Chapter 16 TESSA
Tessa
I wake up before my alarm and lie there staring at the ceiling, because opening my eyes doesn’t make last night less true.
It happened.
The kiss keeps arriving in pieces instead of all at once. His hands on my face. The scar under my fingers. The look he gave me before he closed the last inch, asking and deciding at the same time.
I put both palms over my eyes and groan into them.
I’m his nurse.
That sentence has carried me through every close call in this house. Every dressing change. Every walk with his arm across my shoulders. Every time he looked at me one second too long. I’m his nurse. This morning it sounds like a lie.
I’ve had two serious relationships. Good men, both of them. I was always the one giving.
I never once let them do anything back.
Every time it turned that direction I found a reason. I’m tired. I have a shift. Let me instead.
Nobody ever pushed.
Last night I forgot my own name. I felt that kiss everywhere. Behind my knees. Low in my belly, a pull so hard I forgot to be careful with the shoulder, and God help me, I wasn’t sorry. I would have let him have anything he asked for.
Twenty-five years I’ve been able to take it or leave it. Twenty-five years I’ve been so sure that part of me was just quieter than everyone else’s.
Turns out I was just waiting to be kissed by him.
And there’s the part that won’t fit, the part I keep snagging on. Weeks ago I looked him up. Years of photographs and careful space in every one. A paid interview with an ex, and the single line I couldn’t shake — Ronan Sinclair doesn’t kiss people.
It’s the one thing everyone who’s ever gotten close to him agrees on. And last night he kissed me like every word of it was a lie. Like a man who’d done nothing else his whole life.
I read physical evidence for a living, and it doesn’t match the file. Which leaves two possibilities. Every one of those women is lying. Or I’m the exception.
I throw the covers back before I can think any harder than that.
By the time I’m showered and dressed I’ve talked myself into being sensible. Coffee. Morning meds. Shoulder work at ten. The schedule doesn’t know we kissed. Muscles don’t heal differently because two idiots finally stopped pretending.
Which does not explain why I left my hair down instead of twisting it up like every other morning.
Or the black spandex shorts I keep telling myself are more comfortable.
Or the lip gloss I dug out of the bottom of my bag and put on like it meant nothing.
Sensible women do not put on lip gloss for a shoulder rehab session.
I do it anyway, and I don’t look too closely at myself on the way out the door.
I can do this.
I open my door, and his opens at exactly the same moment.
We both stop.
He’s in a white shirt with the cuffs still hanging open and dress pants that fit the way expensive things fit, hair wet, cane in one hand, and for a second neither of us remembers how hallways work.
Three weeks of T-shirts and sweatpants, and this morning there’s a collar.
Button-front is easier on a healing shoulder than anything overhead, he knows that, it’s in the discharge paperwork.
Nothing in the discharge paperwork explains the pants.
I decide not to mention any of it. He decides not to explain it.
“Morning,” he says. His voice is rough.
“Morning.”
“You sleep?”
No. “Enough.”
The corner of his mouth moves. “Liar.”
“I learned from the best.”
The almost-smile arrives, and it is not enough to save either of us.
He steps back and tips his head toward the kitchen, letting me go first, because of course he does.
I smile and go. Then he’s behind me, and just like that I’m seventeen years old.
Here’s what nobody tells you about the morning after.
I thought it would be awkward. It’s worse.
Because now he’s behind me, and a man who notices everything is going to notice the hair I left down and the spandex shorts I did not need to put on, and know exactly who I put them on for.
Three steps of that is all I can take, and I slow down and fall in beside him.
“I’ve got it,” he says.
“I know.”
I stay beside him anyway.
Except now I know what his mouth feels like, and my body has decided that’s the only fact worth keeping.
The storm left the world scrubbed. Sun everywhere, the ocean loud and blue, branches down across the lawn. Knox is already out there dragging one off the drive. Mrs. Vale is at her sister’s until tomorrow, so the kitchen is ours.
He makes the coffee. He pours mine first and hands it over pale, exactly the ratio I fix it, and I stand there holding the mug and trying to remember a single time I told him how I take my coffee.
I can’t. There isn’t one. He watched.
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” He pours his own, black, and this time he looks right at me, and the corner of his mouth tips up like he can’t help it. Then neither of us seems to know what comes next, and the quiet stretches between us.
“Video call at eleven,” he says, with a wave at the collar. “Valence lawyers. Frank wants them to see me upright.”
“So the shirt’s for the lawyers.”
“The shirt’s for me.” A pause. “The cuffs wouldn’t cooperate.”
He holds out his wrist. And that’s how I end up buttoning Ronan Sinclair’s cuffs the morning after he kissed me, his thick wrist warm under my fingers, both of us watching my hands, neither of us saying a word about it.
Ten o’clock is shoulder work, which means an hour of my hands on his bare skin, warm under my palms, working the joint through its arcs, and we get through it by talking about everything except the thing.
The Valence redline. The tree down across the drive.
Whether chowder is better on the second day.
I keep my eyes on the joint and nowhere near his face, because his face is a problem I don’t have a protocol for.
I count reps I don’t need to count. His range is better than yesterday and I make myself say so in my professional voice.
An hour of my hands on him, and neither of us dies.
I count it as clinical success.
* * *
The courier comes at noon.
I’m alone at the door when the van pulls up.
Ronan is in the study, on camera for Boston, his negotiating voice carrying down the hall, and I sign for a white envelope with my name in typed letters and a Portland return address in the corner.
Certified. Signature required. An envelope that means somebody wants proof I received it.
I don’t open it.
I take it to my room and put it in the bottom of my bag, next to the hospital badge and the folded gait belt, and I zip the bag shut and press down on it with both hands like it might get out.
Then I go back to the kitchen, and I am absolutely fine.
I make lunch I don’t taste. I wipe down a counter that’s already clean.
He comes out of the study at half past twelve, and the call must have gone fine, because he’s got the satisfied look of a man who just won. It takes me a second to work out what else is different.
The sleeves. The cuffs I buttoned at breakfast are undone and shoved to his elbows, and his forearms are just out there now, corded and tan, watch at his wrist. I buttoned these cuffs this morning with steady hands. Turns out the buttons were the easy part.
I’m staring. I’m a medical professional, and I am staring at forearms.
“Lunch?” I ask, to the sandwich.
“Please.” He comes to the island, and I can feel him looking at me, and there’s a smile in his voice when he asks, “Something wrong?”
“No.”
“You’re sure?”
“Take your meds.”
I have them lined up on the island with water, and he takes them one at a time, watching me over the glass.
The forearm does something deeply unfair when he lifts it.
I look at that instead of at him, which is not an improvement, and he knows it, and he takes his time with the water, entirely too pleased with himself.
“You’re quiet,” he says.
“I’m tired.”
He looks at me and I watch him decide, the same as I watched him decide in that bedroom two nights ago, whether to push. He doesn’t. He sets down the glass, and lets it go, and I love him a little for it.
That’s the thought I’m not finishing today.
* * *
He finds me at four with the cane already in his hand.
“Get your shoes.”
I look up from the chart. “My shoes?”
He tips his head toward the windows, toward the water. “The beach. Sand packs hard after a storm.”
“If your leg starts—”
“Then you’ll be right there.”
Two months ago this man wouldn’t accept a wheelchair from paid professionals, and now you’ll be right there is just a fact he plans around.
The path down is slow, and I stay beside him the whole way, trying not to hover and hovering anyway.
“You’re hovering,” he says, without looking over.
“I’m supervising.”
And then his cane hits sand for the first time since the accident.
He stops. He stands there at the bottom of the path with the whole beach in front of him, and he doesn’t say anything, and neither do I.
Ronan Sinclair on his own beach. On his own legs.
I’ve charted every milestone this man has hit for three weeks.
This one isn’t for the chart.
It’s for me.
“Well,” he says finally, to the water.
“Well,” I agree.
The storm threw the beach around. Kelp in ropes, a stray lobster buoy up by the grass line, off somebody’s string from the ledges. He points it out with the cane. “That’ll be Carter’s. Knox will run it back over.”
“How do you know it’s Carter’s?”
“It’s pink and green.” He catches my look. “Everyone knows everyone’s colors. It’s Maine.”
We walk the waterline where the sand is hardest packed.
His cane leaves a trail of small round holes behind us, and I keep myself between him and the slope of the beach without making a thing of it, and he lets me, and that’s new too.
Out past the point the swell is still running big, and somewhere beyond it is the cove, and the seals.
And down at the dock, riding out the last of the swell, a boat with his mother’s name on it.
“How are my seals?” I ask.
“Your seals.”
“You said nobody owns them. I’m claiming them.”
He chuckles, low. “They’ll have ridden out the storm on the lee side. Seals have more sense than people.”
“Than some people. You’re on soft sand with a healing femur.”
“Water’s settling,” he says, nodding at the swell. “You’ll have your lane back by tomorrow morning.”
I stop walking. “My lane.”
He keeps walking. “You’re consistent. The seals could set their watches.”
“You’ve been watching me swim?”
“I’ve been drinking my coffee on the terrace. The view’s incidental.”
My face goes hot in the wind. “Incidental.”
“Completely.” His eyes stay on me, not the water. “I don’t go out there for the coffee.”
Heat curls low in my belly, sudden and unasked. He said it plainly, no charm to hide behind, and my body answers before my mind can.
He stops walking and turns.
The wind is doing what it wants with my hair. He lifts his free hand and tucks a piece of it back, knuckles along my cheek, and everything in me leans. His eyes drop to my mouth. One more inch and we’re back in the kitchen, storm and candles, and God, I want to be.
Then I remember the envelope in the bottom of my bag with my name typed on it.
I step back. His hand stays in the air a moment, then lowers, and he looks at me and doesn’t ask.
“Not because I don’t want to,” I say, because he deserves that much, and because I’m done pretending too. “You know it’s not that.”
“I know what it’s not,” he says. And then, looking at the water and not at me, “I’m not in a hurry, Tessa. I spent seven weeks in a bed learning how to wait. I’m better at it than I look.”
We have five weeks. Neither of us says so, and the tide comes in anyway.
We turn back when the light starts going gold.
The walk up the beach is slower, his leg tiring, and he doesn’t pretend it isn’t, which is its own small miracle, and partway up he finds my hand.
No announcement. His fingers lace through mine like they’ve done it for years, warm and sure, and neither of us says one word about that either.
I hold on. I watch our shadows go long up the sand, his with the cane, mine half a step closer than a nurse stands.
Whatever is in that envelope has a date inside it.
It can have every day after this one.