Josie couldn’t help herself and laughed and extended her hand as if she had never met Dr. Alex Derjian before. “Josie Mendham. Pleased to meet you,” she said, her palm pressed against his, sending an electric current through her body that made her back stand at attention, her body filled with ice and heat, her breathing steady and slow in contrast to her heart, which sped up as if it were sprinting to the finish line of some race she didn’t even know she was running.
“We’ve met before, Grandpa, actually,” Alex said without relinquishing her hand, the steady pumping of their embraced palms slowing until Alex was just holding her hand for no reason other than she let him.
Their eyes locked and Ed crossed his arms over his chest and gave them a puzzled look. “Then why did Josie pretend she hadn’t met you?”
She could feel the rush of blood to her cheeks and knew that she was blushing, but couldn’t pull her eyes away. Finally, she did, tearing them as if fibers had been ripped in half by warring impulses. Ed’s very amused, red-rimmed orbs met hers.
“Because I’m afraid I’ve been quite rude to your grandson,” she said, filled suddenly with a perplexing shame. As if not answering a guy’s calls and texts made her a disappointing child. It was funny how grandfatherly figures brought that out in her, as if she ceded authority to them simply because of their age. You would think that working on an Alzheimer’s unit—and a research trial, no less—would disabuse her of that tendency. In fact it had strengthened it in her, leaving her helpless at times, feeling completely not up to the task of carrying the moral weight of being a good girl.
It was no surprise that she wasn’t up to the task of carrying that moral weight around; she’d accepted that a long time ago. So shame shouldn’t make sense to her, and yet it was still there. Laura once told her that it was probably the result of not being parented enough, that she had some of that too when it came to older men, as if they had no sense of what normal was in interacting with a father figure or a grandfather figure.
Maybe that was it. Or maybe it was simpler than that. Perhaps blowing off the one guy who had rocked her world more than any other was hitting her now, and as two separate parts of her collided, Alex being Ed’s grandson, she started to feel like the hand of fate was somehow involved and that she had been smacking it away in defiance.
Alex was persistent, she had to give him that. It must have taken guts to come here in spite of her ignoring him.
Why?
Why would he go to so much trouble, especially for her? He could have just about any woman he wanted—being a young, eligible bachelor doctor tended to lead to that outcome. So, why pick a woman who had only recently managed to go from scrawny to skinny in the appearance category, who had gained weight along with her pregnant friend as a form of camaraderie, a companionship through culinary means that had made her shapely for the first time in her life but, even then, still quite slim and boyish?
Men played around with women like her—they didn’t chase them. So, when Ed cleared his throat she realized she was in some sort of trance and then quickly lifted the clipboard lying limp in her hand and said, “So, let’s get on with the appointment, shall we?”
Ed gestured gallantly to the small room where her short interview would take place. “Ladies first,” he said, leaving Alex in the waiting room without a backward glance. Ed seemed relaxed and grounded today, really on his game—aside from forgetting her name, such a small lapse that it didn’t trouble her. The handful of steps into the tiny interview room gave her just enough time to wonder about that level of comfort.
Routine was so important with Alzheimer’s patients…if Ed were this fine and grounded, then coming here with Alex must be his routine. How long had Alex been bringing him? And how could she have missed such a fine man right in front of her face?
Alex felt like a drowning man holding on to her hand as he shook it, as if it were a life preserver or a last-minute attempt to pull him out of troubled waters. In reality it was neither. The expression on her face said that what had started out as a polite gesture—a farce, really—for Ed’s benefit had turned into an acknowledgment of the attraction that he so keenly felt.
A million questions peppered his thoughts and nearly threatened to come out in a rush. Why had she ignored his phone calls? Why had she ignored his texts? What had he done to turn her off? What could he do to turn her back on? Did she remember him from these appointments? From the shocked look on her face he guessed not, which made him feel fairly pathetic. How could she be so memorable to him when she found him so easy to overlook?
Maybe he wasn’t her type on the deeper level that he’d thought, and he was making more of this than there really was. Surface-level attractions could probably be as hot as their connection had been, and surface-level explanations were often enough.
He didn’t really believe that, but some part of his bruised ego needed to think it through and at least contemplate it, because why else wasn’t she jumping into his arms right now? What made her hesitate? Why would someone so interesting and quirky—and so passionate only a week ago!—be so measured in her reaction to him?
Measured—that was a hell of a euphemism he was coming up with, wasn’t it? She wasn’t measured. She was blowing him off. She’s just not that into you, Alex, a voice said.
At that moment he knew he was a goner because even thinking it felt like someone had punched him in the throat hard enough to cause his vision to be filled with gray spots, the pain so real and so great, it trickled down into his toes. Waiting for his grandfather felt like his life peeling away, the minutes like hours. He felt what he had thought he had to hope for, what he thought he and Josie had, slip from the context of what had been and thrown away. Ready to be incinerated and recycled into everything else and nothing else.
There was not enough in the waiting room to distract him from his thoughts, either. Reading the latest article in The New Yorker or checking out new recipes in Good Housekeeping were his only other options. He had his smartphone, but he wasn’t the type to haunch over texting people, or to read BuzzFeed articles or check his nearly non-existent Facebook feed. He had seventeen friends and fourteen of them were family.
He was rather used to being at this sort of loose end. Few typical distractions engaged him—his interests were medicine, Grandpa, and quite a bit of philosophical contemplation over a macchiato as he tried to figure out what he was going to do with the rest of his life.