THIRTY-FOUR
MELISSA
Luke holds my hand as we walk to the visitor parking area.
“Leave your car here,” he tells me. “We’ll come back for it tomorrow.”
“Okay.” I don’t want to let go of his hand, even for the ten minutes it’ll take to drive to my house, and I sense he feels the same.
There are so many things I need to say to Luke, but the road isn’t the place for it, and I can tell he senses that too. So we drive in silence, our only communication the clasp of our fingers. His is a surgeon’s hand: clean and strong, and a little rough from all the scrubbing. Capable of saving lives.
And yet he’d give up surgery for me.
His words play in my head on a loop.I’m not giving you up, Melissa, even if it means I lose my medical license.
At last, Luke parks his car in my driveway, takes off his seatbelt, and turns to me.
“So you love me, huh? That was a pretty good speech you gave Drew.” He says it lightly, almost as though he’s teasing, but his hazel eyes are serious. I’ve learned thatLuke has a habit of pretending to tease when he’s really trying to say something important.
“You know I love you, Luke,” I reply. “But I’d never ask you to choose me over your medical career. You save lives, Luke. That patient you had last night, the one in the car crash?—”
“You don’t understand, Milly,” he interrupts. His expression changes to something I’ve never seen before, and there’s no question he’s serious now. “That patient last night. . . she’s thirty-one years old. Your age. And I saw her husband’s face when he thought she didn’t make it, and I imagined how I’d feel in his place. If I thought I’d lost you.”
Luke’s voice is a little shaky from the strength of his emotion. “And last night, when I told that woman’s husband she was going to survive, he wept. He wept, and then he hugged me, and he told me he fell in love with her in high school. And I just . . . I had to see you, even though it was the middle of the night.”
“Oh,” I say inarticulately. And I’d thought he was just stressed from a difficult surgery.
“And I knew I had to report Ethan’s drinking,” he says. “Because if you needed emergency surgery, I’d sure as hell want your surgeon to be sober.”
“Yeah. Yeah, of course. But Luke, your medical license?—”
“Melissa, surgery’s just a job,” Luke interrupts. “If I quit tomorrow, the hospital would have a replacement hired by next week. And I could find another job, in research or consulting or something. But you’re not replaceable, Melissa. Seeing that woman’s husband last night helped me get my priorities straight.”
I’m too overwhelmed to answer right away. Instead, Istare at his face, drinking him in. He was the first man I ever fell in love with, and I know he’ll be the last.
And most importantly, he’s mine again.
“I love you, Luke.”
I don’t know how long we spend kissing in my driveway—time seems to lose all meaning—but we don’t stop until Luke’s elbow hits the car horn and it blares.
“Shit,” he mutters, shaking his head. “Let’s go inside, Milly.”
So we go inside, and he takes me to bed.
Once we’ve satisfied our hunger for each other, we order pizza and eat it in my bedroom. I show him the video of my math rant and tell him about Carole Chan’s offer of a permanent teaching job.
“Are you considering it?” he asks.
“Yeah. She’d like me to go to Teachers’ College, but there are some online programs now. So I could probably do it remotely and keep teaching part time. I wouldn’t start until next year, when Liam’s in school. What do you think?”
He smiles. “I trust your judgment, and I think you should do what you want. But considering the success of that video, you might make more money as a math influencer.”
I roll my eyes and lean over to tickle him in the ribs.
“I almost forgot,” he says. “I got you a present. It’s in my car.”
He disappears for a minute and returns with a shopping bag from Negligée, a fancy lingerie store at the mall. Even the bag looks expensive, pink and black and shiny, and it’s bigger than any lingerie bag I’ve ever seen.
