Chapter 17
After lunch, Erin puts her headphones on and heads down to the gym.
This is one of her favorite perks of staying at hotels whose nightly rates she'd rather not know — they always have a private workout room.
She wants to make the most of it, because there's nothing on the schedule today, not even a meeting, but tomorrow they leave for Philadelphia, and she finds herself wondering if she could keep up this pace year after year.
She takes the stairs for the extra exercise, and when she finally reaches the gym, she stops the moment she walks through the door.
Four members of the crew are there, and one of them is Mia, on the treadmill, doing the exact opposite of what she was asked.
Erin had been sure the singer came down this morning, but clearly she hadn't — and she doesn't even want to think about the possibility that Mia has been here twice.
She takes her headphones off and walks over to the machine.
Mia has her back to her, running in those same shorts from this morning and a tank top.
For a moment, the doctor just stands there, telling herself she's admiring the tattoos when she's actually letting her gray eyes travel the full length of Mia's body.
She bites her lip and takes a step closer, then stops again, because one of Mia's tattoos catches her eye.
Mia has so many that Erin hadn't noticed it before — not that she's seen them all, though she'd like to — but this one is identical to the tattoo Noah has on his arm, only much smaller and right above Mia's elbow: Danny.
Erin is dying of curiosity. She's almost asked Noah about it more than once, and something has always stopped her, but seeing it now on the singer's arm, her curiosity doubles.
She circles the machine and positions herself on the other side, right in front of Mia, who is flushed and sweaty and blinks and raises her eyebrows when she sees her.
"Dooley, what a surprise," she says, still catching her breath.
Erin bristles at the sarcasm but decides to swallow her response rather than make things more complicated between them.
"Can you stop, please? Hit the button." She points to it, and Mia, after holding her gaze for a few seconds in a way that feels like a challenge, hits it. The belt slows gradually until the singer is standing still on it.
"I just wanted to run for a few minutes, I needed to—" Mia stops when she sees Erin's expression, aware that an excuse will only make her angrier. "Sorry. The machines bore me."
Erin picks up the water bottle sitting on top of the treadmill, opens it, and hands it to her.
"Then walk," the doctor concedes, "but today it's better if you don't push yourself. These no-rehearsal, no-concert, no-hundred-things-to-do days are rare — it's important to use them to rest."
"All right," Mia says, pressing the button so the belt starts moving again.
Erin leaves her there and heads for the weight machines.
She feels tired today, maybe from the stress of these weeks on tour with the singer, because she still hasn't adjusted to this constant moving around with barely a break.
The ER had felt easier, even when it was chaos.
She had known every space she moved through, and had always known exactly what needed to be done.
Here she controls nothing — not even her patient — and she doesn't have time to get used to one room before they're switching hotels and moving to another.
Her muscles feel heavy, but when she sits down at the first machine to do leg presses, what she feels is relief — the kind that comes from being able to push out whatever it is she's been carrying inside.
She spends the next half hour moving through the machines, following her usual routine and keeping an eye on Mia.
The singer stepped off the treadmill a while ago, did a bit of elliptical, and is now off to one side talking to one of the sound technicians who travels with them.
He's a tall guy with a well-built frame and a certain attractiveness, plus a nearly permanent smile that makes it impossible not to like him.
Erin moves to another machine and sits down on a weight bench.
Mia turns around at the exact moment Erin lies back to grab the bar, and she gets so absorbed that the guy she was talking to understands the conversation is over and goes back to his workout.
The singer's mouth goes dry and her pulse is racing so fast now that her heart is beating harder than it was when she stepped off the machine.
Erin is lying on her back with her feet flat on the floor and her legs apart, pressing the bar up and down.
Mia sees those lines she loves so much standing out in sharp relief along Erin's arms, the tension in her entire body, and starts imagining things she shouldn't — though she shuts them down quickly when she thinks again about Erin spending the night with Lexie.
That uncomfortable feeling that's been pressing against her chest ever since Noah told her surfaces again, and Mia runs a hand over the back of her neck, still surprised by how much it's affecting her.
She struggles to make sense of all the tangled thoughts in her head — she can't even begin to sort them out, everything blurring together — but she knows one thing for certain: she's falling for Erin Dooley, and the doctor wants nothing to do with her.
She knows she has to keep living her life because there's nothing else she can do, but she can't even enjoy herself with other women anymore, and Erin slept with Lexie.
Her throat tightens and she takes a sip from her water bottle, holding back the urge to walk over and ask how it went, whether she enjoyed it, whether Lexie gave her what she was looking for and that's why she's not so sharp-edged today.
She wants to say so many things to the doctor that she feels frustrated, because none of them matter if Erin doesn't feel the same way.
She sets the bottle down and walks over, unable to stop her own feet.
Erin is finishing her last rep. She lowers the bar onto the rack and lies still for a moment, staring up at the ceiling, at the decorative plasterwork above her, and when she sits up, her heart lurches — Mia is on the bench with her knees nearly touching Erin's and those deeply blue eyes fixed on her.
She's so close that Erin's mind betrays her, her first instinct to lean forward, wrap a hand around the back of Mia's neck, and pull her mouth in.
She exhales hard, trying to shake the fierce rush coursing through her, until she gets herself back under control.
"What are you doing, Wilder?" she asks, and her voice comes out completely rough.
Mia takes a moment to respond, because Erin's chest is rising and falling from the effort and her skin is damp with sweat.
"You just answered my question, Dooley." She almost savors the last word, as if reminding Erin that this habit of calling her by her last name gets under her skin.
"What?" Erin is completely thrown, unable to figure out what she's referring to.
"I asked if you slept with women. Now I know you do."
A sharp ringing tears through Erin's ears, and she feels like if she moves she'll end up coughing her heart right out of her chest. Her mind kicks into overdrive, trying to work out whether Mia knows because Noah told her he saw her leave with Lexie, or because she saw the journalist coming out of her room.
Either way, she lands on the same conclusion — it doesn't matter.
The point is that Mia knows, and what washes over Erin is a tide of anxiety she doesn't understand.
The singer sleeps with women whenever she gets the chance, so Erin shouldn't feel like she's cheated on her, like having sex with someone else is a betrayal that hurt her — but she sees that flash of pain in Mia's eyes, and the doctor can't make sense of herself.
She made it clear to Mia that she doesn't want anything to happen between them, and the singer tries to respect that, but sometimes she brings it back up, and Erin is starting to suspect she does it because she senses something in Erin that makes her think she's more interested than she lets on.
She opens her mouth, but for the first time she doesn't know what to say. If she tells Mia it's none of her business — and Erin believes it isn't — she can feel that it will hurt her. And if she says nothing, she has the sense that she's hurting her just the same.
"Lexie's great — she's beautiful, kind, and funny." Mia's shoulders lift in a small shrug while Erin watches her, completely rattled. "And a very lucky woman. I'll let you get back to it."
Mia stands up, grabs her water bottle and the towel she'd left on the floor beside the bench, and walks out of the gym without looking back once.
Erin needs several minutes before she can move.
Her arms are trembling from the effort of the bar, but the rest of her body shouldn't be shaking the way it is — leaving her dizzy — and yet she's trembling from head to toe.
"You done with the bench, doc?" asks one of the guys who'd been in the gym.
Erin runs both hands through her hair, pulls out the clip holding it up, and twists a strand hard between her fingers while the guy stares at her, unsure whether to stay or go. After a few seconds, she takes a slow, deep breath, gathers her hair back up with the clip, and stands.
"All yours," she says, giving his arm a quick pat before grabbing her things and heading out.