"What if she doesn't catch up?" Alex asked. "What then?"
I studied my lunch again. "Then…the wait will have been worth it. I'll never wonder what could've been."
Nick crossed his arms over his chest and turned his face to the sky. "Y'all have extremely complex romantic lives." He glanced from me to Alex, then back to the sky. "I don't know how you handle all this drama."
"Dude," Alex said with a sigh.
I leaned forward, my elbow braced on the table as I pointed at Nick and stared at Alex. "Is he for real right now?"
She shook her head. "I hope not."
"Same," I muttered. "Maybe his residents should wrestle him into the MRI this afternoon because there's no way he's forgetting the time he and his wife lived on different continents—"
"For two fucking years," Alex finished.
Nick shook his head, still soaking up the sun. "That situation is nothing like the two of y'all. I met a woman, I married her that day, and I played the long game in getting us under one roof." He shrugged. "Nothing outrageous."
"Um, I'm going to push back on you there, Acevedo," Alex argued. "It's rather outrageous and I do recall you Charlie-Browning your ass around here between your trips to Iceland. And let's not forget the part about you spending every free minute writing emails and ditching us so you could video chat."
"Or all the times you'd sit right there, sniffling over your sandwich because Erin liked bread or some shit like that," I added.
"Yeah," Alex replied, jabbing a finger toward me in agreement. "That. Your wife is the tits and I'm really thrilled she's local but you were too damn emotional over bread to claim you have any kind of experience with normal relationships. Get off the moral high ground for a minute, would you?"
Nick waved a hand at us. "Say what you will but I never sat here and told y'all I was taking it slow and low-key assaulting her in parks."
"No," Alex replied with a sharp nod. "You never did those specific things. However, you did drag me to a jeweler because I had to help you pick out a wedding band for your wife some three months after you eloped. I also had to try on sweatshirts for you even though I have a solid fifty pounds on your wife. I'd argue these things are the same but different. Excessively dramatic and unnecessarily complex."
I stared at the platinum band shining on his left hand. I resented it, just a bit. Like he said, he met a woman and then he married her the same night. I couldn't execute on that move.
"We'll agree to disagree on this point," Nick said.
"It must be a neurosurgeon thing," she mused. "This intractability. It's what happens when you assume one organ system is more important than the others."
"It is," he replied. "When the brain shuts down, the game's over."
Alex squared her shoulders and let out a long breath. "Gastric functions continue, unaided, for at least a week following brain death."
"Yeah. With a ventilator," he snapped.
Because I couldn't listen to this argument without fighting for my service's supremacy, I added, "You're both wrong because none of it matters without a beating heart."
The three of us stared at each other for a second, each ready to drop our specialized hammers. Then Nick said, "We need to get a urologist at this table. Someone to stand up for balls."
Immediately, I thought of Stella and all the balls she juggled.
"That's the lamest argument you've lodged yet," Alex replied. "The last thing anyone needs is balls and the urologist would come down hard for kidneys."
"I'll see her again on Tuesday morning," I said, swinging the conversation all the way back to my complex affairs. "Stella. On the trail. I'll see what happens."
Nick sighed as if I was causing him real pain. "I need you to use an abundance of caution. No more incidents, please. Once is an accident. Twice is cause for concern. Three times is us passing the hat for bail money."
I scowled at him. "You can afford it on your own."
"We're focusing on the wrong things here," Alex said.
"Don't injure the woman again," Nick warned. "Even if she's the one who causes the accident, I need you to be far away from it."
I glanced back to the river. It must've been freezing out there, with the wet wind blowing right off the water. "I'm working on it."
