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They can't agree on whose idea it was to keep it a secret.
Max swears he can remember Helen proclaiming 'the walls talk' as she'd gone out of her way to take her normal, separate route into the hospital every day that first week, when they'd spent every night wrapped up in each other's arms. Helen, on the other hand, insists that she'd been taking her cues from the joke he'd made about them needing to declare it to HR, six hours after he'd shown back up on her doorstep with no words, no ring and not an ounce of restraint.
Either way, it's now been two months—two crazy, distracting, still kind of perfect months—and they haven't told anyone.
Max allows himself some small concessions, chaining conditions and conjunctions together in his head until the resulting scenarios happen rarely enough that they don't rouse suspicion. If he's running early and buys two coffees on his way through the atrium and finds himself alone in the elevator en route to give Helen hers, he'll use the marker which lives permanently in the pocket of his scrubs to write something on her cup that'll make her smile. If it's been a long day and he really does need to be in her office and there's no-one else around, he'll steal a touch here and there; a firm hand on her hip, or the brush of his thumb against her cheek. He doesn't have the words to describe how much he loves that she still shudders into his touch if he catches her off-guard.
So here they are, two months in, and Max's least favourite day of the year has rolled back around. One of the vanishingly few silver linings of the pandemic had been that the New Amsterdam Annual Fundraiser had been cancelled. This year it's back with a vengeance, and with his tux freshly returned from the dry cleaner's (Helen's annoying foresight, although the fact that she'll be there too is perhaps the one saving grace in all this) and his offers to join the on-call rota for every department in the hospital tonight declined (Karen's doing, he's almost sure of it), Max is all out of excuses.
He spends all day going through the motions and secretly hoping for some kind of non-life-threatening crisis to descend upon them, but it doesn't come. He puts off getting changed for as long as possible. He re-laces his shoes. He manages to waste ten more minutes trying and failing to do the knot of his bowtie, staring at the door of his office like it's the gates to hell, before eventually Helen comes looking for him.
More precisely, she sweeps in wearing a deep red dress looking like every fantasy he's ever had rolled into one, and Max's entire train of thought evaporates.
"God, you look stunning," he breathes, as she checks the hallway behind her and then elbows the door closed, twirling on the spot so the dress flares out around her legs. Oh, those legs.
"You scrub up pretty well yourself." Helen takes in the state of his collar, undoes his admittedly poor attempt at the bowtie and re-ties it with deft fingers, smiling. "Honestly, it's like you've never had to wear one before."
"I have to tie one exactly once a year, so I learn and then I immediately forget. Rinse and repeat."
She shakes her head, bemused. "Okay, let's do this. Schmoozing face at the ready?"
Max stretches his mouth into an exaggerated smile with his index fingers and gives her his best puppy dog eyes.
"Close enough." Helen turns to leave, but as Max moves to follow her, she holds a hand to his chest to keep him in place. "Give it a minute," she says. "Just so we don't walk in together."
He thinks about saying something then, something like 'would it be so scandalous?', but there's a time and a place to have the conversation about how serious they are and whether they're both ready to deal with the potential career fallout from this, and right now—when he's about to plaster on a fake smile and be a walking sound-bite for three hours—is probably not that time. Instead he grabs Helen's hand before she's out of reach, kisses it and wordlessly lets her go.
~
He's two hours and three glasses of really terrible wine into the fundraiser when things go from averagely bad to train-wreck bad. One minute Max is trying his level best to sweet talk Andrew Nomura, who in turn is trying his level best to play hard to get, dangling a potential seven figure sum over Max's head like it's chump change. The next minute, he catches a glimpse of a familiar face by the edge of the stage, and he feels his heart drop into his stomach like a stone.
His interactions with Akash Panthaki had been limited in both the medical and personal senses, but Max would be lying through his teeth if he said he didn't remember his first few months at New Amsterdam and just how interested he'd been in the sparse details of Helen's love life at the time. While giving some half-assed response to Andrew and trying to come up with a way to excuse himself from the conversation altogether, he scans the room looking for Helen.
He spies her in the crowd just in time to see Panthaki make a beeline for her. Helen breaks into a smile when she sees him, and Max watches with a kind of self-torturing intrigue as Panthaki goes in for the double cheek kiss and Helen gives him a kind of half-hug in return. Thankfully, Andrew seems to have excused himself at some point in the last few seconds, because when Max turns, he's alone. He takes a long sip of wine and positions himself so he can see their conversation without it being completely obvious who he's looking at.
A few minutes pass, though it feels like an hour. At one point Helen throws her head back and laughs, the kind of head-to-toe laugh he's used to being just for him, though as that thought crosses his mind he realizes how stupid it sounds. She's Helen; her charisma is one of the things he loves most about her, so of course there are other people practically queueing up to make her laugh. Max doesn't exactly have a problem with it, but that doesn't mean he's over the moon watching it play out in front of him when he's trying to keep his distance, either.
Don't be an idiot, he tells himself. It doesn't mean anything. They're having a conversation, a totally normal conversation between two colleagues; two colleagues who used to be a whole lot more than colleagues—no, it's no good, he can't ignore it. Even though watching them is making his chest physically tight, he finds himself totally unable to look away. Panthaki looks like he's launched a full charm offensive, and the only thing on earth that Max wants right now is to trade places with him, consequences be damned.
All at once they turn, fast enough to catch Max off-guard, and he accidentally catches Panthaki's eye over Helen's shoulder. Something subtle passes between them as they both hold the eye contact in wordless stages of call and response; a question, a realization and another question. The game is up, but before the more rational part of Max's brain can kick in to consider a less nuclear option, he's set his wine glass down on an empty table and is striding purposely towards them.
"Hi," he blurts out as he reaches them. "Uh, I'm sorry, I really need to steal Doctor Sharpe."
Helen gives him a searching look, not immediately convinced. "Can it wait five minutes?"
"Afraid not," he rushes, putting a guiding hand on her shoulder and firing off a vague "Good to see you, Doctor Panthaki," over his shoulder as he steers her to the edge of the room.
Worry clouds Helen's face as they weave in and out of donors, doctors and board members, towards the door. "What's going on?"
"Oh, the hospital's fine," Max says, absent-mindedly.
"What was that about, then?" The worry seems to dissipate, but the frown that replaces it makes her question feel like an accusation.
He shakes his head, reaching over her shoulder to push open the door to the atrium. "Not here, I need to get out of this room."
What he needs is to be somewhere quiet, somewhere out of reach of prying eyes, and it's not until he's stabbing the call button at the north elevator bank that he realizes he's not heading for his office, but for the roof. Helen glares straight ahead of her in complete silence for the four or five minutes it takes to put enough distance between the two of them and the next closest person in the hospital.
The moment that the door to the roof swings shut behind them, she turns the scathing look on him and demands, "Well?"
"I, uh—I know I didn't handle that amazingly," he starts, apologetically. It doesn't have the desired effect.
"I'd call that a bit of an understatement. What you just did wasn't fair, Max." The pitch of her voice raises almost imperceptibly; the telltale sign that he's upset her. "I haven't seen Akash in almost two years, and me catching up with him has absolutely nothing to do with me and you."
"I know."
She wrings her hands, eyes wide. "So, you don't trust me?"
"I've trusted you with my life more than once, of course I trust you with—"
"Don't be facetious, not when you've just dragged me up here like a jealous teenager." Upset has come and gone; this is anger, now.
"I wasn't trying to be facetious," Max pleads, rubbing his forehead with his thumb and forefingers, trying to find the words to explain in a way which won't put her on the back foot. "I'm sorry," he tries again. "You're right, it wasn't fair. It wasn't even about him specifically. I just think I got jealous because all I've wanted to do all night is to dance with you. I'm no good at keeping my distance from you. I, uh, don't think I ever have been."
There's a lump in his throat, but he keeps going, watching Helen's expression soften gradually from irritation to what he hopes is understanding. "I don't want to keep us a secret anymore," he says.
Helen exhales, long and slow. After a while, she nods. "Thank you for apologizing." In a softer tone, she adds "I hope you know it's not been easy for me, either."
"I do," he says, reaching for her hand. "I know it's not an excuse for overreacting but I love you, and I'm—I'm finding it really hard to hide that. Most days I want to come up here and shout it from the literal rooftop, if I'm being honest."
That earns him a smile.
"What do we do?" He asks, as much a question to the skyline as to Helen herself.
To his surprise, she clasps their hands together and steps in close, wrapping her other hand around his waist. He closes his eyes as he realizes what this is, wraps his other arm around her, and lets his feet guide them as they start to move slowly to a silent rhythm. It feels like a fragile moment; something Max has been craving for hours coupled with something he's been slightly dreading for weeks, so he sinks into it and tries to memorise the feeling of her against him.
Helen is the one who eventually breaks the silence. "You might get accused of preferential treatment," she says, like she's testing the water.
"I've thought that too," Max admits. "But I favoured you long before this, I think I even told you that at the time."
She hums in agreement. "Mmm, this definitely makes the optics worse though."
"If anyone has anything to say, my honest answer will be that I'll always do what's best for this hospital, and it just so happens that your ideas are often what's best for this hospital."
Max gets the feeling that what she's just said isn't all of it, so he lets the faint hum of traffic from the road below fill the next few seconds while they continue to sway together.
"People might think I'm using you," she says, quietly.
He takes a deep breath; even the suggestion of it fills him with mild fury. "They'd have a hard time arguing that, since you were at the top of your field before we'd ever even met, and you resigned as my deputy."
She doesn't say anything in response, just keeps hold of his hand and keeps following his lead.
Max takes the opportunity to lay the last of his own cards on the table. "I'm worried that I'm pressuring you into telling people about this before you're ready."
And of course, because the universe seems to often lose patience with Max and ends up making decisions on his behalf at crucial junctures, before Helen can so much as tilt her head to look up at him, the door to the stairwell opens and then shuts again with a familiar thud. They pull apart quickly, but not quickly enough.
It's Reynolds. Weirdly, he breaks into a triumphant grin so immediate and so wide that Max finds himself both confused and disgruntled, and it must show on his face.
"Bloom owes me a hundred bucks," Reynolds shrugs, by way of an explanation. "She thought you'd keep it up until Christmas."
Max decides to play dumb. "Keep what up?"
Reynolds gestures between them. "This. It was pretty obvious you were keeping something under wraps."
"How?" Helen asks, indignantly.
"You stopped spending as much time together in the hospital," he says, like it's obvious. "But when you were together, it wasn't awkward, like it would be if you'd had a fight. So we figured it had to be the opposite."
Max frowns. "So you're saying that because we spent less time together..."
"Exactly."
"And the 'we' in that sentence—that's you and Bloom?"
Reynolds lets out a dry laugh, shaking his head. "No, that's everyone."
Even without looking at Helen, Max knows how hard she must be rolling her eyes right now. "Well, that's—uh, great," he mumbles. He's about to ask Reynolds how he'd known where to find them, but realizes as he opens his mouth to say it that they must hardly have a monopoly on using the roof as a hiding place. He settles with asking, "Is there a problem, or did you just come up here on the off chance you'd win the bet?"
"Brantley's on the war path," Reynolds explains. "Something about showing your face and not letting your reputation do the hard work for you. You know you can do that"—he mimes one half of a slow dance—"downstairs, right? If I were you, I wouldn't keep our overlords waiting too long."
Max groans, silently. He's ended up putting Helen in the exact position he didn't want to put her in. He's thinking at a million miles an hour trying to figure out how to ask Reynolds to give them a minute without simply kicking the can down the road on coming clean, when Helen surprises him and takes a decisive step towards the door.
When she turns back to face Max, he gives her a questioning look. Out of eyeshot of Reynolds, she smiles, reassuringly. "What do you say, Doctor Goodwin?"
Max exhales, relief flooding through him all at once. Maybe this is it, then. Maybe, after all the over-analyzing and second guessing, it's actually this easy. "You sure, Doctor Sharpe?" He asks, cautiously. "People might talk, after all."
Helen waves a dismissive hand, and Max closes the gap between them. She links her arm through his. "Oh, let them."