All Amity Allows (Fall for You Book 2) (14 page)

She’d raced to the hospital as soon as she’d detected his anger—zipping to the space outside his office door in a fraction of a second. She listened as he spoke with Becca, and wrapped her grace around his mind listening for any sign he was about to crack the way Rose’s husband had so many years ago.

Instead, he’d taken the opportunity to heal himself a little more. Amity smiled to herself as he took a few big strides toward acceptance and understanding—the two things he needed to find to be in a position where he could heal and then maybe even find someone new to focus on.

The thought sent her smile tumbling into a frown. She didn’t think he was ready for anyone else just yet. At least,
she
wasn’t ready for him to be with anyone else just yet. It had only been a few weeks since everything had happened with Becca, after all, and if he was going to fall for anyone else, it should be someone who brought out the best in him. The silly, laughing-at-animated-trolls best in him. Amity stopped the train of thought in its tracks—it was dangerous to let herself think that way. She wouldn’t be the only one to face Heaven’s repercussions if Michael found out how she felt about a human.

After pulling herself up, Amity had continued to listen to the conversation. She’d debated rescuing Drew from Becca, but didn’t when it sounded like he didn’t need her help. She’d only intervened after Drew had said her name. It had shocked her to the core when Drew had given her so much credit for keeping him sane. She’d known she was helping, but for Drew to say he would have gone crazy if not for her . . .

Well, she almost didn’t believe it. Except he couldn’t lie—the tear in his soul might have been slowly healing, but it was still there, and the interference of her grace’s lingering presence still pushed him into speaking only the truth.

After hearing her name, she’d knocked. Not because of any concern she had that things might get nasty, but because she genuinely wanted to spend some more time with Drew and was going slightly insane over the fact that Becca was in the room alone with him. The fact was that Amity desired Drew’s attention more than she should have. She’d interrupted Becca and Drew in what could have been a healing conversation, and she couldn’t even find it in herself to care.

He’d stirred compassion in her that had lain dormant for years. It terrified her just as much as it fascinated her. So when he’d offered her his arm, she’d taken it willingly—albeit carefully so she didn’t touch his bare skin with hers.

“So what’s on the menu?” she asked Drew.

“You tell me since you’re the one who instigated this lunch date.”

“Yeah, but you know the area better than I do.”

“There’s a little deli up the road. We could get some sandwiches.”

They walked in a companionable silence. Amity assumed Drew was still lost in thought over what had transpired between him and Becca. She could have confirmed it by brushing her grace against his soul again, but she had an urge to do things the old-fashioned way—with instinct and guidance.

“So what exactly did I interrupt back there?” Amity asked after they’d grabbed their food and settled at the only spare table in the tiny diner.

Drew snorted. “Nothing good.”

Amity waited for Drew to elaborate with a raised brow to let him know she wanted more. When he started talking again, he told a tale of word vomit that left Amity cringing through her fingers and laughing along with Drew.

“She must hate me,” Drew said as his chuckling subsided.

“At least you can laugh about it now.”

“When I was stuck in that office with her, I didn’t think I would ever be able to. I have you to thank for that.” He leaned forward, and slipped his hand forward across the table, as if he was going to reach for her. Before he could, she smoothly dropped her hands into her lap.

Even though the thought of holding his hand terrified her for the pain it might cause, her stomach twisted in a not altogether unpleasant way at the thought that he’d made the attempt. She wanted to let him, but she didn’t want to feel the pain of humanity. There was more than that though; her brewing desire was alarming her more by the minute. Part of her wanted nothing more than to flee at the mere thought of how desperately she wanted to let him hold her hand.

“I haven’t really done anything,” she said.

He frowned as he looked at the place her hand had been. “I think we both know that isn’t true.”

The way he looked at her made the air in the small deli thicken to the consistency of tar. She didn’t need the oxygen, but she still felt the struggle to breathe as acutely as any human might.

“You’re probably going to be missed if you’re not back soon,” she said, pushing away from the table in a desperate attempt to break the tension.

He eyed her barely-touched sandwich before pushing his own away. “Yeah. I guess.”

Before she’d had a chance to say anything more, or reduce the impact of her obviously too abrupt change in topic, he’d cleared off the table, tossed everything in the bin and was pushing the door open to leave the small space.

“Drew, wait,” she called out as she followed him out. She caught up to him easily despite his long-pacing strides. “Don’t run away from me. Please.”

The instant her hand touched his shoulder, he spun around. His face was a blank mask, but his eyes practically screamed with the pain he was hiding. “I’m not running.”

He turned and started pacing back toward the hospital again.

She sighed. “Drew—”

“Just don’t worry about it,” he threw back at her over his shoulder.

“I
am
worried about it.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m your friend.”

He stopped and sighed. “Yeah. That’s right. Friend.”

Amity could tell that something had shifted between them, and maybe that shift had set him backward, but she didn’t know how to fix it other than to give him space.

“I need to remember that,” he muttered under his breath before moving on again.

Maybe the hands-on approach isn’t as effective as I’d hoped
.

Chapter Thirteen

Friend
.

The word rattled around Drew’s head all afternoon, long after Amity had left him after their disastrous lunch. Her words had been the reminder he needed that they were friends.
Just
friends. That was all they were, and all they could be. Her friendship was a big part of the reason he’d been feeling better lately, but he was still recovering from a broken heart for fuck’s sake. The last thing he needed was an awkward situation at home as well as at work.

It was just that . . . well, they’d been getting along so well that he’d all but convinced himself that she felt something for him too. Maybe not love, it was too early for that, but something more than friendship.

Apparently not
.

He’d fumbled his way through a few consults but his mind was elsewhere. It was at the front desk with Becca, but not for the reasons his mind had turned to her so often in the past. Instead, he wondered what the etiquette was for the broken-hearted. Did the fact that she appeared to have well and truly moved on mean he could too? His mind was also off with Amity—God knows where—wondering how to stay just friends with her when she’d become such a constant presence in his life. It was easy to imagine sharing more with her—sharing
everything
with her.

He was so preoccupied with his haunted past and his desired future, that it took him until almost mid-afternoon to realize he was being assigned to the most basic cases. Every patient he’d seen were ones he probably could have managed with his eyes closed, even as an intern. For a moment, he debated trying to get to the bottom of it, but logic quickly reasoned that it was probably his father’s doing. After all, his father had been the one to suggest a little time off—no doubt this was his idea of a compromise.

He marched to his father’s office, hoping to deal with the issue as quickly as possible, but it sat empty. When the initial disappointment of that discovery wore off, Drew thought some more about his situation—or tried to in between his mind swinging to thoughts of Amity. It became clear to him that maybe his head was so full of Amity because his life was so full of her. Since she’d crashed into it at the bar, they’d spent almost all of his free time together. He hadn’t even spent that much time with Becca, and he’d been dating her.

Maybe he needed an evening off, he decided. An evening away from Amity and back in his old routine. Or at least, the routine he had established around dates with Becca.

With his father obviously in surgery, or somewhere else in the building, Drew decided to bypass asking him for permission and rang his stepmother, Addy, instead.

“Well, this is a surprise,” Addy said when she picked up the phone. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

The hesitant joy in her voice gave Drew momentary pause. He’d very rarely called to speak to her. In fact, to call their relationship tenuous would have been a vast overstatement.

It was because of his mother and his loyalty to her. Even though she had been the one to do the leaving, she’d still considered it an unforgiveable sin when his father had moved on and remarried. Because of the simple fact that Addy was ten years younger than his dad, Drew had always assumed the marriage was the result of an early mid-life crisis, especially when he’d learned about the new hobbies Addy had encouraged him to take up—something which Drew himself had only recently begun to understand the benefits of.

“I was just wondering if Dad had any plans this evening,” Drew said.

He wondered whether he imagined the small sigh on the other end of the line before Addy spoke again. “No, we have no plans for tonight. Why?”

“I just thought I might come home for dinner. If that’s all right, that is?”

“You know you’re always welcome.” Her voice had perked up at least three octaves during her response, so much so he could practically hear her smile.

Once more, as he ran through a plan for dinner with Addy, he found himself wondering whether he should really go easier on her. Maybe she was actually good for his Dad—she certainly meant a lot to him. In the same way that a particular blonde someone shaking Drew loose a little hadn’t harmed him in any way.

He’d just hung up from the call and turned around when he practically tripped over Cathy.

“You. Me. Your office. Now.” She snapped the five words at him before turning and heading in the direction of his office before he could argue.

He should have guessed that what happened with Becca—his wildly inappropriate slip of the tongue and the subsequent explosion in his office—wouldn’t be the end of it. Like a schoolboy following after the headmaster, he dragged his feet and took his time making his way back to his office. He knew Amity wouldn’t come back onto the scene to rescue him from Cathy—not that the rescue from Becca had ended that fantastically.

By the time he closed his office door, Cathy was already sitting in the chair across from his with her arms folded across her chest.

“To what do I owe the pleasure?” he asked as he circled his desk to take his seat.

“What’s going on with you, Drew?”

He didn’t want to open his mouth just in case things he didn’t want to say spilled out again. Instead, he shrugged and stared at her, waiting for her to get to the point.

“I’ve been hearing stories from all around. I thought some of them were too farfetched to be true, but after this morning, I don’t know what’s too farfetched anymore.” She raised her eyebrow at him. “So, I ask again, in the interest of the vestiges of our friendship, what’s wrong?”

Cathy’s attitude left Drew reeling. She was always no nonsense, but this was even more blunt than usual. Wondering if he was pushing all his friends away today, Drew leaned forward, cupped his hands over his face, and blew out a frustrated breath. “I don’t know what’s wrong.”

“Not good enough.”

He looked up at her, wondering just how crazed he must have appeared after the day he’d been having. He raked his hands through his hair. “I know it’s not. Trust me, I do. But I don’t know what else to give you. If I told you the truth, I doubt you’d believe me.”

She leaned back in the seat and gave him her best, “Try me,” look.

He scoffed.

“Trust me,” she said. Her voice was a little softer, inviting.

He remembered what she’d said to him the day after he was unceremoniously dumped, and all the times she’d been there for him professionally, and found himself wanting to confide in someone not involved in the situation. “Fine. But you’re not allowed to have me committed after I tell you.”

She laughed.

“I’m serious,” he added. If someone came to him spouting the sort of information he was about to spill, he wouldn’t think twice about having them put into involuntary psychiatric care.

When she nodded and indicated that he should proceed, he sighed and then let the words flow. For the next thirty minutes, he detailed every strange occurrence that had happened to him since his break-up with Becca.

“And to top it all off,” he finished. “I think I might be falling for my housemate even though she’s made it clear that she is not interested in me in that way. I’m stuck in the friend zone. How pathetic is that?”

During his monologue, Cathy had alternated between sitting back skeptically and leaning forward as if nothing could have been more interesting. Now, she was somewhere in the middle with an unreadable expression on her face. “I don’t think it’s pathetic at all. Pathetic would be curling up in a ball at home and not doing anything. Pathetic would have been driving to Becca’s house for a confrontation. Trust me, Drew, you are far from pathetic.”

He offered her a weak smile.

“But we do need to get this verbal diarrhea under control. It’s affecting your work and your patients.”

“I know.”

“It could cost you your job.”

“I know,” he repeated, his voice resounding with a little more of the frustration that bubbled in his chest.

“It could cost Becca hers.”

“I know, goddamn it. I know.” He stood, slamming his fists onto the desk in front of him as the words exploded from him. The instant they were free, he wanted to reel them back in and remove the wide-eyed concern on Cathy’s features. He slumped back into his chair. “I just don’t know what to do about it.”

“You could talk to Dr. McGregor?”

“I don’t know that it’ll help.”

“It might though.”

He waved her off dismissively.

“Maybe you need a vacation?”

He sighed and thought about just getting away, of letting his hair down and going somewhere completely unfamiliar with no expectations or chance of running into either Amity or Becca.

“Maybe you’re right,” he said as the idea formed and solidified in his mind. He barked a hard laugh as he shook his head.

Cathy tilted her head questioningly.

“A week ago, I wouldn’t have even considered the option,” Drew explained. “I would have thought it was nothing more than a waste of time. Time I could spend improving my skills here.”

“You can’t spend your whole life working,” Cathy said.

“You’re the second person to tell me that lately.”

“Maybe that just means that it’s time for you to start listening.”

When Cathy eventually left Drew’s office, he was more confused than ever, but actually felt okay about it. Maybe he didn’t need to have all the answers all the time.

Amity didn’t
know where to go. She burned and ached, and was more confused than she’d ever been in her entire existence. Thousands of years’ experience hadn’t prepared her for the way Drew made her feel. When she closed her eyes, a million thoughts and emotions swelled around inside of her like a swarm of angry bees, each one demanding attention and stinging her from within. For the first time in the longest time, the shell wrapped around her grace took center-stage. Her human body thrummed with need, overriding all of the desires of the angelic parts of her.

In an attempt to escape the hormones battering her body, she closed her eyes and retreated into herself. She loosened the hold of the humanity she’d wrapped herself in for so long, and allowed her grace to leave her body. Before she’d really decided what she was going to do, she returned home for the first time in too long. Heaven was an impossible thing to describe to anyone who couldn’t travel there. It wasn’t at all like the storybooks of man described it to be, at least not to the angels who resided there. There were no gold-lined streets, no white-clad beauties plucking at harp-strings as they lazed about on clouds. There was nothing. And yet it was everything. Every hum of energy that wrapped around the cosmos, everything that kept it all connected, radiated out of Heaven.

Human souls, all a pure form of energy, returned to find a home alongside loved ones and keep the whole universe balanced. They were all conscious, able to have thoughts independent of the pool of energy they formed. Therefore Heaven was something different to every person who entered through the pearly gates. Angels were the caretakers of Heaven and Earth and were acutely aware of the interconnectivity of everything. Only one angel could read the dreams the human souls created though.

“Amitiel?” The “voice” thrummed through her and around her. Without her human shell, Amity felt, heard, and even tasted the word. It became part of her for the moment that it existed. “What are you doing here?”

“I needed to come home, Peter. I needed space to think about something.” Even as the words encompassed her being and released to him, they dragged the emotions and the feelings she’d been able to hide so well down on Earth with them. In that instant, Peter, keeper of secrets and creator of worlds, knew everything she had ever felt.

Her brother’s energy thrummed near hers and she was brought into a world of his making. He stood guard at the metaphysical pearly gates—creator and curator of all the worlds inhabited by the souls in his care—and this was his way of forcing her to stop and talk.

She took a moment to appreciate her new surroundings. The bright, spring sun filled the orchard with light. The scent of the crisp fruit hanging from the trees provided a pleasant backdrop to what she was certain would be a not-too-pleasant conversation. Her outfit, gingham and overalls, was something she never would have picked for herself and her hair was split into platted pigtails. She decided to keep her mouth shut on the outfit lest Peter decide to make it even worse.

She glanced over at Peter, holding an apple in his hand and sitting on a bench positioned between two trees. His appearance was that of a seasoned farmhand, tan and weathered skin; his face shadowed by the straw hat on his head and the mottled pattern of the sun filtering through the trees around him. Top to toe, he was dressed in check and denim.

Amity chuckled as he threw the fruit at her. She caught it mid-air and offered him a wry grin in response. “Apt,” she said.

“I thought so.”

Holding the apple in both hands, she took a seat next to him. She hadn’t thought she’d had any specific reason for returning home, hadn’t planned much at all outside of escaping the overloaded human body that she’d inhabited until moments earlier, but now that she was with Peter, it was like a light switched on inside of her. She’d unwittingly come to seek council from the one person who could give it without anyone else finding out. He gave support, offered souls what they needed to adjust to the change, and because he was stuck guarding the gates, wasn’t impacted by any of the changes that occurred on Earth. He wouldn’t judge her for her growing feelings toward Drew, not the way that Michael would.