“You, um, enjoying being back on regular duties?”
It took Angie a minute for the question to register, so caught up was she in the embarrassment—and the flicker of enjoyment—of noticing an available woman and engaging in conversation that strayed into the personal. Maybe, maybe, there was hope that she could move on from Brooke some time in the not-too-distant future. She’d been full of bravado talking with Vic about dating and noticing women a week ago. False bravado, phony confidence. But now it actually seemed like a possibility, and though it was one that scared her, it didn’t actually terrify her anymore.
“I am.” Say something besides one-syllable words, you dork. “I mean, teaching was a challenge I really enjoyed, but the street is where I feel I do the most good. The classroom’s not really the place for me. It’s too…stagnant. Too boring.” Her ears began to ring at how rehearsed her words sounded, but Julie kept looking at her as though she’d actually said something interesting.
“Good, I’m glad. We like having you around here, you know.”
“Ah, there you are.” It was Vic, rounding a corner and making a beeline toward them. “I heard you’d brought a patient in.”
“I did. And Dr. Whitaker here was just telling me what a fine job I did.”
“Well, I wouldn’t want to interrupt that.” Vic’s smile reached right up into her eyes. It was the happiest Angie had seen her since, well, everything. Maybe she too was beginning to turn a page, and Angie was dying to ask her if she had started noticing other women. Had maybe even begun flirting with them too.
“No,” Angie teased. “It’s not every day a doctor tells me I did a good job. I have to savor them, they’re so rare.”
“Ah, you poor thing,” Vic teased. “Starved for affirmation and compliments from us mean doctors, huh?”
“Yes. I should make you two buy me lunch one of these days to make up for all your ball busting.”
Julie brightened, opened her mouth to say something, then clamped it shut. It was uncanny how much the two women looked alike standing next to one another. Julie was a decade younger, her blond hair a shade lighter, her eyes more hazel than gray, and she was a couple of inches shorter than Vic. But they could be sisters. Or cousins. So if she thought Julie was cute…oh shit. Did that mean she thought Vic was cute too? And if so, was she even allowed to think of her that way? What the hell did the rules say about thinking your ex-girlfriend’s new girlfriend’s ex-wife was cute? Her head spun. Damn it, why did I have to start looking at women again? And why can’t doing so be uncomplicated?
“Come on,” Vic said, touching the sleeve of Angie’s jacket. “I’ll walk you back to your rig. I’m afraid lunch will have to wait for another time. We’ve just had one of the docs on the next shift call in sick.”
She waved goodbye to Julie, who waved back with that enthusiastic smile still on her face. It felt like trouble. But it felt kind of good too. “Thank you for rescuing me.”
“Rescuing you from what?”
“Another couple of minutes and I think I might have asked the cute Dr. Whitaker out on a date. Or she might have asked me. And we’re only supposed to be looking, right?”
“What?” Vic looked like she didn’t have a clue what Angie was talking about.
“Julie. She’s cute. And we made a deal, remember? We’re supposed to start noticing cute women. I can’t believe I never really noticed her before.”
“I…Julie?”
“Yes. Julie. As in Whitaker. As in cute. That’s all I’m saying.”
“Oh.”
“What?” Had she said something wrong?
“I…” Vic was a million miles away. Or she was annoyed with her. “Nothing.”
Angie studied her, hoping to solve the puzzle of why she was so obviously displeased by the subject. Surely she wasn’t upset that she found Julie cute. That would be…weird. Possessively weird, as in jealous. So, no, that couldn’t be it. She’s probably just having a busy day, distracted by a hundred things.
“Well, there’s my bus,” Angie said, pointing to her ambulance sitting in the bay and Jackson standing impatiently next to it. “Call me some time. Come up to the peninsula and we’ll drink more wine. Or do something healthy like go for a run. It smells so nice with the leaves falling.” Angie didn’t want to go and yet she wanted to get the hell away as fast as she could.
“Oh…right.” Vic pulled together a smile. “Sounds great.”
Even though it was dinnertime, Vic wasn’t hungry. Mostly because it’d been too busy this afternoon for her stomach to have time to register the fact that it hadn’t had any food all day, and now she couldn’t muster the interest in food. Julie and Liv had been run off their feet too, all three of them working a couple of extra hours, thanks to a flu bug knocking down staff like flies. Not only had a doctor called in sick for the evening shift, but so had one of the nurses. Vic chose a garden salad for her tray. And a much-needed cup of coffee.
“Honey, you need to be gaining some weight back, not losing more,” scolded Olivia, in line behind her and watching her like a hawk.
“I’m forty. Trust me, my skinny days are behind me for good.”
Olivia made a face and asked for the hot turkey on a bun with fries and gravy. “Well, so are mine, but what the hell. You only live once. I can be skinny again when I’m dead.”
In spite of her gray mood, Vic laughed. She wasn’t sure why she felt like a balloon that had been punctured by a pin the size of a tire iron. She’d been content most of the day—and content these days felt like the next best thing to happy. Now she felt like shit again—grumpy, exhausted, joyless—and yet it wasn’t fair to blame it on Angie. Angie was being…normal. Angie was noticing other women. Flirting with other women. She was moving on with her life, and good for her. It was right that she should, wasn’t it? Just because she herself didn’t feel like—
“Oh, look, there’s Julie sitting alone,” Liv said. “Let’s join her.”
Julie moved her tray to make room. “Boy, isn’t this turning out to be a day?”
“Hey, thanks for agreeing to stay late,” Vic said. She could have ordered Julie to help out, but Julie had volunteered. It was better that way.
“Not like I have anything else to do on a Saturday night.”
“Well, I do,” Olivia supplied. “My wife is sitting at home with a glass of wine that has my name on it.”
Vic patted her friend’s hand. “It was good of her to let us keep you. Tell her I’ll buy her an entire bottle of wine.”
“Ooh, a bottle of Sunset Bay wine?” Olivia waggled her eyebrows. She knew Vic and Angie had become friends.
Julie leaned in. “That’s the winery Angie Cullen’s family owns, isn’t it?”
“It is,” Vic said. “It’s good wine too.”
“Well, I wouldn’t expect anything less.” Julie looked all dreamy and dopey suddenly, like a high school girl with a secret crush. “She sure is hot, isn’t she?”
Olivia coughed on the milk she’d just gulped. “Like, hell yeah! I can see her muscles under that uniform. Mmm-mmm. And those brown eyes you could absolutely curl up in, like wrapping yourself in a warm blanket on a cold night.” She nudged Vic. “Don’t you think so, V?”
“What? Angie?” It was…inappropriate talking about her that way. And, and…weird. And, just, no! It was not how she wanted to think about Angie Cullen. Not at all!
“Well,” Julie said. “She seems nice too. And I was thinking, like, you know, maybe I’d ask her out on a date some time.”
Vic’s insides turned to molten lava. She pinned Julie with her eyes, not meaning to, but it was too late as she watched Julie shrink before her.
“I mean, if you think it’s not too soon. Or, you know, too weird or something.” Julie’s body language, her eyes, pleaded with Vic not to skewer her simply for giving voice to the idea of dating Angie. “I wouldn’t if it would make anyone uncomfor—”
“Honey, I think it’s a fabulous idea,” Olivia said. “Th
at girl needs to move on from…” She glanced quickly at Vic to include her too. “From all that awfulness. You can’t stay in a place of hurt and betrayal forever. I think you should go for it. And if it is too soon, I’m sure Angie would tell you.”
Wait, Vic wanted to say. It was too soon. How could anyone think otherwise? Two months. Two crappy little months after years of being with the same person. Was eight weeks the current shelf life on grieving for the end of a relationship? On healing from such devastating hurt? And if so, who the hell had decided all that? And why hadn’t she gotten the memo?
She pushed her half-eaten salad aside and stood, her appetite gone. “Sorry, I just remembered I’m supposed to check on the patient in Three.”
She pushed her chair out and made her retreat before Olivia and Julie could say anything to stop her. And she refused to glance back at Liv and see the alarm on her face, or worse, pity. She hurried down the hall, the colored stripes on the wall that directed visitors to various areas of the hospital a blur as her rubber-soled sensible shoes squeaked on the polished floor. There was no actual urgency in her task, so before she got to the Emergency Department, she ducked into a supply closet and leaned on a plush pile of towels and blankets that still smelled of detergent.
What the hell was wrong with her? She had no right to be rattled by Julie wanting to ask Angie out on a date. No right whatsoever. She was being…what? Jealous, territorial, childish, petty? Or was she simply being cautious, careful, protective of herself and, by extension, Angie? She liked to think it was the latter, yet why did her stomach feel like a washing machine on spin cycle? And why the hell did it matter so much that Angie seemed so eager to move on while she herself stayed stuck in…in this miserable place?
She brought a towel to her face, smelled it, held it to her cheek. Angie Cullen could go ahead and date whomever the hell she wanted, because Angie and Brooke hadn’t been married. Angie hadn’t been with Brooke for half as long as she and Karen had been together. Angie obviously hadn’t loved Brooke the way Vic had—or thought she had—loved Karen. No, she told herself, there was no comparison. And as much as she thought Angie understood her and sympathized with her, she was wrong. She was in this thing all by herself.
The absence of Karen ambushed her with such force that her breath caught and her eyes began to fill with tears. She’d never felt so alone.
Chapter Ten
Coffee. That’s all it was, Angie told herself. Although, admittedly, it was coffee with a good-looking, single woman. So. Okay. Maybe it could be construed as more. Like, a date. Which it wasn’t. Not really. She sipped her overpriced mocha latte and tried to focus on what Julie was saying. Something about taking flying lessons.
“What do you like to do in your time off?” Julie asked. “For hobbies?”
Oh, Jesus. This was the part where she got to feel inadequate with her lame interests that couldn’t come close to exotic hobbies like flying lessons. “Um, well, I…Let’s see. I like running. And I’m a big reader. And I help out my folks a lot at the winery.” She liked to dabble in fiction writing, but that was her little secret. Well, Brooke knew a little bit about it, but Brooke hadn’t been particularly encouraging. “You realize,” she’d said in that razor-sharp tone she’d honed to perfection practicing law, “that there is no money in writing.” Like money was all that mattered, the only thing of value.
“Ooh, a woman who reads.” Julie’s eyes glinted with fresh interest. “What do you like to read?”
“Ah…” It hadn’t been this hard talking with Vic about the things she enjoyed doing, especially reading. This was more like a job interview. Or a matchmaking questionnaire. “Um. I like biographies and histories. I just finished one on the Civil War.”
A frown formed on Julie’s forehead.
“And Zadie Smith,” Angie added, hoping to score a point. “I love her fiction, especially her most recent.” So did Vic. They’d exchanged texts last week about Smith’s novel, what they liked and hadn’t liked about it, even rating it (five out of five stars from Angie, four-and-a-half from Vic).
“Can’t say I’m familiar with her.” A tenuous smile. “I guess with my line of work, it’s mostly medical journals I read. Short stories, now those I’d probably have time to read.”
So why don’t you? “I see. Any favorites?” It was mean of her to push the topic, but Angie wanted to punish Julie for not sharing her love for books.
“Sorry?”
“Short story authors.”
“Oh, um, not really.”
“Alice Munro? George Saunders? Flannery O’Connor? Julian Barnes?” Angie had read them all.
Julie shook her head, the names clearly failing to register. “I guess I haven’t read much since high school.”
Angie sipped her latte, shifted a little in her seat, wishing for a way out of this. She could be home with a bowl of popcorn watching an old Katharine Hepburn comedy, for God’s sake, or cracking a new novel from her to-read pile. Julie was most definitely nice, so that wasn’t the reason she wished this little date was over. Good-looking too. In fact, she looked damned amazing in her tight jeans and a scoop-necked sweater that hinted at the gentle swell of the goods below. Her hair, shoulder length, was pulled back in a youthful, delightful ponytail. But the more the silence between them stretched, the more Angie felt like she’d been tossed into the middle of someplace she didn’t belong. Or at least, with someone she didn’t belong.
Julie, apparently, possessed no such reservations. She kept looking at Angie with a glint in her eye, with an expectant kind of interest. With thoughts, Angie was sure, that coffee was merely the appetizer, the warm-up to something a little more intimate. And could she blame her for thinking that way? She’d kind of led Julie down the garden path, what with wearing her brand-name designer jeans and square-toed leather boots and her most expensive sweater, the one she liked to think showed off her shoulders to maximum advantage. They’d both showed up at the café looking very much like this was an official first date.
“I don’t mean to pry,” Julie said quietly. “But you and Vic Turner seem to have become friends.”
“Yes. We have.”
“I guess it must, you know, help to be able to talk to someone in the same situation? I mean…I guess it makes sense.”
It was a nuisance that everybody at the hospital and at her workplace knew her business. Each sympathetic glance, every whisper in her direction, was a personal affront to her. Traverse City was really more like a small town. Ditto for the hospital and emergency services. Everybody, sooner or later, came to know everybody else’s business, good or bad, and everybody’s turn came round eventually as the subject of all that burning gossip. It was inevitable that her and Vic’s situation would be talked about. Talked to death, probably, until it lost its power to entertain or arouse and something juicier came along. It was what it was and Angie had no control over it, nor had she the interest anymore in letting it get her down. It was wasted energy to worry about what others thought or said.
She shifted again in her chair. Julie wasn’t being judgmental. She was actually being kind of nice about it, but it didn’t inspire Angie to want to disclose much. “It does help a bit.”
When it was clear that was all she had to say on the matter, Julie smiled nervously and said, “Good, I’m glad.”
Each woman retreated into her own thoughts until the silence became a chasm between them. Then they both started talking at once.
“You know, it’s very kind of you to—”
“Do you think maybe you would—”
They both laughed.
“I think what I’m trying to get at,” Julie said around a smile, “is that I’d really like to get to know you better. If, you know, you’d be interested in that. If it’s not too soon to, like, go on a real date.”
A real date. Angie pondered the meaning of that. Dinner? A movie? And what about afterward? Would sex be an expectation? A fine bead of sweat began to break out on her forehead.
Vic shuffled along behind her shopping cart, surprised to find herself surrounded by shelf after shelf of canned soup. It was a veritable mountain of canned soup—vegetable soups, creamed soups, stews. The only soup she ate was the freshly made kind from the deli section. Which showed, she thought with renewed frustration, that work seemed to be the only thing she was capable of focusing on these days. When she wasn’t at work, her thoughts crashed around like a pinball. And it wasn’t just the supermarket where she found herself dazed and confused, losing her train of thought or forgetting her purpose. Two days ago she’d gotten momentarily lost while driving home from work, ending up in some new subdivision that seemed to have endless cul-de-sacs and streets named after every possible kind of tree.
Enough already, she told herself. Enough brooding and feeling sorry for yourself. It had been nine weeks, and while she knew there was no magic number, no jail sentence with a finite date, she was tired of spinning her wheels, of alternating between hoping Karen would come back to her and silently begging to be free of the specter of their relationship. She wanted all this behind her once and for all, and yet she knew how unlikely that was to happen anytime soon. The settlement continued to grind its way through the lawyers and Karen, still, chose to ignore her messages. And so Vic’s purgatory continued.
She rounded the corner, her cart bumping into another cart with a shrill metallic clang. Her mouth opened to apologize as her eyes rose. And settled on Karen. Karen and Brooke. For a moment, time seemed to stand still. Vic was paralyzed with indecision. Turn and run like hell or acknowledge the situation?
“Vic.” Karen broke the awkwardness, her smile tight, like a string pulled to the breaking point. “Close call, huh? Sorry, I, we…weren’t paying attention.”
No, Vic thought, you weren’t. You weren’t paying attention to a lot of things, Karen. And neither, apparently, was I!
Brooke, her lipstick and eye makeup perfectly applied, her perfume faint but smelling undeniably expensive, extracted herself with a feeble excuse—she needed to hit the produce section before the cantaloupes got picked over, she said—and disappeared. Karen looked over her shoulder a little too frantically, a little too panicky, as if willing Brooke to return to her side. Pathetic, Vic thought with a small measure of satisfaction.
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