Chapter 10
What was supposed to be a flight to Boston turns into a bus ride after the flight gets canceled due to bad weather.
Because of that, everyone is woken up earlier than usual to get moving as soon as possible.
Erin doesn't mind much; she's been up for an hour and was just about to head into the gym when Noah intercepts her to let her know.
The first thing she does is check her watch: it's barely seven fifteen, way too early for Mia to have gotten enough rest given how she spent her evening, and it puts Erin in a bad mood for two reasons — because it affects her patient's health, and because remembering that woman walking out of the singer's suite makes every muscle in her body go tight.
Half an hour later, she's standing at the hotel entrance with her suitcase handle in one hand, her backpack slung over one shoulder, and a to-go coffee she grabbed from the café on her way out.
"Not what you were expecting, right?" Nell says, stepping up beside her while Erin stares, impressed, at the double-decker bus with its tinted windows. "You didn't need to bring coffee — there's service in there, and the seats recline so far you could sleep the whole way if you need to."
"I don't know if I'll ever be able to get on a regular bus after this," Erin murmurs, as someone from the crew comes to take their bags and stow them away.
Nell laughs and rests a gentle hand on her back.
"If there's one thing I've learned in all my years doing this, it's that you can get used to luxury very fast — but if you weren't born into this world, there comes a point where you miss what you had before. Don't ever stop being who you are, no matter what you see here," she tells her.
Nell leaves her standing there on the sidewalk, makes her way to the steps, and boards the bus.
Erin thinks about her words, and she honestly doesn't think she'd have any trouble going back to her old life as far as creature comforts go.
But she might have a harder time returning to her routine at the hospital and her day-to-day that feels so empty — because even though she hasn't made any real friends here either and isn't sure she will, she notices the hours move faster, mostly because there's always something to do.
The tour's pace is chaotic; it doesn't leave much room for sitting alone on a couch — the way she did back home — with no one to talk to and no idea what to do with her free time.
Sometimes she thinks about her life and it frustrates her: she's still young and could do a thousand things if connecting with people came more naturally to her, if building relationships that weren't strictly professional felt less impossible.
But after spending her whole life taking care of her family, now that she doesn't have them anymore — Brooke barely counts in that regard — she doesn't know how to start living.
When she really thinks about it, her biggest achievement has been that budding friendship with Barry, and just when it was starting, she left with Mia Wilder's tour.
But over the week she's been on the road, Barry has texted her a couple of times to check in, so she feels good about what she's built, and she's sure that when she gets back to New York, she'll have a friend waiting for her.
The hotel door opens behind her and Erin feels the warm air from inside hit her back, but she also picks up a kind of static electricity that raises the hair on her arms and makes her turn around without knowing what she expects to see.
Mia is coming through the door with one of her bodyguards. She's wearing torn jeans, an oversized hoodie, and her hair tucked under a cap with the Wild tour logo.
"Hey, Dooley," the singer says as she passes.
Erin can't manage a response fast enough for Mia to hear it before she boards the bus, because she's still rooted to the spot, trying to push out of her head the image of the woman she saw leaving the suite last night — but even more than that, the sound of the moans she heard through the door, which have taken up permanent residence somewhere in her brain, along with the certainty that Mia was the one making them.
In the moment, she wasn't able to place it, but later, at the gym, she immediately connected that low, husky tone to the same voice Mia used during the concert in one of her songs — when the music stopped, the lights dimmed, and she sang a chorus a cappella that left the entire audience spellbound.
"Ready?" Noah's voice makes her jump.
She turns and finds him at her side, dark hair messy, wearing athletic clothes and his over-ear headphones.
"Yeah," Erin says, giving him a smile, and finally gets on the bus.
A lot of people are already seated; some she recognizes, others she can't even place if she's seen them at all. She says a quiet hello and heads up to the second floor, where the space is much more open and there aren't as many rows of seats as on the lower level.
"All the way to the back," Nell says, jerking her thumb over her head.
She's sitting in the first section of seats because she likes a clear view of the road. Erin nods and walks to the end, where a door clearly leads to Mia's room. She knocks a couple of times and waits a few seconds.
"Come in, Dooley," she hears from inside, as if Mia already knows she's the only one who'd dare bother her this early.
She opens the door and finds her sitting on a twin bed, back against the wall, legs stretched out, phone in hand.
She's taken off her cap, her sneakers, and her hoodie, so most of the tattoos on her arms are on full display.
Erin isn't particularly fond of needles pushing ink into skin — she doesn't have any herself and they don't usually catch her eye on other people — but Mia Wilder has so many they've become a kind of signature, and it's hard to imagine her without them.
"Sit wherever," Mia says, gesturing toward the bed and the two armchairs by the window at the back of the bus.
Erin chooses the bed. She sits down beside her and takes her wrist without a word, checking her pulse.
"Did you sleep?" she asks before she starts counting.
"Some, yeah."
Erin raises an eyebrow.
"How many hours?"
"I don't know, Dooley — four? Maybe three. It's hard for me to sleep after a show, I already told you," Mia says drowsily, opening her mouth into a yawn she can't hold back.
"Did you smoke last night?"
She lifts her head from her phone and focuses her blue eyes on Erin — the edges red from tiredness and, most likely, from the joint she smoked after the woman left her suite.
"Yeah, one. Sometimes it makes me sleepy, sometimes it just takes the edge off."
"Nothing else?"
Mia's gaze hardens.
"No, just that, I already told you. You can talk to Noah if you don't believe me. I don't have access to anything — I don't even know how to roll the damn thing. He preps it for me on show nights only."
"Did you eat breakfast?" For some reason she can't explain, Erin believes her, though she doesn't rule out talking to Noah about it, because plenty of patients lie to their doctors and the more she understands Mia's lifestyle, the easier it'll be to treat her.
"A watered-down coffee with about a half liter of water. Disgusting, by the way," she adds with a grimace.
"Coffee isn't food. I'll have a light breakfast and a big bottle of water brought to you, and more coffee if you want it. You should drink the bottle over the next three hours — you lost a lot of fluid through sweat last night and you need to replace it."
"I'll try."
Mia watches her for a second. Erin is still sitting beside her in her cargo pants — olive green this time — and a plain black T-shirt.
Mia takes in her arms, the lean line of muscle that defines them, that serious expression paired with those ash-gray eyes and full lips that are never wet but always look so damn good, and her mouth goes so dry she's pretty sure she'll need more than one bottle.
"Good. How are you feeling this morning, given you didn't rest well? Any dizziness when you got up? Anything off?"
"Sex always does me good, Dooley, so I'd say I'm great," Mia says — and then, a second after the comment she couldn't stop herself from making, she flushes and blinks a couple of times, embarrassed. "Sorry, I don't know why I said that."
Part of her wants the doctor to know everything she does, especially with women — just to see if it gets any kind of reaction out of her.
But the other part doesn't. She's made up her mind to respect her, not to push her with stupid, out-of-line remarks or say things that might make the doctor uncomfortable.
But she likes this woman so much that keeping those impulses in check has become one of the hardest things she has to do all day.
"Glad you had a good time," Erin says, not looking at her, with an expression of total indifference that ties a knot in Mia's stomach. She stands. "Eat whatever they bring you and try to sleep. Lock your phone and give it to me."
A flash of confusion crosses Mia's face, her eyes going wide.
"Why would I do that?"
"Because you need to sleep, and if you keep it, you'll get distracted. Give it to me," Erin says, her hand open in front of her, waiting.
Mia stares at her fingers — straight and strong, perfect for— She clears her throat, makes sure the screen is locked, and sets the phone in her hand. Erin slips it into the side pocket of her right cargo leg and walks to the door.
"Get some rest. I'll check on you at noon."
She steps out and takes a seat in the row closest to Mia's room.
She presses the button on the armrest — the one above the letters that read "Assistance" — and thirty seconds later a uniformed young man comes over to ask what she needs.
She orders breakfast for Mia and another coffee for herself, and when he leaves, she pulls out her notebook, writes today's date at the top, and notes the singer's vitals along with the time she took them, logs that she's only had coffee, that she slept three to four hours, and that she had sex.
She stares at those last two words. She wrote it down because it's a real piece of data she needs — something that adds to her patient's exhaustion and that she has to factor into her care — but seeing it there on the page irritates her almost as much as it did last night watching that woman walk out of her room.
She tells herself her annoyance is purely about the fact that Mia doesn't seem to be making much of an effort to rest and follow her instructions, and she pushes away any other thought that has nothing to do with that.
The bus pulls into Boston mid-afternoon.
Mia had breakfast, slept nearly four hours between one meal and the next, and feels recharged.
Erin, on the other hand, barely slept a wink the entire trip.
First making sure Mia's breakfast was delivered, then checking that she'd actually eaten it, then peering through the door every hour to confirm she was asleep, and finally making sure she ate when she woke up, that she'd drunk enough water, and taking her vitals again.
During the stretches when she was just sitting in her seat, she couldn't close her eyes because her mind kept getting away from her, making her wonder what she was doing there — on a bus full of strangers, traveling through the country with no time for anything, alongside a girl who says things she shouldn't and then apologizes for them.
When the bus stops, Erin has to look twice through the window. If Toronto had fans of the singer, here there's a full-on crowd that the police are trying to hold back behind the barricades the hotel staff set up at the entrance.
"It happens sometimes," Mia's voice makes her turn, and she finds the singer standing in the aisle.
She's changed clothes; she's now wearing fitted black jeans, white sneakers, and a hoodie in her size. Her hair is damp and she's not wearing the cap, and the dark circles she had this morning are completely gone.
"What happens?" Erin is genuinely thrown right now, overwhelmed by what's outside the bus and by the presence of this blue-eyed girl watching her from half a meter away, hands tucked in her back pockets, radiating that magnetism she doesn't even seem to know she has.
"The people," Mia says, nodding toward the hotel entrance.
"Usually it leaks through some fan club — there's always someone willing to dig hard enough.
They know the arrival date and the city, and they'll work the hotel staff they think are likely candidates until someone tells them what they want to know.
Other times it's Jude who leaks it," Erin blinks, "he calls it free publicity. "
"I see," the doctor murmurs.
"I don't," Mia shrugs. "Sometimes things get out of hand — people getting too worked up, ending up with an unnecessary shove. Jude shouldn't do this."
She turns and keeps moving, and Erin watches her go until she disappears down the stairs.
She picks up her notebook, tucks it into her backpack, slings it over her shoulder, and heads out.
Nell is in her seat, perfectly still, nothing packed up, one foot resting on the railing in front of her and an enormous book open in her hands.
"You're not getting off?" Erin asks.
The woman looks up and takes off her reading glasses, which fall to hang against her chest on their cord.
"Not yet. Better to wait until Mia's inside. She's the one they want to see — once she's in, they stick around another ten minutes and then most of them leave. If you go out now, they'll swarm you almost as much as her, ask you who you are, and try to get information out of you."
Erin frowns, slides her backpack off her shoulder, and sits in the seats behind Nell, looking out the window as Mia — flanked by a bodyguard on each side — waves at the fans, takes photos, smiles, and answers a few questions.