A Doctor in His House

“The soup really helped.”

“I can heat you some more.”

“Actually, yes, another mug.”

“More toast, too?”

“Please. It’s really settling my stomach. How come you’re so good at this?” she blurted out.

There came a long beat of silence, then, on a reluctant growl, “My mom was sick for a long time. From when I was a kid.”

A shock ran through her. He’d never told her that, six years ago. Never once. Not hinted at it, or—

Nothing.

She’d worked out that he’d had a challenging history—well, he’d ended up rubbing her face in it, with deliberate anger—but she hadn’t known about his mom. He’d never told her enough about anything, back then, and it shocked her that he hadn’t breathed a word about something this huge.

“She died a few months ago,” Daniel added, in answer to the question Scarlett hadn’t found a way to ask. “It was a good thing, by that point. She was glad to go.”

She apologized awkwardly, as if it was her fault that she hadn’t known. Maybe it was. Maybe he would have told her about his mom’s illness when they’d come up here, if—

Yeah. If a few things.

If she hadn’t been so obviously on the rebound. If her ex hadn’t left her with so much emotional baggage. If she hadn’t been so scared of the strength of her physical response to Daniel, when her whole life her bright mind was the thing she’d been taught to rely on. If she’d had more trust—because she hadn’t trusted even the good things about him, back then, let alone the obvious differences between them.

And if they hadn’t spent so much of their short time together in bed.

“It’s okay,” he said, and the words covered all sorts of bases, and allowed them both to let the subject go.

Silence wasn’t comfortable, though. She scrabbled around in her woolly mind for something to say, but Daniel managed it first. Very polite. “Your brother has done up the house great.”

“It’s gorgeous, isn’t it? He didn’t do all of it. The previous owner had made a good start. I’ve seen some photos from the 1970s when it was a dump. Badly subdivided, with cheap paneling everywhere, and dark brown paint with mustard-yellow appliances and flooring.”

“I remember that kind of color scheme. Actually our refrigerator was avocado-green.”

“You’re not that old!”

He laughed. “Some people don’t manage to buy a new appliance or repaint a room for quite a while after the fashions change.”

“True.” She held her breath. It was the kind of conversation topic that would have deteriorated into an argument six years ago, hinging on his underprivileged background—living with bad paint—and her well-paved path through life—regularly updated decor. She would have said too much, made it all too complicated, while he would have said barely anything at all, but with a sense that there was enormous emotion lying underneath.

Would he turn it into an argument now? Or one of the white-hot, simmering silences she’d hated?

After a moment, he laughed again. “Funny how you can turn memories around.”

“Yeah?”

“I hated those paint colors when I was a kid. Now they’re an anecdote. A war story.”

“Kids today think they have it tough,” she mimicked. “We had to live with avocado-colored refrigerators.”

“What is it they say? What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

“It surely does!”

They talked a little more, never openly confronting the fact that they knew each other, but letting it say itself in a reference here and there. Daniel held himself back, the way he always had. Scarlett gave a little more, and felt a zing of triumph every time she got something from him in return.

She thought that they couldn’t have related to each other like this in any other situation. It was only happening because she couldn’t see, because he’d had to help her, and because there had been that first ten or fifteen minutes when it wasn’t clear whether they both realized that they’d met before.

After a while, the conversation petered out in a natural kind of way. They watched—or in her case listened to—TV in silence, while she measured the passage of time in sitcom units and listened to Daniel’s occasional gruff gurgle of laughter.

She liked it when he laughed. It was a warm and very physical sound, reassuring and hopeful. Laughter created companionship every bit as much as conversation. Maybe more. She laughed along with him a couple of times, and his laugh touched her like a soft blanket or the palm of a comforting hand. She wished the sitcoms were funnier, so that the laugh would come more often.

Four and a half of them went by, which meant that it must be around nine. They’d spent most of an evening together and barely said a word, and yet she felt her emotions settling to a deeper place, a better place than she would have thought possible, with regard to this man.

For the past six years she’d felt a churn of uncomfortable memories and feelings any time she thought of him. She’d second-guessed everything she’d said and done, and everything he’d done, too. Maybe she hadn’t needed to feel that way. Maybe none of it had been as bad as she’d thought, on either side.

Well, huh.

She let the thought sit, didn’t know what she wanted to do about it.

Time for more medication, and the bed awaiting her upstairs. He brought the pills to her, with a glass of water, and she gulped them down. From experience, she knew that it didn’t do to let the pain take hold again between doses. The medication was most effective if she stayed strictly to the four-hour interval.

“Thanks, Daniel.”

“No problem. Going up now?”

“That’s the plan.” She stood.

And swayed.

Light-headed rather than actively dizzy, maybe because she’d been lying down for so long.

Daniel was there almost at once, grabbing her by the elbows and then, in case this wasn’t enough, stepping right up to her so she could grasp two fistfuls of his shirt and lean her weight into his chest. When she took a staggering step sideways, he kept her on her feet, and then the lightheadedness subsided and she felt almost normal, apart from her sight.

He put his arm around her waist and engulfed her hand in his and it felt good, even though she couldn’t even see him, she had no idea what he really looked like now. Not in detail. If he had lines starting to form around his eyes and mouth, or if his hairline was receding, but he felt so good, and he smelled so good, too, like sandalwood and mint and clean laundry.

“I could make you a bed on the couch, if it’s too hard for you to get upstairs,” he said.

“I want a real bed. It’s worth going up for.”

“Yeah, a real bed is always good.”

The words dropped into the air and seemed to hang there. She remembered the big, puffy four-poster at the bed-and-breakfast. She remembered the bunk bed in the doctors’ on-call room at the hospital, when Daniel had wedged a chair under the handle of the door.

She remembered her own bed at home in her parents’ Manhattan apartment. She’d gone back there to live after her separation from Kyle and had stayed on there through her demanding internship year, until she had more time to find the right place on her own.

Mom and Dad had been away for the weekend. Daniel had looked around at the high ceilings, the oil paintings on the walls, the windows with a distant view of Central Park, and couldn’t hide that this level of privilege was new to him and troubled him. What did it say about their differences?