Chapter 8 TESSA
Tessa
The coffee in the gas station cup went cold somewhere around the New Hampshire line, and I drank it anyway, because the alternative was falling asleep at seventy with the sun coming up in my mirrors.
Rhett’s fine. I keep saying it to myself.
He’s fine. A separated shoulder, eleven stitches over his eyebrow, a helmet that did its job and a dirt bike that did not.
He went off a berm on some trail in the dark, showing off for boys I’ve never met, and the hospital called me before they called our mother, because I’m the number all three of them have saved under EMERGENCY.
I’ve been that number since our father died. Pancreatic, and fast. I was fourteen, our mother was working two jobs, and somebody had to be.
I drove the two hours down the second I hung up. There was nothing to decide. One of my brothers is hurt and scared, so I go, the same as I’ve gone for every fever and breakup and dead battery since I was old enough to hold a license, and I would do it again tonight without changing a thing.
I held his hand in the ER until the swelling came down and his color came back and the resident told him what he couldn’t do for the next six weeks.
I sent our mother home to sleep. I bought Rhett a terrible breakfast sandwich and watched him eat it one-handed and called him an idiot until he laughed, because a Quinn who can laugh is a Quinn who’s going to be okay.
Once he was stitched and slung and settled, and there was nothing left to do but hover, I got back in the car and drove the two hours the other way, to the man who pays me to do exactly this.
Dawn meets me in the kitchen with the overnight chart and a soft, sorry face. He slept through till seven, she says, ate half his breakfast, and has been a bear since. I thank her, and I mean it. She’s kind. Kindness doesn’t work on him.
I find him in the bed, propped against the pillows with the laptop open and a familiar scowl. When I stop in the doorway, he looks up.
For just a second, something in his face lets go. Relief, plain and unhidden. Then he remembers himself, and the shutters come down, and he goes back to the laptop.
“You’re back,” he says, to the laptop.
“I’m back.”
“I wasn’t aware number five came with personal days.”
A complaint instead of a hello, and I’m too tired to chase whatever’s under it.
I set my bag down and start the things I do. Meds, water, the chart, the blind to halfway. I can feel him watching me the whole time, and when I glance over, he doesn’t bother to look away.
“Sit down,” he says.
“I’m fine.”
“You’ve been off since you came through the door.”
“Just tired, I guess.” I try to shake it off.
“You’re pale.” He says it flatly, and I realize he’s been reading me since I walked in the same way I read him.
“Mrs. Vale.” He doesn’t raise his voice. She appears in the doorway like she’d been waiting on the other side of it.
“Get her something to eat. And coffee.”
“No, honestly, you don’t have to do that.” I’m already half-turning to wave Mrs. Vale off. “I’m more than capable of getting my own.”
“I’m sure you are.” He doesn’t look away from me. “Sit down anyway.”
I sit, because I’m too tired to win the argument, and because some traitor part of me, the part I keep on a short leash, wants to be told to.
Mrs. Vale comes back with eggs and toast and a tray of coffee things, the pot and milk and sugar and a little dish of cream. I fix my mug how I like it without thinking, sugar and enough milk to turn it pale, and when I look up he’s watching me do it. Closely.
“My brother put a dirt bike into a ditch last night,” I say, because personal days has been sitting under my skin since I walked in. “The hospital called at two. I drove down, I drove back. That’s where I was.”
He sets the laptop aside.
“Is he all right?”
“He will be. Shoulder and his pride, mostly.”
“You drove four hours on no sleep,” he says. “You should have stayed down there.”
“I’ve driven on less.”
He doesn’t answer that. I eat instead, hungrier than I let on, and when I finally slow down I look at him. “Thank you.”
He nods.
He turns his face to the window and the bright water, and leaves me to the rest of it.
His phone goes before I’ve finished the toast. He glances at it. “Frank,” he says, and answers it.
I only get his half of it. Valence. A client who wants to see his face. A meeting he can’t take from a sickbed in Maine. He pushes up off the pillows like he can will himself back into the version of him that runs things, and the ribs catch him. He winces, and keeps talking.
“I’ll handle it,” he says finally, which is what he says about everything, and hangs up.
He shouldn’t be working. I could tell him so. I don’t, because telling him would only make him do it harder, and because I’m learning that with Ronan the things you push on push back.
But he’s wrung out from the call, slumped into the pillows with the bad shoulder taking weight it shouldn’t. Before I go, I lean across him to work them back into place, and it puts my face right over his.
He turns his head, and his eyes are right there on mine. I can feel the warmth coming off his skin, the quiet rush of his breath against my cheek. Neither of us moves.
“That should help,” I say, to the pillow.
I straighten it, square my shoulders, and walk out at a perfectly normal speed.
* * *
Tonight I should be asleep. Instead I open the laptop and type his name into the search bar.
The internet has opinions about Ronan Sinclair.
Most of them are about money. But if you scroll long enough, past the funding rounds and the magazine covers, you get the rest of it, the part he’d hate me knowing.
A father who made bad bets and lost everything.
A house sold out from under the family. A kid who, somewhere in all that, decided he would never again be the one left holding nothing, and built an empire to make sure of it.
And there are the photos. Years of them.
Galas, openings, black-tie events, him in a tux that ought to be against the law.
There’s almost always a beautiful woman somewhere near him, and never the same one twice, and the more of them I scroll the more I notice the same strange thing in every frame.
Always space between them. Walking one to a waiting car.
Standing beside her without quite touching her.
I’m deep enough that my eyes are burning when I find the interview. A woman who tried to be more to him than a fling, and sold what little she got when it went nowhere. Most of it is the usual bitterness. One line isn’t — she says he never kissed her.
I close the laptop.
I go to bed and I don’t sleep. I lie there with the window cracked and the tide working at the rocks below the lawn, telling myself he’s fine, and then thinking about yesterday and the scare he gave me, and then telling myself he’s fine again.
At half past twelve I give up and go down the hall in my pajamas, bare feet.
There’s light under his door.
It’s open a few inches and I push it wider, and the room is all low gold from the lamp beside the bed with everything past it gone into shadow. There’s a tumbler lying on its side by the leg of the dresser and a dark patch spreading out from it into the rug.
He’s awake. The bed is raised enough to keep him somewhere between sitting and lying down, the braced leg stretched out under the sheet, one forearm across his eyes. His T-shirt is dark at the collar and stuck to the middle of his chest.
“Hey.”
He lowers the arm. His eyes come to my face and then go down my legs and back up again.
And there it is. I have walked into a patient’s room in a tank top and a pair of sleep shorts, looking about as professional as a woman can manage barefoot. Nothing to be done about it now. Going back to change would only tell him I’d noticed.
“I’m fine.”
“I didn’t ask.”
I cross the room and put the back of my hand to his forehead, and then to the side of his neck. He’s hot, and my hand stays there longer than it needs to.
“Why didn’t you wake me?”
“I was hoping it’d settle.”
I run the thermometer across his forehead. A hundred point one, which isn’t enough to frighten me and is enough that I’m not going anywhere.
“Your shirt needs to come off.”
He glances down at himself and back at me.
I get my fingers under the hem before he can decide he’d rather argue about it.
“Let me.”
His hand drops.
I work the damp cotton up over his ribs and stop when I reach the bad shoulder.
“Easy.”
Getting it off him puts me leaning in with both hands behind his neck, his breath coming warm past my cheek.
Then the shirt is off and I’m sitting on the edge of his bed with it balled in my hands, nearer to him than I need to be, looking down at him.
The lamp takes one side of him and leaves the rest to the dark, and I sit there and take in the whole of it — the bare shoulders, the stomach moving as he breathes, the healing line at his ribs, the pink scar down his jaw. There is still more of him than that bed has room for.
I have seen this man without a shirt. I have changed his dressings and checked his bruising and put my hands wherever they needed to go, and none of it has been easy for a while now.
But there was always daylight, and a chart, and somewhere else I was supposed to be.
There’s none of that at this hour, with the house asleep and one low lamp on and nowhere for either of us to look but at each other.
I get up and drop the shirt over the back of the chair.
“Stay there.”
“I had ambitious plans.”
I go and fill a basin with cool water and bring it back with a cloth, and his eyes are shut again when I sit back down on the edge of the bed.
“Cold,” I tell him.
His eyes open just as I lay it against the side of his neck.
He’s looking at the strap of my top where it’s come off my shoulder, and then at my knee against the edge of the mattress, and the heat of it goes straight through me.
I swallow and put the strap back where it belongs, quick, as though that fixes anything.
I don’t look at him. I keep my eyes on the cloth and go on working, and the whole time I know exactly where he’s looking, and he knows that I know.
I turn the cloth and draw it over the back of his neck and across one shoulder, and his jaw comes loose.
I rinse it and wring it out and take it over his chest and down across his ribs, catching the sweat, the water going warm against him almost as soon as it touches down. Neither of us says anything, and I don’t think we need to.
His breathing hasn’t settled. Neither has mine. I set the cloth aside and check the dressing at his ribs.
It’s been taped down like cargo. Too tight, no give in it, dragging at the skin every time he takes a breath since yesterday morning. Dawn did it kindly and did it wrong, and he never said a word, because saying a word would have meant admitting the thing was on him.
“This isn’t right,” I say.
I get the tape off working from the edges, one hand braced beside it so the skin doesn’t come with it.
Underneath, the wound is closing exactly as it should, pink and tidy along most of its run, only the lower edge gone angry where the tape’s been pulling.
I clean around it with saline and lay the fresh gauze down and tape it the way it should have been done, with room in it.
“Better?”
He breathes in, and out.
“Yes.”
Then I put my hand on his thigh above the brace and find what’s actually been going on. The whole muscle is locked solid and has been for hours, the quadriceps hard as wood, the hip riding up with it.
“You’ve been guarding it.”
“I’ve been attached to it.”
“You know what I mean.”
He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t have to.
I work the heel of my hand up the outside of the thigh, well clear of anything healing, along the band down the side and into the hip where the worst of it has gathered.
“Does that hurt?”
“Yes.”
“Here?”
“...Yes.”
“Here?”
“Little lower.”
I go lower.
“There.”
After that neither of us talks at all. I work and he lets me, and the only sounds in the room are the sea and his breathing, and every time I glance up he hasn’t moved his eyes off me.
He doesn’t move them when I’m at his hip, or when my hair comes loose, or when I lean across him to reach the far side.
So I stop glancing up.
Then I glance up anyway.
I keep at it until the muscle lets go, and he lets out a breath.
“Better?”
“...Yeah.”
I slide one hand under his calf. “Lift, just enough.”
He does, and I get the pillow in under the leg and ease it back down until it sits square and the hip stops pulling. Then I fill his tumbler at the sink and bring it back with the cup he didn’t take at ten. He takes them without arguing and drinks looking straight at me over the rim of the glass.
I gather up the old dressing and the wrappers and the basin and set them by the door.
Then I sit down in the chair beside the bed. He doesn’t tell me to go. I pick the medication leaflet off the tray and read both sides of it, every warning, because it gives my eyes somewhere to be.
It doesn’t work. I get to the end of the contraindications and glance over, and he’s still watching me, quiet now, the hard set going out of his face as the medication takes hold.
He keeps his eyes on me, stubborn about it right to the end, fighting it like he fights everything else.
Then somewhere between one breath and the next he loses, and he’s gone, and he never knew it was happening.
I pull the sheet up over him, take the bed down a few degrees, and turn off the lamp. I have the basin against my hip and my hand on the door when I hear it.
“Thanks, Tessa.”
He has never once called me that. It’s been Miss Quinn since the morning I walked into this house and refused to leave it. I stand in his doorway in the dark a moment longer than I need to.
It isn’t hard to see how a boy who watched everything get taken grows into a man who makes sure he never needs anyone again. That part I understand.
It’s the kissing I can’t place. A man who can have anyone, who takes them home and never once kisses them.
I turn it over for a while and get nowhere, because it’s late, and I’m running on a gas station coffee and four hours of road, and because it is absolutely none of my business what Ronan Sinclair does or doesn’t do with his mouth.