Ella
My phone buzzes during my dinner break — a granola bar and black coffee in the supply closet, because the cafeteria closed an hour ago and I refuse to eat from the vending machine beneath my brother's smug jerky face.
I almost drop my coffee when I see two texts from Jason.
You can use my laptop if you need it for studying. Password is BAUER$.
Sending you sum $$ for a cab or whatever. We're heading to DC straight from the arena. Back Sunday.
I stare at the screen. Jason Rujkowski, the man who weighs his protein powder and once threatened a college teammate for borrowing his stick tape, just offered me his laptop and left me cab money. Unprompted. Without a lecture about the rules.
Something happened. I don't know what happened, but something did.
I text back a quick
Thank you.
Three dots appear, disappear, appear again.
Yeah. Good luck studying.
That's it. No explanation. No emotional breakthrough. Just Jason doing something thoughtful for the first time in recent memory and immediately retreating before anyone can make a big deal about it.
I'll take it.
I get out of my shift only a half hour late and order a ride share for the first time, feeling like royalty in the back seat of a sedan that smells like pine air freshener instead of dried piss.
The driver doesn't try to talk to me. The heater works.
I tip him generously and feel only a small pang of guilt.
The apartment is empty. Really empty — I have the place to myself for at least three days. They’re in DC, then a stop somewhere else, I think. I haven't memorized their schedule.
I drop my bag, shower, and stand in the living room in my pajamas — flannel pants and an old college T-shirt — and notice something I missed this morning in my pre-dawn rush.
Curtains.
Someone hung curtains over the floor-to-ceiling windows.
They're simple, dark gray, blackout material, the kind you'd find at any home store, but they transform the room.
The living room is no longer a glass box broadcasting my existence to the riverfront.
It's enclosed. Private. Mine, at least for the next few days.
I run my hand along the fabric. Did Bernard do this?
Had to be him, right? I glance around, and there’s no note.
I know my brother just turned into a human being, but Bernard has been kind to me for over a week.
Rides to and from work. Leftover food. And apparently hanging curtains in a room so I don’t feel watched in my temporary home.
I close the curtains, and the apartment wraps around me cozy as a blanket. I duck into my brother’s room and grab his laptop, laughing when I see he has the password written on a piece of tape on the case. Snuggling into the sofa with just the stove light on, I pull up the NCLEX prep website.
I've been using the app on my phone, squinting at tiny text on a cracked screen, and the difference is immediate. The questions are larger. The answer choices are spaced apart. I can actually see all four options without scrolling.
But the real discovery happens by accident. I'm poking around in the settings when I find the accessibility features. Text-to-speech. Screen reader. Audio playback of questions.
I click it. A calm, robotic voice reads the first question aloud: "A patient presents with sudden onset chest pain, diaphoresis, and shortness of breath. Which of the following nursing interventions should be performed first?"
And I know the answer. Immediately. No jumbling, no second-guessing, no transposing words. The voice reads the choices, and I click the right one without hesitation.
I take twenty questions. I get sixteen right.
I take twenty more. Eighteen correct.
My hands shake. Not from anxiety — from something else that feels like the ground shifting under my feet, like discovering a door in a room you thought had no exits.
Suddenly, Bernard’s playful voice in the car and on this couch seems less like witchcraft and more like a revelation: when information comes in through my ears instead of my eyes, my brain processes it just fine.
I pass a practice test for the first time since I started studying.
I close the laptop and press my hands over my face and breathe, because I am not going to cry on my brother's couch. But something cracks inside me — something old and heavy and calcified — and for the first time I think: maybe I'm not stupid.
My roommates’ road trip leaves me feeling like I live alone. I drink coffee with no bra on, sleep in my underwear with the heat cranked high.
And, interestingly, I text Bernard Houser. A lot.
It starts with a practical purpose.
Bernard
Pop quiz. Name the four chambers.
Me
Are you serious?
Bernard
Name them.
And I do.
Bernard
Just warming up. What's the normal ejection fraction?
Me
55 to 70 percent. Are you Googling these?
Bernard
I have a sports medicine textbook in my hotel room.
Me
Why??
Bernard
Spinner thinks it's a bible. Don't ruin it for him.
The tone shifts.
Bernard
How was work?
Me
Long. Dislocated shoulder, three lacerations, a guy who swallowed a quarter on a dare.
Bernard
A quarter.
Me
He was thirty-four years old.
Bernard
Did you get it out?
Me
That's not really my department. But I did get to watch the X-ray. It was in his esophagus, very shiny, very stupid.
Bernard
I once swallowed a piece of a mouth guard during a game and didn't tell anyone for three days.
Me
Bernard.
Bernard
It came out on its own!
Me
I'm choosing not to respond to that.
It shifts again.
Bernard
I've been thinking about the next lesson.
And that halts me right the hell in my tracks, nipples hard in the living room, grateful for the curtains.
Me
Oh?
Bernard
Yeah. I have a day off when I get back… If you want.
How could I want anything more than kisses with him again? Those sweet touches and shivers… Except I shouldn’t want that at all, and he’s just doing me a favor to prepare me for the ultimate goal: my own man. Separate from the world of hockey. And yet…
Me
I want.
A pause. Dots appearing, disappearing.
Bernard
Good.
That single word sits on my screen and heats me from the inside. I press the phone against my chest and stare at the curtains, think about Bernard’s hands on my collarbone and his mouth on mine, and worry that I don’t just want to have sex with “a” man to savor that experience.
I’m worried, I want to have sex with that man. Specifically.
Not good.
Aarthi catches me smiling at my phone during a lull and hip-checks me against the nurses' station.
"Who is he?"
"Nobody."
"Nobody is making you grin like a concussed person in a dark hallway? Spill."
McKenzie materializes — she has a sixth sense for gossip, the way I apparently have one for dropping blood pressure. "Who are we talking about? Is it a man? Please tell me it's a man. I need to live vicariously through someone because my love life is an abandoned parking lot."
I shove my phone deep in my scrub shirt pocket. “It's nobody. It's just a friend."
"A friend," Aarthi repeats, in the same tone she uses when a patient says they only had 'one or two drinks.' "Does this friend have a name?"
"Does this friend have a juicy butt?” McKenzie adds.
"I'm not discussing this."
"She's discussing this," Aarthi says to McKenzie. "Give her thirty seconds."
I last twelve. "He's … someone I know from back home. He lives in Pittsburgh. We've been texting each other."
"Texting what?" McKenzie's eyes are enormous.
"Medical trivia, mostly."
They both stare at me. Aarthi puts her hand on my forehead like she's checking for a fever. "Honey. That's foreplay for you?”
I swat her hand away, but I'm smiling, and they see it, and suddenly the three of us are huddled at the nurses' station giggling like we're at a sleepover instead of a trauma center.
"We should hang out," McKenzie says. "Outside of this fluorescent nightmare. Like actual human women who do things that aren't work."
Aarthi claps her hands. “I saw a flyer for an aerial silks class in Lawrenceville," she offers. "It's like circus stuff, but you hang from fabric and feel powerful. My cousin does it in New York and says it changed her life."
"I'm in," I say, before I can overthink it.
The three of us look at each other, and McKenzie grins. “Send us the details?”
“Yes! I love this.”
The rest of the shift moves faster after that.
I have friends. I have a plan. I have a thing that's mine, not Jason's, not hockey-adjacent, not something I'm doing in the margins of someone else's schedule.
For the first time in my life, I'm choosing an activity because it sounds fun and I want to try it.
I take the cab home and text Bernard about it.
I'm trying circus school this weekend with my nurse friends.
Bernard
Like clowns?
Me
No. Like silks. You hang from long pieces of fabric and do acrobatic things.
Bernard
That sounds terrifying.
Me
Because hockey is so peaceful
Bernard
Touché
I've had three glorious days of solo living, and I’m spoiled. I wear what I want, eat what I want, and study whenever the spirit moves me.
This evening, I set up shop on the couch, lying back with Jason’s laptop on my legs. The curtains are closed, the lamp’s glow is warm, and I’m comfortable in a way that suggests I’m going to drift off midway through my review of medication side effects.
I don't remember falling asleep.
I do become aware of surfacing slowly, the way I always do, through layers, heavy and warm. There's a hand on my shoulder. Gentle. A voice, low, close.
"Ella. Hey. We're home."
I open my eyes, and Bernard's face is right there. Close. Soft expression, tired eyes, still in his travel suit with the tie loosened. He crouches beside the couch, one hand on my shoulder, and he smells like airplane and coffee, and underneath it, that body wash.
"Bernard," I murmur, and my hand comes up before my brain engages. I touch his jaw. My thumb traces the stubble, the curve of his chin. "You're back."
He goes perfectly still. His eyes search my face, and something passes through them — something warm and unguarded and raw — and for a moment we are just this: his face in my hand, his hand on my shoulder, the lamp casting us in gold.
"I missed you," I say, still half-asleep, still floating in the space where honesty lives because my defenses haven't booted up yet.
Bernard's breath catches.
Then a voice behind him: "She awake?"
Jason. Standing by the front door with his road bag over his shoulder, watching us.
I snap fully conscious. My hand drops from Bernard's face like I've touched a hot stove. I sit upright, clutching the laptop, blinking in the light.
"I'm up. Sorry. I fell asleep studying." I'm already gathering things: laptop, textbook, blanket. "How was the trip?"
"Two and one," Jason says. He's looking at me, then at Bernard, who has straightened up and taken a measured step back from the couch. "You good?"
"Fine. Just tired." I hug the laptop to my chest like a shield. "Thanks for this, by the way. It really helped."
Jason nods. Something flickers across his face, not suspicion exactly, but awareness. Like he's looking at a play he can't quite read yet. "Yeah. No problem."
"Goodnight," I say to both of them, to neither of them, and walk down the hall to Bernard's bedroom and close the door.
I sit on the edge of the bed in the dark.
I press my palms against my eyes and breathe. I crossed a line big time with the guy who is trying to help me out. I remind myself that the physical stuff with Bernard is a favor, lessons, to prepare me for an actual man I have the option of dating.
I touched his face like he was mine. I said I missed him like it was the truest thing I knew. The guy who is best friends with my brother, who lives with him, and plays on a team that’s had enough interpersonal conflict. Would the Fury tolerate an explosion between Jason and Bernard?
I am playing with trouble.
But I’m not sure I want to stop.