“You’re saying the moon made you kiss me.”
“Lunar gravitational influence on human behaviour is a recognized field of study.”
“It’s absolutely not.”
“There are papers.”
“There are not papers. You’re a neurosurgeon. You know there aren’t papers.”
“There are papers adjacent to the topic.”
“Papers adjacent. Arjun. You’re citing papers adjacent to a field that doesn't exist to explain why the moon made you kiss me. Do you hear yourself? We've gone from adrenaline to fatigue to psychological pressure to moonlight to papers adjacent. That's five excuses in eight minutes. Are you going to blame the scent of the jasmine in the air next?”
“The jasmine is a known anxiolytic. It's not entirely outside the realm of?—”
“Arjun.”
He stops. He looks at me. And underneath the panic, underneath the excuses, underneath the armour and the morning-after retreat and the thirty-three years of emotional barricade construction, I see him. The real him. The him who held my face in his steady hands last night and kissed me like he was drowning and I was air.
“I'm not asking you to have it figured out,” I say. “I'm not asking for a declaration or a plan or a surgical roadmap. I'm askingyou to not pretend it didn't happen. That's all. Just don't pretend. Not with me.”
He is quiet for a long time.
“I am not pretending,” he says finally, and his voice is so quiet I have to lean forward to hear it. “I am failing to pretend. That is the problem. I have been failing to pretend since Toronto, since the kitchen table, since you held my hand and my entire nervous system short-circuited. I cannot pretend, Casey. I have tried. I am categorically, constitutionally, humiliatingly incapable of pretending that you are just an arrangement.”
I feel the words settle into me like warm water into cold ground. Slow. Deep. Filling every crack in my heart.
“Okay,” I say again.
“You keep saying okay.”
“Because it’s okay. All of it. The panic and the excuses and the moonlight theory and the part where you wake up and try to take it back. It's all okay. Because underneath all of that, you just told me you can't pretend. And that's enough. For now, Doc, that’s more than enough.”
He looks at me across the three feet of silk sheets. His green eyes are red-rimmed and exhausted and wide open, and his clinical mask is in pieces on the floor, and his hands are resting on his stomach, and they are shaking.
I reach across the space. Slowly. Giving him time to pull away if he needs to. My hand finds his. My fingers thread through his trembling fingers and hold. Warm. Steady. Sure.
His hands stop shaking.
We stay like that. Holding hands across the wreckage.
He doesn’t say anything else. Neither do I. The morning light moves across the floor as time goes by.
And then, very slowly, Arjun turns his head and looks at me. Really looks. Not the clinical assessment, not the Dread Prince evaluation. Just Arjun. Green eyes in the morning light, red-rimmed and exhausted and scared and open.
“Casey,” he says, and his voice is very small. “I panicked.”
“I know.”
“The lapse in judgment was the lapse in judgment speech. Not the kiss.”
“I know that too.”
He swallows. His thumb moves against my fingers, a slow, tentative stroke, testing. “It was not the moonlight.”
“It was not the moonlight.”
“Or the jasmine.”