Chapter 12
It’s been a week, and Will hasn’t mentioned it once.
I’d prepared myself for another conversation. An argument. For him to use it against me in any way possible.
But nothing has changed.
He shows up to work on time and comes to dinner at Frank and Joyce’s on Monday. Even stopped by the house with a pizza for the kids two days ago and never said a word about it.
He’s being completely normal, and it’s driving me crazy.
I can’t even be mad at him. He’s not being mean about it, he’s just not bringing it up. I should be grateful.
Instead, I feel unsettled.
At dinner, he talked to Frank about finding a used car for decent price and helped Joyce make a pie. He played a game with the kids that had Ollie laughing so hard he could barely breathe. Everything has been great. He’s really becoming part of the family again.
But he ignored me the entire evening.
He didn’t look at me. Didn’t talk to me. Only answered when I spoke to him, the way you’d act with someone you don’t know. Polite, but kept at arm’s length. And the entire time, I sat at that table, and I smiled, and I made conversation, all while feeling like my heart was breaking in half.
And that sucks, considering I don’t even want to want him.
He and Victoria have become thick as thieves out of nowhere.
I hear them from my office sometimes, in the lull between patients, his voice and her laugh. I’ve walked past the front desk more than I’d like to admit this week.
It’s not that I’m jealous. What is there to be jealous of? I don’t have a chance either way.
He said so himself.
I’m concerned that he told her is all. That her boss has a big, stupid crush on him. She’s not acting as if she knows. Other than the weird look she gave me when I walked through the lobby for the third time to get to the bathroom, even though there’s a bathroom in my office.
The only thing off, the only sign that he’s even thinking about me, is the smirk.
Every time I catch his eye, he gives me that look. One corner of his mouth barely ticked up. Mostly in his eyes. An acknowledgment, a reminder that he knows, and he could do something about it at any moment, and he’s choosing not to.
He makes me want to pull my hair out. And kiss him until I can’t breathe.
Once again, I have to wonder why it has to be him? The universe is full of people. Rosehill alone has plenty of them, and some of them even like me.
Karen, for instance.
She’s a lovely woman. I had a perfectly good evening with her, and we’ve been out one more time since. She’s kind, and she’s pretty, and I feel nothing when I talk to her.
Or the man who waited our table last week when I took the kids to dinner, since I now know I can like men too. Addie announced loudly that he was cute, and I looked at him and thought, sure, objectively, he is handsome.
I didn’t want him, though. No. That would be too easy. The person I want is a man who laughed in the face of my feelings. Who’s spent every minute I’ve known him hating me for no good reason.
By Thursday, I’m running purely on bad coffee.
My shift at the hospital ended at five, giving me enough time to go home, fall asleep in the shower, and get the kids up and ready for school.
We almost made it in time, if Addie hadn’t lost the shoes she had to wear today. So by the time she found them, she was running late to school, and I’ve been behind ever since.
I have back-to-back appointments, twenty minutes behind for every patient after this morning, charts that need to be finished, and phone calls I have to skip lunch to return.
Victoria brings me a coffee without me having to ask, and I’m reminded that I really need to give her a raise.
When the final patient leaves, I sit down at my desk, pulling out my reading glasses, faced with an endless amount of paperwork I wasn’t able to get done earlier. I’m so tired I hardly know what I’m doing, moving through the motions of the work without being present.
Sometime later, Will appears in my doorway, knocking once before opening without me telling him to come in, but I don’t have the energy to act insulted by that.
He leans against the doorframe, and I look up from my charts. I’m aware of the tight shirt he’s wearing and his hands, dirty from the work in a way that would normally draw my attention, but right now, all I want is to sleep for a year.
“Room’s done,” he says.
“Okay.”
“Baseboards came out good. I think it was the right decision to replace them. The other ones were starting to rot. Come on, I’ll show you.”
I pull my glasses off, rubbing my eyes so I don’t fall asleep at my desk. “I’m sure it’s fine.”
“It looks better than the other rooms, actually,” he says, and I detect something off in his tone, but I don’t examine it. “If you want to move the—”
“Will.” I put my glasses back on, looking back at the chart in front of me that’s started to blur. “I really need to finish this.” There’s a long stretch of silence from where he’s standing.
I’m already reading the next line of notes, and I’ve forgotten he was even there when I hear a puff of breath and, “Right.” Followed by his footsteps, heading down the hall in the opposite direction.
By Friday, I’m feeling refreshed after an actual decent night’s sleep. Enough to respond to a text from Karen, confirming our plans for tomorrow—
When I hear a yell.
I drop my phone, running toward the sound of Will’s voice.
“Shit, fuck, ow!”
He’s in the next room where he’s started working, standing with his right hand cradled against his chest, blood from his opposite hand staining his shirt. “It’s fine,” he says the moment he sees me.
“Let me see.”
“It’s just a scratch. The knife slipped and—”
“Will.” I cross the room, and he takes a step back when I reach for him. “Let me see your hand.”
He narrows his eyes, but he does hand it over, and this isn’t a scratch. It’s a cut across his palm, a few inches long, deep and bleeding steadily. It may heal on its own eventually, but, “I think you need a few stitches.”
“I don’t need stitches,” he challenges. I don’t listen to him, dropping his wrist and heading for the door. “It’s not that bad,” he says, but he’s following me, so he must know he needs help, even if he doesn’t want it.
I push open the door to the first exam room and go to the cabinet, pulling out what I need. After working in the ER and years of practice, I could do this in my sleep. “Keep pressure on it,” I tell him, handing him some gauze to stop the bleeding.
When I pull the stool over and sit in front of him, taking his wrist, it doesn’t look as bad as it did in the dim room with all the blood. The cut is deep, but it’s clean. I turn his hand slightly, reaching for the saline solution when he pulls back. “Ow! That hurts!”
“I haven’t done anything yet. Hold still.”
“Maybe if you were gentle—”
“I am being gentle.” I uncap the saline, and he watches me with narrowed eyes as I clean the cut. I’m sure it doesn’t feel great, but he’s being dramatic when he winces in pain.
“Okay,” I say, reaching for the suture kit. “I think you’ll only need a few stitches. Maybe three.”
He looks at the kit and back at my face, and he doesn’t seem convinced. “What if you mess it up?”
“I’m a doctor.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Will.” I hold his gaze, choosing to stay professional about it.
He may be infuriating, but I don’t want him to get an infection.
“I’ve done this a thousand times. Your hand is going to be fine.
If you’re worried about the pain, I can give you a local anesthetic.
It’s an injection that numbs the area so you won’t feel anything but a little bit of pressure. ”
“I don’t need it,” he says too fast, shaking his head.
“It’s going to hurt.”
“I’ve had worse.”
“Okay,” I say, reaching for the suture kit again, trying not to think about what that means. What does he consider worse? “If you’re sure. This won’t take long.”
He nods, clenching his jaw and, looking at the wall to his left, staring at the art Addie recommended I buy for the room.
I take that as my cue to start.
He’s silent for about two seconds before he sucks in a breath through his teeth. “Okay?” I ask, concentrating on threading the suture through his skin.
“That—” He stops with another pained sound. “That’s— shit!”
“Stay still.”
His free hand gripping the edge of the table, his knuckles turning white. “I thought you said you’d done this before!”
“I have. This is what it feels like.”
“You don’t have to be so smug about it,” he says through clenched teeth.
“I’m not being smug.”
“Sure you’re not,” he mutters, “some doctor you are.”
And despite the fact that I resent the feelings I have for him, a fondness blooms in my chest that I let sit there, smiling down at his hand as I finish the final stitch.
I go through the motions of wrapping his hand, ignoring the feeling of his skin beneath my hands, even though, now that the adrenaline of the previous moment is gone, all that’s left is him and his skin that I’ve been dying to touch. Stay professional, I repeat in my head, hoping it will sink in.
The stitches are neat and will heal well as long as he keeps the wound clean. I tell him that multiple times before I drop his hand and stand up to clean the mess I’ve left on the counter.
Behind me, I hear him stand up from the table, but I keep my back to him, gathering the trash and putting things away.
“Bet you enjoyed that, didn’t you?” he says into the silence, his voice gone deeper than usual.
I stop what I’m doing, staring a hole into the counter. “What?”
“Getting to hold my hand. That’s the sort of thing you think about, right?”
Against all instinct, I turn my head to look at him out of the corner of my eye, where he’s standing in the middle of the room, wearing that look on his face that always kickstarts my heart. “We’re finished, Will. Go home.”
He takes a step toward me instead. “Bet you’ve got little hearts drawn all over something. Dr. Nolan Davis.”
“Stop.”
Another step. Closer and closer, coupled with a mean laugh. “Wow. You’re not even gonna deny it, are you? You got it bad, man.”
“I’m absolutely denying it. That’s absurd,” I say, turning around to face him.
That’s a mistake.
Because he’s right there.
I have nowhere to go, the counter at my back and Will in front of me, his eyes moving over my face. Like he’s considering me, studying me, and I don’t know what he finds there, but suddenly he’s reaching for my glasses, plucking them from my face and setting them to the side.
“W-what are you doing?”
The only warning that he’s going to do anything is the brief moment before, when his eyes drop to my mouth.
And then he’s kissing me.
It’s nothing like the park, I think as his mouth connects to mine with a certainty that makes my brain go offline. It’s warm and wet and Will’s lips, so soft—
Somehow, I get my hands up against his chest and push until he moves back a step, taking his perfect lips with him. “Wait,” I say, breathing harder than I’d like. “I-I thought you said—”
“This means nothing,” he says through his own deep breaths, kissing me again before I have a chance to respond.
All I can do is let him. Right now, with his body pressed against mine and his tongue dipping into my mouth, pressing against my own, I don’t care what it means, only that it’s happening.
My hands don’t leave his chest, tangling with the fabric of his shirt, pulling him closer. He makes a low sound against my mouth as his uninjured hand lands on my hip, fingers digging in, and it’s so different from anything I’ve ever felt.
He’s in control, manhandling me, kissing back with a fight for dominance I have no intention of winning. With the few women I’ve kissed, it was always my job to lead, to hold them, to push them against the wall.
This is different.
I make a sound I immediately wish I hadn’t, but I’ve never been kissed like this, and his big hand is squeezing my ass and tugging my body into him until we’re touching everywhere, every nerve in my body is screaming and—
Oh no.
No, no, no.
It happens so fast, the pressure of him against me suddenly becoming too much when he lines his leg up a certain way that my cock rubs against him just right—
I don’t mean to come.
But I don’t realize I’m so close to the edge until I’m hurdling over it.
My whole body shudders as I let out a high-pitched sound I’ve never made before in my life. I’ve never been particularly vocal in bed. But surrounded by his scent and his taste and his body against mine, I don’t have control over anything.
It takes me a second to recover before I realize that Will has gone still.
“Did you—” he starts, pulling away from me, leaving behind a cold I’ve never felt before.
I can’t move. I can’t meet his eyes. I’m frozen in place with my face burning so hot I’m worried I might spontaneously combust. “Did you just come?”
I don’t say anything, but the proof is right there, drying in my underwear.
His laugh comes out startled and disbelieving at first, but then he keeps going, head dropping back, his injured hand catching him against the cart with my laptop, making him wince. “Oh my God,” he says, laughing through the pain. “Oh my God, you—”
“Please, don’t.”
“You actually—” He can barely talk, he’s laughing so hard, and I’ve never been more embarrassed in my life. I’ve never felt so shitty and so unwanted, and I have to get out of here. “From a kiss!”
I turn and walk out of the exam room without responding to him, his mockery following me until I make it to my office and shut the door behind me, locking it with trembling hands.
I clean up on autopilot, changing into the spare set of scrubs I keep in case of accidents, and when I’m done, I sit down in my desk chair, burying my face in my hands.
I don’t know how long I sit there, but by the time I get up and open the door, the lights are all off, other than the single empty exam room, and when I walk through the rest of the practice, searching for the man who continues to shatter my heart—
He’s gone.