Chapter 7 #2
The twinge in his chest tightened. Too? But Isabel didn’t need his questions.
She needed answers. For their interview.
He cleared a cranberry from his throat. “No. I mean, not for long. The other kids learned fast not to try anything with me. I got my growth spurt early. I wasn’t shy with my fists.
Bullies learned even faster not to go after my younger brother—Adrian—and definitely not Erin. ”
Bullies like Chase—and a surge of adrenaline contracted his muscles, his hands curling into balls.
Isabel’s arms instantly, and maybe instinctively, wrapped around her ribs in response. Her body hunched into itself, making her small, her gaze darting away, low and shadowed. Her lips thinned.
Shit.
He unfisted his hands with conscious effort and splayed them on his thighs. “Sorry.”
One shoulder twitched.
He picked up his sandwich again and bit off more than even he could chew. He wiped pickle juice from his chin, then counted to sixty before he ventured back into the quiet.
“So, your list. You’re right. Structure’s helpful.” Meaning, he couldn’t be trusted on his own. He tried for normalcy. “Could you read some of the questions while we finish lunch?”
Her other shoulder moved.
“Thanks.” Now he went for a second laugh. “Reading’s the hard part for me. But I’m pretty good at oral stuff, so that’s probably a bonus for us—”
This time, her twitch was a full-body lurch. Isabel almost toppled off the couch. Heat flooded her cheekbones as her eyes widened in shock or disgust.
“Sorry! Again. Fuck, I didn’t mean—”
“I know.”
“We—our. . . it’s only on paper. Obviously, we don’t need to have sex.”
“Uh.” Her tongue was hot in her mouth. Beneath the cashmere folds of her sweater, her skin prickled, even while her body froze with anxiety and shame. “N-no.”
Obviously, we don’t need to have sex.
We don’t need—but then a shaft of sunlight lanced through the windows, and sudden vertigo likewise plunged fast through her temples and her stomach, between her thighs:
Migraine aura.
“Ah! No, I. . .I—” She staggered up from the couch to fumble for the Ceretobicin capsules in her overnight bag. Her palms were sweating, barely capable of unscrewing the cap, of tipping a pill down her throat with water from the bathroom faucet.
No, no, no—
She gripped the sink. She counted the humming pulses of a fluorescent light above the mirror.
She counted the uneven flutters of her heart.
She stared at her reflection, eyes stinging.
But she didn’t blink as she waited for the glass to sizzle and warp, for the crescent blurs at the edges of her vision to solidify—signaling that she’d delayed too long before forcing down BioPulse’s preventative pill; that now the pain would come, would lodge itself like a spike at the base of her skull at any moment, any breath.
Another gasping inhale, counting.
Waiting. . .
And another.
Another. . . five minutes, then ten. . .
But despite the vertigo and the heat under her skin, the agony she anticipated remained at bay.
Breathe. Again, again. . . until experimentally, after her 300th breath, she eased her grip on the porcelain.
Her palms were striped white and red. Even as she watched, however, her skin equalized its color.
Under her ribs, the constriction of her lungs eased, too.
Her heartbeat steadied.
Then her reactive nervous system.
Finally, her fear.
Which was good, of course. Averting a migraine was always good. . . though had she averted one?
Ceretobicin mitigated the worst of her allodynia. It didn’t erase the effects entirely. She should be feeling some residual pain. A regular headache, if nothing else.
She wasn’t.
Her prodrome had been real. The sensitivity to light, sound, touch, and temperature, the accelerated pulse? Yes, real. But no migraine. So what could explain her heat and dizziness in the living room? Isabel closed her aching eyes, numbering back the minutes for clarity, for data, for a warning.
Obviously, we don’t need to have sex.
Her body apparently had little faith in such a perfect arrangement—one that would secure her visa and Wes’s boat, while theoretically making few demands on either her or him.
We don’t need to have sex.
He hadn’t touched her. Wouldn’t touch her. He’d be on the far side of the world in a month or five weeks.
I’m safe.
Safe, and she wasn’t in pain. Except. . .
her panic had been as real as the onset symptoms of her migraines.
She’d run to medicate herself here in the bathroom and had wasted a precious Ceretobicin capsule.
Turning the pill vial over in her hand, Isabel ran a thumb across the ridges of its cap, across her name on the prescription label, across its instructions to take a dose at the earliest signs of vision loss or vertigo.
These pills made her life bearable.
She couldn’t jeopardize her access to them.
She couldn’t run from Wes again. There wasn’t time.
“Cold fish,” they’d called her.
Putting aside the bottle, she splashed her cheeks, mopped up the drips in the sink, and walked back into the living room.
Her mind was clear and calm, her objective certain.
Be a cold fish. No running. Not even when Wes—humming a jaunty Beatles tune, after having loaded their plates into the dishwasher and preserved the uneaten half of Isabel’s sandwich in plastic wrap—popped a loose slice of pickle into his mouth and swiped the juice from his lip.
She stopped right outside the kitchen. She studied the refrigerator door. “I—I think we should consider a few more of our questions now.”
“Sure.” He grinned. Was their awkwardness forgotten? Just like that. Was it really so easy with him? “Can I add to the list, too?”
“Yes, of course. . .”
“Good.” He dried his hands, then moved past her to kick on his shoes at the door; she followed him to the deck and into a blaze of late-afternoon sunshine. “I’ve got a hypothetical one: how’d we meet?”
She tensed in the light. But her eyes adjusted. Still, no pain. “That’s not quite hypothetical. Last night, we—”
A crystal dangling from the gate dinged Wes on his ear when he shook his head. “No, I mean, what’s our story? What’s the meet-cute? The kind of thing we can use for our interview.”
The fantasy, he meant.
Not a lie. Just camouflaged truth.
“I understand.” She joined him on the sidewalk. She swallowed down a little lick of bile, but said, “When I met Chase at the hospital in San Francisco—”
He stopped mid-stride. “That wasn’t my question.”
“No.” She crossed Tide Avenue’s faded yellow lines and stepped off the pavement. Moving down through pebbles, sand, and succulents, she wound into a maze of cratered rocks that formed inlets near the surf. “But I don’t know any other way for it to be.”
Her first encounter with Chase could have been a fantasy. For anyone but her, it might have been.
Handsome doctor, white smile—rescuing her from a handsy photographer.
“Cold fish.”
Waves roared in over the pools, spraying mist across her cheeks.
Droplets clung to her eyelashes. She breathed through the chill.
“I met him at UCSF Medical Center. I was being photographed in a promotional shoot for a drug company after one of my clinical trial appointments. Stock footage for the corporation that manufactures Ceretobicin. Chase had endorsed the medication. He’s at the organization’s headquarters now. ”
“In Las Vegas.” Wes advanced onto the rocks with her.
She crouched beside the nearest pool and dipped her fingers into the water.
Crabs with vibrating antennae scuttled for cover when Chase’s ring flashed a brilliant warning.
Globular sea anemones waved their tentacles to catch particles of plankton.
Ignoring her intrusion, a sculpin edged along the submerged rock on its pectoral and pelvic fins.
“He noticed me there. He was interested in how well I’d responded to the drug.
He was interested in my photographs as well.
He wasn’t running the study or the shoot, but he knew about the trial and the promotion. . . And the rest is what it is.”
“But you’re camera-shy.”
It wasn’t a question, just an observation.
“Yes.” She examined a starfish. “The photographer kept touching me. Positioning me and—more. But there was free lunch available after the shoot. And Chase,” the charming doctor with the perfect smile, “intervened, when he saw what was happening. He said I was still a patient at the hospital, even if I was also modeling. That I needed rest after my appointment, not stress. Because I had to have a neutral neural baseline for the Ceretobicin study. He told the photographer that I was done. Then he asked me to have dinner with him. I hadn’t received my support fund from the Canadian government yet and I was grateful. So I. . .”
Wes didn’t make her say it. He didn’t make her explain. Not the photographer, and not Chase. Not her hunger.
Instead, “Free lunch,” he repeated. Hunched beside her, his voice was low, his gaze dark beneath sun-lightened eyelashes, staring hard into the tide pool.
Not in wonder at its oceanic microcosm. No, because when he continued, his mouth curled with anger.
“Slices of deli meat and dry cheese, with that sleazebag and his camera watching? I know the type of meal. But it probably cost more than what they paid you. They definitely didn’t pay enough! ”
At least she’d been paid, even if the money had come in an envelope slipped to her under the table, with a hand grazing her thigh. She repressed a shudder to assure him, “It doesn’t matter now.”
He didn’t agree.
After a frowning moment, however, when a second surge of spray crested into the pool to liberate its fish, Wes braced his palms on his knees and pushed to his feet.
“What if I give our story a try? I’m damn sure I can come up with something better than hospitals, old salami, and creeps with cameras.
How about a whirlwind—or whirlpool?—romance? If you’ll help me with the details.”
“What details?”