Friends Without Benefits (Knitting in the City) (34 page)

Dan nodded. “I agree. In fact, I’ll let our legal department know and they’ll start working on it. Maybe we can get it pushed through today.”

“Quinn has a legal department?”

Dan eyed me warily. “Yeah.”

“What for?”

“Legal stuff.”

I frowned at him, confused by his vague response. M
y hands were shaking so I crossed my arms over my chest.

“Hey
 . . . maybe you should go home?” He placed a hesitant hand on my back.

“
No. I’m fine, really. Just a little on edge.”

His
concerned brown eyes moved over me in plain surveillance, and I tried to give him my best impression of a brave face.

“Ok
ay. Fine. I’ll be here the whole time. Hell, I’ll even follow you into the bathroom.” His words were tinged with a faint Bostonian accent. “But if you need to go home—”

“No. It’s ok
ay.” I balled my still-shaking hands into fists. “I’ll be okay.”

Dan grimaced, cursed under his breath. “I’m just glad we
re-briefed the hospital security team earlier this week. They’ve decided to resend the email out to all staff with her picture, so hopefully someone will see her and call it in.”

“Yeah
,” I said. “Hopefully.”

~*~

I was okay. Well, I was mostly okay.

A
dmittedly, I was jumpy at first. But as patient after patient filtered through the ER and my attention was yanked from my own concerns to those of helping families deal with sick children or spouses work through a difficult diagnosis, my nerves evened out. Mostly, I felt exhausted.

Detective L
ong arrived just after noon. I felt foolish, telling the story a second time. She brushed for prints around my locker, questioned me, collected my statement for the restraining order, and took the eerily perfect lab coat and disturbingly shredded knitting bag with her when she left.

By the time b
oth Nico and Rose brought Angelica to her afternoon appointment, I did my best to suppress the up-down of my emotions. I didn’t hug Nico, but I did hold his hand a bit too tight when he extended it to shake mine; I did stare into his eyes a bit too long.

He frowned, his brow creas
ed with concern, I could read worry in his eyes. We weren’t alone, surrounded as we were by our security guards, the clinical research unit staff, and his family. I tried to give him a heartening smile. This only served to increase the hardness of his features. 

After I hooked Angelica up to the infusion line and stepped back to find her a blanket he caught me, pulled me slightly to the side in the small space. “Hey. What’s wrong? Are you ok
ay?”

I nodded, swallowed, fiddled with the stethoscope around my neck. “Yes. I’m fine.” Except my voice was shrill, strained even to my own ears. I winced then tried again. “Really.”

He took an impatient breath. “Is this about earlier? What I said—”

“No! No, not at all.”
I hoped he’d somehow read my thoughts and guess at the events of the morning. It was a completely ludicrous hope. I noted that we were being watched by the nurses. Fleetingly, I considered pulling him into an encounter room and filling him in on the details. Good judgment had me deciding against it. I didn’t need any of the hospital staff recording us or any hints, suggestions of inappropriate behavior. Instead I did my best to reassure him. “Really. I just . . . Listen, we’ll talk when I get off.”

“What time do you get off?”

“Three.”

“
You mean in an hour?”

“No.
Three in the morning.”

“Oh
.” He stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Can’t we talk now?”

My eyes flitted around the room, scanned the hovering nurses. I thought back to the pictures of Nico and me taken after our friends
-without-benefits conversation. I didn’t want any more pictures; I didn’t want to add any more fuel to the fire by separating ourselves for a private conversation.

It could wait.

“We’ll talk later. I’ll . . . I’ll call you during my next break.”

His frown increased in severity
, and he glanced at Angelica. “Let me get her a blanket.”

I nodded, stepped to the side so he could fi
nd what he needed on the shelf and only halfway succeeded in arranging a mask of calm over my features.

All through the rest of the visit I stole glances in his direction. He didn’t meet my eyes. Instead he held Angelica’s hand and kept his attention focused on the
My Little Pony
episode playing on her iPad.

When the visit was over I allowed an obliviously happy Rose to pull me into a brief hug
. I walked the trio plus their guards to the staff elevator and boarded with them. On the way down, Rose made chitchat about a recent outing to the Natural History Museum and the impressively huge stuffed Lions she’d seen in the basement.

Just as the elevator reached our floor Nico threaded his fingers through mine and squeezed my hand. I met his big green eyes and found them devoid of twinkle. Again I tried to reassure him, returned his hand squeeze, but with my every attempt he seemed to grow more agitated. He held us in place as everyone else exited the elevator
, and I didn’t realize his intent until it was too late.

I started to exit
, but his hand pulled me back, his arm wrapped around my middle and I—confused, caught, stunned—watched as the doors closed. Rose, Angelica, and all our guards on one side and us on the other, alone in the elevator.

“Nico! What—wait—what are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking you need to tell me what’s going on right now. There is something wrong.”

I spun and hit his chest; the
elevator and my anxiety began their ascent. “That was incredibly stupid! All of our security is on the other floor, we’re alone!”

He gripped my wrists. “What is going on? You look petrified. I don’t know what I can say about this morning, ok
ay? I was being impulsive, it was stupid. I never should have said it—”

“This isn’t about that. I had, someone
—damn it!” I darted to the other side of the elevator and hit the wall, furious. “Don’t you care at all about your safety?”

“Yes
! . . . Wait, what?”

“This. This right here is the problem! There is a crazy person running around this hospital! You have a nutty fancy stalker who is completely unhinged, cutting up lab coats and leaving
creepy pictures all over the place and you’re dodging your security!” I had no control over the volume of my voice. I was screeching like a banshee.

“What the hell happened?”

“You push and you push and, you know what? Maybe I wasn’t ready for this! I told you over and over again that I didn’t want to do this, but you wouldn’t listen! You just kept pushing me and now I’m not going to let you do this to me, do you understand? I’m not going to be left! You are going to start taking your safety seriously—if you get hurt or die I will kill you!”

Just as I finished my screaming tirade the elevator dinged, announcing our arrival at the
fourth floor. The doors slid open. I could see several people in my peripheral vision hovering at the entrance to the lift. They didn’t get on. Something about the way Nico and I were glaring at each other must have warned them away. The doors closed.

He swallowed. I could tell he was trying to school his expression, was attempting to build a wall between me, my words, and him. He broke eye contact first and punched the button for the basement, where we’d left our guards, Rose, and Angelica.

I huffed, blinked against the gathering, stinging moisture and took a step toward him. “Nico . . . I—”

“No.” The single word was a sharp reprimand, a line in the sand. “We’ll talk when you get off
work.”

“Something happened this morning—”

“I said we’ll talk about it later, when I’m not
pushing
you.” He wouldn’t look at me. Instead he stood in the opposite side of the car and glared at the doors.

I huffed again, leaned heavily against the wall.
“I didn’t mean that.”

Silence.

“I mean I did, but I didn’t . . .” After a brief second of indecision on how to continue I threw my hands in the air. “Why are we always having these conversations in elevators?”

The doors opened once again, revealing two security guards—one of them was Dan—who breathed a visible, audible sigh of relief upon seeing us.
Without glancing back, Nico left the elevator and followed his guard to a waiting black SUV. Dan stepped on the elevator, his expression stern, perturbed.

But I didn’t care about Dan
’s silent disapproval. I cared about Nico’s silent departure and how he’d disappeared into the big vehicle without giving me a backward glance.

As soon as the opportunity presented itself,
I sprinted to the doctors’ lounge and tried to call Nico. When he didn’t answer I called again. When he didn’t answer for the third time I left him a long, rambling voicemail describing the events of the morning and apologizing for my over reactive outburst. I called him a fourth time and told him I loved him.

My heart plummeted
that night when Rose brought Angelica to the evening appointment, Nico conspicuously absent. I did take heart from the fact that Rose was still giving me knowing smiles. When she reminded me, just before leaving, that I had a key to the penthouse the sick feeling in my stomach dissolved a little.

If Nico were truly angry with me sur
ely his mother would know. Surely she would be prying and pushing me to fix whatever I’d broken. But she appeared to be happy, happy as a crazy fox in a hen house.

I also took comfort from Angelica’s happy, albeit sleepy, face when she saw me. We hugged. I indulged myself by sitting next to her the whole time and stroking her hair. When she left I felt like she took part of my heart with her.

I counted the hours until my shift was over. When the clock struck 3:00 a.m. I bolted, left my charting for the next day. Dan had been replaced sometime in the evening with a tall, imposing guard named Jackson. Like Dan, he shadowed me through my shift and, when we left the hospital and walked to the car, he kept one hand on my upper arm and one hand hovering over his gun.

We arrived back to my building without incident, though Jackson insisted on riding up with me to Nico’s penthouse. I bid him goodnight—although he didn’t look like he was going anywhere—and tiptoed to Nico’s room.

Part of me hoped that he was asleep so I could strip naked and snuggle against his warmth. Part of me hoped he was awake so that I could apologize then yell at him some more about putting himself in danger.

He was awake. His laptop was perched on his lap and was the only illumination in the room. I hovered in the doorway briefly, memorizing his face, sending up a silent prayer of thanks that we were both here, safe, unharmed.

He looked up when I shifted forward and closed the door behind me. I noted his face darken, his eyebrows pull into a deep V of concentration or irritation or concern—or all three.

“How was your double shift?”
He didn’t sound precisely mad, more like distant.

I closed half the distance to where he sat then loitered, uncertain if I should cross to him, if I were spending the night, of where we stood. “Busy. Did you get my messages?”

He nodded. His jaw ticked.

I waited for him to say something. When he didn’t I closed my eyes and rubbed my forehead. “What happened
earlier, with the elevator, you can’t take chances like that.”

“You should have called me right after the police. Why did you stay at work? You should have come home.”
Now he sounded mad. In fact, he sounded downright furious.

“I stayed because I have a job to do.
My
guard was with me the whole time.” I leveled him with a severe glare. “I didn’t strand myself alone in an elevator.”

“Wait—are you mad at me?” When I didn’t answer his expression transformed from disbelieving to defiant.

“You separated us from your security team.” I flicked on the light by the dresser; he and the room were better illuminated. I was able to discern, but didn’t quite register, that he had his small satchel half-packed on the edge of his bed.

“Because
I knew something was wrong. It was a chance to speak privately. You’re working all night, I have to leave, and I’m going to miss you!”

“You were
reckless.”

He stood and walked to me.
“Don’t you understand that I can’t stand the fact that I’ve put you in danger? Don’t you know that I’m going crazy, thinking about what you went through? You couldn’t even take a minute to call me? To tell me about it until hours later?”

“I’m not worried about me
—”

“Well I’m worried about you!
”

“You’re not listening.
”

“
Fine. Why do you think we’re fighting?”

“Don’t you get it?” I forced myself to lower my voice. “I wasn’t thinking about me, I was thinking about you!” Because I couldn’t both control the volume of my words and keep from hitting him, I hit him. But once I started I couldn’t stop, I
backed him into the wall and gripped his arms as I unloaded my fear. “What if she did come back? What if she was there when the elevator opened on the fourth floor? All I could think was that this was it, that your fancy stalker has a gun or a flame thrower or a bomb strapped to her chest and that I was going to lose you. That she was going to—”

“Hey, hey
.” He grabbed my wrists, stilled my flailing hands, and tugged me against his chest. “Not going to happen. You’re not going to lose me.”

I pulled out of his grip, my hands still shaking, and moved beyond his reach. “You don’t know that! Especially when you insist on acting irresponsibly and taking stupid chances with your safety.”

“If you’d told me about what happened—”

“This is one of the reasons why I didn’t want to do this, but you kept pushing me, and pressuring me and now you—”

“We rode together in an elevator, alone, one time. Which, I wouldn’t have done if you’d called me and told me what was going on.”

“All it takes is one time.
I don’t—” I shook my head, growled a little, stalked away from him and whisper-yelled. “I don’t want to do this!”

A thick silence followed my outburst.

“Do what?” When Nico spoke it made me jump; I could tell his temper reaching critical mass by the sharp edge to his voice.

“I don’t want to worry about you, about losing you, about getting a call from the police one day because you decided to ditch your security team.”

We stared at each other for a long moment. Unlike our previous staring contests which usually ended in lustful eye sex, this one ended with me closing my eyes in frustration; an errant tear escaping and fleeing down my cheek.

I stood in his room, exhausted, wondering why I didn’t just strip naked and invite him to bed instead of arguing about something that could have waited until morning. The answer came to me swiftly:
because you’re terrified.

It was true. I was terrified. I was terrified that he would be hurt or I’d lose him to some nut. Happiness, love
, and relationships were impermanent, fleeting. My mother was gone. Garrett was gone. I felt like I was losing Janie in almost every way that mattered.

Therefore, e
ventually Nico would be gone too. Likely high falutin and experiencing a very satisfying happily ever after with the—suddenly omnipresent in my brain—girl C.

Gah! I was a mess! And I needed more sleep.

The sound of nondescript rustling and zippers pulled me out of my depressing manifesto. I glanced at Nico; his back was to me. He was stuffing a book into the bag on the bed.

The half-pa
cked bag on the bed.

My adrenaline spiked.

I stomped to him, stood at his elbow as he put a folder on top of the book. “What are you doing?” I already knew the answer before he responded.

“My flight leaves at six.”

I stared at him; I knew my eyes were about to full-on leak floods of tears any second. “You’re leaving? Now? But I thought you didn’t have to leave until this afternoon?”

“Now seems like a good time. I think I need to stop pushing y
ou and let you make up your mind on your own.”

I glanced between him and the bag. He walked around me, not making eye contact, and retrieved his lap
top from where he’d left it on the chair.

“Nico
, you’re not pushing—I mean, you did, but that’s not what this is about.”

“Yes. Me pushing you is exactly what this is about.”

“I feel like you’re purposefully misunderstanding everything that I say.”

“I’m not. I understand you perfectly. You don’t know what you want and I’m trying to give you the space to figure it out
. Maybe we need a little distance to figure this out.”

“I don’t want distance
.”

“Well, you’re getting it. Whether you want it or not, you’re getting it.”

He sounded so resolute, so stubborn, pushing again, but in the opposite direction. Like he’d made up his mind hours ago and discussion was pointless. I watched his back as he walked from one side of the room to the other.

“Please don’t leave.”
My voice sounded so small. I was pleading with him, and I didn’t care.

He paused
; he shook his head. “I can’t stay.”

I
swiftly moved to his position, forced him to face me and filled his arms. I kissed his chest, his neck, his face. “Stay, with me. Forget I said anything. Just don’t leave.”

“Elizabeth
 . . .” He groaned, nuzzled his nose against my neck. “I have to go, I have to let you go at some point.”

I pulled away, felt like he’d just sucker punched me in the stomach. “What do you mean,
let me go
? We haven’t—we just—”

“I have to step back. I’ve been crowding you, pressuring you. I have to know that you and I want the same thing and
that you’re not just . . . not just giving in.”

I frowned at him, sadfaced him. I didn’t trust myself to speak without
begging even more or saying something spiteful so I said nothing. He searched my eyes, heaved a giant sigh and turned away from me again, pulled completely out of my grasp.

“I’ll be back next week. We can try each other out for a while. See if it works. We’ll take it one day at a time.”
He shrugged as he spoke.

Try each other out.

See if it works.

Take it one day at a time.

WHAT THE HELL?

I sat on the bed, willed myself not to cry.

My head was spinning. Everything was happening too fast. One minute we’re tearing each other’s clothes off in an elevator, then bringing up marriage, then he’s leaving me for a week and basically telling me not to contact him.

I kept thinking that he wasn’t being fair.
He pushed me into this relationship, and now he was pushing me out of it. He was leaving, and I had absolutely no say in the matter. I didn’t understand how I’d let this happen, how or when I’d given him so much power over me.

I sat silent, still, staring at nothing for a long while
, and he packed his small bag. When he finished he crossed to me and held out his hand. I didn’t take it. I couldn’t even look at it.

He sighed. “Listen, I’ll
 . . . I might be hard to get in touch with this week. We’ll catch up when I get back, okay?”

I couldn’t
talk, and if I met his gaze I would burst into tears. Therefore, I didn’t move. After a long moment he reached down and pulled me up by the shoulders, lifted my chin and pressed a devastating kiss on my mouth. He was warm and soft and wet and just delicious. His hands moved down my sides, his thumbs grazed against my breasts, and my body responded to him, to his petting, without the permission of my mind.

Then he broke the kiss and turned away.

I wanted to scream, throw things, threaten, issue ultimatums. I wanted to shake him and ask him why he suddenly felt it necessary to rip out my heart. Instead I watched him walk out the door.

Walk away from me, from us. Then, like the watering pot that I’d become, I cried.

~*~

The rest of
Saturday was a terrible day. I stayed up long enough to administer Angelica’s infusion then I went to sleep. And, yes, I slept in Nico’s bed because it smelled like him, his cologne. I woke up in the afternoon just long enough to administer Angelica’s next dose then went back to bed.

Rose chased me back into Nico’s room and plied me with food. To my utter mystification, she didn’t seem curious about why my eyes were puffy or why Nico had left so early.
This lack of needling threw me for a loop, and I ended up blurting out—

“Nico and I had a fight!”

Rose’s mouth hooked to the side. She gazed at me through her black lashes.
“L'amore non è bello se non è litigarello
[34]
.”

“Please, Rose, what does that mean?”

“It means, you both have passion for each other, and you have love for each other too. You should expect fights, fights are good for the soul and the body.”

I studied her, nonplussed. “My training tells me stress is bad for the body, how can fights be good for the body?”

“Because after a fight there is always the making up. . .”

My eyes popped out of my head, my jaw fell open, and—despite or because of my heartbreak—I laughed. I laughed with the hysteria that accompanies helplessness.
It felt good to laugh because it wasn’t crying.