Devil’s in the Details (28 page)

Within five minutes, Alex was passed out. Breathing heavily as she held onto me like she owned me. In reality, she did. She owned my entire being and there was no turning back now.

Chapter 9

I had woken up a few hours after I passed out on Victoria. The beer had blended with the emotional highs of the day, and caught up to me. Allowing my body to relax just enough to fall asleep in the blink of an eye. Unlike like most nights when I fell asleep immediately, I would wake up a few hours later and sit in the dark. Convincing my brain that it was perfectly okay to go back to sleep for another six or seven hours, especially on a day off.

Normally that would have worked when I was alone in my loft apartment, sprawled out in the middle of my bed alone, but right now, my mind was on a mission with my eyes. There was enough ambient light in the room from the small night light in the bathroom that I could see most of Victoria's features as she laid on her side, sleeping peacefully under warm blankets and pillows.

I had moved to sit up in the bed against the headboard, trying not to disturb Victoria as I looked down at her. The first thing my eyes fell to were her hands. Lying next to her face on the pillow, they made me sigh at the memory of how they felt in mine. How whenever she and I held hands, I felt completely safe with her.

I leaned over further to focus on her knuckles. The tiny white scars from scrapes and cuts, the calluses. Her hands looked like hands that belonged on a boxer or a mixed martial arts fighter, not the gentle woman sleeping peacefully next to me. Victoria was a teacher, not a fighter. It was something about her hands that had bothered me for as long as I knew her. More on the days she would come home from one of her work trips and she would hide her hands from me any chance she could. I sighed softly, maybe I was thinking too much into it. Maybe her scars were from helping her neighbor Dale dig holes, fix his roof, or putter around working on that old Mustang in his garage.

Dragging the duvet up further, I let the curious questions I had about Victoria's hands, and the mysteries they often held, fade into the thoughts of how her and I had gotten to this point. How one terrible moment in my life became one of my most cherished friendships, then evolved into this love I was on the verge of professing. Even as my gut was poking at the bottom of my heart trying to tell me that there was something more to what my trained nurse eyes saw on her hands and in the way she tenderly moved her body sometimes after one of her trips.

Sitting in Victoria's bed, propped against her pillows, I couldn't pinpoint the exact moment that I knew I had fallen in love with her, and that somewhere along the way she began to feel the same. I could simply feel it in the air between us, the looks we shared while passing the salt or the popcorn or how she would pause her sentence as she looked up and met my eyes.

It was all cliché things written in the books from the dawn of time that led all humans to believe in love and that love was attainable if we felt it. I had spotted the signs in the second month of our friendship. In that second month of a newly formed routine, the idea I was smitten with Victoria only because she had been the Good Samaritan, fell to the wayside. It was quickly replaced by that slow burning and rolling feeling in the pit of your stomach that told you all the things you didn't want to hear or believe.

The whisper of love was slowly creeping its way into your life whether you wanted it to or not. Not caring if you were ready or not, pointing its big bold finger at the one who looked at me like Victoria did. It was that look that would carry me to the rest of my days finally believing in the bedtime stories and cheap romance novels my mother read on long road trips.

I did wish I had one particular moment where I would be able to sit and tell my grandchildren, ‘and that was the moment I knew I was in love with her.’ But there wasn't one exact moment, there were many. All little sections and pieces of time that snowballed into this feeling that sat heavy, happily heavy, around my heart whenever I was near the blonde.

We fell in love the old fashioned way as Bill would say, with small looks, touches and a deep rooted feeling of undying safety of giving one's heart to the other.

I smiled, reaching over to brush some of the hair that had fallen across her face. Maybe one day I would sit and try to figure it out. For now, I was content to live in the moment.

Victoria sighed heavily when she felt my hand skim across her cheek. Rolling over in the bed, she slid her hand across the mattress until it bumped into the side of my leg. Her eyes flicked open and squinted to focus in the dark. "Alex? Are you okay?" Her raspy voice was laden with worry.

I grinned, nodding as I scooted back down to lay next to her. "I couldn't sleep. My brain is still on double time." I moved the duvet to cover her up. "Go back to sleep, Victoria."

She nodded slowly, her eyes already closing as she moved closer to me. Resting her head on my shoulder before breathing out heavily and falling into the gentle rhythm of sleeping. I dropped my hand to rest on her shoulder, running small circles against the thin material of her sleep shirt. Eventually putting myself to sleep with the monotonous motion of my hand infused with the even up and down of her breathing.

I left Alex in the bed, laughing silently at the way she sprawled out into the middle of the bed the second I got up. Clutching to the pillow I used in one hand and hers in the other. She was sleeping like a dead rock with her face smashed into the pillows and her body buried under blankets. It was something Alex often did when she was beyond tired and had kept her body up longer than it needed.  She usually achieved this level of exhaustion on the weeks when she worked endless doubles then tried to stay awake for my benefit to spend time with me.

It was an only a few minutes past eight in the morning, and like clockwork, I got up and went downstairs to start my morning routine. Start a fresh pot of coffee, stare at the pantry to decide if it was going to be a cold cereal, oatmeal, or bacon and eggs kind of morning.

As the coffee brewed, I picked up the morning paper from the porch, waved hello to Dale who was out as usual, watering the flowers in his front yard. I then would go back inside and head to my den while my internal breakfast choice debate continued. Then, I would sit down at the ominous black laptop and read through the next job I had in my queue.

But this time, the routine changed. Instead of sitting at my desk, I stood in the doorway to the den. Arms folded and peering over at the plain looking black rectangle perched at the edge of my desk. For the first time in a very long time, I didn't want to open it up, turn it on and dive into the emails or case files awaiting me.

Walking away from the den I returned to the kitchen, removing the semi faded index card with the berry muffin recipe Mary gave me months ago when I raved over them after she handed me a bag over the fence one morning. I had decided to busy my hands with trying not to mangle the simple looking recipe while waiting for Alex to wake up.

Setting up all of the items I would need to make the muffins, I allowed myself to indulge in the warm moments of last night. The intense and consuming goodnight kiss Alex launched on me, followed by me doing another first in my life, asking Alex to sleep with me out of the simple desire that I wanted to be close to her.

I wanted to finally know what it was like to have her warmth roll over me as we slept. How it finally felt to have her in my arms like I dreamt of far too many times when we were trying to be just friends and I was jealous of the stupid fuzzy blanket she curled up in on movie nights.

There had been so many diminutive things about Alex that many would have overlooked or paid no attention to. Like how she treated all of her patients like they were the only one she had. How she would always give her spare change to whoever needed it, or the way she just knew what was wrong with me within the first syllable I uttered. Then there was the way she looked at me, not like I was the person who saved her that night on the station, but the person who was saving her heart when so many others had failed. The way Alex cared about me, looked at me, all of it, was what brought the humanity I had lost so long ago back from the deep dark depths I had to force it into to do the job.

Then there was the way she would giggle at her favorite parts of a movie, covering her face to hide the fact that she was truly giggling and not laughing. The way she would always con me into watching whatever dumb TV show of the week she had gotten hooked on, and ask incessantly if I liked it. The way Alex was just Alex. Living life to the fullest and not letting the darkness of the world she often saw in the trauma ward, affect her.

I had only seen her cry once, a month before she called me out on our pseudo relationship and our friendship started on the path of fading into nothing. It had been after one of her patients that she spent days looking after when they came in after a car accident, passed. She gave her all to that patient, doing her best to make sure that they would be able to go home. But sometimes fate and medicine don't always agree, and Alex lost the patient. She called me that night, unable to speak through the sobs. I raced to her apartment and sat with her as she cried until she fell asleep in my arms on the couch. That was the moment I knew I had fallen completely and irreversibly in love with her, and I would do everything I could to take care of her. We never spoke of that night, but the tension between us grew incomprehensibly thicker and I knew what would be coming in time.

All these fragments of ridiculous and serious thoughts had carried me for a year as I tried so desperately to keep Alex in the “friend's only” category. Hoping that I wouldn't fail and I could keep her away from me, to protect her. Never mind that the woman was tough, tenacious, stunning, intelligent and had a heart that would make an iceberg melt with one of her infamous hugs.

As I slathered the muffin pans with butter, I thought back to how close I had come to letting her fade into the wind and into the arms of that doctor. I had meant it when I told her that it took me seeing her in the arms of another, receiving the attention and love I wanted to give her but had fought so hard not to do while I kept in her in the friend zone. All because I wanted to stick to my guns and not get any deeper involved with the woman.

Getting deeper involved with her would jeopardize her safety, it was a given. A given that I didn't know if I could stomach. Seeing her cry once was soul shattering enough. I didn't think I could endure being the reason, or the cause of her sobbing and broken heart, all because I had another life that was a killer of a job.

She was the woman from the metro station. The woman who I took one look at and knew that she would be the one thing that could change my life more than all the other life altering things I had experienced. The woman I cursed myself for getting involved so long ago, and now as I looked up at the ceiling, hearing her stir in the bedroom above me, I smiled happily.

Twenty minutes later, a yawning brunette straggled her way down the stairs and popped into the kitchen with a sleepy grin on her face. Tugging on the drawstrings of a very familiar dark blue and yellow sweatshirt. "Morning." Her voice was deeper than normal with the slight rasp that came with having just woken up.