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“Did you have fun?” Callan asks, drawing circles on the center of my back with his finger.
“I did. I beat your ass.”
He laughs. “You did. That was awesome. I should have known you’d be a ringer. You’re good at everything you do.”
His phone pings with a text, and when he reads it, his entire disposition changes.
“What is it?”
He looks like he’s seen a ghost.
Slowly his gaze rises to mine, and then he flips his phone so I can read it. And when I do, only one word comes to mind. “Fuck.”
31
Tick, tick, tick.The gold clock on the medical school director Dr. Scabowitz’s desk—everyone calls him Dr. Scab, and I know it bothers the shit out of him—is making me postal. I’m alone in his office, waiting on him to get here, and I’m a half-second from picking up the heavy timepiece and chucking it out the window. It feels particularly cruel to leave me sitting here when he texted last night that he has something so important to discuss with me that it requires me to come in early before class for it.
He knows about me and Layla.
He has to.
Why else would he want to meet with me before my class to discuss her?
That’s what his text said.
Dr. Scabowitz: Good evening, Dr. Barrows. Are you available to come to my office Wednesday morning before your lecture to chat about a situation surrounding Miss Fritz?
Me: Of course. Is it anything I should be concerned about? Is there a problem with Miss Fritz?
Dr. Scabowitz: We’ll talk about it Wednesday, my boy. Wednesday.
My boy. I’m a doctor and a grown-ass man, but that was entirely beside the point.
I showed Layla the text, not knowing what else to do or say other than replying that I’d be there. When we got home and talked about it after we put Katy to bed, she started to lose it, and rightfully so.
“I don’t know what it is,” I start, taking her in my arms and pressing her back against my chest. “Not for sure anyway since he wouldn’t say anything. My guess is he somehow knows about us. I can’t think of anything else it could be.”
She stiffens against me and then grows preternaturally still. “You told me I didn’t have to choose between you and med school. You told me you were an adjunct, that I could have both, that I could have it all, but that’s a lie. I can’t have you and med school. Not right now.”
Grief slams through me because she’s not wrong. This might finally be out in the open between us, but there’s so much that still has to remain hidden.
Inwardly, I flip off the irony of this. We went from having a fake engagement where we pretended it was real to a real relationship we now have to pretend isn’t there. I love her, and she loves me, and I want the world to know it.
“I’ll take care of it,” I swear. “I’ll make sure nothing touches you.”
“You can’t make that promise.” She puffs out a breath and rolls over to face me. “You can’t guarantee that, and I don’t even want you to do that. I know you’re trying to protect me, and I love you for it, but I agreed to everything we did. I was far from an innocent little coed who got swept off her feet by her older professor.”
“No? Because I sort of like the way you phrased that.”
She rolls her eyes at me in the dark. “It doesn’t make sense. Why now?”
I run my fingers through her hair, relieved that she hasn’t stormed out of bed or kicked me in the nuts. “What do you mean by why now?”
She pins me with a look. “We haven’t touched each other on campus in weeks, Callan. We had sex in your office that one time and since then, it’s been nothing. We don’t talk on campus, and we don’t interact on campus. We’ve been good. Careful. So why now?”
Her question gives me pause. I think through what he said, and she’s right. It’s not adding up. “I don’t know. If he had known about us before, he would’ve said something. He would have had to.”
“Exactly,” she asserts. “So maybe he doesn’t know about us. Maybe this is something else entirely. Maybe he’s going to ask you to be my clerkship adviser since my first rotation is at MGH with you.”
