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“How was your New Year’s Eve?” he asks, surprising me. I haven’t had a conversation with Graham that lasted more than a couple of quick hellos in ... well, years. Many years. Unless you’re counting work conversations, which I’m not.
“It was okay,” I say. “I was with my family.”
“Oh, sounds . . . fun.”
I smile. “It really wasn’t.”
“Does the Price family still play games all the time?”
“All the time,” I say.
Graham knows all about the Price family game playing since he and Kyle were once inseparable. They were always together, practically connected at the hip. But then Graham went to medical school somewhere on the East Coast and Kyle went to UNLV for finance and we saw less and less of Graham.
And now, Kyle is warning me about him. I wonder what happened between them. Maybe it was just a growing-apart kind of thing. It’s not like I ever see my friends from high school anymore. Of course, those relationships were mostly with people on the swim team, and they dissolved pretty quickly after the accident. They all went off to college to swim and I had to stay home and heal that first semester.
“How was your New Year’s Eve?” I ask, not wanting the conversation to end. For a holiday, it’s been pretty boring around here. I only have two rooms to check on and we’re waiting on X-rays for one and labs for the other.
Graham lifts a shoulder and lets it drop. “It was pretty boring,” he says.
“No big parties to attend?” I search his face for signs of a hangover, but his eyes are bright white and there’s no sagging, discolored skin underneath them.
“Nothing to write home about,” is all he offers.
Did he, too, play charades with his family and then blow on a noisemaker while everyone around him kissed at midnight? I doubt that. Plus, he didn’t have the best home life growing up, hence the reason he was always with my family. Maybe that’s changed, though. I hardly know this man standing not too far from me.
“Do you remember that one New Year’s when you and Kyle set off those bottle rockets behind my house?”
He furrows his brow before another one of those award-winning smiles spreads across his pretty face. “I do remember that,” he says. “Didn’t the police come? I think the neighbors called.”
I shake my head. “It was Derek, actually.”
His eyes go wide. “Derek?”
“Yes, my brother Derek, the rule follower, called the cops on his own brother. We only found out like a few years ago.”
We’re both laughing now, the sound reverberating through the small space.
“Oh, wow. I miss your family,” he says, still laughing.
“We miss you too,” I say easily. There’s rarely an evening that we get together without a Graham and Kyle story being shared. There are lots of them.
Graham’s work phone goes off, and he pulls it out of his pocket. “I guess I better get back to work.”
“Yeah, me too,” I say. Although I don’t have much to do right now.
“It was fun catching up,” he says.
“Yeah, it was.”
I’m not sure why Kyle told me to stay away from Graham. There wasn’t an ounce of flirting from him. Not even a suggestive comment. Maybe he’s got it all wrong.
Graham turns to walk away but then doubles back. “Maybe we can take lunch breaks together later and catch up some more.”
Technically it would be dinner, but all food breaks on whatever shift you’re working around here are called lunch.
I give him my best broad smile. “I’d love that,” I say. “But I’m not sure when crabby-butt Evie will let me take one.”
He eyes me, and I almost miss the very subtle head shake he gives me.
