Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle(121)

She paused with her fork still in the papardelle-and-mushroom pasta she’d been demolishing. “I started out wanting to be a doctor. I was pre-med in college, took a ton of science classes. And then someone very wisely suggested I spend a day shadowing a doctor. So I did. And I stood there, watching what she did, thinking, oh, God, I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to take people’s lives in my hands like that. Not every day. Not ever, actually.”

She was so animated when she talked, hands moving, her skin glowing, cheeks pink, her eyes bright with excitement. He thought of the conversation he’d had with her on the phone, the urgency of the desire she’d called up in him. Even without visual contact, all her vivacity had found its way across the phone line and under his skin. That was her power over him.

“And then I thought, wait, if this is the best way to understand what a job is like, I should shadow some other people. I asked everyone I knew, my parents’ friends and stuff, if I could go to work with them. I went to work with, like, ten different people, and it all left me cold. Then I went to work with a woman who had been my babysitter when I was a little kid. She was a seventh-grade science teacher. And, honestly, she wasn’t that good at it. I kept thinking, Wait! I have a better way to explain that! I wanted to butt in so bad it hurt to shut up. So I knew.”

He’d like to watch her teach sometime. Maybe he’d go visit her in Boston soon, and he’d ask if he could see her in action.

If there was no criminal charge against him. That would probably put a damper on his ability to spend time inside a middle school.

When she’d asked him if he’d embezzled the money, every little thing inside him ground to a halt. It had become so quiet in his own head that for the first time in months he’d been able to hear something else. His heart. He wanted, with a kind of fervor he couldn’t understand, to tell her everything. How terrible it was to be accused, how terrible it was to be doubted, how quietly desperate it felt, knowing no one believed he was innocent.

It was connected somehow to the moments he’d first seen her, at the party. To the way she’d been then: So open, so completely in the world. So willing to pull everyone else in with her. If only he could pour everything out to her, he could be there, too. With her.

But when he had opened his mouth, none of that came out. Only the barest facts, the simplest delineations of what you could read in a newspaper. His assertion of his own innocence had felt like way too little, way less than he needed her to know. Not an invitation into the world, just a reminder that he was in a place no one else could live in with him.

“Miles?”

“Sorry.”

“You went somewhere.”

“I was thinking about—” But he didn’t want to return them to the darker topic, didn’t want to suffocate her ebullience. Didn’t want to subdue the sparkle that was all over her skin, something he could lick off later and hope would get into his own blood. “You’re lucky you had someone to tell you to do the shadowing. I don’t think enough people think to do that.”

“They don’t,” she agreed. “How’d you figure out what you wanted to do?”

“I was in I-banking after college. Not because it was the right thing for me particularly, but I was graduating and I didn’t know what I wanted to do and it was there. They came right on campus to recruit us, and it was a solution to not knowing, so I did it. And I turned out to have a gift for parting people from their money—”

He heard the words coming out, felt them like a slug in the gut. He’d said that phrase a hundred times, probably a thousand times, told the same story to countless people, but for the first time, it was ugly.

“Shh,” she said. She took his hand across the table.

The warmth of her hand, the warmth in her eyes, helped steady his breathing. Again he felt the urge, the need, to pour himself out to her. I’m innocent! It would be a kind of anguished cry, an insistence bigger than the words. I’m innocent, and I need you and everyone in the whole world to know and see.…

Help me. Help me tell them.

And maybe she would. If there was anyone in the world who would, it was Nora.

“It’s fine. I know what you meant. Go on.”

Her voice, so quiet and even. Free of judgment. She wasn’t disturbed by his situation, but she might be turned off by his desperation.

And he’d been stoic so long, he wasn’t sure what would happen if he stopped. He’d made a science out of the stoicism, knew exactly how to wrap his arms around all the pieces and hold them together. The thing inside him—it had the feel of a genie in a corked bottle, all unintended consequences and wishes for things you could only approach, could never have. Weren’t fairy tales full of those kinds of stories? I want her to know what I’m thinking. Feeling. Only no one did, really. No one wanted to be that kind of naked and exposed.