Chapter 4
JESS
Ifelt like Cinderella after she'd left the ball.
One night I was celebrating with the prince in the middle of a Stanley Cup victory, swept up in something I hadn't seen coming and hadn't had time to think too carefully about — and then I was back in Chicago, back in my brownstone, back in the ordinary rhythm of school pickups and night shifts and Justin's dinosaur collection taking over the living room floor. The fanfare was over.
The clock had struck midnight. And I was standing in my kitchen with my coffee wondering if any of it had actually happened.
It had happened. Carter calling every night was proof enough of that.
He called the next morning, before I'd even had coffee. Not a text — a call, which I was already learning was his preference, his own brand of showing up. His voice was easy and a little rough with sleep and he said good morning like he'd been thinking about saying it for a while.
"Did I wake you?" he asked.
"No." I was already awake, had been for an hour, lying in the hotel bed thinking about the conversation from the night before and trying to be sensible about it. "I'm an early riser. Occupational hazard."
"Head L&D nurses and hockey players," he said. "We keep the same terrible hours."
"Is four in the morning a terrible hour for hockey players?"
"Game seven of the Finals? Absolutely not."
I laughed, and something about the ease of it surprised me — how naturally it came, how unguarded I was with him already, how little effort any of this seemed to require when effort was usually the first thing I brought to anything new.
We talked for an hour. About nothing important. About everything that was.
June became a series of phone calls.
He called every night, late, after Justin was down and the house had settled into its evening quiet. I'd take my phone to the porch swing and we'd talk until I was half-asleep and the summer air had gone cool around me.
He told me about the off-season, about the facility, about Ty's ongoing conviction that a catfish had personally targeted him during a fishing trip.
I told him about my unit, about the delivery that had gone sideways on a Tuesday and come right at three in the morning, about Justin's current obsession with a stuffed bear.
The weekend after we got home from St. Louis, he'd gone to a classmate's birthday party — one of those Build-A-Bear afternoons where every kid goes home with a bear — and while the other kids named theirs things like Fluffy and Mr. Buttons, my son had stuffed his, dressed it, and announced with total conviction that its name was Carter Junior.
After the hockey player he'd just met. The one he'd decided, entirely on his own, was his favorite person on the planet.
"Carter Junior," he said, the first time I mentioned it.
"Carter Junior," I confirmed.
A pause. "He named a bear after me."
"He named a bear after you."
Another pause, longer, and I couldn't quite read what was in it. "I'm going to need to meet this bear," he said finally.
"I think that can be arranged."
I didn't examine too closely what it meant that a little boy had named his new stuffed animal after a man he'd met twice.
I was trying, in general, not to examine too closely any of the things that were happening that summer, because examining things closely was how I usually talked myself out of them, and for once in my adult life I wanted to just — let something be what it was, for as long as it was allowed to be that.
He called on a Tuesday evening, his voice easy the way it always was, and said: "I have a light training schedule this weekend, and I was thinking — if it can work for you — I'd love to come to Chicago.
I'm anxious to see you, but I want to make sure you can actually be available.
For the whole weekend, if that's possible. "
I checked my schedule, checked with Rosa, and called him back the same evening.
"Saturday morning through Sunday works," I said. "Rosa is going to keep Justin at the house so I have some flexibility. He loves having her to himself — it's not a hardship for either of them."
"Perfect." A pause, warm. "I'll book a hotel nearby. Send me the neighborhood?"
"You don't have to?—"
"I want to," he said simply. "It's easier. No pressure on anyone."
He booked a place two blocks from my brownstone, sent me the confirmation number without making a thing of it.
He knocked on my door Saturday morning. When I opened it he was standing on my porch with two coffees, one extended toward me like an offering.
"Black, no sugar," he said. "The place on the corner you mentioned."
"You remembered."
"I remember everything you tell me." He smiled, and then he leaned in and kissed me — warm and unhurried, a good morning kiss that meant it — and I thought: I am in so much trouble.
We spent Saturday morning with Justin — the park, the ducks, Carter pushing him on the swings with the patience of a man who genuinely didn't have anywhere else he'd rather be.
I sat on a bench and watched.
Justin had brought Carter Junior along — he'd been waiting weeks for the bear and its namesake to finally meet, and he presented the two of them to each other with complete seriousness, like a formal introduction.
Carter accepted the honor with equal gravity, shaking the bear's small paw, and Justin immediately launched into a full briefing on the bear's preferences and daily routine, which Carter listened to with the focused attention of a man receiving intelligence on a matter of national importance.
"He likes to watch hockey," Justin said.
"Smart bear," Carter said.
"He knows the Flip."
Carter looked at him. "He knows the Flip?"
"I taught him." Justin demonstrated with Carter Junior's small stuffed arm, making the backhand-to-forehand motion with complete conviction. "Like this."
Carter looked at me over Justin's head. His expression was somewhere between delighted and completely undone, and he covered it quickly, but not quickly enough.
"That's exactly right," he told Justin. "You've got it perfectly."
We got ice cream after the park — a place on Addison that Justin had strong opinions about, specifically regarding the superiority of the chocolate-vanilla swirl over all other available options.
Carter ordered the same thing Justin ordered without being asked, which Justin noticed immediately and approved of with a solemn nod.
They sat on a bench in the sun eating their ice cream, both of them getting it on their hands, Justin narrating a complicated story about something that had happened at camp involving a water balloon and a misunderstanding about whose fault it was, and Carter listening to every word of it like it was the most interesting thing he'd heard all week.
I stood a few feet away and thought: oh no.
Not in a bad way. In the way of someone who has just realized something they can't unrealize, and isn't entirely sure what to do with it yet.
Rosa had Justin for the evening, which meant Saturday night was just us.
Carter had made a reservation — a small Italian place in Wicker Park that I'd never been to, candlelit and unhurried, the kind of restaurant that understood dinner was supposed to take time.
We sat across from each other for three hours and I couldn't tell you afterward what we ate because I was too busy paying attention to him — the way he listened, the way he asked questions that assumed I had interesting things to say and then actually waited for the answers, the way he laughed when something genuinely surprised him, unguarded and real.
"Tell me something nobody knows about you," he said, somewhere around dessert.
"I stress-bake," I said. "Badly. My banana bread is actively dangerous."
"I find that hard to believe."
"Ask Rosa. She's thrown away entire loaves rather than hurt my feelings."
I was not a woman who got distracted by a good-looking man.
I’d spent fifteen years around residents and surgeons and the occasional underwear-model-turned-patient’s-husband, and I had a clinical, professional, entirely unbothered relationship with the human body.
And then Carter Michaels reached across the table for the bread, and his sleeve pulled tight over his forearm, and I lost the thread of my own sentence.
It was absurd. He was all lean hard muscle under that shirt, shoulders that took up too much room, a jaw you could have cut yourself on, and every time he smiled — the real one — something low in me clenched like I was twenty-two and stupid about it.
Get it together, Calloway, I told myself, and reached for my wine, and did not get it together even slightly.
He laughed — that real one, the one that reached his eyes — and leaned back in his chair and looked at me with an expression I was still learning how to read. Warm. Certain. Like he'd made up his mind about something and was comfortable with the decision.
Which was, I decided, as good an opening as I was going to get.
"Can I ask you something?" I turned my wine glass by the stem. "How old are you? Actually?"
"Thirty-one."
"Mm." I nodded, like a woman confirming a diagnosis she'd already suspected. "I'm thirty-seven."
"Okay."
"With a six-year-old."
"I've met him," Carter said, a slow grin tugging at his mouth. "He's the best guy I know."
I smiled in spite of myself and pressed on, because I'd started this and I was going to see it through.
"So an older woman with a six-year-old is really doing it for you, is that the situation here?
" I tilted my head, keeping it light, giving him every chance to laugh it off and let us both off the hook.
"You must really be desperate, hot shot. "
He didn't laugh it off.
He looked at me across the candle for a moment, unhurried, and I watched him decline the exit I'd built him. "I like smart, beautiful women," he said. "I've only met the one so far who’s all of it at once. Her age never came up. I wasn't taking notes on the paperwork."
Something in my chest did a slow, undignified thing.