I smile at her because I don't know what else to do, and then I turn and walk the rest of the way alone.
His consultation room looks exactly the way you'd expect Dr. Collington's consultation room to look if Dr. Collington were the kind of man who made even breathing look elegant. Which he is. So.
The desk is pale wood, almost white, with nothing on it except a single pen and a closed laptop placed at a precise angle. The chair behind it is low-backed, simple, the kind of chair that would look boring in anyone else's office but here looks like a throne that's choosing to be modest. There's a low shelf along the wall with a handful of books between wooden bookends, and I can't read the spines from here but I already know they're arranged in some kind of perfect order because the man who sits in this room irons his lab coat.
The walls are bare except for one thing. A single scroll of calligraphy in a dark wood frame, brushstrokes so spare and clean they look like a breath held on paper. I don't know what it says. I don't read Japanese. But something about it feels private in a way that makes me look away, like I've accidentally seen something I wasn't supposed to.
There's a small stone basin on the shelf near the window. No water in it. Just the basin, smooth and grey, sitting there like it's been sitting there for a hundred years and plans to sit there for a hundred more. The whole room smells like him, I think, even though I don't know what that means exactly. Not cologne. Not antiseptic. Woodsy, maybe. Like paper and cedar and very clean air.
Everything in this room is calm.
And I’m the opposite...because I still think...
I think he was pressured.
This isn't a prank. I know that much. Dr. Collington isn't the type to participate in such things. He's too busy and too dignified, too much of a super hot superhero whose cape of choice is a lab coat with his initials monogrammed on his breast pocket, and he once apologized to a door for opening it too fast. That man does not do pranks.
But that's exactly why none of this makes sense.
I don't know how he ended up being forced to lie and pretend about having feelings for me, but the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that I'm right.
Maybe someone's blackmailing him?
I'm not sure why falling in love with me would be the punishment, and I'll be the first to admit I'm not good at the technical stuff, but it could be true, right? Maybe someone's got something on him, and the price of their silence is him pretending to be in love with the girl who once asked him to check her heart rate because a woman in Radiology smiled at him, and he actually did it, and my heart rate was in fact elevated, and he recommended she reduce her caffeine intake, and I said I would even though I would literally rather die, and oh God, I'm spiraling.
Or what if he's suffered an accident and no one told me about it, and the side effect is temporary insanity manifested by his sudden declaration of love for me?
So many possibilities crowd my mind that I find myself jumping to my feet, and I’m thinking, thinking, oh why bother?
I think I’m just going to distract myself with the coffee station in the corner of his consultation room. I still remember the day he taught me how to use it and how to make latte art. That’s actuallyanotherreason why I’ve always believed Dr. Collington issecretlyinto me, but...what if I also got that wrong?
What if I’ve gotten everything wrong?
I mean...he was so, so patient while teaching me, and at that time, I was thinking,it’s a sign, it’s another sign I’m special to him.
But what if he’s just, you know...patient?
And then there’s how super,supercareful he was when teaching me. Meticulously making sure that we don’t come into contact atall. At that time, Ialsosaw it as his way of making me feel—yes, it’s that, too—I believed it was his way of making me feelspecial.
But what if he’s just, well...careful, and oh my gosh, I feel like I’m overthinking myself to death here.
This coffee station with all the fancy things it can do is supposed to distract me, but it’s not working at all. All I can think of is how the past two years have been, and how none of it might have meant what I thought it meant because...
I think he was pressured.
I give up on the coffee station and start pacing the length of his consultation room. Could that be true? Have I just been jumping from one crazy conclusion to another this whole time? When I asked him earlier if he was in love with me, and he said yes—
Was that really true? Or was he lying because...Ipressured him to say so?
Just the thought of it makes my heart feels like it’s about to implode, and I’m starting to find it so, so difficult to breathe. It’s like someone telling me I’ve won a million dollars...only to have that same person say they’ve made a mistake, it’s actually someone else—
Oh!
The door suddenly opens, and I’m completely caught off guard at the sight of Dr. Collington walking in like an angel made human. Everything he does is just so effortlessly graceful and so perfectly...hot. I honestly don’t know how he does it. White coats aren’t exactly the sexiest thing on earth, but he just makes it work, with his sleeves rolled to his forearms, and oh, just looking at him now—
A part of me wants to cry. Another part of me wants to run away.
But in the end, the part of me that wins is the part that believes in doing the right thing, and so—
