CHAPTER 10
1044 Words
Reina's POV
We stayed in the car for another twenty minutes just talking about the building.
Not about us. Not about Celeste. About square footage and bed configurations and what a pediatric research partnership actually required from an infrastructure standpoint. He asked questions that were specific and intelligent, and he listened to every answer with the focused attention of someone taking real notes mentally, not just waiting for enough information to feel confident.
I knew things about hospital design that had nothing to do with my job description. I'd learned them over years of watching underfunded wards operate on improvisation. He knew things about asset structuring and board leverage that I had no framework for. The conversation moved fast and neither of us was performing.
That was the thing about him I kept coming back to. He didn't perform intelligence. He just had it, and he used it, and he expected you to keep up without making a production of the expectation.
I kept up. He noticed. I could tell by the way the conversation accelerated every time I took something he said and built on it instead of just receiving it.
When we finally stopped talking, the street outside was quieter. I didn't know how much time had passed and I didn't particularly care, which was its own problem.
"You should come inside," he said. "See the actual space."
"It's nine o'clock."
"I have the access code."
I looked at him. "Of course you do."
"Is that a yes?"
It should have been a no. I had a six AM shift and a sensible life and a system that had kept me intact for years. I looked at the building and thought about forty-seven kids on a waitlist and then I looked at him and thought about something else entirely that I wasn't ready to name.
"Ten minutes," I said.
The space was raw. Exposed concrete, temporary lighting, the particular hollow echo of a floor that hadn't decided what it was yet. He walked through it like he was already seeing the finished version — pointing out where structural walls could come down, where natural light would work, where the nursing station would need to anchor the whole layout.
I walked beside him and added things without being asked. He incorporated every one without comment, just a slight recalibration of what he was describing, and somewhere in the third room I realized we were designing it together and neither of us had formally decided to do that.
"This corner," I said, stopping. "South-facing, away from the main corridor. Quiet room. Not for procedures. Just for kids who need to not be in a clinical environment for an hour."
He looked at the corner. Then at me.
"That's not in any funding model," he said.
"No. It never is." I paused. "It's also the thing that makes the most difference."
He was quiet for a moment. Standing close enough that I was aware of the specific warmth of another person in a cold empty room. Not touching. Just near.
"How long have you wanted something like this to exist?" he asked.
"Since my second year. I had a patient — seven years old, post-surgery, terrified every time anyone in scrubs came near him. We had nowhere to take him that wasn't still clinical." I stopped. "He associated the whole environment with pain. Which is rational. But it makes everything harder."
"What happened to him?"
"He recovered. Went home." A pause. "I still think about him."
Damian looked at me with that expression I'd stopped trying to categorize — it wasn't pity, wasn't admiration exactly, it was something more like recognition. Like I kept showing him things that confirmed a conclusion he'd already started reaching.
"You remember all of them," he said.
"The ones who needed more than I could give. Yes."
"That's not a flaw."
"I know," I said. "It's just heavy sometimes."
He didn't try to fix that. Didn't offer anything to make it lighter. He just stood there and let it be a real thing I'd said, and I felt the specific relief of not being handled.
I was in trouble with this man and I knew it with increasing clarity.
"Celeste is coming to dinner Sunday," he said. The shift was deliberate — back to solid ground, something tactical we could both stand on.
"I know. You texted me."
"I want you there."
I looked at him. "That's a significant escalation."
"She forged your name on a legal document," he said. "You have more right to that table than she does."
"That's not the point and you know it. If she sees us together before you know what you're dealing with—"
"She already knows we had dinner. Twice." He said it evenly. "I found a notation in my calendar. Someone flagged both evenings and forwarded the information. She's been watching since the dissolution filing."
Cold moved through me. Not surprise — I'd half expected it. But hearing it said directly was different.
"She's going to come at me," I said.
"Yes."
"And you want me at that dinner anyway."
"I want you at that dinner," he said, "because I want to see how she behaves when she realizes you're not afraid of her. And because I don't want you walking into whatever she's planning without me knowing what it is first."
I studied him. "That's protective."
"Is that a problem?"
The honest answer was no. The complicated answer was that I hadn't let anyone be protective of me since Marco and I were out of practice with what to do when it didn't feel suffocating.
With Damian it didn't feel suffocating. It felt like standing next to someone who'd decided your safety mattered and wasn't asking permission to act on that.
Which was its own kind of dangerous.
"Sunday," I said.
"Sunday," he confirmed.
We stood in the empty room with the city faint below us and the space around us full of something that hadn't been named yet but was taking up more room every time we were in the same place.
He didn't push it. Neither did I.
But when we walked back to the elevator our shoulders were almost touching and neither of us moved away.
- Writer
