Chapter 16 – Ariane – The Unknown Man
I have decided the hospital waiting room is designed by someone who hates humans.
The chairs are the exact shade of punishment, the vending machine is an optimistic liar, and the TV in the corner plays a soap opera with the volume low enough to be maddening.
A toddler keeps smacking their juice box like it owes them money.
I’m on my third paper cup of water because I won’t let myself get another cup of the liquid tar that the cafeteria calls coffee. That sludge wouldn’t pass FDA approval, I just know it.
“Ms. Vale?” a volunteer in a mauve vest chirps at me like we’re old friends. “Your mother’s labs are in. Doctor Ames will be right out.”
Eleanor is not my “mother” today; she is Her Majesty of Elevated Blood Pressure, ruling from the gurney behind Door Three with a thin bracelet and a lethal attitude. She had a dizzy spell before breakfast, went pale in a way that scared even me, and now here we are.
The initial tests looked fine. More tests are happening because hospitals collect tests like grandmothers collect antique spoons.
Julian is sitting next to me, perfect posture, perfect suit, perfectly bored.
He checks his watch, vintage, inherited, probably wound by angels, for the millionth time, and then checks me like he’s calculating which expression will make this photo-op look best if there happened to be cameras.
There aren’t, which I think disappoints him.
“How are you holding up?” he asks.
“I’m great,” I say wryly. “I love fluorescent lighting. It brings out my best undertones: late-night existential crisis.”
He huffs a laugh, unfazed by my sour mood. “You could go home?” he suggests, always willing to fall on a sword for me. “I can wait for the doctor.”
“No,” I say. “If I leave, she’ll tell everyone I abandoned her at death’s door. Then live to repeat the story for twenty years out of spite.”
Another almost-laugh.
He reaches for my hand and I let him take it, even though the guilt is eating me alive.
His palm is smooth and dry and impersonal.
Like a conference handshake you don’t remember an hour later.
I don’t pull away. I don’t lean in. I breathe, count to five, and try to locate the particular flavor of self-loathing that’s been sitting under my ribs since last night.
Finn’s mouth. His hands. His face. His dick.
His perfect dick. That’s the problem. Well, one of them.
Kiss number two was last night, and my body is still writing sonnets about it while my conscience tries to light them on fire.
But it wasn’t only a kiss. It was so much more that that…
I can see it in flashes. His mouth sucking my nipples.
My hands holding onto the railing for dear life because I didn’t want to make a sound.
My hands around his dick. His dick throbbing inside me.
The sound he made when I made him come, the feeling of him flooding me with his seed.
It was stupid and selfish and so good it broke all the careful locks I’d built. The only reassurance I have is that I tried to stop him. I wasn’t planning on having sex with him, but he took me my force.
Right?
It’s not like you protested though… you were dripping for him, your pussy ready to be filled.
Fuck. This has to stop.
It won’t, my traitorous brain whispers, and I tell it to shut up because I am a grown woman with a fiancé who buys me tasteful jewelry and says the right things at the right times. Cheating is not my thing. It can’t be. Especially not with my stepbrother. What the actual hell is wrong with me?
I don’t even notice I’ve zoned out until I’m tuning in to find Julian in the middle of his sentence: “—be back by Thursday, sweetheart. Maybe Wednesday if the board behaves.” He squeezes my hand. “I’m sorry I can’t stay longer. The flight’s at nine.”
“Tonight?” I make my surprise sound small, a polite bump in the road.
“Tonight,” he says, and leans in, lips graze my temple like a stamp of propriety. “I’ll miss you.”
I arrange my face into the correct reply and hope it holds. “I’ll miss you too.” The words taste like poison in my mouth. “It’s just a few days.”
“A few days,” he agrees. “And I’ll call. Every night.”
I nod, which is safe.
I don’t say: please don’t. Stop being such a picture perfect partner.
I don’t say: every night is the problem.
I don’t say: I let a man do things to me you’d be horrified to even think of. The worst part is I’m barely sorry and also very sorry and okay I might be broken.
“Family of Eleanor Wagner?” Doctor Ames appears with a tablet and a mercifully normal expression.
He’s the kind of man who could narrate nature documentaries and soothe your childhood nightmares.
“Everything points to dehydration and stress. We’re going to hydrate her, keep her for observation a few more hours.
If her pressure remains stable, she can go home this afternoon.
That should be cause for celebration, not another argument. ”
“Define ‘argument,’” I say, because the man knows our family and I’m not about to lie to a person holding a discharge form hostage.
“Anything that raises blood pressure,” he says wryly. “Which includes disagreeing with my discharge orders, Mrs. Wagner.” He raises his voice just enough to be heard through the curtain.
It rustles. A royal sigh floats out.
“Please tell my mother that the word ‘rest’ is not a personal insult,” I add.
He smiles. “I’ll use Latin if I have to.” Then he softens. “She’s fine, Ariane. Scared you, but she’s fine.”
My shoulders drop half an inch. I only notice the ache in them now that it loosens. “Thank you.”
When he’s gone, Julian squeezes my fingers again. “I told you it would be fine.”
“You did,” I say, because he did. Because he likes being right and I’m too tired to dent the shine. “You also told me the coffee was fine.”
“I said it was ‘efficient,’” he corrects, mouth quirking. “There’s a difference.”
“Efficient at corroding organs, maybe,” I tease, and stand because my legs need to move before my thoughts catch up. “I’m going to see her.”
“Tell her I’ll swing by before I head to the airport.” He rises, straightening an imaginary wrinkle. “I have a call in twenty minutes. Can I borrow the chapel to take it? Better acoustics.”
“It’s not a WeWork, Julian.”
“Every room is a WeWork if you believe in capitalism.” He pecks my cheek again, already half gone. “Back soon.”
I watch him walk down the hall, sleek and precise.
I picked this. I walked into this with eyes wide open because stability is a kind of love too, right? Because wanting quiet is not the same as being weak. Because Finn is chaos wrapped in restraint, and I am tired of being the match. Because I shouldn’t be thinking about Finn at all.
Mom makes sure I can’t think about anything else for a minute. She has her lipstick on, naturally. A shade called Power Move. Her hair is smoothed, and she’s sitting up like the IV pole is merely a seasonal decoration.
“Well?” she says, as if she might cry and as if she might fire me in the same breath.
“Hydration, observation, liberation,” I report. “You’re fine. Or you will be once you stop arguing with the doctor in your head.”
“I do not argue,” she says, then immediately argues. “I advocate.”
“Try to advocate for broth and Netflix,” I say, pulling the blanket up nearer her waist because it’s riding low and there are limits to what the general public needs to see. Caring is a muscle memory. “Also, you scared me.”
“I scared me,” she says, and for a second the queen’s mask slips. There is a frightened woman underneath, the one who raised me with a timetable and a tighter hand every time life slipped. She clears her throat, swallows the softness. “But I am… what did he say? Fine.”
“Fine,” I echo, and sit. “You’ll appreciate this: Julian wants to convert the chapel into a conference room.”
She sniffs. “He would. It’s quiet and people have the decency to whisper.”
A laugh huffs out of me before I can stop it. “I hate that you’re right.”
“I’m often right,” she says, but her gaze searches my face like she’s looking for an answer to the wrong question. “You look tired.”
“I am tired.” Too much is underneath that. Finn in a hallway, Finn’s mouth on mine, my hunger and my shame like twin fires. Not now. Not here. “Drink your water, Your Grace.”
She gives me a look that would wilt fresh roses and sips anyway.
We lapse into a quiet that’s not terrible. Monitors chirp like patient birds. The soap opera on mute shows two people clutching each other dramatically in front of a fake funeral. Nurses float by with purposeful steps. I tuck my feet under the chair like I’ll stay planted if I can’t bolt.
“Julian is leaving tonight,” I say finally, because I might as well rip off the bandage.
Mom’s mouth tightens. “Already?”
“Board meeting,” I say, which is true enough. “He said he’ll miss me.”
“And?”
“And I said I’ll miss him.”
I don’t add: I said it like a person reading a recipe aloud just to hear the right words.
She watches me for three beats. “You’re getting that look again.”
“What look?”
“The look that says you are very stuck in your own head. You’re acting like the Cancerian woman you are.”
“Wow,” I say. “You’ve really cracked open my psyche, Mom. Next, you’ll tell me my attachment style and my enneagram wing.”
She doesn’t smile. “Be careful, Ariane.”
“I always am, Mom,” I lie. “What could possibly happen in a hospital? The worst thing you can do here is underestimate the cafeteria jello.”
She keeps watching until I busy myself with the blanket again. I tell myself I’m reading her, not avoiding her. She’s pale under the lipstick. She is scared, and the only way she knows how to be scared is to be mean. I can be gentle. I can meet her where she is. I can do that much right.
I’ve only been fussing over her for a few minutes when I hear her choke on a breath. Alarmed, I look at her, and look behind myself to where her gaze is affixed.