Chapter 9 Sienna #2
Elise listened as she did everything, completely. Her eyes held Sienna's across the candlelight and her body was still and her attention was total.
"That must have been lonely," Elise said.
"It was disciplined."
Elise held her gaze across the table, steady and unblinking. "That's not what I asked."
Sienna looked at the candle flame. It guttered in a draught from the window and sent shadows rippling across the table. "Yes. It was lonely."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be. They loved me. They just loved me in their language, and their language didn't have many words.
" She reached for her glass of water and took a sip.
Her throat was tight. She hadn't talked about her parents like this in years, if ever.
She'd mentioned them to Helen in passing, mentioned them to colleagues in the context of her medical career, but she'd never sat across from someone and said the quiet part out loud.
That her parents' love was real but insufficient.
That growing up in their house had been like living in a beautifully maintained greenhouse where nothing was allowed to grow in an unexpected direction.
They cleared the table together. Sienna stacked the containers with her usual neatness while Elise wiped down the surface one-handed, the cloth moving in broad, efficient strokes.
Their hips bumped at the kitchen counter when they both reached for the recycling bin at the same time.
Sienna stepped back. Elise didn't. The contact lasted less than a second and Sienna's skin remembered it.
Elise made coffee. The process involved spilling grounds on the counter, swearing under her breath, and knocking a spoon off the worktop with her elbow.
Sienna offered to help and was firmly refused.
"I'm injured, not helpless." The coffee was too strong but Sienna drank it anyway because Elise handed it to her with a look of defiant pride and criticising it would have been cruel.
They moved to the sofa. It was deep and soft and they sat close together, closer than two people who were maintaining a professional relationship needed to sit.
Sienna's knee was six inches from Elise's thigh.
The candles on the coffee table were burning low, the wax pooling in the glass holders, and the light was golden and intimate.
Elise's shampoo reached her, rosemary, and the clean scent of her skin beneath it.
"Can I ask you something?" Elise said. She was turned toward Sienna on the sofa, her legs tucked beneath her, her good arm resting on the back of the cushions. Her fingers were close to Sienna's shoulder.
"Of course."
"Do you ever get lonely here? In Phoenix Ridge?"
Sienna considered the question. The honest answer was yes, constantly, in the familiar, persistent way she'd been lonely in every city she'd lived in since San Diego.
But the loneliness had changed since she'd started spending time with Elise.
It had a shape now, a specific absence, and the shape was the absence of exactly this.
Sitting on a sofa in candlelight with someone who asked questions that went past the surface and into the places she kept locked.
"Sometimes," she said. "Less lately."
The admission sat between them, exposed.
Sienna hadn't meant to say the second part.
It had come out on its own, pulled from somewhere deeper than the careful, curated responses she normally gave.
Less lately. Because of you. She might as well have said it.
The meaning was transparent and they both knew it.
Elise didn't look away. She held Sienna's gaze with the steady, unblinking focus she brought to everything, and Sienna held it back, and the apartment shrank until it was just the sofa and the candlelight and the two of them and the six inches between Sienna's knee and Elise's thigh.
"I'm glad," Elise said. The two words were quiet and simple and they hit somewhere in Sienna's chest where they had no business hitting.
The apartment was very still. Outside, a car passed on the street below, headlights sweeping briefly across the ceiling before fading.
The candle on the coffee table guttered in some invisible draught, sending shadows dancing across Elise's face.
The faint freckles across the bridge of Elise's nose were visible in the candlelight, barely there beneath the tan, and the small scar on her right forearm where it rested on the back of the sofa.
Elise's fingers moved from the back of the sofa to Sienna's shoulder.
The touch was light, barely there, her fingertips resting on the silk of Sienna's blouse where it met her collarbone.
Sienna's breathing stopped. Elise's fingers were nothing and everything, and her heartbeat hammered in her throat, in her wrists, in the tips of her ears.
"Sienna," Elise said. Her voice was low and certain and it sent heat straight through Sienna's core.
Elise leaned in.
The movement was slow and clear and unmistakable. She tilted her head and her eyes dropped to Sienna's mouth and she leaned across the space between them. Sienna saw it coming and her whole body went taut with the wanting and the terror.
Sienna pulled back.
She pulled back sharply, a full-body flinch that took her to the far end of the sofa, and her heart was slamming against her ribs and her hands were shaking and Elise's face went from open and hopeful to stunned in the space of a breath.
"I can't," Sienna said. Her voice came out wrong, too high, too fast. "I'm sorry. I can't."
Elise sat very still. The hope drained from her face and what replaced it was careful, controlled blankness, the same neutral expression she wore in the corridor when she was pretending she wasn't hurt. "Okay."
"It's not that I don't..." Sienna stopped.
She couldn't finish that sentence. If she finished that sentence, she'd have to say what she did want, and what she wanted was to close the distance between them and kiss Elise until neither of them could think.
"You're my patient. I have a professional obligation. This can't happen."
"Okay," Elise said again. Her voice was level. Too level. She uncurled her legs from beneath her and put both feet on the floor and her posture shifted from soft to straight, the athlete's spine reasserting itself.
Sienna's fingers twisted in her lap. "Elise..."
"It's fine. You're right." A brittle smile. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have done that."
Sienna shook her head. "You didn't do anything wrong."
"I just tried to kiss my doctor." The dry humour was back, but it was sharp this time, turned inward. "That's pretty wrong."
The lightness in her voice was practised.
The same lightness she'd heard Elise use in the corridor outside the team lounge, and in the medical suite when the pain was bad, and on the phone to her mother when she didn't want anyone to worry.
It was the voice Elise used when she was protecting other people from what she was actually feeling, and hearing it now, directed at Sienna, at the hurt Sienna had caused, was unbearable.
Sienna's chest ached. She wanted to reach across the sofa and take Elise's hand and tell her everything, every thought she'd had since the first day in the medical room, every shower fantasy, every moment of weakness when Elise's name on her phone screen made her pulse stutter.
She wanted to say: I pulled away because I'm scared, not because I don't want you.
I pulled away because I've never let anyone this close before and I don't know what happens when I do.
But the words wouldn't come. They were trapped behind the wall she'd spent decades building, the wall her parents had laid the foundation for with their quiet, disciplined love and their careful, contained emotions.
The wall was right there and she hated it and she couldn't get past it, not here, not now, not with Elise looking at her with the effort it was taking to pretend this was fine written across her face.
"I should go," Sienna said. She stood up. Her legs were unsteady.
Elise stood too. "You don't have to."
"I think I do." She gathered her jacket from the back of the chair and her keys from the counter and moved toward the door.
The candles were still burning. The sushi containers were stacked neatly on the kitchen counter.
The coffee cups sat on the table, half-full, and the entire apartment looked like the aftermath of an evening that had almost become more.
At the door, she turned. Elise was standing by the sofa with her arms at her sides, her injured shoulder held carefully, and the candlelight behind her made her silhouette soft and golden.
"Thank you for dinner," Sienna said. "I had a lovely evening."
"Me too." Elise's voice was quiet. "Goodnight, Sienna."
Her name in Elise's mouth. Still warm. Still devastating.
"Goodnight."
She walked down the stairs and out into the evening air. The street was dark and quiet, the trees rustling overhead.
She got into her car and sat in the driver's seat with her hands on the wheel and her forehead pressed against the backs of her fingers.
The car smelled of fabric freshener and the ghost of the Japanese food, ginger and soy, and the dashboard clock glowed green in the dark.
Eight forty-seven. She'd been in Elise's apartment for two hours and twelve minutes and it was the best evening she'd had in years and she'd ruined it.
No. She'd protected it. She'd done what a responsible physician does when a patient crosses a boundary. She'd maintained the professional framework that protected both of them. She'd been ethical and principled and correct.
And Elise's face when she'd pulled away. The hope draining out of it like water from a cracked glass. The practised blankness that replaced it, the athlete's mask, built for cameras and post-game interviews and moments when the thing you're feeling is too raw to let anyone see.
Sienna pressed her fingers against her eyelids until she saw colours.
The car was quiet. The street was quiet.
Everything was quiet except the low roar inside her chest, which was not quiet at all.
It was the sound of twenty years of restraint rattling its cage, and for the first time, the lock didn't feel strong enough to hold.
She had done the right thing.
Her hands were still shaking when she started the engine.