The rawness in her voice gave the words sense they wouldn’t have otherwise had.
“You can tell me you were terribly ill, but you don’t want me to see it.”
“There are very few people in my life I’m close to—you and my sister, Miranda, basically—who don’t see the long shadow Penelope casts when looking at me, and I don’t want you to see me that way. I want you to see me how I am now, or how I was before all this. Strong. Capable. Healthy. Not perpetually nauseous.”
She’d just included him in a small group that consisted of him and her sister, the one member of her family who apparently only knew New and Improved Penny.
“Sit down before you fall down.” He gestured back to the sofa, then sat back in his chair.
He was in the box of people who saw her as complete. Boxes he could understand. He liked them. If you put people into one box you kind of knew what to expect from them. It kept things neat.
Or it would if he could figure out what box to put her into. She kept moving. Partner. Lover. Possible wife. Mother of his child. The boxes were overlapping, which defeated the whole point of boxes.
But she’d just put him into a box with family. Was that New Family? It couldn’t be that easy.
* * *
“I feel terrible. I’ve been letting you take care of me every second of the day so the least I could do is help with dinner.” Despite her words, Penny edged onto a stool at her kitchen island and watched Gabriel continue chopping sweet potatoes he’d just peeled. “What is it we’re having again?”
“Simple grilled chicken breast, since your kitchen is awesome, and baked sweet potato wedges. Everything I’ve read said take it easy on vegetables for a few days.”
There had even been some kind of marinade for the chicken, which automatically announced that he was a better cook than she was. The very best Penny ever managed in the kitchen when starting from a position of raw food was fondue. She could melt a mean pot of cheese and buy a mean loaf of bread. She also reheated meals from restaurants like a master.
His proficiency shouldn’t gall her, but somehow it did. It seemed like he did everything well, except maybe relax. He hadn’t relaxed anytime she’d been awake and watching him. Even when he’d said he was tired, he’d still dug into her albums rather than just lean back and have a nap like any sane, overworked New Yorker would.
“I’m feeling better than I did. I’m going to try and go back to work tomorrow.”
“Are you sure you’re ready?”
“On the floor. The floor is safe. If I’m working in Emergency and I start vomiting, I can just go home. No crash landings to sort out first.”
“Sensible,” he praised. “Sensible” in Gabrielese was like “awesome” in Penny’s world.
She changed the subject before all that praise went to her head. “Did your mom teach you to cook?”
“Grandmother. Mom’s mom. My mom’s a great cook too, but I learned to cook from my grandma. Spent a lot of time with her in the summer when my parents were still working and we needed minding.”
“We?” She didn’t have any cozy grandma stories, but that wasn’t the part of the statement that interested her. “You have siblings?”
He tossed the potato wedges with oil to coat them, spread them on a baking sheet, salted and peppered, and then shoved them into a pre-heated oven. The show-off.
“No siblings. Cousin. We were as close as siblings but, uh, not now.”
She knew next to nothing about his past, and her plan to learn about it two months ago hadn’t exactly worked as planned. “Did he move away?”
Everything was on to cook, and Gabriel took his time washing his hands again as they shimmered with oil, and then he turned back to her. “He died a couple of years ago.”
The manner of delivery was flat, like he didn’t care at all, but that wasn’t possible, not when he’d previously referred to him as close as a sibling. That didn’t add up.
“I’m sorry.”
“Me too.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
He gestured to her untouched cup of apple tea and, before answering, grabbed tongs to flip the chicken breasts over on the grill built into her neglected but terribly fancy range. “There’s not much to tell. We weren’t close when he died. In junior high, he got involved with the wrong crowd, and it went downhill from there.”
The wrong crowd. Downhill. And Gabriel was from New Jersey... “Was he murdered?”
“It was an accident, actually. But he was shot. Wrong place, wrong time.”
“Like a store robbery gone wrong?”
He put the tongs down and looked over his shoulder at her. “What made you ask that specifically?”
Penny shrugged, took a sip of her tea so he didn’t tell her to drink it again, and it gave her time to work out why she’d chosen that random situation. “You said he went with the wrong people, and then later got accidentally shot because he was in the wrong place, which implies innocence. It was the first thing that popped into my head where an innocent bystander could be shot. You hear about convenience store robberies all the time. Was I right?”
Nodding, and looking a little disconcerted, he came to lean against the other side of the island. “Sometimes your instincts alarm me.”
“My gut talks to me. Unfortunately, the past couple days most of what it’s been saying has been... ‘Let’s get all this food out of here.’” She pointed to her belly then her mouth, and when he grinned, she shrugged. “This is why I could never have been a doctor. I like to skip over parts of the whole logical progression of facts. I usually get the right answer, but I also rarely have any real idea how I got there. Whenever they told me to show my work in math classes, I was always in trouble. Got the right answer usually, and never had a complete breakdown of the steps. I could get several of the steps, usually in order, but I always missed writing down some.”
“That’s why you didn’t go to medical school like all your siblings?”
“Nope. I didn’t want to go to medical school. Can you imagine me studying that much? I can’t. Plus...I had been confined for so long that, once I could, all I wanted to do was keep moving. I didn’t even want to go to school as long as it would take to become a physical therapist. I’m not dumb, I just can’t sit still that long when I’m not drugged by anti-barf pills. Why did you become a doctor?”
“Because the human organism is fascinating. And it’s good to help people when and how you can. And body parts are easier to fix than mental parts. I originally thought I’d go into psychiatry, I wanted to figure out where things went wrong for Kyle.” He peeled the chicken off the grill, then went to fetch the potatoes, and when he came back, his brows had come down in such a firm line that she didn’t know whether to ask him to expand on his statement.
All she knew was that Kyle was his cousin.
“When did you change track?”
“The first time he went to jail, I went to visit with him to try and tackle this problem, work out some way to get him to change his own track, and he said the best part of his childhood was when we stayed with Grandma in the summer. I knew why, even though he didn’t try to explain it, and that I couldn’t help him fix it.”
She didn’t prod at the wound until they’d dished up plates and relocated to her ever-neglected dining room to eat like civilized people, with her taking a nibble-the-potato-and-see-what-happens approach to eating.
He doled out information slowly, and she was sensitive to making emotional missteps with him, at least outside wrestling her albums away from him. Those were only a fraught subject for her. She waited until dinner was half-over, deciding what and how to ask before she prodded that wound again, gently. “What was wrong with the rest of Kyle’s childhood?”
“He didn’t have a dad. His mom worked all the time to support th
em. She loved him and tried to do what was best for him, but he didn’t have what I had. A stable home life, the love and support of both parents.” He winced a touch, as if knowing how out of step with modern life he sounded, then clarified, “Little boys need fathers to teach them how to be a man. He didn’t have that, so he found that instruction from other places. Not good places.”
The subject came with gravity, of course it was heavy, but his pauses were just as heavy. There was something else going on in his mind.
Putting down her remaining half a potato wedge, she carefully wiped her fingers, then reached for his hand. “I know I’m not always super-present and good at picking up on social cues, but I’m on the job tonight. There’s something you want to say, and you can stop drip-feeding it to me. Just say it. That mutual agreement not to talk about stuff has got to go if we’re going to have any hope of making this work.”
He listened, and she liked the way he paid attention, like every word she said—or sometimes babbled—was important. When she tugged on his thumb, he turned his hand over, fingers opening so she could slide hers into them.
“Whatever is making you retreat into your head, spit it out.”
“I’m trying to be careful about all this. You want to know what’s going on in my head? We’re making another massive mistake.”
Her stomach lurched and wobbled, but since nothing immediately rushed up her esophagus, she stayed put and tried to breathe through it. “What mistake?”
“I still want to marry you. I don’t understand how this parental partnership will work out.”
“I thought it was pretty self-explanatory. We’ll be parents, and share stuff. The baby. Responsibilities. Decisions.”
“Yes, that’s self-explanatory. It’s the rest of it.”
“What rest?”
He jiggled their intertwined hands.
The relationship stuff. Not the actual parenting. The undefined partnership aspect.
“Oh.”
“I only know how to do that one way. The traditional way. Raising children with a wife, making a family.”
“We’ll still be a type of family.”
“No, we won’t. We’ll be two people who share a family member. At best, we’ll be like some kind of in-laws, quasi-related because of another.”
“We’re going to have legal paperwork for custody.”
“Which is what you get after a divorce, when you stop being a family. When you’re a broken family.”
The words sank in slowly, along with the understanding that it meant something to him. The words “broken family” and his tone said enough. There was pain there.
“Did your parents divorce when you were little?”
“They’re still happily married.”
Which, maybe, provided the blueprint, but didn’t explain the pain she saw on his face. Was it to do with Kyle?
“But there’s someone who divorced.”
“Me.” There was a flash of something on his face, but she couldn’t name it, only recognized it as a cocktail of something unpleasant, maybe painful, definitely sad. “I’m divorced. A long time now. I wanted kids with her, she said she didn’t, then didn’t want me either. Smothering her or ignoring her, I never got a good answer—it changed, depending on the day. She left.”
He delivered the words simply, even somehow without emotion except for his volume. She knew without him saying so how deeply it had cut him by his volume. His ever-decreasing volume. By the time he’d said “She left,” it was almost a whisper.
He’d been hurt, and she hated that this hurt him more. The only parts of this conversation that felt good was the fact that they were talking, and his warm hand linked with hers.
Maybe he was right, maybe it was ridiculous to think they could have a simple partnership, there was too much something between them. History? Chemistry? Genuine caring? But the answer to that big riddle wasn’t in her gut. The only thing in her gut was the desire to give something back to him that he’d been giving her the past two days—comfort, acceptance.
The day it had all gone down, and he’d come over to find her wallowing in guilt after beaning him with the test, his hand on her cheek had been enough to cleave through the swirling awfulness in her heart, and ground her.
Extracting her hand from his, she rose and rounded the corner of the table to stand behind his chair. If those pills hadn’t sucked all her energy up, she’d have just muscled his chair back from the table and planted herself in his lap so she could hug him until he felt better. But with her current energy level she might have chicken and sweet potatoes on her plate, but there wasn’t any strength there.
“Pen?”
“Shhh,” she answered softly, then wrapped both her arms around his shoulders and pressed against the seatback, until his head rested against her collarbone and her cheek pressed to his head. “I know I can’t make that better. If I had a time machine, I would go back in time and stop you from marrying that terrible person.”
His chest deflated a little, tension not entirely gone but diminishing. She kissed the top of his head then his temple, letting her lips linger there. Would he feel the same melting sweetness she’d felt when he’d kissed her head?
He breathed out so slowly and deeply she could only tilt her head to try and catch his eye, with no idea what any of it meant.
She’d no sooner stepped from behind his chair than it slid back. His large hands found her cheeks and drew her mouth down to his. Just like the first time in that Schenectady motel room, her whole world narrowed down to just her and Gabriel. Her body moved without conscious thought, bringing her to sit across his lap as he angled his head to accommodate the change in height and keep their mouths from separating.
Nothing about Gabriel’s kisses could be called hurried, and he never let her hurry him either. Her whole life was rushing for the finish line, grabbing life and experiences before they could get away from her, but no matter how she clutched at his shoulders, or twisted her hands in his shirt to try and pull closer, he held her still. His hands fisting in her hair held her back enough to force her to focus on the slow, velvety slide of his lips on hers. His tongue in her mouth was a dance, slow and drugging. Smoky and potent, it singed the hard edges of their painful conversation and curled the corners like burnt paper.
She didn’t know how long it went on, only that at the last gentle, sweet kisses trailing off, she was breathless and in trouble. Passion was still there, but this was something else entirely. Sweet, exploring, consoling, vulnerable, and all she really wanted was to pull tighter and hold onto him, let whatever wanted to happen happen. Stop trying to force words or expectations onto whatever this was.
Only that plan hadn’t worked so well for their night together, even less after their night in Schenectady, not knowing what to say. Relationships came with expectations, and expectations came with disappointment, pain.
Asking him to stay another night would be a mistake. Asking him to sleep with her in the bed until morning would be a bigger mistake. Gabriel needed the comfort that his expectations could be satisfied, and she couldn’t give him that.
“I think I need to sleep,” she said instead, not mentioning the kiss or the way pulling away from him left an ache in her chest. Really not inviting him to stay until he didn’t want to stay anymore, be it twenty minutes or twenty years. “It’ll be an early morning.”
“I’ll clean this up.”
“No, it’s okay. I have someone coming tomorrow. Leave it.”
She hurried away from him while trying to seem like she wasn’t fazed by what had just happened, then climbed the stairs, leaving the decision to him on how to handle the night.
As she shut off the bedside light to settle into bed, she heard his decision in the closing of her apartment door. He’d left, whatever that meant.
CHAPTER FIVE
“WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU?”
Penny had just thrown back her head to take her don’t-barf-today pill when her brother’s voice almost made her choke on the darned thing. Carefully, she swallowed, took another big drink from her tumbler of apple tea, and smiled, probably like she’d just been caught doing something bad, because that was exactly opposite to the kind of smile she was going for.
But, really, what had Zac seen? He’d caught her taking a pill alone in the staffroom. So what?
“Vitamin.”
Lying to family was a great way to start your day.
“Really? Have you been grounded because of multivitamin dependency?”
Smart-alec brothers were a less great way to start the day. Not having a story primed to tell people she didn’t yet want to know she was pregnant? Also a fairly un-great way to start the day.
“I’m not grounded,” she denied, tugging at her scrubs, wishing like heck for her comfy flight suit. “I decided to work the floor for a couple days. That’s all.”
The look he gave her demanded more words, but she couldn’t think of any.
“Really.” It wasn’t even a question. Questions had a questioning lilt. His word just sat there like a big disbelief log for her to trip over.
“Sometimes I work in the department. You know paramedics are good on the floor.” And none of this was making her less guilty, especially since she could feel her cheeks getting hot. “Charles said it was okay.”
“Why? Something to do with how pale you are?” Then his brows snapped down like a plank over his eyes. “What’s going on?”
“Fine, I got hold of something that made me throw up a lot.” Not exactly a lie. Everything made her throw up a lot.
“Are you hungover?”
Hungover. God, why did everyone think she was such a mental case that she’d be drinking heavily when she had to work the next day?
On second thoughts, better that story than the other.
“Not anymore. But you’re right, it was tequila. I met this guy, we did some body shots, and then after all the loud, sweaty sex on the jungle gym in his bedroom, then we did some more body... Hey, Zac, where ya goin’? I was just getting to the good part!”
The Rescue Doc's Christmas Miracle Page 7