Chapter 15
“You’re going to freeze your hands off if you keep insisting on going without gloves.”
Nerissa’s voice is muffled by the damp wind rising from the River Dee, laden with the scent of wet earth and ancient stone.
She walks beside her with her hands buried in the pockets of her black coat, her shoulders relaxed and carrying that elegance that always makes her seem dangerously self-possessed.
Chester stretches out beneath them like a postcard frozen in another century, and Seraphina Chapman smiles.
She smiles because she is utterly happy, even if she has to tuck her chin into the collar of her coat.
“Don’t exaggerate. It’s not that cold,” she replies.
“Says the woman who’s been rubbing her hands together for ten minutes as if trying to start a fire,” Nerissa retorts before flashing an incredible smile.
Seraphina is about to fire off one of those sharp retorts she usually uses to protect herself at board meetings, but then she looks around.
No one knows them in this city. No one expects a studied smile, impeccable posture, or an impeccable surname from her.
That absence of scrutiny gives her a strange, liberating sense of vertigo.
She stops in the middle of the Roman wall.
Nerissa turns her head slowly and watches her in profile, bathed in the golden light of a streetlamp.
The wind plays with a few dark strands of her hair and makes the tip of her nose turn slightly red.
She is beautiful in a painfully ordinary way: she is neither the feared surgeon nor the woman who pushes her against hotel walls with savage urgency.
She is simply Nerissa, tired after a hellish day, walking beside her.
Seraphina pulls her hand out of her pocket and intertwines her fingers with hers, feeling Nerissa’s slight start before her hand responds to the touch.
“No one knows us here,” Seraphina whispers, squeezing her fingers lightly. “Walk with me. Let me feel that this can be real. Without fear getting in the way.”
Nerissa’s expression changes completely. It isn’t an immediate smile, but something deeper and more vulnerable, as if that simple gesture had just opened a crack in all the walls she’s built between them over the last few weeks.
“You don’t know how dangerous you are when you do this,” Nerissa replies.
“Holding your hand?” Seraphina asks with feigned innocence.
“Acting like this could be normal. Like we could have this every day.”
Seraphina swallows.
“It’s going to be like this, I promise. As soon as I get everything sorted out,” she promises.
Together, they continue walking slowly along the wall.
Below, traffic moves slowly amid wet reflections and reddish lights. A group of tourists passes by laughing, too busy taking pictures to pay them any attention. For the first time since it all began, Seraphina doesn’t feel the need to let go, to run away.
“The conference was torture,” she remarks shortly after, trying to lighten the intensity surrounding them. “Four hours listening to men talk about ‘resource optimization’ as if patients’ lives didn’t matter.”
Nerissa bursts out laughing and shakes her head.
“I can just imagine.”
“And another guy spent twenty minutes talking about leadership while mispronouncing the name of his own CFO,” Seraphina snorts. “This industry is going to hell.”
Nerissa turns her face toward her, clearly amused.
“That’s why you’re the CFO of our clinics.”
Seraphina laughs with a genuine, light, liberating laugh. Nerissa’s expression softens as she hears it, and her fingers tighten around Seraphina’s.
“I’ve missed you,” Nerissa admits. “And I’ve also missed seeing you laugh without looking over your shoulder or beyond the next thing waiting for you.”
Those words pierce her stomach, and Seraphina looks down at their clasped hands.
“I’ve been longing for something like this.”
Together, they walk down to The Rows, where the elevated arcades and illuminated doorways give Chester an almost theatrical air.
Then they end up at a bistro tucked away in a stone basement beneath one of the old buildings.
There are candles on the tables, background music, and a warm scent of spices from the kitchen that envelops Seraphina in something dangerously close to peace.
The waitress leads them to a secluded table next to a brick wall. Nerissa takes off her coat, and Seraphina can’t help letting her gaze wander over the line of her shoulders and the subtle rise and fall of her chest as she breathes.
While they wait for their food, they act as if it were a first date, like a normal couple. Seraphina smiles as they talk about music, and Nerissa confesses that she listens to Arctic Monkeys before going into the operating room.
“That explains a lot…” Seraphina murmurs, sliding her foot under the table until it brushes against Nerissa’s ankle.
“Like what?”
“Like the way you walk down the hallways at the clinic. Sometimes I get the feeling you’d like to pin me against a hallway wall.”
Nerissa lets out a low, dark laugh.
“Maybe…” she replies, taking a sip of her wine. “And I suppose you listen to Ludovico Einaudi when you sign balance sheets.”
“Exactly.”
“My God. I don’t understand why you haven’t confessed this to me before,” Nerissa says. “A professional at work, and a hot woman in bed.”
Seraphina squeezes her thighs together as Nerissa raises her glass as if making a toast before winking at her.
The two women share the risotto and the entrec?te.
“You’re going to have to make it up to me for getting me all worked up like this…”
Seraphina smiles.
“I’ll make it up to you.”
Nerissa exhales slowly, her eyes darkening.
“Damn it, Seph…”
Then the phone vibrates inside Seraphina’s purse, and the sound completely shatters the bubble. It’s a message from Isobel about the barbecue they’re having this weekend, in a parallel life. Her real life.
Seraphina turns off the screen and sets the phone face down. When she looks up, Nerissa is watching her calmly.
“Problems?” she asks.
“Just my neighbor reminding me of something.”
Nerissa nods, and the warmth she was feeling cracks slightly, letting sadness seep in once more. And insecurity.
“Sometimes I still forget that world exists while I’m with you,” Seraphina admits.
“I never do,” Nerissa replies honestly. “But I choose to ignore it. Even though it’s getting harder and harder for me.”
Seraphina feels a lump rise in her throat. Nerissa leans forward and strokes the back of her hand with her thumb.
“Eat your dessert,” she whispers.
“I’m not hungry.”
“Said the dessert thief…”
Seraphina laughs, but the sound comes out trembling on her lips. Nerissa wipes a tiny smudge of chocolate from the corner of her mouth with her thumb, and the gesture is so intimate and domestic that Seraphina holds her breath.
“What are you thinking about?” Nerissa asks.
Her voice drops an octave, drifting over the distant clinking of cutlery.
Seraphina takes a few seconds to answer. She swirls the red wine in her glass and watches the tears slowly slide down the crystal before looking up.
“That this hurts so much more than being in any hotel,” she confesses, holding her gaze steady against those eyes devouring her from across the table.
“Because now that we’re not in a hurry, I know exactly what I’m missing the rest of the time.
Your hands resting on my waist, your mouth kissing me at any time of day.
.. the way you’d love me if time stopped being our enemy. ”
Nerissa frowns, letting a small crease break the firmness of her brow. Then she sets her glass down on the tablecloth.
“Tell me why it hurts. I want to know,” Nerissa says, though just looking into her eyes is enough to know.
“Because it’s… addictive,” Seraphina whispers, leaning forward just enough for the candlelight to illuminate her pupils. “Because right now, I’m imagining what everything would be like without the clock ticking on the nightstand.”
Nerissa rests her chin on the back of her hand without breaking eye contact.
“I envy you,” the surgeon murmurs.
Seraphina flashes a wistful smile, seeking refuge in her usual irony.
“Manchester’s star surgeon is jealous of a boring director?”
“Well, yes,” Nerissa replies. “Because it seems that, for a moment, you feel free.” Her fingers begin tracing invisible lines on the table, coming dangerously close to hers.
“You have a different glow when you stop watching the restaurant door. Look at us... having dinner on an ordinary night, arguing over the last slice of cake on the menu.”
Seraphina holds her breath. She reaches across the table, bridging the distance, and catches Nerissa’s fingers. The candle’s flame flickers between their faces.
“We’re real,” Seraphina assures her, feeling her throat tighten. “This is the only thing left that feels real to me. And when you touch me, even like this, with your fingertips in a public place, I feel my whole body—and my heart—open up to you.”
Nerissa closes her fingers around Seraphina’s with an almost desperate strength, a firm grip that betrays the hunger and tenderness battling inside her chest.
“When we get back to the hotel room…” Nerissa says, “I’m going to undress you as if we had our whole lives ahead of us.
I want you to give yourself to me, knowing that tomorrow you’ll have to go back to your life, but that tonight…
tonight you’re completely mine. And that soon, our chance will come. ”
For a moment suspended in time, Seraphina feels that her marriage, her children, and her social status no longer matter.
She longs to set her perfect life ablaze for this woman who looks at her as if she were the beginning and the end of the world; a woman whose fingers promise her heaven and whose eyes hold a love so immense that she can no longer ignore it.