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Jacob sent a cat heart-eye emoji. That was the last I heard from him for the night.

The next day Jacob and I were the only two attendings on the ER floor, which meant we couldn’t take our lunches together since there was nobody to babysit the residents. He did however leave me a letter around noon, next to my charting computer, taped to a brown paper bag.

Dearest Briana,

There is no accounting for your poor taste. But the heart wants what the heart wants.

Sincerely,

Jacob

I opened the bag. It was Taco Bell.

I barked out a laugh and looked up to see him across the ER watching me with a smile. I blew him a kiss and he pretended to catch it—a very uncharacteristically playful move by Jacob standards. It cracked me up. Several nurses and a few patients made awwwwwww noises.

We were doing a wonderful job looking like we were in love. Everyone was eating this up.

I left him a note on his computer after I took my break.

If I’m in the bathroom later while you’re over, just know that I died eating what I love. And also that you are an enabler.

Regards,

Briana

He’d even gotten me fire sauce.

Chapter 21

Jacob

Once I knew we were eating Juicy Lucy’s, I carefully planned when I’d have to leave to get the food to get to her house on time. I Google Mapped it. I didn’t want to show up early in case she wasn’t ready for me. If I did get there early, I planned to wait in my car until it was time—but not in her driveway. Down the street somewhere. If I waited in her driveway, she might see me pull up and then it would stress her out that I was outside, even though I hadn’t knocked—and thinking that I was stressing her out would stress me out.

But in the end, I ended up showing up late because my very last patient vomited all over me.

It pushed my entire plan back by twenty-seven minutes. I was twenty-seven minutes late. This made me flustered, so I was anxious when I pulled up in front of her house, even though I’d texted and told her what happened and she didn’t seem to care that I wasn’t there yet.

When I knocked at almost eight o’clock, my anxiety was at a low hum. But when she opened the door, it quieted down and then disappeared with a blip.

She was in black fleece skull pajama bottoms and a navy shirt that said Everything Is Terrible on it. Her hair was piled on top of her head in a messy bun and, as promised, there was no bra.

It was hard to feel anxious when the situation is so informal. And I was starting to realize it was hard to feel anxious around her in general. Most of the time when I did, it was in the lead-up to seeing her, not the actual spending time with her, and it was my own overthinking that got me there.

Speaking of overthinking…

There was something I kept going back to from the other night at my parents’ house. She’d said she really looked forward to our letters. I wondered if she just made that up for the story. Because I had looked forward to those letters. A lot.

I think it mattered to me so much because those were before the news about my kidney. How she felt about the letters wasn’t because of what I was doing for Benny, it was just between us. Unadulterated by gratitude.

There wouldn’t be anything that was untouched by that now. Now I wouldn’t know if anything she was saying or doing was because we were pretending or she was just feeling indebted to me.

I wished I could navigate it better and know what was what.

Had she really liked the letters? If she wasn’t trying to make our relationship look authentic, would I even be here tonight? Would we have talked on the phone like last night? How much bonus time was I getting from her because of our fake dating, because she felt obligated?

I hated that I didn’t know.

“Hey,” she said, pushing the door open to let in me and Lieutenant Dan. I stepped into the entry and she crouched to pet my dog and he bounced on his lone front leg and made puppy noises. He liked her.