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Graham comes walking up to the nurses’ station a few minutes past nine.
“Evie on her break?” he asks as he sidles up next to me.
“She is,” I say. “You have time now?”
“I do, Price. Let’s hear what you’ve got.”
“I’m not sure you’re ready for what I’ve got,” I say, my eyes going wide as soon as the words come out of my mouth. That was way more forward sounding than I meant it.
Graham rolls his lips between his teeth.
I can’t help the sly smile that spreads across my face. “You want to say something, don’t you?”
He shakes his head, schooling his features. “I do not. I am a mature man who doesn’t need to comment on anything. The words don’t even cross my mind.”
“But if you were that kind of man, what would you have said?”
“Nothing; I would have said nothing.”
“Liar.”
“Okay, let’s hear this poem,” Graham says.
I look around us, Joelle sitting at a computer just behind us and a couple of techs having a discussion just ten feet away.
“Should we take this into your office?” I ask Graham.
“What, are you not proud of your poem, Price?”
I sit up straighter. “I am; I just don’t really want an audience.”
Graham’s eyes travel around the room and then back to me. “I mean, if you’re too chicken to do it in front of people ...”
I stand up from my chair. “I’m no chicken,” I say, grabbing my phone out of my pocket and pulling up Morgan’s number.
I hit the FaceTime button, and her face pops up on my screen only a few seconds later. I prop it up on the tall counter that runs the perimeter of the nurses’ station, against a vase of flowers someone brought us from a patient room upstairs.
“Hey,” I say to Morgan, and Graham leans over and greets her too.
“Okay, are we doing this poetry thing or what?” she says through a yawn.
“You seem super thrilled,” I say, my tone flat.
“I’ve spent the whole day with thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds,” she says. “Believe me, I should be more tired than I am. Now, who wants to go first?”
Graham and I look at each other.
“Lucy, you go,” Morgan says, her impatience showing.
“Actually, I think Graham should go,” I say, feeling suddenly less competitive. I don’t know why—it’s a poem. It’s not a big deal. It just unexpectedly feels like a big deal.
“I’ll go,” Graham says, pulling the black notebook out of his pocket and flipping open the cover.
He clears his throat once. Then he does it again.
I look up at him. Is he ... nervous?
Morgan sighs through the phone’s speaker. “Okay, you two,” she says. “We’re going to do what I have to do with my students. You two read each other’s poems.”
