Poppy nodded and hoped she conveyed a level of confidence she currently did not possess as she turned on her heels and headed back the way she came. She had no clue who to ask or where to look. If Zeta didn’t know where Liam was, and he wasn’t in an on-call room, then she was out of ideas. The roof, maybe. He’d go up there sometimes to be alone.
“Oh, and do you have any idea where AJ is?” she heard Frankie call out after her.
Poppy’s heart slammed into her chest once more, it was basically a crash dummy at this point. She quickly turned back around and tried to ‘read the room,’ if you will.
What did Frankie know?
How could she know?
Was this a trick to get her to confess?
“What? No. Why? Why? Why would I? Why would you ask that?” Poppy heard herself stumbling over her words. If she wasn’t guilty, she sure as shit made herself sound like she was…which, obviously, she was.
“I just…” Frankie’s expression was one of concern and confusion. “I just…You were at the wedding, and Niko mentioned something about seeing you two dancing, so I thought maybe…I don’t know maybe you saw where he went. No one can get ahold of him. He wasn’t at his cabin.”
“Ohhh, really?!” Poppy did her best to sound natural and surprised by the news that Frankie was sharing with her, like this was the first she was hearing about it and it had nothing to do with her. “Well, I don’t know. I’m sure he’ll, um, yeah, I’m sure he’ll turn up.”
With that, did a one-eighty and power-walked away from them. She went up onto the roof and did not see Liam there. She also tried to call AJ, but it went straight to his voicemail.
Or at least she hoped it was his voicemail. It didn’t have a personalized greeting. It was just a robotic voice telling her that she’d reached the number. When the beep sounded, she took a breath. “Hey AJ, I’m at the hospital and everyone, or not everyone…” She remembered that it bothered one of her neurodivergent patients when neurotypical people made generalizations. Not that every neurodivergent person was the same—she refused to paint in generalizations—but she wanted to be aware of her speech. “…um, your mom, brother, Liam, Frankie, and Zion are here because Dr. Sterling had a medical emergency, um, a heart attack last night. He’s in surgery now. They have been trying to get ahold of you and haven’t been able to. I didn’t say anything about…you know…us, last night. I didn’tknow if you’d want people to…or not. Not that it even matters with what is going on. It doesn’t. I just wanted you to know. Okay, bye.”
She hung up and replayed everything she’d said in her head over and over. Had she made it seem like she didn’t want people to know they’d spent the night together? Because that wasn’t the case. She just didn’t want him to think that she did want people to know. That didn’t even make sense. It didn’t matter. There were much bigger things going on.
Her pager went off, alerting her that her first appointment was there. Mrs. Patterson had a lot of anxiety and was claustrophobic. She always requested Poppy when she needed to get CT scans for her pancreatitis.
“Fuck.” She had to go do her job. She wished that she could blow it off, but it was too important. She tried Liam’s phone once more. Again it went to voicemail.
What was the point of everyone having phones if no one ever answered them?
13
AJ passedthe city limits sign for Hope Falls, the chill of early morning slicing through his slightly rolled-down windows as he coasted down the pine-shadowed road. The car was silent except for the steady rhythm of his own breath and the faint, familiar drone of rubber on blacktop. It was a silence that felt clean, a decompression chamber separating him from the intensity of the night before.
He was five minutes from the Mountain Ridge Outdoor Adventure Resort and wasn’t due to meet his mom and Dr. Sterling for breakfast for another hour. AJ had planned the timing precisely to maximize the time he had alone. He lived by a code of internal regulation, and nothing soothed his system better than the repetition of footfalls, the climb of his pulse, and the quantifiable accomplishment of the body. His plan was to run, to feel the burn in his calves and lungs, and to push himself to his limit in an attempt to piece together the damage the past 24 hours had splintered in his being. Between the aftermath of travel, being herded through airports, the disembodied announcements, the press of strangers, the endless fluorescent lighting, and then the onslaught of interactions withrelatives, conversations, being hugged, and being touched, he was drained. He’d been in a perpetual sensory onslaught that left his skin buzzing and his mind jittery with a thousand details that refused to line up in neat rows.
The previous night, with Poppy, had been a jumble of the unfamiliar and the deeply, viscerally good, and his nervous system didn’t know what to do with the dissonance. The truth was, he’d never found sleeping at someone else’s house anything less than impossible and stressful. The first time he’d stayed over at a girlfriend’s place, sophomore year at college, he’d lain awake all night listening to the mechanical whine of her box fan, the muffled thuds of her roommate’s feet, and the smell of unfamiliar detergent in the sheets. He had left at three in the morning, walked the length of campus back to his apartment, and only then, in the neurochemical safety of his own bed, fallen instantly asleep.
But last night had been different. Last night, AJ had slept—actually slept—beside Poppy, a solid, continuous block of four hours that left him rested in his body, balanced in his soul, and quiet in his mind. He’d woken up with her hair tickling his nose, her hand resting on his chest, and her body curled against his side and experienced a flood of contentment so intense it nearly unraveled him. The only place he’d wanted to be was there, with her.
He wondered if that was because he was in California and the option of being in his own home was not available to him. If the same situation had occurred in Virginia, would he have felt differently? It was only hypothetical, so he couldn’t be certain, but his gut was telling him that he wouldn’t have. It wasn’t about the location, his desire was about the person he was with. It was the improbable rightness of sharing space with a person whose very existence seemed to reprogram the rules of his internal operating system.
As he turned into the narrow drive leading up to the resort, AJ thought about the repairs he’d made at Poppy’s. It was a compulsion he hadn’t tried to fight. Growing up, Papou was a handyman, and AJ realized he’d learned a lot by observing him. He started out fixing things when he was around ten. It was a way to channel his energy into tasks, keeping his hands busy when his mind spun out. Later his skills were useful when Niko convinced him to flip houses during college.
It had been nearly a decade since AJ put his home improvement expertise to use, but it all came back to him. The drippy faucet in her bathroom had been the first thing he noticed the night before, the steady plinks of water, a constant drum beat in the otherwise still house. At four in the morning, while Poppy slept, he’d padded into the dark bathroom and dissected the problem. It was a worn washer, a missing O-ring, nothing he couldn’t handle with a flashlight and pink pliers that he found under her kitchen sink in a 40-piece WorkPro Pink Tool Set. He’d fixed it in less than ten minutes, satisfied by the silence that followed.
Then, as dawn ghosted in through the gaps in her curtains, he’d walked the perimeter of her tiny house, taking inventory of what needed to be done. He tackled the water pressure in her shower next, followed by the electrical in her kitchen, a half-dead outlet over the countertop that sparked if you wiggled the cord just right, and rounded out his work by taking care of the creaky step on her porch. Even if he never saw her again, which he hoped was not the case, he felt better leaving knowing that those things were taken care of.
Statistically speaking, there was a good probability AJ would see Poppy again. They had family members in common. Whether or not it would be in a personal capacity was yet to be determined.
He’d left Poppy a note on the table along with flowers, and he wondered if she’d read it. If she had, he wondered what she thought. He had to actively stop his mind from obsessing about her. If he didn’t, he’d get hyper-fixated on her aquamarine eyes, her unique fresh floral and laundry scent, the sweet tangy taste of her arousal on his lips, the melodic cadence of her voice, and the pressure of her body pressed against his ribs, which felt like she’d been made to fit there.
When he’d asked why she was single, he wasn’t kidding. He honestly had no idea how that woman didn’t have men fighting to the death for her. What sort of world did they live in that men weren’t lining up to be with her? He’d known her less than twenty-four hours, and she’d made him question everything he knew about himself, about his life, and about the world.
Gravel kicked up under his tires as he pulled to a stop in the resort parking lot. He cut the engine and sat for a moment with his hands on the wheel. In the distance, the jagged peaks of the Sierra Nevada shouldered up against the sky, lit from behind by the rising sun. His eyes took in the shapes of the landscape, how the mist clung to the treetops like a living thing, and how the steep highway out of town twisted and disappeared among the ponderosa pines.
Determined to put Poppy out of his head, at least for an hour, he grabbed his phone off the charging pad, put it in his pocket, then got his carry-on out of the back and headed up to his cabin. He was looking forward to the silence, to recalibrating after thirty-six hours of cross-country travel, family reunions, and the strange, exhilarating experience of waking up in another person’s bed and wanting, for once, to stay.
The morning sun was just high enough to burn off the last shreds of fog, leaving the air dewy and cold. Rustling trees, the crunch of his boots on twigs and leaves, and the faint tinkling from the resort’s wind chimes in an odd, minor-key melodythat would drive a wild turkey insane were playing as nature’s soundtrack as he walked up the path towards his cabin.
