One Good Friend Deserves Another (14 page)

She reached behind him to adjust his pillow. “You’re right, of course,” she said, playing along. “I’d best alert the nursing staff to be on guard.”

“Oh, yeah. I’ve heard about those naughty nurses.”

“Might not be necessary.” She pressed the lever to elevate the top part of the bed. “Your magnetism may be confined solely to cardiologists.”

“How’s that?”

“Well, there’s nothing sexier to a cardiologist, you know, than seeing a patient stumble in clutching his chest.”

He made a little grimace as he clutched the bed rails to shift upright. “I suppose there are better ways to get a woman’s attention.”

“You think?”

“Like throwing a Frisbee at her feet.”

She turned her attention blindly to the lever, trying not to be distracted by the memory of an apple-cider wind.

“Or,” he added, “tugging on that glorious hair of yours.”

She stilled. She met his assessing eyes. Among the beeping of the monitor and the whirr of the machinery, the memory shimmered in the small space that separated them. The memory of when he’d wrapped her long braid about his forearm as they made love.

His shoulder flexed as if he were about to reach up and touch her, but Dhara reacted instinctively, and she shuffled back a fraction. Embarrassed by the reflex, she toggled the lever a little more, and then, satisfied with the height, took a full step away from the bed.

Cole dropped his hand back to the covers, and his smile turned wistful. “I have a confession.”

She shoved her hands into the pockets of her lab coat, bracing herself for what he might say.

“On that table, in the ER,” he said, “I thought that you were an angel.”

“Oh.” She could hear the relief in her own voice and then tried to gloss over it with a shrug. “Funny, I get that all the time.”

“But then you ripped those electrodes off me.”

Below the low edge of his hospital gown, a few welts glowed an angry red. “Sorry. We move fast in the ER.”

“It got me worried that I might be going to a different place. Someplace where there are no angels.”

“Don’t.” Dhara paused to gather her scattered wits. She really had to be more professional in front of her patient, even if the patient used to be her lover. “You’re going to be fine, Cole.” Even speaking the words, she knew they might be lies, for a quick glance at his EKG showed that all was not yet in perfect order. “You’re in good hands in this hospital. The best of hands.”

“Clearly.”

“It’s very important,” she added, “that you get some rest. Your heart has been under a terrible strain.”

“I love when you go all doctor on me.”

“Please don’t do this. This wasn’t your finest moment.”

“Can’t knock it. It did get me here, with you standing beside me. While I lie in bed practically naked.”

A slow, creeping heat rose up her throat. He shouldn’t do this. He shouldn’t remind her of the many times she’d crawled naked into bed beside him after a long weary shift, brushed full-length against his hard body, and gave herself up to him. It wasn’t fair to remind her of the good times they’d had and then blithely ignore all the bad stuff that had pulled them apart. The bad stuff that had landed him in her ER.

“Here’s the real question, Cole.” She drew in a shaky breath. “This drama certainly got my attention. Did it finally get yours?”

And there it was, the eight-hundred-pound beast in the room, the roaring monster that had destroyed their relationship. She saw the struggle in the spastic twitch at the corner of his eye, in the swift dimming of his self-deprecating amusement, in the way he suddenly took excessive interest in the fraying hem of the hospital linens. She saw it, too, in the unhealthy tone of his skin, and the fragility of him—in part because of her own failure to stop this from happening.

And then that monster, in all its thrashing, flicked its sharp tail back at her, lashing her with the usual hefty dose of guilt. Maybe she should have stuck around longer. Maybe she gave up on him too soon. Maybe she took the easy way out, shucking him and his boatload of issues behind.

She remembered it hadn’t seemed easy at the time.

“You know,” he said, his voice gravelly and rough. “I didn’t plan this.”

“I know.” She resisted the urge to fix the covers sliding down his chest. “Nobody gives himself such a serious arrhythmia on purpose.”

“I mean, of all the hospital emergency rooms in all the towns in all the world, I didn’t mean to walk into yours.”

“Yeah, well.” Her voice was doing a strange, breathy thing, as she remembered when they’d watched
Casablanca
one late night when the heat had gone off in her building, burrowed on the couch under a mountain of blankets. “I guess you didn’t have much choice.”

“Hey, our little redheaded friend can bark orders like a general when she wants to. Very colorfully. She wasn’t going to bring me anywhere but here.”

A stray thought wandered through her mind, of why he was with Kelly, and why Kelly hadn’t mentioned that she’d still been in touch with Cole. Especially in light of all that was going on with Dhara’s marriage.

“Can’t say I’m not glad,” he added. “Glad that you were on call. Glad to see you again.” His chest rose as he took a deep breath. “Damn, Dhara. It’s always like this with you. I don’t see you for a while, and then I do…and I’m dreaming of angels.”

She looked away to the scuffmarks on the tips of her sensible shoes, while the heat that warmed her cheeks now burned all the way to her brow. Thank God her skin didn’t betray her, as Kelly’s or Wendy’s might. Surely Cole couldn’t see how his words were affecting her, digging up a whole heap of emotions she’d tried to bury.

“I was starting to wonder,” he said softly, “if I’d ever get the chance to see you again.”

“Of course, you would have. College reunions. Wendy’s wedding. We have too many mutual friends. Too much history. We’d cross paths eventually.”

She’d been bracing herself for that. The awkwardness of the inevitable first postbreakup encounter. What was she going to say? What was she going to do? How was she going to introduce him to Desh? How was she going to handle it, blithely, calmly, and with sincere hope that he’d found someone else, someone better for him, someone with more patience, more backbone, someone not so woven in to a wild tapestry of a family?

She hadn’t planned on seeing him struggling for breath on a hospital gurney.

“Yeah, well, after this tumble into the light, there may be no more college reunions or weddings for me—”

“There you go again, Mr. Theater Minor.”

“Hey, it’s true. Which is why I can’t think of a better time than now to say I’m sorry.”

Sorry.

The word reverberated. She had fifteen years of knowledge of this man and all his laughing ways. She’d spent the last year of their relationship slowly coming to understand his terrible secrets and all his skillful deceits. But now, from the sheets of this hospital bed, he was looking straight at her—no wavering gaze, no scoffing, no verbal overinsistence. He was still woozy from the effects of the sedative, which made it all the more sincere.

What she saw was real regret. Open acknowledgment. Acceptance.

She reached for his hand. “I’m so sorry too.”

Sorry that she’d dragged Cole from family gathering to family gathering, overwhelming him with relatives, thinking that by spending as much time as possible amid the close network of the Pitalia clan, he himself would somehow feel more comfortable among them. She was sorry that Cole had a feckless mother and a bastard of an absent father. Sorry that he couldn’t confess to her the real demons that haunted his days.

His fingers slipped around hers in a sensation so familiar it was as if the years together had dug grooves in their skin. “You were right all along. I just…fought it. I was an asshole.”

Not always, she remembered. There was a time when everything had seemed to be going swimmingly. Her mother was thrilled that Dhara had finally brought a man home to meet them. The parties began, every weekend, and she’d watched with amusement as the news spread through the family, and everyone vied to be the first to have them over.

But then a letter from Memphis had flummoxed him. It had come from his father. The father he’d met only one terrible, terrible time.

She glanced down at their entwined fingers and thought: I shouldn’t be doing this. I am getting married in less than three months.

I’m just comforting him, she told herself.

Long before she and Cole had become lovers, they had always been the best of friends.

Dhara found Kelly in the corner of the waiting room, a tattered copy of
Popular Mechanics
by her side. Kelly twisted a thin plait in her hair, watching an episode of
SpongeBob SquarePants
on the teeny ceiling TV.

“Hey, Kelly.”

Kelly leaped up. “Any news?”

“He’s stable and resting.” Dhara had prepared her little speech. “We’re going to need to do some tests over the next few days. I have to call his mother, she’s next of kin.”

“Don’t bother,” she said, stretching her arms over her head to pull the kinks out of her back. “I put myself down as his sister.”

Dhara gave her an arch look. “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.”

“What do you think his mother is going to do,” Kelly said, “when you tell her Cole is in the ICU?”

“Absolutely nothing.”

Dhara had met Cole’s mother once, on a quick trip she and Cole had made out to Portland just when things were getting serious between them. His mother had welcomed her by offering weed she’d cured in her own barn. Dhara found herself working in the kitchen with Cole’s mother’s bushy-browed, pot-bellied, ex-logger boyfriend, while Cole fixed fences, weeded the field, hung a door that had been rusted out, and put new screens in the bedroom windows. All while his mother lolled in the kitchen like a hippie ex-debutante. When Dhara finally left, she confessed to Cole that she hadn’t realized until then how thoroughly he’d raised himself.

“I have to call her anyway. It’s the rule.” Dhara suddenly realized what she hadn’t fully registered when she’d first seen Kelly in the waiting room. Kelly was wearing a pair of baggy sweats, an oversize T-shirt, and pink fluffy slippers. “Kelly, why are you in your pajamas?”

“I put these on as soon as I got home from work. Cole was there, and he had made some dinner and said he wasn’t feeling well, but I thought it was just some virus going around.”

Dhara blinked at her, trying to process, waiting for Kelly to explain why Cole was at her apartment after work on a Tuesday when he wasn’t feeling well, while Kelly was comfortable enough to be in pajamas. Dhara’s mind was unwilling to make the logical leap to what absolutely
could not be.
Because Kelly, of all her friends, had been the most insistent that Dhara belonged with Cole.

“No, no, no!” Kelly shook her head, suddenly understanding the implication. “It’s not what you think.”

“You’re not sleeping with my ex-boyfriend?”

“Of course not! That’s the second time this week I’ve been accused of that.”

“Excuse me?”

“He is—was—just living with me.”

Dhara dropped into a waiting room chair, too gobsmacked to think.

“No, no, not like that!” Kelly swiveled on a heel, pacing in a small circle. “You must know what I mean. He was just staying with me. As a
friend
.”

“As a friend.”

“Yes! I mean, it’s not like I have a
love life
or anything, or that I’d be able to keep a secret that big from you or Marta or Wendy. Geez.”

Dhara sat stunned and relieved, but wary too, because this didn’t make sense. “Maybe you can tell me why he’s staying at your apartment when he has a place four times the size on Maiden Lane?”

“I can.” Kelly bounced to the edge of the seat, her hands working in her lap. “But it would mean I’d have to break a promise to him.”

Dhara gave her a look that she hoped spoke volumes, because right now all kinds of weird thoughts were flying through her head.

Kelly shifted her weight, apparently uncertain. “Would it help his health, if I told you the truth?”

Ethics were a bitch. “No,” Dhara admitted. “I have a pretty good idea what’s happening with him.”

Kelly sucked in a swift breath. “Is it serious?”

“It could be.” Dhara rolled her shoulders, only now realizing how drained she was from all the drama. “I’m not even sure I’m right. I just think…Call it instinct.”

Kelly’s face spasmed, tight with uncertainty. Dhara watched her, knowing that Kelly would spill soon enough if she just waited her out in expectant silence.

Kelly closed her eyes and sank back into the chair. “All right, then. He’s going to kill me. Mostly because you’re not going to like hearing this.” She sighed. “About three weeks ago, Cole was evicted from his apartment.”

Dhara started.

“He couldn’t make the payments because he’d been fired from his job, just a few months after you two broke up.”

Dhara absorbed the information with a sick feeling growing in her stomach and a terrible rush of lightheadedness. Shifting her weight on the seat, she planted her elbows on her knees and sank her face into her hands, forcing herself to breathe steadily, breathe steadily…