Make Me a Match

by Diana Holquist

  No, all she had taken in with a level of detail so minute, she was sure she wouldn’t sleep for a week, were his dancing green eyes.

  Oh, hell. Little pieces of the life she wanted no part of were seeping into her world, drop by drop. She felt them as if they were splashing on her skin.

  “Oh, ow, Doctor! Chest pains!” he called through the closed door.

  Emily, the senior nurse practitioner, walked by, stopped, and gaped at Cecelia.

  “It’s okay. I’ve got it,” Cecelia assured her.

  Emily continued to stare, unassured, her hands crossed over her immense bosom.

  Right, Cecelia had to go back in there.

  She took a deep breath, then opened the door a crack and slipped in. She didn’t want Emily to see the very well-built cause of her distress sitting inside.

  Except he was no longer sitting. Finn had jumped off the examination table and had his back to her.

  “What are you doing?” She walked around him. What she thought was luggage was a picnic cooler.

  He pulled out the foot-extension platform to make the table longer, and began unpacking the cooler onto the red-checkered picnic blanket he had spread. “You look like hell,” he said. “Take a break.”

  “What in God’s name do you think you’re doing?” Was that a 1989 Bordeaux he was unpacking? Her fingertips tingled. She flexed her hands to dislodge the pressure.

  “I’m just picking up where we left off. I was thinking that if I had wanted to pick you up in the park that day, I’d have had a full picnic waiting—wine, cheese, bread, Frisbee.” He pulled out a red disc and piled it onto the examination table on top of a crusty loaf of French bread.

  She couldn’t speak. Fear and anger shouted inside her, drowning out a tiny voice that said, This is nice.

  This was not nice. This was irresponsible. Nicely irresponsible. Oh, to be irresponsible for just a few minutes. Have a glass of wine. The pressure building in her hands began to spread up her arms. One sip.

  No. Nothing. It wasn’t possible. You can’t have it both ways, she reminded herself. She tried to focus on the problem at hand: getting this impossible, irresponsible man out of her office before someone discovered him. “Listen very carefully: I was not trying to pick you up in the park.”

  “Okay. Forget the pickup. Let’s be friends.” He scooted himself back up on the table next to the meal and sat casually, his legs slightly splayed, swinging loosely from the knee. He poured the wine and offered her a glass. “Last time I saw you, you were an uptight wreck, just like now. You need to relax.”

  “I’ll relax after I’m fired for fraternizing with patients!”

  “Just one sip, to deal with those awful humans you call patients.” He held up his hand to stop her rebuttal. “Oh, I know, they’re sick, they’re dying, yada yada yada. They still have no right to yell at you. I heard that jerk through the wall. He was so rude, I almost busted in there to tell him a thing or two.”

  “Don’t think you can charm me,” she said, already charmed but trying to fight it off.

  He grinned, shaking his head at her. “Wouldn’t dream of it. Cheese? I have a really nice Stilton.” He unwrapped a wedge of cheese. “That guy deserved a punch in the jaw.”

  “That guy was the head litigator for the United States Defense Department and very sick. You might have killed him.”

  “Good. No one should yell at you that way and live.”

  His words stopped her cold. All the air went out of her and she found herself completely empty. Light. Weightless. When was the last time Jack had offered to beat up an unruly patient? (Never.) When was the last time he had noticed she was tired? (Never.) When had he ever packed her a picnic? (Never.) When had his shoulders stretched to infinity—

  Oh, God. She had to be careful. “What are you doing here?”

  “See, I may be dying.” He handed her a poppy cracker with cheese.

  8,412 kinds of cheese in the world, and he had picked her favorite. Fate? She eyed him suspiciously.

  He urged the tiny cracker toward her.

  French Bordeaux (her favorite). Now the Stilton. And those shoulders, those hands, those eyes. It was all so right that it was creepy—creepy in the way that only things connected with Amy’s Names could be creepy. Like the time they were in Austin, Texas, and the woman who didn’t have a single hair on her entire body found out her True Love was Jacques LaMier, the world’s preeminent wig-maker.

  Except that Finn was so wrong. She could never be with a man who was so irresponsible that he put her job in jeopardy with a lame pickup prank. A man with no address or phone number who played recreational baseball for a bar (probably a drinker). He was a loner, a drifter—a personification of every man she had ever known—and despised—in her childhood.

  Plus, if he was the right Finn, he was dying.

  A wave of sympathy overcame her. This picnic was hands down the nicest thing anyone had done for her in years. Irresponsible, but nice.

  He held out the cracker. She hadn’t eaten since eight that morning. One cracker wasn’t adultery. One cracker wasn’t betrayal. There was nothing in the Hippocratic Oath against snacking. She took his offering. “So, you’re here for a checkup?”

  “Right. And while you give me the checkup, you’re going to tell me why you slipped me that note. The truth this time. Here, I’ll say it for you. The truth is this: Finn, I was trying to pick you up. I’m living a boring, uptight, stressful life and then you came along—”

  “I am not risking my job and my fiancé all in one fell swoop for—”

  “Fiancé?” He stopped cold.

  She held up her ring.

  He looked stricken. “I never get those left-hand right-hand things straight.” His voice had changed, gotten lower, quieter.

  “Left hand. Ring finger. Engaged. To be married.”

  He put his wineglass down. He looked so confused, she felt guilty as if she’d been leading him on. Which she hadn’t.

  “Why were you trying to pick me up if you’re engaged?” he asked.

  She rolled her eyes. “For the last time, I wasn’t picking you up.”

  He stared at her a long minute. “Boy, do I not get you.”

  Now she was the one who felt confused. The Stilton, the Bordeaux, the way he made her feel—she realized that she thought that he did get her. But he didn’t. Of course not: he had no part in the world she had worked so hard to build for herself.

  They both stood, looking at the floor, as if they had just broken off a serious relationship. What was wrong with her? He was a stranger.

  “Engaged,” he said under his breath. “I better go.” He stuffed the spread, along with everything else, back into the cooler. The Frisbee jutted up, refusing to let the lid close. “I feel like an ass.”

  She watched him pack the cooler and she felt as if he were putting away tiny parts of her. Okay, she had to get a hold of herself. This wasn’t about imagined longings for an inappropriate stranger. This was about possibly saving his life. He might be dying and she had him here in her office. She couldn’t let him go. “Wait. Stay.”

  He stopped packing and took a deep, troubled breath. “Why?”

  She sighed. “I really am afraid you’re sick.” The office reflected white and pure around her. The sterile room, her white coat, her proper, pressed clothing, were a cold contrast to his messy, hastily packed picnic, his jeans, the faint hint of stubble on his face.

  He crossed his arms over his chest. “Why?”

  “I’ll get Dr. Sutter to do an exam,” she said, hoping that she could duck more questions.

  He looked irritated. “No. If I’m staying, I want you and I want answers.”

  I want you. His ambiguous words combined with his intense green eyes made her break out in a cold sweat. No man had said those words to her in so long. Not even Jack. He said things like, “Should we meet at seven-thirty in the love nest, chick-a-dee?”

  Jack.

  “I’ll make you a deal, Finn Con
cord. You want the truth? I’ll give it to you. But only if you let me check you out.”

  “The whole truth.”

  “And you tell me your middle name.”

  “Are you always such a weirdo?”

  “Yes.”

  He stared at her long and hard. “All right Doctor, you win. But I want the whole story, start to finish.”

  She tossed him a paper gown. “Strip.”

  He smiled ruefully. “I thought you’d never ask.”

  Chapter 10

  She turned her back to him, trying not to listen to the soft swish of denim sliding over skin. The paper gown rustled as she watched a ghostly outline of him reflected in the chrome paper towel holder, a blur of movement and color. She silently repeated the ancient Hippocratic Oath she had memorized when she became a doctor: Whatever houses I may visit, I will come for the benefit of the sick, remaining free of all intentional injustice, of all mischief and in particular of sexual relations with both female and male persons, be they free or slaves . . . or hot recreational league shortstops.

  This was not helping.

  “Okay, Doc. I’m ready to go to the ball,” he said.

  She willed her face into an impartial mask, then turned. “All right, let’s go,” she said. This was a routine checkup, so why were her hands trembling? She placed her stethoscope on his chest and leaned in. He smelled like vanilla. She loved vanilla on a man.

  “Geez, you look worried already, Doc.”

  She pushed aside her thoughts. She had to stay in the moment. “Your heart sounds fine. Normal—in a medical sense, anyway. You weren’t really having pain, were you?”

  “No I just told them that to get in here.”

  She retreated to the safety of his chart and scribbled some notes. Keep it business.

  “It wasn’t easy to get in here. Did you know your office takes only private insurance? No HMOs, no Medicaid or Medicare?”

  “I see you managed,” she said.

  “Yeah, but I lied.”

  “Why does that not surprise me?”

  “Good thing I’m not really sick.”

  She leaned against the counter and crossed her arms. “We’ll see about that.”

  “Let me ask you a question. If someone came in here, someone really sick, but she didn’t have the right insurance—”

  She? Cecelia felt a twinge of jealousy. Which was ridiculous.

  “Would you help her?”

  “I’d send her to the right agencies—”

  Finn held up his hand to stop her. “If all that’s no good. If the agencies don’t work. If she needed your help. What would you do?”

  “Well—” Cecelia took a deep breath and approached him. She took his wrist in her hand and counted his pulse. Sixty-seven—perfectly normal. Why was she the only one whose pulse was racing? “You have to understand the way medicine works, there’s no such thing as free—it would cost me. I’d have to take a loss, see? Pay the hospital, the nurses, the pharmacy, the lab. We even have to rent the operating rooms if it were something serious.” Saying “she” made Cecelia wince. Who were they talking about? “It would be impossible.”

  His eyes turned to glass.

  She felt a pang of impatience. Nondoctors never understood. “People always wonder why doctors don’t do more to help people, but the way the system is set up, it’s not possible. We’re cogs in the machine. Why do you think American doctors are always going abroad to help people? There’s a joke, that the only border Doctors Without Borders won’t cross is the border into the U.S. The system here is so broken, we can’t help if we wanted to. Blood pressure.”

  She reached for his arm, then drew back with surprise.

  She felt the power of the tattoo etched onto the skin of his upper arm as if it were carved into her own. A crying angel knelt on one knee, weeping openly, its body wracked with grief, its wings folded over in pain, its head in its hands. It was the most moving, beautiful tattoo she’d ever seen. Actually, it was the only moving, beautiful tattoo she’d ever seen.

  He watched her react. “An angel cries when someone dies who shouldn’t have,” Finn said. His voice seemed to come from another world. “Someone innocent who couldn’t get the help they needed.”

  She couldn’t find her voice.

  “Not that you’d care about someone innocent dying, Doctor. I mean, unless she had private insurance.”

  She again. Someone he loved had died. Cecelia shook herself from the image’s spell. She tried to concentrate on taking his blood pressure. She calmed herself by the rhythmic whoosh of his blood as it pulsed through his veins. Everything so far was normal. This wasn’t a dying man. This was not her True Love. In twenty minutes, this man would be out of her life forever.

  He stared straight ahead at nothing.

  “Breathe,” she commanded.

  He obeyed.

  She listened through the stethoscope, watching his back expand and contract. She jotted some notes on his chart, then dabbed at his arm with alcohol-soaked cotton and unwrapped a syringe from its plastic enclosure.

  She jabbed him with the needle a little harder than she needed to, realizing only then that she was mad at him for his smugness about her life. She worked hard for a living, damn it. She did her charity work outside the office.

  Or was she just jealous of a dead woman?

  He didn’t even flinch.

  They watched his blood fill the tube.

  “Okay, now that I’ve given blood, it’s your turn,” he said. “Tell me about the letter.”

  Okay, do the exam, try not to think, just talk.

  She leaned over with her otoscope and looked into Finn’s ears. Nice ears. Clean, smallish. Oh, hell, even his eardrum was kind of sensuous. “You’re not going to believe this, so I’m just going to tell you straight out. Look away from the light.” She put the otoscope away and picked up the ophthalmoscope. She pulsed the light until she found the small beam, and peered into his eyes. “My sister is a psychic. She can hear the name of a person’s True Love.”

  He looked directly into the beam of light. “Ouch!”

  “Hey, I said look away from the light,” she warned, clicking off the beam.

  He blinked the flash from his eyes. “Did you just say your sister is a psychic?”

  “Look away from the light.”

  He looked back at the spot on the wall, his mouth drawn down in a frown. She flicked the beam back on and continued to inspect his eyes. They were just eyes and she was just looking for abnormalities. She was not looking at their incredible, indelible green, the green of a forest after a rainfall.

  He looked right at her, shooting a ray of his own directly into her eyes. “A psychic? Like a seer?”

  She shook herself back into the present. Cecelia put the scope away and pressed her fingers up and down his neck. “No, a hearer.” Thyroid, parathyroid, she tried to ignore the warmth of him. “She has the power to hear a person’s True Love’s name. Open your mouth.” Cecelia inspected his throat, or at least she meant to. Instead, she drank in the warmth that flowed to her hand, which was resting lightly on his shoulder. “Okay, lie back.”

  “Not until you stop talking like a crazy person. You slipped me that note in the park because a ghost told your sister the fortune-teller that I was dying?”

  “Yes. Well, it might be a ghost. She doesn’t really know where the voice comes from.”

  He settled back on the table, shaking his head in disbelief. The frown was on his lips again. She pressed on his flat, chiseled stomach. The guy must do a hundred sit-ups a day.

  “Are you really a doctor?” he asked.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” She stopped the exam. “Why is it so unbelievable that a doctor can believe in a psychic?”

  He stared up at her. “Is there a hidden camera in here? Are we on TV?”

  “No.”

  He tried to sit up again and she pushed him down. “Let’s just finish this.”

  “So, according to some ghost, I�
�m dying and you’re marrying your True Love?” he asked.

  “No. My True Love is named Finn Concord.”

  A coughing fit overcame him.

  She crossed her arms, waiting for him to get over the thrill of discovering he might be her one and only.

  Only he wasn’t stopping. He was going a little green around the gills.

  Oh, great, he was going to die of asphyxiation right here in her office because she told him he might be destined to love her.

  She whacked him hard on the back.

  He sputtered to a stop, caught his breath, then managed, “So your fiancé’s name is also Finn Concord?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. Let’s get back to that in a minute.” He bit his lower lip. He coughed again. “So did the ghost say what I was dying of?”

  “The Name Amy hears is fading. That means death. No more info.”

  “Did this ghost go to the same medical school you did—?”

  “Mr. Concord!”

  “I hope his bedside manner is better than yours—”

  “Enough! You asked, I’m telling.” She felt her face go hot.

  “So, you wrote letters to warn all the world’s Finn Concords that they might be dying.”

  “Yes. I found you on the Internet. But I couldn’t find your address. So I came to the game to give you the note so you could get help.”

  He ran his tongue inside his cheek. Then he shook his head in consternation. “And you believe that your True Love is named Finn Concord, but you’re marrying another guy?”

  “Right.”

  Suddenly he brightened. “Oh, I get it. You don’t want to marry a dying guy.”

  Cecelia sighed. “No. I’m marrying another man because I’m not interested in True Love.”

  He blinked a few times, then cocked his head. “That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. I mean, after the psychic bit.”

  Cecelia rolled her eyes to the ceiling. “Everyone thinks that they want to know the name of their True Love. Then Amy tells the upstanding citizen that his One True Love is a junkie, or the die-hard Republican that his True Love is a Communist. My favorite was once down in Georgia, this Klu Klux Klan Grand Wizard came to Amy, and she had to tell him that his True Love was a black hairdresser named David.”