Her hand in mine, we walked along the sea wall as low tide lapped against the fishing boats moored in the harbor there. We stopped at the far end, and Erin turned her eyes to the sky. She glanced from constellation to planet to constellation, ticking them off as if she was taking attendance. I moved in behind her, wrapping my arms around her torso and pressing my lips to her neck because she was right. About there never being enough time, about all of it.
"I lost a patient yesterday," I said. "I used to be able to count the patients I'd lost on one hand. Now I can't."
Her head dropped back against my chest as she squeezed my wrist. "What happened?"
I shook my head with a sigh. "Came in with a concussion eight months ago. Seven years old. Fucking peewee football. MRI showed a brain stem tumor, and I went in, and I'd gotten it all. IknewI'd gotten it all. But it came back, and…I opened him up again. Thought I could get it. Thought I had it," I said. "He didn't survive the surgery."
Erin didn't offer any hollow words about me doing everything possible or how I shouldn't blame myself. Silence was better than bullshit, and she knew that.
"It's the worst thing in the world, Erin," I said. "Telling parents that I couldn't save their child, it makes me want to crawl out of my fucking skin and scream at the universe. I know the names of those six kids and their birthdays, and what they wanted to do after their surgeries, and I know exactly why they died and how I failed them. It makes me think I shouldn't hold a scalpel again, and right now, I really don't think I should."
She thought about that for a moment, her chin tipped up to the sky. "Okay," she said slowly. "Tell me about them."
I didn't understand how she knew exactly what I needed, but it was that. Right fucking that, stark and awful.
Just fuckin' take me, woman. Have me, flaws and failures and all.
We sat on the sea wall for hours while the tide crept in and the world slept around us, and we talked about everything.Everything. It started with the patients I'd lost, the cases that made me question my beliefs in modern medicine, the cases that restored it. Then it was my unlikely path into pediatric neurosurgery despite being squarely in the family practice camp at the start of med school, and Erin's equally unlikely path into geochemistry and volcanology. There was my contempt for managed care, and her frustrations with science and progress and politics, and a shared musing of whether anything we did mattered at all. We agreed it all mattered. It had to, because we couldn't do what we did without a thick streak of hope behind us.
She grew up in suburban Boston, me on a working horse ranch outside Dallas. Her siblings ran an architecture business, my sisters were beauty pageant veterans. There was her brother Sam's issues with anxiety, and my sister Maya's repeated bouts with postpartum depression. Her mother was from rural Ireland, mine was from old oil money and had the audacity to marry a ranch hand. My father loved horses and hated high society, and there were two straight years when he'd slept in the musty apartment above the stables because their marriage wasn't an easy one. It still wasn't easy. Erin's mother died too early and her father died too late, and nothing in between those events had been good for her. There was a high school teacher—one she thought she could handle, one who should've known better—who made things even worse, and her father's perversion and depravity, and a night when she didn't think she wanted to see morning.
"I'm happy you didn't succeed," I said. The quiet, hollow parts of night were behind us, and dawn was only a few hours away. "Let me say that again because I want you to believe it. I'm fucking thrilled that you're alive."
My palm was flat on the small of her back, under her sweater but over the t-shirt because it was the only way to keep this decent. We'd touched each other all night, but it wasn't suggestive, down-to-fuck flirting. This was affection like a Mazzy Star song, or The Smiths.
"You say that because you like my tits, and you'd have nothing to admire if I was dead," she said. That shouldnothave been okay, but it was the kind of lightness one could only understand after some time alone in the dark.
"Of course I like your tits," I said, angling my head to speak directly to her chest. "I might've said that I lost my religion in med school but I'm ready to pray to the God who created those beauties. Lord, please take me back. I've seen the error of my ways, and I want to worship before your gifts. Specifically, these two."
"You're ridiculous," she said. "I didn't succeed, and that's good. I still do irresponsible things though."
"Yeah, I know all about that. I've seen the pictures of you next to lava flows," I countered. "Would you get in my lap, woman? Get over here, and tell me how irresponsible you want to be tonight."
"This night is almost over," Erin said as she rose up on her knees. She brought her hand to the back of my neck, and she tugged me down, closer. She was tentative at first, her lips brushing over mine and her fingers inching under my collar, but then she unleashed herself on me.
It was just like she'd said: she flew past the niceties and went straight for the rough stuff.
Wild, wild kisses. Hands all over, everywhere. Teeth and tongue in all the right places. Needy murmurs and hungry sighs.
In this kiss, she was confiding in me, speaking without the complication of words, and I was listening. I was answering.
My hands were locked on her waist, even if that was an exercise in willpower. I knew that if I took even an inch more, we'd need a level of privacy we didn't have handy at the moment.
"I dare you to steal a boat with me," she said against my jaw.
"Only if I can call you Skipper while we do it," I said.
She pressed her lips to my neck, and lightning struck far off on the horizon. I could smell it in the air, and I felt the jolt right in my nerves, as if the universe was sayingYou've found her. Now keep her.
Chapter Three
Erin
"What's the expat life like?"Nick asked over the roar of the boat's engine.
That accent was working me over. Each drawled syllable was like an ax blow to a tree trunk. A few more good whacks, and we'd be yellingtimber.
"Europe is great, and yes, I still vote and pay taxes," I said. It was my stock answer. I fielded this question with great frequency, but I wasn't trotting it out to give him the brush-off. God,no.
