And if he doesn’t wake up…well. Is letting them believe this white lie really that bad? Letting them think he had company and comfort in his last weeks, last moments?
“This is kind of awkward,” she manages to say, Nolan’s mom’s arm still around her. “But he never actually told me any of your names.”
Not a lie, technically.
Marie laughs out loud, and Alice steels herself. She can do this. Just until he wakes up.
Or doesn’t.
Two
Alice walks toward the hospital, blankly following Nolan’s mom, who is apparently named Barbara but insists that Alice call her Babs. Alice personally would rather be called almost anything other than Babs, but, sure. To each her own slightly infantilizing nickname. His Aunt Sheila is absolutely booking it inside, and Alice and Marie are practically running after them to keep up while the men park the car.
Alice almost balks at the entrance to the hospital. She hasn’t been in one in over a decade, not since she was nineteen, and she’d honestly hoped to never cross the threshold of Portland Grace, or any other hospital, ever again.
But here she is, about to go in not for her own dad, but for someone she’s never really met. Or, well. For his family, she guesses. For Babs and Aunt Sheila and sweet Marie and the two boomer men she’s still struggling to tell apart. She takes a deep breath—one last breath that doesn’t smell like sterile plastic and antiseptic—and she forces herself inside.
They ride up to the fourth floor, and Aunt Sheila bolts outof the elevator before the doors are fully open.
“Alice, what’s your last name?” Marie asks as they breathlessly stride out of the elevator in a futile attempt to catch up. “I need to find you on Instagram.”
Oh definitely no. Alice’s Instagram is basically a graveyard, but it has a suspicious lack of Nolan on it. “I don’t have one,” she lies, resolving to delete her account at the first opportunity. “But it’s Rue. Like rue the day.”
“Alice Rue.” Marie scrunches up her nose. “That’s so cute I almost hate it,” she says and Alice, for the first time today, laughs.
“Hey, we can’t all be Altmans,” she says, and Marie grins, pretending to flip her hair. The move is slightly compromised by the two different colored Crocs she’s wearing, but something about her energy is infectious anyway.
God, Alice would love to be an Altman.
Marie links her arm with Alice’s, which makes Alice almost stumble in surprise. She doesn’t have what one might consider friends and she’s so painfully single she seems to have hallucinated an entire relationship, so it’s been a minute since she’s touched anyone. Marie doesn’t seem to notice, still grinning as she says, “Well, none of us are going to rue the day we met you, I’ll tell you that much.”
Alice laughs again but this time it’s fake, high and way too loud. Alice is going to rue the day she was fucking born, that’s for sure. She’s moderately confident that Nolan doesn’t have any social media, but now she’s paranoid about it. She’s spent many hours searching for Nolan on Instagram without finding him—she’s not a stalker, she’s simply insanely bored at work and also maybe very lonely—but what if he does have one? Alice is clearly not going to be on it, and, shit, what if there’s another girl pictured? Oh god, what if he really has agirlfriend?
How did a simple, private little crush get so complicated? It’s enough to make her regret maybe saving his life altogether.
Marie pulls her down the long hallway, and Alice tries to repress the flashbacks dancing between her eyes, the way her gorge is rising at the familiar fluorescent lights, the steady whirs of the machines, the squeak of comfortable nursing shoes on linoleum. It’s all as familiar as breathing and she hates it with every molecule in her body.
“He’s in here,” Marie says, pushing Alice into the last room on the right. The first thing Alice sees is Nolan in the bed. He’s in a gown, with an oxygen cannula in his nose. His hands are flat at his sides, and the blanket is tucked under his armpits, unnaturally smooth. Purely by habit, Alice’s eyes flick to the monitors, but then she drops them. His vitals are none of her business. Besides, she can tell the important thing from looking at him. He’s still not woken up.
He looks terrible, pale and wan under the thick black hair that Alice has always loved. Something clenches in her chest. This is the man she’s been pining after for 751 days, and this is how she’s meeting his family, learning how his mom brushes the hair out of his face, how his aunt bustles around the room like it needs fixing. This is her first sight of him outside of his tailored suits, and it’s all wrong. Nothing is supposed to be this way.
It becomes very clear, between one heartbeat and the next, that Alice absolutely cannot handle this. Not him lying motionless in this bed. Not the hospital, not the loving mom, not the little sister hanging on her arm. None of it. She can feel the old signs of a panic attack forming behind her eyes, signs she hasn’t felt in years. The world is closing in around her; her chest feels too tight and her brain too swollen for her skull,just like when she was a kid, standing in this same building.
She turns on her heel, ready to flee, plan be damned, but she crashes straight into a wall that has a surprising amount of give.
“Oomph,” the wall says. “What in the—”
The wall is gripping onto her arms now, and the small part of Alice that isn’t consumed with panic registers that the wall is probably a person.
“Hey, are you okay?”
Certainly the most compassionate wall Alice has ever met, with a pleasantly gravelly voice, like the owner doesn’t use it much. The hands on her biceps are big and strong, somehow holding her up but still gentle. The wall smells amazing, a combination of cologne and a slightly feminine shampoo that cuts beautifully through the ubiquitous stench of hospital disinfectant.
A tiny corner of Alice’s mind clears, and she realizes that the wall is quite possibly the most stunning butch she’s ever seen.
She looks like Nolan—same coloring, same square jaw, same strong nose, same devastating cheekbones—but softer where he almost veers into hawkish. Marie looks like Nolan watered down, but this person makes Nolan look like the one who is a faint copy. She’s tall and solid, wearing an extremely stereotypical flannel shirt tucked into dark jeans.
“You okay?” she asks again, and the way her dark brown eyes bore into Alice’s is way too much for Alice’s poor bisexual brain.
