“I’m—what?” Mason stared at her. There was a good chance he hadn’t heard her. The espresso machines were pretty noisy. He dropped into the chair across from her. “Have you always lived here?”
“I don’t even live here now,” she replied. “I’m still deciding where I want to be.”
I settled across from Whit while Brie and Mason launched into a conversation about neither of them enjoying this city much. It was a good thing, seeing as he was no longer welcome at many of Boston’s bars.
“How did it go yesterday?” Whit asked.
I gathered her hands in mine as I shook my head. “I didn’t really see anyone.”
“I told you that would happen.” She grinned. She loved being right. It was hard for me to find fault because she made gloating look good. “Do you feel better?”
“Maybe? I don’t know. Everything feels off.” I passed her my phone to read through the text exchange. “Does that make any sense to you?”
“If either of them was upset or had something to say to you,” she said, scrolling back and forth through the messages, “they would’ve done that. Those two don’t bite their tongues.”
“But then why did they look so upset the other night? And why did Tori speed off like that?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know, but isn’t it possible they’re over it now?”
“Hey, we’re going to order,” Brie said as she and Mason stood up. “What do you guys want?”
“I want the muesli bowl,” Whit said, “and Henry wants two breakfast sandwiches with extra bacon.”
Yeah, Ireallyloved this girl, and one of these days she’d be ready to hear those words from me.
As they left, Whit caught my hand and brushed her thumb over a bruise on my knuckles. “What happened here?”
“That’s where I stopped Mason from taking a header into a bar last night.”
“Which bar did you go to?”
“All of them,” I said. “And I’m not allowed back at a few.” When she frowned, I shifted gears. She didn’t need the gory details. “I talked to Stremmel and O’Rourke the other night. They’re working on adding an extra trauma rotation to my schedule for next year.”
She laced our fingers together, her delicate rings sliding against my skin. “You’re one of them now.”
“Why do you sound disappointed about that? You want me back on transplant?”
“Not for a single minute, no.” The hard flash of her hazel eyes made me laugh. “Though I’ll be seeing plenty of you over there. Your patients have a way of becoming donors for my patients.”
I sucked in a breath. “We’re going straight into the dark humor this morning?”
“No reason not to.”
I glanced down at our joined hands. I’d spent all night thinking about her.Missingher. The only reason my hand was bruised was because I’d drifted away into my own world ofWhat if I just asked her to marry me right now?and had overlooked Mason getting into it with some dude over college basketball, of all things. The entire time we’d been sitting in the foyer, my mind was busy constructing a world where she knew I’d never leave her, where she knew I’d always stay for her.
On the other side of the café, a coffee bean grinder kicked into high gear and a baby started howling. I blinked in that direction, unseeing.
What if I asked right now? What if we stopped wasting time and took the plunge without looking back? If Stremmel and Shapiro could pull it off, surely we could too. And then what would happen? Who would we be when it was just the two of us and none of the tension we’d carried in one shape or another for months?
Maybe I’d still fuck it up. Every step was a fumble in the dark. Maybe I just wanted to hide out in the quiet peace of her arms forever and avoid all the problems pressing in around me. Maybe— “Let’s get out of here.”
“What? And abandon our charges?”
I glanced at Mason and Brie as they waited. They seemed to be debating something about the menu. Or whatever else they’d stumbled onto.
“I never told him about going to therapy.” I wasn’t sure why I said that but it was out before I could think better of it. “I didn’t say anything about it when I started because I wanted to be able to quit without anyone giving me shit about it.” I turned her wrist over and rubbed her palm. “So, yeah, he knows the version of me that treated relationships like minefields. He doesn’t know that I put work into fixing that shit.”
Whit was quiet for a long moment. I went on working her abductor muscle. All that surgical efficiency made her hands tight.
