledge that’s hundreds of feet in the air.”
“That’s the point.” She picks her head up and stretches her neck from side to side. “I do things that scare me. And I find I can enjoy them with enough practice.”
I don’t fully understand the lesson, but I know there’s one here.
It’s like Aesop and his fables. If only I had ever understood what the fables taught.
It’s like Brooke is giving me pieces to a puzzle, but the only picture I have is the one I imagined the puzzle would look like, and the pieces aren’t fitting together.
I do the only thing I can in this situation—give her a single nod to show I heard her.
She smiles softly, then shivers and scoots back from the edge until she’s firmly in the center of the rock formation. “That was enough exposure therapy for me today.”
I can’t help it. I’m a serious man, but there is something so charming about Brooke, with her pink hair and her wide eyes and her gorgeous smile that … I laugh. Not a chuckle, but a real laugh. The kind of laugh that I haven’t let out in four years, three months, elev—
But why bother counting?
Brooke arches an eyebrow and smirks. “Find something funny about my completely rational fear?” she teases.
“Yeah,” I say, walking toward her. “It’s that I was just thinking that I haven’t wanted to meet anyone for a long time, and then it’s my ridiculous neighbor’s granddaughter who swoops in, all gorgeous, and is the first person to make me laugh in over four years.”
“Four years without laughing?” She frowns. “I wasn’t trying to be funny.”
“That’s the thing, though, Brooke,” I say, ambling closer and wrapping her hand in mine. “You didn’t have to try.”
She’s quiet for a moment, her eyes turning to the vista before us. I’m sweaty and sticky, and spent half our date performing CPR on a random stranger, but she didn’t think that was a problem. She made me laugh with her joke about exposure therapy. She’s completely herself.
I allow myself to think that maybe she really thought I was heroic.
My chest inflates with hope.
She didn’t mind the sweat before when she hugged me after everything, and I have the urge to pull her into my arms, but she drops my hand, pulls her phone out, and begins taking pictures of the view.
The moment passes like the beat of a butterfly’s wings.
It’s an incredible panorama, I’ll give her that, but it’s not the best thing I’ve seen today.
“Here.” I hold out my hand for her phone.
“Hmm?” she says, not turning around.
“Let me take one with you in it.”
“A little bold there, Dr. Whistler,” she teases over her shoulder.
I arch a brow and shake my head at her teasing, holding my hand again out for her phone.
Brooke passes it to me, but as she does, a new voice meets my ears.
“I can take it for y’all.”
“That would be great.” Brooke beams a huge smile at the woman who said it.
I turn slowly toward the voice. I know my ears heard it, but maybe my brain is warping sound or something. It has to be a glitch in the matrix. It has to be.
Brooke’s arm snakes around my waist as she poses for the picture, but I can’t move. I can’t say a single word.
“Beck?” Brooke and Addie say at the same time.