by Milly Taiden
He nodded. “Now you see the true power of bringing together your technical skill and your artistic vision.”
The sketches spread before me. Not in four years of college had I learned something so important so fast. Who was this man? And why was I meeting him now, when it was almost too late?
My own thoughts from earlier rushed right back at me.
People came along when you needed them.
And, I amended, you should learn from them.
***
Chapter Thirty: Dr. Darion
Cynthia was sitting up and drinking a little broth when I visited her again at the end of the day.
“Hey, Dary,” she said. “Did you find the Pokémon for Andrew?”
“I did.” One of the volunteers had picked it up for me since I hadn’t been able to get away.
“Did he like it?”
“I don’t know. I left it with his nurse.”
“Dary!”
“I’ll ask.”
“Can I go back to art tomorrow?” Cynthia asked.
“Are you feeling like throwing up?”
Cynthia frowned. “Maybe a little.”
“Well, we’ll see how you feel when it’s time tomorrow, okay?” I pressed a hand against her forehead. She was a little warm. The monitor read 99.6. “Angela, can you take her temperature manually in a bit?” I pointed at the screen. “I don’t trust these things.”
Angela nodded. “Will do. You going home tonight finally?”
Cynthia’s eyes got big. “Did you sleep here?”
I sat next to her on the bed. “I slept in the operating room,” I said. “I used the little blue paper sheets for a blanket.”
“You did not!” she said.
“Did too!”
Angela laughed. “You two kids are something else.”
I patted Cynthia on the shoulder. “You call me if you need me, okay?”
“I will.”
It wasn’t easy leaving. But I did have to go home, at least for a while. I needed clothes.
Plus, I was going to see Tina.
I stopped at the desk to see if Cynthia’s blood test results had come in. Once again I had to separate the clinical side of myself from my feelings as I pulled up the report.
WBC less than 0.1 (out of range)
Hgb 11.2 (out of range)
Platelets 32 (out of range)
Lymphocyte 73 (out of range)
Monocyte 14 (out of range)
Eos 13 (out of range)
ANC 0 (out of range)
I didn’t expect anything to look normal. We were just establishing a baseline. I’d order her a transfusion for her platelets and a G-CSF to boost her white blood count. Hopefully her ANC would bounce back this time. She’d been immunosuppressed for so long.
I scrolled to the second page. This was more telling, if there were still cancer cells in her blood.
No atypical or immature lymphs detected.
No blasts in her blood. No cancer. I let myself relax, just a little.
I wouldn’t order a bone marrow aspiration for a while yet. I didn’t want to put her through it until I was certain her cells were rebounding. Nothing was more discouraging than a hypocellular draw, which told us nothing.
But this was a start. No blasts. The cancer was not circulating.
We would beat this thing.
I powered down the iPad. Fatigue threatened to set in, but I pushed it aside, something I had mastered during my first residency. I pulled off the lab coat, and laid it over my arm. Official duties were done for the day.
Now I could see Tina.
When I arrived at the window, she was partially obscured by a large canvas on a wood frame. I could only see the back of it, propped on a metal stand. On the table, she had mixed a rainbow of reds, pinks, oranges, and yellows in a palette.
I rapped twice on the door, then opened it. Tina looked up at me, her gray eyes standing out from her pale face. She had a small smudge of pink on one cheek.
“You’re working,” I said.
“Having fun.” She stuck the paintbrush between her teeth as she squeezed a bit of white onto the palette. When she took the brush in her hand again to blend it in, a touch of orange transferred from the handle to the tip of her nose.
“I am almost at a stopping point,” she said. “Just let me get this last color down.” She dipped the brush in the white and added it to orange until she achieved a pale melon. When she touched the brush to the canvas, I walked around to see what she was doing.
Along the top third of the canvas, the colors of a sunset radiated across a translucent sky. The center was almost pure white, moving to a yellow gold, then shifting to all the colors from orange, to pink, to a dusty red.
I let her work, admiring the set of her jaw, the concentration in her eyes. She moved the brush smoothly across the canvas, dipped and mixed and blended, then cut through one color with the other.
She stuck the brush in her teeth again, an endearing habit. I sat next to her and picked up a clean brush. A piece of unused children’s construction paper sat at the end of the table. I slid it over.
I had never taken formal art classes past high school, when my father stepped in to ensure that my education would veer back toward premed. But dipping the brush into paint had a sensuousness I always appreciated. And the slide of color across the textured paper felt like a caress.
At first I mimicked the sunset of Tina’s, then ventured off, realizing the pinks and pale oranges had the appearance of skin kissed by a late afternoon sun. The strokes took on more shape, a waist and a hip. I had filled the page with the lines, so the form was close up, an indentation of a belly button, a hint of a shadow of the thigh propped up. The knee disappeared up beyond the page, but I brought in the darkest color to shadow in behind a calf as the leg came back into view.
Now the image began to emerge. A woman, lying on her back, her leg bent.
I chose a pale color, imagining the light coming from near her head. The tension of the day began to unfurl as I took a chance and painted the woman’s arm across her face, revealing a breast. Only after I had touched the brush into a pale pink and swirled in a delicate nipple did I realize I was painting Tina.
I set down the brush.
Tina had stopped working, watching me. When she realized I had stopped, she looked up at me with wonder. “I didn’t know,” she said.
I wasn’t sure what she meant exactly. That I could paint. Or that I had this image of her in my head, sensual and naked.
Her hand slid over mine, her fingers barely grazing the surface of my skin. “You have more secrets than I would have guessed.”
This made me tense up a little, but as Tina continued to run her palm over the back of my hand, encircling my wrist with her fragile grip, it dissipated again. I should tell her about Cynthia, soon, before it became too big a lie. Before she sensed it and felt alienated by my lack of trust in her.
I glanced up at the viewing window. The halls were quiet, but the evening staff would still walk by occasionally.
“Where should we go?” Tina asked. “I assume you have a place?”
Filled with images of Cynthia and our family, I thought. But here Tina was, making this move. I remembered her on the beach, so passionate, so lost in the moment before she withdrew. What would she do this time? And if she got angry with me again, what could she do with my secret? To Cynthia?
“I do. It’s not close, though. Is yours?” She might have a roommate. If so, I could take her to a hotel. We could be decadent.
“It’s not far,” she said. “Just don’t get eaten by the Pink Monster.”
“Are you referring to your —”
“No!” Her eyes got big. “Oh my God.” The spell was broken, and Tina became more of herself, laughing instead of intense. “Although I do like the thought of my girl parts as a force of destruction.”
She let go of me. “Maybe you can paint those next time, all flowery like Georgia O’Keeffe.” She stood
up. “Or go full-on Gustave Courbet.”
I didn’t know Courbet’s work, but I could guess. “That sounds like a fascinating idea. You’ll model for me?”
She sat back down, mostly obscured from the hall window by the canvas. She lifted the edge of her skirt slowly, up the striped stocking, above her knees, past the elastic edge, and finally revealing a long expanse of thigh. “You choose the lighting,” she said.
I was going to have to put my lab coat back on.
***
Chapter Thirty One: Tina
He painted.
He painted.
The whole drive to my apartment, this wouldn’t leave my head.
He was an artist.
Who was this man?
I still felt in a fog as we walked up to my door. Then I remembered the furniture. As I unlocked the door to my apartment, I turned to Darion. “I wasn’t kidding about the Pink Monster.”
“Really?” Darion asked. “Is it like Godzilla or more Oscar the Grouch?”
“Worse than either.”
I stood back to let him in.
He held the pizza box over my head as he passed. I knew the moment when he saw the fuzzy sofa, because he said, “Good God.”
I closed the door behind me. He was here. In my apartment. Well, Corabelle’s. I texted both her and Jenny while Darion paid for the takeout pizza, warning them to stay away.
“The doctor is making a house call,” I told them.
Corabelle responded with nothing but exclamation marks. Jenny said, “Time to break in the Pink Monster!”
Darion ran a hand over the fur. “Is this your usual style?” he asked.
I had to laugh. “Are visions of tackiness dancing in your head?” I dropped my bag and keys on a side table and plopped down on it. “My friend Jenny has this bizarre boyfriend who keeps buying her stuff. This is one of her castoffs.”
Darion lowered himself gingerly onto the sofa. “I’m picturing bodily fluids mixed in the fur.”
“Are you now?” I took the pizza box from him and set it on the coffee table. “Is it disturbing your sense of sterility?”
“Are you telling me you haven’t thought about it?”
“I’ve only had the sofa for two days.”
He ran his hands over the surface. “I’ve definitely never seen anything like it.”
“Let’s imagine pizza grease on it first.” I popped open the box. “I’ll get some plates.”
I dashed into the kitchen, then peered around the cabinet. I still couldn’t get over it. Dr. Darion was sitting on my pink sofa.
I tightened my ponytails. Why was I nervous about this? I wasn’t exactly a virginal teenager. I pulled a couple of Corabelle’s plates from a shelf.
I peeked around the corner again. “You’re not a knife-and-fork guy, are you? With pizza?”
“Not a chance,” Darion said. He leaned back on the sofa and surveyed the room. I saw his gaze land on Albert’s mermaid.
I returned to the sofa. “One of my patients made that,” I said, then remembered when he’d insisted I didn’t have patients. “Well, one of the hospital patients. I guess they aren’t mine.”
Darion frowned. “I’m sorry I said that. I shouldn’t have.”
I shrugged. “It’s okay. I know what I am.” I plunked a piece of pizza on each plate. My half was just cheese. Darion had gotten all sorts of junk on his. Sausage and anchovies and peppers.
“I’m so glad to be away for a little while.” He took a bite and leaned his head on the back of the sofa.
“I bet. Do doctors often sleep at the hospital?”
“During our internship and residency, sure.”
“Aren’t you a staff doctor now?”
“I’m a little unusual. I completed a residency in oncology, but now I’m also working in pediatrics. I have another year to go on that. But technically, yes, I’m staff, not a resident.”
“I’m trying to figure out what program to do for the hospital. Be a social worker or a therapist.”
“Very different things,” Darion said.
“What do you think?” I set my plate down. I wasn’t really hungry. Having him here put me off balance. “For, you know, a lazy artist type.”
Darion rested his plate on the pizza box and turned me around to face him, my legs draping across his lap. My heart sped up a little as he ran his hands along the stockings.
“That’s a tough call. I don’t see a lot of places where social workers can do art therapy, though. You probably want to go the psychology route for that.”
Darion’s fingers slid up the bump of my knee, pushing my broomstick skirt out of the way. I kicked off my Mary Janes and let them fall to the floor.
He made it up to the elastic band at the base of my thigh and ran his finger inside the edge. “I like these,” he said.
“Everyone thinks I should give them up,” I said.
“Why?”
“Be a grown-up.”
He shrugged. “People want everyone to be like everybody else. I say just be you.”
Cool air hit my skin as he tugged the stocking down. His fingers traced the indentations in my skin from the elastic. “I’ve always found it fascinating how skin is so easily altered, and how quickly it corrects itself.”
I realized with no small panic that too many lights were on, and that my skin had not corrected itself at all on my wrists. The scars would be very visible. Time to get this show on another road.
I dropped my legs to the floor. “Let me put the pizza away,” I said.
He watched me get up and take the box and plates into the kitchen. Dang it, I should have planned better. I thought about the lighting. Maybe we should just go to the bedroom now.
No, that seemed too fast. But if the sweater came off, and it was going to…crap.
I flipped on the kitchen light. The box went into the fridge, and I dumped the plates in the sink. Now to just get the main light in the living room off. Without weirdness.
I walked back toward Darion. “Let me get the light in here,” I said.
His eyes followed me as I moved to the door and turned off the overhead. The room dimmed considerably, lit only by the distant light of the kitchen.
I sat back on the sofa. “I assume you know your way around a body and don’t need surgical illumination.”
He leaned toward me, his mouth on mine. He must have been holding back before, as he crushed me against him, pushing us both back on the sofa. His body was solid and muscled, braced above me. His lips took mine hungrily, the kiss deepening.
I could barely catch my breath. One of his hands went beneath my head to pull me in more tightly. The other moved along my body, breast to hip, and beneath the sweater. I knew it made him crazy that I didn’t wear a bra. I kept pulling out my thickest sweaters so I could do it again.
His palm reached a breast, and my hips pressed up against him. I could feel him erect between us. I wondered what sort of lover he would be, sensitive or passionate, slow or fast.
He braced himself on one arm and pushed the sweater up over my belly. I had been right, this was the first to go. But the light was way too low for him to see the faint scars. I would tell him eventually, but not now, not yet. Normally I didn’t have to worry about it, one-and-done. But this was going to be different. It already was.
He broke the kiss to pull the sweater over my head. I shivered for a second from the loss of warmth, and Darion pulled me against his body. His shirt was rough, the buttons pressing into my skin. He kissed along the curve of my neck and along my shoulder. I quit thinking about anything but his mouth and hands.
He made his way down to that territory we covered in the surgical room, his lips surrounding a nipple and drawing it in.
Blood pounded through me, sending waves of heat in its path. His tongue took its time learning every curve. One of his hands moved lower, pushing the skirt out of his way.
His hand shifted my knee farther out, giving him access. My breathing sped up as he f
elt his way up a thigh and his fingertips brushed against the lace edge of my panties.
I clutched at his head. He moved from one breast to the other, taking his time. He cupped me between the legs, holding me gently at first, then letting one finger slide against the folds, still covered by thin fabric.
I writhed beneath him, wanting more, wanting it faster. He knew what did it for me after that time on the beach. But he was patient, slow, and only after long agonizing moments where I pressed up into his hand did he slip a finger inside my panties and into me.
I could barely hang on. Despite our beach moment, it felt so long since I’d fallen into a hot encounter like this. Sometimes my exit strategy weighed on my mind before we were even done. But this time, I had none.
Darion lifted his head and whispered against my cheek, “I think I sent you a message about this part.”
He had. A very hot, very sexy text about the Courbet painting and what would happen when I struck that pose.
His body shifted down, and the finger moved out of me to the edge of the panties and pulled them down my legs. My skirt was gathered in a bunch around my waist. I ran my hand through his hair as he made his way down.
“I think I might have mentioned something like this.” His mouth landed on me, my knees on his shoulders, and now my neighbors were going to know who I was because I cried out without any control.
Darion didn’t start slow, or take his time. Everything went into it, fingers, tongue, his lips. Pleasure crashed through me, blasting out like a dynamite strike. I clutched at the furry pink cushion, utterly lost, out of control. I couldn’t hold anything back even if I wanted to.
He never hesitated, never slowed down, not waiting on my rhythm, but creating it, controlling my response.
The sensations began to pulse, like a heartbeat, like breathing, and then it all let go, the orgasm blossoming out from my body, surrounding him, engulfing his mouth and hand.
I relaxed against the sofa, the world spinning. Damn. Even if I had wanted to cut and run from him, I wasn’t sure certain parts of my body would have come with me. They already belonged to the doctor.