Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
The hospital garden barely qualifies as a garden. It’s really a courtyard with a few benches and a fountain in the middle. The best thing about it is the jasmine bushes. They’re scattered around the area, dotted with white flowers that smell like heaven.
I’ve always been sensitive to smells, and floral scents are my least favorite.
But the smell of jasmine instantly relaxes me.
Maybe it’s because there was a jasmine bush near my bedroom window growing up, or maybe it’s just a smell my body likes, I don’t know, but as soon as I step into the garden my shoulder’s release and I let out a sigh.
Then my phone buzzes, ruining it.
Ex-dad:
Why aren’t you answering your phone? Did you forget your charger again? I can have a new one sent to the hospital.
Call me, Nutter.
I wish he’d stop calling me that. He says it’s just a play on Mom’s Hazelnut nickname for me, but I remember the first time he used it. It’s one of my earliest memories.
I was maybe three or four, and I was afraid of the color green.
I know it’s ridiculous, but I’d accidentally seen a zombie movie when my parents weren’t paying attention, and after that, the color green meant zombies.
It also meant broccoli and puke and poison ivy.
I didn’t just dislike green. I was terrified of it.
One day my dad took me to the mall, probably to give my mom a break, and he found this green sweatshirt that he thought would look adorable on me. Before I realized what was happening, he held it up to my chest, and I freaked out and ran away. He chased me, telling me I was being ridiculous.
I eventually crawled under a rack of clothing where he couldn’t reach me. He put the sweater back and tried to draw me out with promises of ice cream.
When I finally crawled from my hiding place, he said, ‘You’re such a Nutter, you know that?
’ He claims he meant it in jest, but he was angry that day, and it stung.
After that, he called me Nutter whenever he didn’t understand my actions or thought I was being ridiculous.
For years he gave me one green item of clothing every birthday, as ‘our little joke.’
I don’t run away screaming when something green touches me anymore, but I still don’t have a single item of green clothing in my wardrobe. And Jeremy still makes fun of me for it.
I ignore Jeremy and open my text chain with Aunt Joan. I send her a quick message, letting her know I’m going to get some writing done downstairs while she’s here, and asking her to text me if Mom needs anything. Then I find a spot on a bench, pull out my computer, and open the dreaded thesis file.
If there’s any hope of having it ready in time to be reviewed by a panel of my professors, most of whom are published authors, I need to work on it more than I have been.
It doesn’t have to be perfect, just better than it is right now.
I repeat this over and over to myself, but the blinking cursor doesn’t move.
I don’t know where to start, how to make it better.
Injecting it with heart, like my classmates recommended, seems impossible when my heart is constantly pulled to Mom’s bedside.
The novel is about a woman whose husband commits her to an asylum in the early 1920s after she finds out he’s cheating. It somehow feels too far away from my experience, while also being too close to it. I’m not sure how both can be true, but they are.
“You look like you’re waiting for your computer to bite you.” The deep voice draws me instantly. Cosmos stands a few feet away, wearing that annoyingly alluring grin.
My chest is a hornet’s nest of emotions. Anxious that I’ll fail out of my master’s program. Startled that I’m not alone. Terrified Cosmos will see the real me and run, but thrilled that he found me, that he’s here. Was he looking for me, or is this an accident?
I avoid making eye contact and look back at my computer. “More like hoping it’ll magically finish my novel for me.”
“Novel? You’re a writer?” He steps closer.
“Yes. No. Um… I’m trying.”
“Well, I know nothing about writing a novel, but I’m fairly certain they don’t write themselves.” Even without looking at him, I can hear the smile in his voice.
“And I’m fairly certain time doesn’t stop, so…” I shrug and finally look up to meet his gaze.
He bumps the side of his foot against the side of mine, sending an electric sizzle charging up my thigh. It’s such a casual thing, so innocuous, but I feel that point of contact everywhere.
“Is this why there are so many books all over your mom’s room?” Cosmos asks, eyes sparkling playfully. “Are you a romance writer working on a deadline?”
“No,” I scoff. “Of course not. My aunt brought those.”
I could explain that I’m getting my MFA and working on a literary historical fiction novel, but what if he hates historical fiction? Or worse, asks to read it?
“What are you reading?” I point to the book he’s tapping against his thigh to change the subject.
He turns it over and shows me the cover. The Book of Hours by Maria Rainer Rilke. One of my favorites. A hot doctor who reads Rilke? How is he single?
“May I?” he asks, motioning at the bench next to me.
I nod, but scoot closer to the edge so there’s plenty of space between us. He sits down with a heavy sigh and rubs the back of his neck.
He’s silent for so long that I wonder why he stayed. A bird chirps from somewhere nearby. I’m not sure what else to say, and I’m not one to fill the silence, so I turn back to my computer and stare at the blank screen.
“I like to come out here and read poetry when…” He sucks in a breath and scrubs his palm along his cheek, absentmindedly and repetitively. His expression is cast in shadows from a passing cloud, but the pain on his face is easy to read. Something happened.
I rub my thumb rhythmically over the smooth surface of my computer. “Did you… did you lose someone?”
He drags the toe of his shoe along a crack in the cobblestones and looks down at them as if he’s looking through them, beyond them, back into the sterile room where they perform surgeries.
“When I was little, I wanted to be a superhero. Save lives, you know?” He tilts his head in my direction and looks up. “Either that or a salsa dancer.”
I think he means it as a joke, but it’s easy to picture him salsa dancing.
Every move he makes is controlled and fluid at the same time.
Casually sensual. I can almost feel his long fingers wrapping around mine to lead me in a dance, thighs tangling the way they do for salsa dancers, a palm spread against the small of my back, pulling me closer.
Picturing it makes my cheeks burn and my insides melt.
I need to stop thinking about the way he moves.
“I didn’t realize that being in a position to save lives also means there’s the possibility of losing them.
” He makes a sound that’s too derisive to be a laugh, and I want to reach out and touch him, offer some comfort.
But what comfort can I give? I don’t know what it’s like to lose someone on an operating table. I never will.
“What did you want to be?” he asks.
I’ve always wanted to be a writer, even when I was little. But after the feedback I got today, it feels too raw and vulnerable to say it aloud. It feels stupid to want something so unattainable. So, I deflect. “Nothing as exciting as a salsa dancer.”
He chuckles, low and soft, but the sound dies too quickly on the breeze and silence replaces it again. He taps his book against his leg and pastes on a smile. “When things… don’t go well, reading poetry helps. I guess you could say poetry is my medicine.”
I like the thought of poetry as medicine. It makes sense to me. I’ve experienced it myself. Books have always been my escape, but when Mom was first diagnosed, I couldn’t focus on anything but poetry. I devoured poems like air. Nothing else felt right.
“I can understand that. Poetry is…” I trail off, struggling to find the words, feeling things I don’t have a vocabulary to communicate.
“‘Ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.’”
I smile, recognizing the quote. “Mary Oliver. Yeah.”
A bird lands on the tree in the courtyard and sings, like it’s calling to a friend. Somewhere in the distance, another bird answers.
The courtyard door opens, and Dr. Barbie, from the cafeteria the other day, walks out. “I thought I’d find you out here.” The smile she gives Cosmos is gentle, warm, a little flirty.
What was her name again? Sarah? No, Samantha. That’s it.
She startles when she notices me, and her gaze swings quickly between the two of us. I stand up to leave. “Enjoy your book.”
“You too.”
I make the mistake of looking at him and feel the change in the air when I do. The breeze stops. The bird is silent.
“Have you gotten to the part where Noah chases Ruby through the library?” He says it so casually it takes me a few seconds to realize he’s talking about the romance novel I was reading aloud to Mom when he came to her room a few days ago.
“You’ve actually read it?” I ask incredulously. When he told me he had before, I didn’t really believe him.
“Don’t tell the other residents. I’d never hear the end of it. But it’s one of my favorites.” His expression loses some of its heaviness, and a smile brightens his eyes. “A different form of medicine, you could say.” He winks, and my heart sings a shrill little song, just like a bird.
Despite his words, I get the impression he wouldn’t care who I tell. I’ve never met someone so unabashedly comfortable and confident. Someone so unashamed of what they like. It’s… attractive.
“See you around, Dr. Romero,” I say, trying to remind myself this man is off limits, as unreachable as the sun.
“Hopefully soon, Hazel Berton.” The dimples in his cheeks appear for the first time today, and I want to stick my tongue in those dimples—which is completely inappropriate and infinitely weird, but… so appealing.
I snap myself out of my lust-induced haze and force myself to walk away before I do something so embarrassing he’ll never want to look at me again, even if we can stop time.