“He’s going to know I’m avoiding him,” I said.
She threw her arms out at her sides. “So what? He’s just a guy. Let him suffer for a couple of months.”
All the panic inside me suddenly gathered into a throb of exhaustion. I dropped to the sofa, my elbows on my knees and my face in my hands. “I can’t believe this happened. I know surgeons and he didn’t seem like a surgeon. He said he’d be married to his job for the next five years, but I didn’t think thatmeant he was a resident. And he kept making stupid comments about me stopping his heart.”
“What do you mean?”
I pressed my fingertips to my eyes. “He said”—I pushed air through my lips—“he said I was heart-stoppingly beautiful. No one with even a basic understanding of cardiac function would ever say anything like that.”
She laughed through my misery. “He must’ve been so confused when he realized your name isn’t Olivia.”
I kept my eyes closed. I didn’t need to watch her process this admission. “I didn’t give him Olivia. Back in California. I gave him Whitney. But that was it. Nothing else.”
Meri was quiet for a moment. “You like him, don’t you?”
I dropped my hands. “No, and it doesn’t matter.”
“It could,” she said gently. “If you wanted it to matter.”
“I don’t.” I stood and went to the mirror near the door to check out the state of my face. Fortunately, only some of my makeup had melted off in my wild dash across the building. My eyeliner, as always, was flawless. “That’s how it has to be.”
Six
Whitney
Rule Number Twenty:
Cool girls don’t let anything bother them.
I steppedout of my bedroom and into chaos.
It was no different from the chaos that had greeted me every morning for the past few months and yet somehow I still managed to be shocked by it. Today, every article of clothing my sister owned—along with all the ones she’dborrowedfrom roommates past—had exploded across my living room. Piles upon piles of t-shirts and leggings, cut-off jeans and baggy sweatshirts covered the furniture and floor. An old-fashioned dressmaker’s form I’d never seen before stood in one corner. A clothesline bearing bras and underwear stretched down the hall, anchored to doorknobs.
I knew I’d been bleary when I returned home late last night after a long surgery, but I would’ve remembered limbo-ing under a clothesline to get to my room. That meant Brie had gone on this anti-organizing spree after I went to bed and I’d slept through the whole thing. Maybe that wouldn’t startleanyone else, but my place was small—which made it downright enormous by Boston standards—and I’d spent yet another night being chased around my dreams by the worst possible results of allowing my one-night stand to stay on my service for the next two months. I should’ve heard a clothesline being constructed a few steps from my bed.
But that was how Brie operated. She slept the morning away, worked remotely throughout the afternoon and early evening, and came to life after dark. Some nights she went out with friends, hopping from bars to clubs to house parties until the sun came up. Brie had friends in every city and she picked up more the minute she arrived. Other nights, she dumped a shoebox of sequins on the coffee table and settled in with the glue gun and some Hallmark holiday movies. There was no predicting which way she’d go and I knew better than to ask.
One of the most unforgivable sins in the world was asking my sister about her plans. It was second only to letting on that I had a hard time supporting some of her choices. That was at least part of the reason I continued to bite my tongue about her prolonged stay. It was easier to have my home be turned inside out for a little while than have her angrily pack up and leave while I was at work because I was too loose with the questions. She’d hold that against me for months.
I preferred to eat breakfast at home while I read through my schedule for the day, but there were dresses hanging from every cabinet in the kitchen and skirts all over the table. A handwritten inventory had been abandoned on the countertop along with price ranges, and I realized she was selling her clothes again. She did this a couple times each year. It usually signaled the start of something new, which could be anything from cutting her hair to picking out a different career. I just had to wait and see.
Rather than fighting my way through any of it and disrupting the system she had in place, I grabbed my things and once again headed to my favorite coffee shop.
I’d always put in long hours, but around the time Brie’sshort visitmarched into its second month, I’d taken to spending a bigger chunk of my day at the hospital. This meant I was often the first in line when the doors opened at Coffee Exchange and they usually had a latte and muffin waiting for me. They were angels like that, even though they nudged me almost every day to give the yogurt and granola bowls they were known for a chance.
I’d made that mistake once and spent the entirety of a six-hour surgery trying to work a flaxseed out from between my teeth. If I couldn’t have my usual morning routine at home, I was sticking with unfrosted breakfast cupcakes.
When I made my way down Beacon Hill to the coffee shop on Charles Street, there were already a few people in line ahead of me. It would’ve been a fine time to review my schedule or dig through some emails, but my attention snagged on the person at the front of the line. He wore a pair of dark blue trousers and wingtips with a gray hoodie which I usually considered an unnecessary quirk of modern man-boys, but I couldn’t force myself to look away.
I knew for a fact that I’d never before been captivated by the simple act of someone reaching into their back pocket and retrieving a wallet. I wasn’t sure that I’d ever stopped to carefully observe the mechanics of that move or how it quietly screamed everything about that person’s command of their body.
Right around then was when I realized I was staring at this guy’s ass, and honestly, it was a great ass. Round and firm, like someone had not skimped on the squats. And those trousers were doing god’s work with a straight cut that was slim enoughto highlight the goods yet not so much as to give an anatomy lesson. I enjoyed everything about this.
After another moment of open appraisal, I was ready to chastise myself for objectifying strangers while I was too groggy from a shitty night of sleep to do it without any subtlety. Before I could do any of that, he turned away from the counter.
And I died a little bit because that ass belonged to none other than Henry Hazlette.
His gaze landed on mine and his whole face brightened. He smiled and that was all it took to burn off the fog of my bad-sleep bleariness. I was wide awake now and right back to the breathless shock I’d experienced since seeing him again two days ago.
