Chapter 7 Brian
Brian
Living with Ava Rothwell was slowly killing me.
Not in any way that mattered. Not in any way I could complain about. Just the slow torture of proximity. Of having everything I wanted close enough to touch and knowing I couldn't reach for it.
Her coffee cup sat next to mine in the cabinet.
Second shelf, left side, handles facing out, the way she liked them in the morning when she was still half-asleep.
I'd rearranged them the first week without thinking.
Now I couldn't look at those two cups sitting side by side without my throat going tight.
Her shampoo lived in the shower. Something floral. Lavender, maybe, or chamomile. I didn't know flowers well. I just knew that every time I caught the scent, my brain short-circuited to Ava, and I had to stand under cold water for an extra minute. Recover.
Her humming drifted from the kitchen while she attempted to cook. She was a disaster in there—brilliant enough to run trauma codes and save lives, but somehow defeated by a box of pasta and a jar of sauce. Last Tuesday, she'd burned soup. Soup. I still didn't understand how that was possible.
But she tried. Every few days, she tried again, humming while Watson supervised from his spot on the counter, yellow eyes tracking her movements with what I could only describe as concern.
Watson's toys were scattered across the apartment like fuzzy landmines. I'd stepped on a catnip mouse at 3 AM last week and nearly had a heart attack. Watson had watched from the armchair, looking smug.
Coffee cups. Shampoo. Terrible food. A cat who judged my every move.
I was supposed to be her friend. Her roommate. Her protector until the Lang threat passed.
I was failing at keeping those boundaries.
It started small. Making sure there was coffee ready when she stumbled home from night shift. I knew the exact moment exhaustion hit her—somewhere between the subway and our door—and she needed caffeine to stay vertical long enough to shower.
Then the fridge. I'd noticed she kept forgetting to eat, so I started stocking her favorite snacks. Greek yogurt with honey. Those expensive crackers she pretended she didn't love. The specific brand of orange juice she'd mentioned once, three years ago.
I'd remembered that. Filed it away. Which apparently meant I was pathetic.
I learned her rhythms without meaning to.
Which shifts ran long, which nights she'd need dinner waiting, which mornings she'd be too tired to do anything but collapse into bed.
I adjusted my own schedule to match hers, the way you learn to move around a fire—reading the situation, anticipating what it needs, staying just close enough to be useful without getting burned.
She noticed. I saw her notice. The flicker of something in her eyes when she came home to find dinner waiting. The way her lips parted like she wanted to say something, and then didn't.
Neither of us said anything.
Because acknowledging it would mean admitting what it was: not friendship. Not roommates being considerate.
Something that started with want and ended somewhere I couldn't afford to go.
It happened on a Tuesday.
I came home early from shift, heading to the kitchen for water, when the bathroom door opened.
Ava stepped out wearing only a towel.
We both froze.
Her hair was wet, dripping onto her shoulders, darker than usual against her pale skin. The towel was small. Wrapped around her from chest to mid-thigh, leaving more leg visible than I was prepared for. Much more.
My brain just stopped.
"I didn't—" she started, cheeks flooding red.
"Sorry, I should've—" The rest of the sentence went somewhere. Not out of my mouth.
She clutched the towel tighter, which only drew my attention to where her fingers pressed into the terry cloth, the curve of her collarbone, the freckle I'd never noticed on her left shoulder.
Then she darted to her room. The door clicked shut.
I stood in the hallway for a full minute. Maybe two. My heart was pounding like I'd just climbed ten flights with a hose pack. I stared at the closed door, then at the bathroom, humid with steam, smelling like her shampoo.
I went to the kitchen. Got my water. Drank it in three gulps.
It didn't help.
We didn't talk about it. Not that night, not the next day, not ever.
But now there was a before and an after, and we were both pretending not to notice.
The apartment felt different. The air was heavier, the way a building feels right before something catches.
That held-breath moment when you know it was coming but not where.
Every accidental brush of hands in the kitchen hit me somewhere below the ribs. Every time she squeezed past me in the hallway, I lost a few seconds. Just gone. Like my brain couldn't hold anything but her.
Roommates, I told myself. Friends.
The words didn't fit anymore. Maybe they never had.
The evening ritual became my favorite part of the day.
Ava curled up on one end of the couch, my paramedic textbook open in her lap, bare feet tucked beneath her. She wore her reading glasses for studying. Wire-rimmed, slightly crooked. She kept falling asleep in them.
Watson supervised from the armchair, yellow eyes tracking between us like a disapproving professor who suspected his students of not taking the material seriously.
"Drug interaction," Ava said without looking up. "Beta blockers and calcium channel blockers."
I was at the stove, stirring marinara, trying to focus on anything except how good she looked in my old Mets t-shirt. She'd stolen it from the laundry pile last week and hadn't given it back.
I wasn't going to ask for it back.
"Additive effect," I said. "Risk of severe bradycardia and hypotension. Monitor closely, consider alternative agents."
"Good." She flipped the page, the soft whisper of paper filling the quiet. "Patient presenting with signs of stroke. Walk me through your assessment."
"FAST assessment first. Face drooping, arm weakness, speech difficulty, time to call 911." I turned down the heat and grabbed plates from the cabinet. Hers on the left, mine on the right.
"Then Cincinnati Stroke Scale: facial droop, arm drift, abnormal speech. If positive, establish IV access, monitor airway, and transport immediately. Note time of symptom onset for potential thrombolytic therapy."
"What's the window for tPA?"
"Four and a half hours from symptom onset. But earlier is better—every minute of delay means more brain cells lost."
"Contraindications?"
"Recent surgery, active bleeding, history of intracranial hemorrhage, uncontrolled hypertension..." I rattled off the list while plating the pasta, the information flowing more easily now than it had a month ago. "Coagulopathy, current anticoagulant use with elevated INR."
Ava looked up. The lamp caught her glasses, her eyes, and the smile starting at the corner of her mouth.
"Not bad, Torres." She set the textbook aside. "You might actually pass this thing."
"Your confidence in me is overwhelming."
"I'm very confident. That's why I'm hard on you."
I ducked my head so she wouldn't see my expression. She probably saw anyway. I carried the plates to the couch, handed her one, and settled on the opposite end with Watson eyeing our food from his perch.
Ava never treated my work like background noise. She leaned in. Asked the hard questions, the specific ones, the ones that told me she was actually listening. She wanted to understand the weight of it. The responsibility. The lives that would depend on whether I got this right.
She was building a future paramedic. One who could run a medical scene, not just assist on one. And she took that responsibility seriously. She expected excellence because she knew I was capable of it.
Four years of knowing her. Four years of falling.
How much longer could I keep pretending this was enough?
Not much longer. That was the honest answer.
I kept it to myself.
On Friday night, when we were both off shift, we had no food.
The realization hit around 7 PM, both of us standing in front of the open refrigerator, staring at the sad collection of condiments and a questionable container of leftover something.
"We could order in," Ava suggested.
"Or." I closed the fridge. "We could go somewhere. Eat something neither of us cooked."
"You mean something I didn't cook."
"I was trying to be polite."
She laughed, the sound easy and warm.
"You're right. My cooking is a health hazard. Let's go."
It wasn't a date. We both insisted it wasn't a date. Not out loud, but in the way we carefully didn't call it one. The way we treated it like any other night. Just dinner. Just two roommates eating food.
But I shaved. And I put on the nice jeans, the dark ones Maya had once told me made me look presentable. Then Ava came out of her room in a dress. Simple. Sage green.
I forgot how to breathe.
The dress skimmed her body in ways I was trying very hard not to notice. Her hair was down, loose around her shoulders instead of scraped back in its usual ponytail. She'd put on lipstick, something subtle, barely there. I noticed because I noticed everything about her.
"Ready?" she asked.
"Yeah." The word came out rough. I cleared my throat. "Yeah. Let's go."
The Italian place was Shane's recommendation. Small, tucked away on a side street, the kind of place that didn't need a sign. Everyone who mattered already knew about it.
Not a date.
Two hours in, the conversation had wandered through easy territory. Work stories. Childhood memories. The kind of things you could share without bleeding. I blamed the wine for what came out of my mouth next.
"How come you never date?"
Ava's fork paused halfway to her mouth. "Where's this coming from?"
I kept my voice light. Casual. Like the answer didn't matter. "Four years, and I've never seen you with anyone."
She set the fork down. "I've never really been in one." The confession came out quieter than I expected. "A relationship. I was too focused on my career."
"Not even dates?"