Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle(81)

Dr. Allen looks at me for a moment. “Look, Evan told us in a chart review for you that he excused himself as your OT. You two developed feelings for each other?”

“Yes.”

She looks like she wants to say something, so I give her the permission she needs. “He was always totally professional.”

“I know that. He did everything like he was supposed to, it’s just that I know what he was thinking, and I’d like to ask you your perspective if you’d like to talk about it.”

Not really. I don’t really want to talk about it. Evan and I haven’t talked about it, what I saw on his skin, that C had shown me in pieces. He did everything like he was supposed to except say, that day in my office when he discovered I was Lincoln—I took these pictures.

Which, of course, meant I should be able to say I’ve seen this tattoo, though that choked and lodged inside my throat.

Before, it seemed like the only thing unspoken between us was a kiss.

Now it’s two whole other people who are supposed to be strangers.

“I guess,” I hedge, “I don’t have a perspective, not yet, it’s new.”

“Look, I probably shouldn’t say anything at all, it’s just that you’re special. You’re a special woman. Now, I know Evan, and he’s special, too, and I don’t actually have any theoretical reservations, but you’ve had the most dramatic few months I can imagine.”

I laugh, kind of. “I can. Imagine I mean. And the thing is, with Evan, there isn’t anything to worry about.”

Which feels empty, in my mouth, to say.

We have C and Lincoln to worry about.

“Will you—talk to me about it? If you need to? I don’t want to presume, but you and I? We’re in it for the long haul. Or, at least I am.”

Oh. I feel the tears.

I never had any reason to sit at home in the dark, I’m finding.

None.

None.

Evan Carlisle-Ford, in particular. In my confusion since our afternoon together, I looked him up in the campus directory, looking for little pieces to put together. Obviously, he didn’t use the hyphenate of his name at work, or maybe he didn’t use his given first name with his family. It didn’t matter. I didn’t have enough to put together from the beginning, not enough data.

I wondered if I had all the data now.

I had this hypothesis, about love, about living, but I wasn’t sure how it would be proven.

“Jenny?”

“Yeah?”

Dr. Allen sits down across from me, puts down my chart between us.

“We need to talk.”

* * *

I was so good.

I listened.

Asked questions.

Looked at Dr. Allen’s numbers.

Just rough percentages, she said, but too much loss of peripheral than she is comfortable with inside the time frame.

Answered her questions about my functionality.

Discussed therapy, again, my wholehearted participation in it.

She smiled at me and gave me a hug.

I hugged her back, just like I always do, tight, with my whole heart in it.

It’s snowing and the sky’s dark with it. The flakes are tiny, and coming down fast, the kind of snow that will drift in huge piles. I’m starting to get a sense of the snow, a crash course in it. I’m starting to be able to look at a snowflake and see the snowfall.

The snow that had been so pretty last week, that had been such a pretty backdrop to my shopping, to desperate kissing, had given over to intermittent storms.

Tomorrow, the city will be a mess. Children’s schools will close, or be delayed, traffic will slip and slide over the freeways. If it’s still snowing like this, the plows might even wait it out, conserve their salt and their gasoline until it lets up, until the sun breaks and gives the dark asphalt a chance to help them out.

It feels good, out here in the snow, the air cold enough to break open my lungs and let me breathe. There is never anyone in this courtyard, and there hasn’t been anyone here since it started snowing, most everyone has left for the winter break—no footprints.

Just the white blanket over everything.

Covering everything up.

I want to mess it up.

I want it to look dirty and gray and salted and torn.

I want the red bricks to show through and the black ice to take over.

I want it to look as awful as it really is.

I start on the outside edge of the courtyard, and drag my boots as I go, sliding in the ice that never fully melted underneath. I keep walking, like I’m doing one of those meditation labyrinths my mom always took me to, a maze, except with no dead ends, outlined in pebbles in some beautiful garden, something that was supposed to remind you of the path of life, of its twists and turns and continuity or some fucking-stupid bullshit.

Some fucking-stupid thing.