“Safe,” he chokes, like the word is a baton against his chest. I’m trying to make sense of his reaction as he lifts my hand from the keys, turns it palm up, then presses a kiss oh so gently to the juncture of my wrist. “Should you? Feel safe, I mean.”
“Should I not?” I ask. My pulse pounds against his lips, and I feel the soft gust of his breath blowing against it.
“I don’t know,” Julian confesses. “I’m not a normal man. I’mgreedy. I want everything life has to give to me, and I want to imbibe it. To gulp it down, as fast as I can.” He cradles his cheek against my hand, nuzzles into it. “That includes you, Sean.”
His words feel dangerous. As if we’ve been coasting along a straight road, and he’s just made a sharp turn that’s left me reaching for the grab handle. I can’t look away from him, caught in his web, unable to do more than try to calm my breath.
“I want all of you,” Julian continues, confesses. “All of your secrets and more of your memories. I want to know the things that make you laugh and cry, what you’re proud of and what you’d rather keep close. I want to catalog every kiss”—he kisses my palm—“every touch”—he sucks the meat of it between his teeth—“just so I can return to it in my dreams.” He smiles as he looks at me, a slow, sultry thing. “Does that scare you?”
My heart is a jackhammer in my ears, drowning me out. Julian’s right. His intensityshouldfrighten me. But it doesn’t. Instead it feels like I’m being seen for the first time in a long time. Like he has just held up a mirror to the version of me I’ve tried to squirrel away, the one whose love was boundless and unabashed andtoo much, and given her permission to exist.
“No,” I whisper.
Julian’s eyes flash; his laugh is no mirth and all warning.
“No?” he says, and suddenly his voice is different, now husk and echo, and his grip becomes iron tight. More the man I see in my dreams than the one who held me to his chest in a quiet corridor just hours before. “I’ve just told you that I might be just a little obsessed with you, Sean Sullivan, and you aren’t running away screaming? What does that say about you?”
“That I’m the same, probably,” I confess, breathless, and he shiftscloser, hanging on to my every word. “I think you’refascinating, and I want to know you too. I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to know anyone the way I want to know you.” I swallow, bewitched by the gentle parting of Julian’s lips, his steady unraveling. “I…I dream of you too—”
The sound Julian makes is half snarl, and in one smooth movement, he kicks back the piano bench, and suddenly I’m in the air, lofted into his arms with my legs wound around his waist.
We’re doing this, I think as he pushes the door to the music room open and takes me down the hall.We’re actually doing this. My body is all too eager, every part of me straining for him, and I nuzzle into his neck and inhale. Good lord this man always smells so good. I want to sneak into his cabinet and douse myself in his cologne. Julian shivers.
“Careful, Sean,” he warns.
I’m tired of being careful, I think.Tired of being afraid.I fold his skin between my lips and tug, kiss my way up to his ear, and delight in the shuddering sigh I earn in response. Julian boosts me up in his arms until we are face-to-face and backs me into the hallway wall. The feeling of him hard against me as his mouth crashes into mine whets my most primitive appetite. I want to touch him properly this time. Want him in my mouth, his fist in my hair. Want to watch his eyes roll back as he succumbs to me, to show him just what I’m capable of makinghimfeel for once—
A grating beep interrupts my thoughts.
“What is— Oh shit.”
It’s like I’ve been dropped into a dunk tank; I am instantly sober. I pat Julian on the shoulder and, obediently, he lets me down.
My pager forwards to my phone, which is currently in my purse on the kitchen island, and I pad, barefoot, toward it. My stomach churns with uncertainty—I’m not on call, so either some unfortunateintern has accidentally paged the incorrect interventional cardiologist at the most inopportune time, or something is greatly amiss.
As is my luck, it turns out to be the latter.
“I’m so sorry to do this to you, Dr. Sullivan,” one of the cardiology fellows, Nasreen, says. “But we have a STEMI, and we can’t reach Dr. Pendersen. Can you come in?”
Ten
The thing about emergencies is that they care very little about convenience. The fifty-nine-year-old gentleman about whom I have been called was jolted out of a deep sleep by crushing chest pain after a long shift at the auto shop and was rushed in by ambulance. I am being dragged from my date possibly minutes before getting ravished in order to fix him. Neither I nor my patient is particularly thrilled by the interruption, but we’re both here because this situation is quite literally as serious as a heart attack.
Julian drives me to the hospital. The electrocardiogram that Nasreen forwarded to me looks foul.
“I’m so sorry,” I say to Julian for the thousandth time.
“It’s fine. You’re saving someone’s life,” Julian says.
He doesn’t look fine. His grip on the steering wheel is perfectly set at ten and two, and he’s barely spoken to me since I got off the phone with Nasreen. He’s disappointed, and I don’t blame him, because I am too. I just don’t quite understand why it’s led him to this sullenness when we can just pick up where we left off the next time we see each other.
“This doesn’t usually happen,” I say.It never happens, I almostamend. Brandon is the one on call, but he didn’t respond to the page and isn’t picking up his calls or answering his texts. But to quote every interventional cardiologist ever,Time is myocardium, and I am not about to sit by and let someone die because I’m caught in my own romance. Still, Brandon Pendersen better be lying in a ditch right now to justify ruining my night.
“It’s fine,” Julian repeats, but when we pull up in front of the hospital, he doesn’t lean forward to kiss me good night. He is so many miles away from the man who sat with me on the bench just minutes before, telling me he wants to gulp me down.
“It’s clearly not,” I say as I gather my things.
Julian sighs, but his gaze doesn’t lift from the wheel.