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The amber liquid sloshes down his throat, trickling into the more labyrinthine crevices of his mind, sharp and biting. Somewhere in a sky not veiled by the havoc of civilisation, a forlorn sun pours itself in a steady drip.
For each of the last fifteen minutes, his finger has been teetering on the brink of a call he knows he’ll make.
I don’t need you to follow me, Aparna. I knew there could be consequences.
I made my bed... The least I can do is lie in it.
She stood before him, under the lurid new lights of the revamped atrium. Face contorted in worry, and something else he is no longer a stranger to.
That doesn’t mean you have to weather them alone.
I care about you. Talk to me.
And she looked no older than she did in her first year.
In those days the atrium housed the trees planted in his intern year, and some even older. And Aparna had implored him to stay. Because the patients needed him. Because she needed him.
Ethan was not brave enough to admit he needed her more than she would ever need him. That part of them remains pitifully unaltered.
This time however, it’s different from letting her in. It’s about beating the devil at his own game. Wrestling his slippery self on a rock face.
He wonders what it’s like on the other side of the tunnel. The darker side that the likes of Bloom inhabit. The one that doesn’t have its throat slit by the glare of street lights. More importantly, how do the likes of Dr. Ramsey beat him at his own game and remain unscathed.
He’s being reckless. Dangerously so. But whatever else he might tell himself, he is lonely too.
Cloistered in an apartment that never felt emptier, he can almost hear her terrible joke on fingers of scotch. When did the notoriously single Ethan Ramsey become this dependent he wonders.
After four arduously long rings, he almost disconnects the call.
‘Ethan?’
‘Hey.’
The silence stretches into a long and restless twilight across his windows, and he thinks he ought to ask about her day. She beats him to it.
‘Do you want me to come over?’
‘That… That would be nice.’
She definitely rolls her eyes on the other side of the line.
***
‘Do you ever wish you’d settled for someone… less complicated?’ He avoids her eyes fixing his own on the ceiling.
The fingers massaging his forehead stall for the briefest quarter of a second before resuming. The slight shift finds his head even more snugly settled in her lap.
He feels stifled by an all-consuming sense of helplessness. And it’s different from the trickiest diagnoses when he knows he’s giving his all and failing. It is a plethora of all that is wrong with the system. The one he has been pitted against all his life, and mostly managed to thwart.
Ethan Ramsey never settles for half-measures. Not when he can help it. And with Bloom, he cannot.
Not unless he tips the scales in his favour. And it has taken the last morsel of his sanity to plot it.
No loose ends. Or second footprints for that matter. One more ethics hearing and her career would end before it began, and Naveen himself could do nothing about it.
Yet here he is. The irony of it biting, as the one person he needs to protect by all means is the one being implicated. If Harper, one of the most level-headed people he knows-
‘Besides the fact that I’m nowhere close to being settled?’ Aparna interrupts his thoughts from somewhere above him.
Oh.
‘Sorry, I didn't mean-’
Of course she is grinning. Annoyingly smug and utterly distracting.
He could kiss her senseless and wipe the smirk off those lips. Make her moan right here on the couch.
He almost does.
‘Did you wish you weren’t involved with someone whose medical license was about to be revoked?’ She asks.
Her fingers rove about his temple, right where he has recently seen specks of silver. And he awaits a joke about his age that never comes.
‘Ethan…’
God, he hopes he doesn’t look that miserable.
‘I need you to know I’d go anywhere with you. And I mean that-’ She holds his chin to turn his face. ‘I mean that in every sense of the word. Thought you’d know by now.’
She looks strangely composed.
It could be the immensity of her proclamation. Or the ease with which it has rolled off her tongue. But it alarms him. Not because he isn’t ready, because make no mistake he is. It alarms him because she is doing it again.
In that moment all of his life could flicker past him like the tedious crackle of an old television set, and he’d still be enraptured by the unwavering intent in her eyes.
And she looks no older than she did in her first year.
He raises a hand grazing the softness of her neck. Her cheek. And the corner of her parted lips.
Come here is all he manages before drawing her face to his own.
He only vaguely remembers the drive back home when he wanted to be in control of his life. He has never felt more disarmed. Or more- he discerns the lump in his throat- in love .
Beads of crimson settle on the horizon, and in the abandoned dregs of his whisky. The natural order of things calls for day and night. Much in the same way it summons droughts and downpour.
And as for him, he’d come undone for her again and again.
***
The stillness of the air is riddled by his own ragged breaths mingling with hers. And the deluge in his mind almost subsides.
‘Glad that I stayed?’ She props herself on her elbows and lazily smiles down at him.
‘Always.’
She peppers the column of his neck with a final drizzle of kisses before burying one languid hand in his hair and settling against him. Just as the silence is splintered by the buzz on his coffee table.
Thankfully it’s not her pager. Just her phone. And her fingers resume their stroking of his hair.
‘How are you feeling?’
‘Pleasantly spent.’ It’s his first genuine smile in hours. ‘But really, several things at once.
‘And I’ll talk to Harper as soon as I can.’
‘I appreciate that, but… I think we need to talk to each other,’ She says. ‘For the team, but also for ourselves.
‘I need to be able to forgive her. Not today perhaps. But I need to do it.’
He agrees. But he is baffled that Harper should accuse her now. Especially when she was willing to wait for evidence when Aparna had actually breached ethics as an intern.
Is it his tactlessness he wonders, as she loops his arm around herself. Speaking over her inputs, denying the credibility she has earned in the team by sheer hard work.
Creating the impression that she’s still just an intern with history .
As her breath cools the sheen of sweat on his chest, he instinctively gathers her even closer. And not for the first time that evening, he feels he doesn’t deserve her.
Damage control , the interminable mutterings in his mind suggest. He needs to ensure Harper has not spoken to anyone outside the team. And Tobias has not prattled. Perhaps give Naveen a heads up.
‘Check that,’ He remarks as her phone buzzes again. ‘It could be work.’
But just as he is about to disentangle himself to make the calls, he sees them.
Just wanted to check on you.
Hope you’re not beeting yourself up over it.
Not a saved contact on her phone he realises. But it’s familiar. A little too familiar. He decides against asking.
She shakes her head with a faint half-smile before replacing the phone and curling up to him. He strokes rehearsed patterns on her back as she loops an arm about his chest.
It’s minutes before they startle the peace.
‘Thank you for being here tonight, Apu,’ He almost whispers. ‘For helping me work through this.'
‘I meant what I said, Ethan,’ She says. ‘I’ll always be there for you.
‘Even when I don’t agree with you.’
And it’s there again. That frightfully alarming calm on her face every time she promises to leap.
When he takes her bottom lip between his teeth, it’s with the ardour of a disciple who did not just invoke her minutes ago, or this morning, or into the wee hours of the night before.
‘And I hope,’ He manages breathlessly. ‘I hope I never take that... Take you for granted.’
She doesn’t respond. Except for the immutable glimmer in her eyes. And he knows.
He decides he will call Naveen and Harper once she’s asleep. He’ll not unsettle her. Not when it might never happen.
‘What happens when we go back out there?’
If he only knew.
‘Let’s get you to bed.’ He smiles, lacing his fingers with hers.
His life has long stopped being the neatly stacked manila folders he had once sorted it into. For all he knows, it could be dipped and bent in all directions tomorrow.
But he also knows she will be right there on the promontory with him.