Chapter 10 TESSA
Tessa
The water off Ronan Sinclair’s private stretch of Maine is cold enough to slap the breath out of you, which is exactly why I do it.
Six o’clock, before the house wakes, I go down the weathered stairs and walk into the Atlantic up to my collarbones and let it shock everything else out of my head.
No charts. No phone. No brothers. No Portland.
Just the cold and the pull of the tide and the particular quiet of being the only person awake on a whole headland.
I swim until my arms burn and my head’s finally quiet, and then I come out.
I’m wringing the sea out of my hair on the bottom step when I think—not for the first time—that I could get used to mornings like this.
Cold water and no one needing a thing from me.
Which is dangerous, when I’ll be gone the second he’s back on his feet.
I towel off, pull my sweater on over the wet, and take the back path up to my own door, where I can shower the salt off and be a nurse again before anyone in this house is awake to need one.
Except his day has already started without me.
His room is empty. The covers thrown back, the wheelchair gone from where I left it against the wall.
“Ronan?”
Nothing. My pulse picks up before my brain has caught up to why.
I look around and don’t find him. I tell myself a dozen reasonable things—he’s strong, he’s stubborn, he’s mobile now—and I don’t believe any of them.
He’s seven weeks out from a shattered femur and a torn rotator cuff.
A man like that, deciding to do something on his own at six in the morning, is exactly how people end up back in surgery.
I’ve worked the floor. I know how it goes.
“Ronan.”
I’m halfway down the hall toward the study when I hear it.
The clink of a mug against granite. From the kitchen.
I follow it, and I stop in the doorway, and the fear drains out of me all at once, and something else moves in to take its place.
Ronan is in the kitchen. In the chair, and he’s not waiting for anyone. He’s running his own morning. There’s a press pot on the counter and a mug already drained beside the laptop, which means he got himself in here, found the coffee, and made it, all before I’d toweled the salt off my arms.
I stay in the doorway and watch him, because he hasn’t seen me yet, and because I’ve never once gotten to watch him do anything but suffer.
He wants something from the far counter.
He backs the chair a clean foot, pivots it with one hand on the wheel, rolls himself across the kitchen, and hooks the toe of his good foot against the base cabinet to hold his position while he stretches up for the bowl on the shelf.
It should be awkward. It isn’t. It’s a man solving a problem.
Watching him do it, I understand something I’ve been too busy keeping him alive to notice.
He isn’t waiting to be rescued. He never was. While I’ve been counting pills and therapy sessions, he’s been quietly solving the problem of becoming himself again.
It’s the most attractive thing I’ve seen in longer than I want to admit.
And that’s the trouble, because once I’ve thought it I can’t unthink it, and now I’m seeing the rest of him too—the flex of his forearm on the wheel, the pull of his bicep and the shift of his shoulders under thin cotton every time he drives the chair forward, the plain fact of how much man there is in it.
Three weeks I’ve handled this body like a list of injuries to protect.
Apparently I’ve been protecting myself right along with it.
“You’re staring,” he says, without turning around.
Damn him.
“You’re not supposed to be out here on your own.” It comes out sharper than I mean it, because for ninety seconds in that hallway I’d pictured the worst. “Something could have happened. You could have gone over, you could have—”
“I didn’t.” One corner of his mouth tilts up, not soft, nothing like soft, just a man enormously pleased with himself and not bothering to hide it. The first time I’ve seen him look anything but furious or in pain.
He doesn’t look even slightly sorry. There’s coffee made and a man who made it and not one thing for me to fix, and I’m standing here in the wreckage of a panic he has no idea I had.
Then he nudges a mug across the island toward me. “Drink that before it goes cold.”
I take it and drink before I’ve thought about it, and it’s right. Pale with milk, the exact amount of sugar. It registers a second after the taste does, because there’s only one way he knows how I take my coffee. He watched me do it once, and he remembered.
“What?” he asks.
“Nothing. Thank you.” It comes out quieter than I mean it. “It’s perfect.”
It isn’t a small thing.
Three weeks I have been the one who remembers.
The medication times and the meal times and the exact angle his shoulder wants the pillow at three in the morning.
The one who carries the water glass and the ice pack and the chart.
Before that it was my brothers, my mother, a hospital full of people who needed me steady.
I am very good at being the one who remembers.
Nobody remembers how I take my coffee. Nobody’s ever needed to.
Certainly not the patient.
And he poured it before I walked in. Which means he knew I was coming up from the water. The whole back wall of this kitchen is glass.
I’m standing here in a sweater pulled over a wet swimsuit, salt drying on my legs, wondering how much of that swim was visible from this side of the glass.
He doesn’t look up.
I look out at the water, trying to remember I’m at work, when his phone goes off on the granite. The screen lights up where we can both see it.
Brielle.
He glances at it, sees the name, and goes back to his coffee.
It goes again a minute later. Same name.
He doesn’t even look this time.
“You can take that,” I say, drier than I mean to. “That’s no way to treat your girlfriend.”
He looks up from the laptop. “Not my girlfriend.”
He keeps his eyes on mine.
“And you? No one waiting on you back in Portland?”
It’s a simple question, and it hits harder than it should. He doesn’t know there’s a Portland I won’t talk about. He’s only making conversation. But the word catches on something on its way past, and I keep my face still.
“No one waiting,” I say. It’s true. The rest of it I keep.
I drink my coffee and look at the water so I don’t have to look at him.
The phone buzzes a third time. He turns it face down without checking it, and that, more than anything, is the thing I keep coming back to for the rest of the morning. Not that women text Ronan Sinclair. Of course they do. Look at him.
It’s that he could not possibly care less.
And I catch myself wondering whether she’d be here, if I weren’t. Whether this is a house a man like him fills with women.
It’s none of my business. I know that.
I stand in his kitchen with my coffee going cold in my hand and I wonder anyway.
* * *
By four o’clock I’ve talked myself back into being a nurse, and I go to get him for walking practice like it’s any other line on the chart.
It is not any other line on the chart.
The belt goes around his waist the same as yesterday.
My hands work the buckle the same as yesterday.
Then I step in on his left and slide under his arm, and his forearm comes down across my shoulders, and the whole warm weight of him settles against my side.
Yesterday this was work. Yesterday I was a brace with a pulse.
Today I’m a woman standing inside a man’s arm, hip to hip with him, my fist in the belt at the small of his back, and I can feel his breathing where my shoulder presses into his ribs.
“Good leg first,” I say, and my voice does what I need it to.
He pushes up, and he’s standing, and he doesn’t wait for me to tell him to step. We take the hall this time. Six steps to the console table, turn, six steps back—that’s the plan I gave him.
“Weight through the right,” I remind him. “Let it work.”
“It’s working.”
It is. I can feel it working, is the problem.
Every step rolls through him and into me, the flex of his side against mine, the heat of him through one thin layer of cotton.
I’ve had my hands on this body for three weeks—dressings, vitals, three-in-the-morning pillow negotiations—and none of it prepared me for how different the same weight feels one day after I stood in a doorway and let myself look.
We make the console table. He wants more. I feel the decision go through him before he says a word.
“Turn,” I say. “You did your winning yesterday.”
He huffs, but he turns—and the right leg drags the pivot, one short stumble, and I do what I’m trained to do. I plant, swing in front of him, get my free hand on his chest.
He catches himself in half a second. He was never going down. We both know he was never going down.
My hand stays on his chest anyway.
His heart is going under my palm, and I don’t bother telling myself it’s the leg.
His arm is heavy across my shoulders. His face is turned down toward mine.
Neither of us is moving. I can smell the coffee on his breath.
I watch the scar he thinks I haven’t memorized pull tight across his jaw, and for two seconds, maybe three, I forget I have a job in this house.
“Okay?” I ask.
“Fine.” Rougher than usual.
“Okay.” I make myself take my hand back.
We finish the lap. He doesn’t push for extra steps and I don’t ask for any, and the quiet between us is louder than the whole morning was. At the bed I unhook the belt, and this time I keep my eyes on the buckle, because I’ve learned my lesson about looking up.
Here’s the thing I can’t chart my way around. Three in the morning, half-asleep, helping him settle against the pillow, a body could be forgiven for noticing anything. It’s four in the afternoon. I’ve had two coffees. I am wide awake, on the clock, in my sensible shoes.
I wanted him anyway.
Tomorrow the water’s going to have to be colder.