I take a sip, and sure enough, it’s the same fucking coffee with oat milk and cardamom.
Jesus fucking Christ.
A flicker stirs under my ribs, and it has nothing to do with the caffeine.
I’ve been doing better these last few days. Eating real food again instead of surviving on crackers from the staff room. Sleepingmore than four or five hours at a stretch. Making it through a full shift without feeling like I’m dragging my feet through mud.
I’ve started settling in here too. I know people’s names now. I’ve got coworkers who wait for me before lunch and text me memes during overnight shifts. Seattle still doesn’t fully feel like mine, but at least it stopped feeling like punishment all the time.
The George situation has been shoved far enough into the back of my brain that I can function without randomly wanting to lie face-down on the floor.
Mostly.
Fine, I’m still not at “mostly” but I’m not about to let one stupidly specific coffee order wreck all that progress.
I look up the corridor and see Valerie getting ready for a wound dressing in Bay four. Passing by a stretch of windows along the wall that looks out over the parking lot, the glass doors leading to this floor just beyond it, I walk towards her to ask where she got this coffee. Through the strip of windows, my eyes catch some movement outside.
George is standing on the other side of the glass.
For a moment, I don’t move. My brain registers the impossible, that I’m possibly deteriorating and making this shit up. I know I’ve been having a rough few months, but not to a point where I’ll start hallucinating people into existence. Even if I were, my brain would probably have the decency to pick a less inconvenient time.
I blink hard once. He’s still there.
Hands shoved into his jacket pockets. Broad shoulders, looking through the glass like he belongs here.
It’s not the memory-version George—it’s the real one, bigger in person than he’s been in my head these last few months.
Then the details start registering one by one. Beard trimmed shorter. Hair longer on top now, pushed back. Dark jacket and worn boots. He looks cold.
He also looks unfairly fucking good.
My body reacts instantly before my brain can get involved, heat flashing through me so fast it’s almost dizzying before it leaves behind this hollow, tight ache under my ribs that makes me want to start a fistfight with God.
I catch the faintest lift of his chin. He’s looking.
And then our eyes lock properly for the first time in almost three months.
All that distance, and I still haven’t managed to kill this thing off inside me. I’ve just been carving pieces out slowly and calling it progress. Teaching myself how to get through a day without constantly reaching for him in my head like muscle memory.
And now he’s just standing there outside the clinic like none of that happened.
I force every expression off my face immediately. Lock it all down tight.
I break eye contact first and walk down the corridor before my body can do something stupidly humiliating, like run after him.
One hand jams deep into my scrub pocket because I suddenly need somewhere to hide the fist clenching hard enough to hurt. The other grips the coffee cup so tightly it buckles slightly near the lid.
I reach the nurses’ station sink, stare at the cup for one long second, then dump the whole thing straight down the drain.
I watch the coffee disappear.
I don’t look back to see if he’s still there. I grab the next chart and keep moving. No way am I going to stand in the middle of the ward trying to figure out what the hell George is doing in Seattle, thousands of miles from where he belongs.
The third run-in with the fucking past hits at the end of a brutal night shift. I’m running on fumes—twelve hours of barely-there sleep and the last scraps of professionalism I have left. I push through the main doors of the clinic, expecting nothing but the cold and the emptiness of the parking lot.
George is standing just a few feet away under the glow of a building light, breath fogging in the freezing air. There’s some sort of bag in his hand. He looks up as I step outside.
“Fuck,” I say before I can stop myself.
