It's Complicated (38 page)

He opened his mouth to say something, and she put her fingers over his lips. “You get one chance to pull that shit, Alex. Your chance is over, and you know what else? You had one chance with me”—her voice cracked as the tears that had formed in her throat struggled to take over—“and you just showed me who you really are and what you really think of me.” She marched out the door of his apartment, eyes blinded by tears, and struggled to find her way down the street, to get as far away from him as possible.

From the moment that Josie had talked about the medication group versus the control group, Alex’s brain had been on fire. He’d been so careful his entire life, following every rule, never straying, being better than the best, having to over-prove himself, because he was, after all, a reject, right? A bastard.

His professional ethics dictated everything. His sense of honor, his sense of decency, drove everything in him. Violate that, and he might as well lay down and wait for death. As the words had come out of Josie’s mouth, he knew what was coming next, he knew that she thought that she could override the research study’s rules and help his grandfather, and that was when some circuit in his head just blew.

The conversation had gone very wrong, and as he watched her ass get smaller and smaller, as she marched out the back door, her legs pumping her forward as swiftly as possible to get the hell away from him, he deflated. The anger that had made him so righteously indignant, and had triggered all of those words that came out of his mouth, that had seemed to make sense at the time that he said them, was a flashpoint. Incredibly stupid and presumptive fury that made the gesture she had just tried to extend seem more reasonable, and Alex was the freak. She was right, he had assumed, and when he made that crack about her being a doctor, it just…ugh. It was as if he were channeling “The Claw” or one of the other countless pompous asses at the hospital. It was like no matter how hard he tried to keep that kind of viewpoint out of his head, it somehow had seeped in by osmosis, through the process of so many years of med school, and internship, and residency.

Calling her on her professional opinion, and making that crack, had cut her deeply. He knew it. You didn’t do that to a nurse; just because she hadn’t gone through med school didn’t mean she wasn’t a valuable medical professional. He knew he could now go back to her and apologize a thousand times, but it was out there, it was said, and “good guy” Alex was now tarnished.

Self-aware enough to know that the mess at work had just spilled over into his personal life like a goddamned pot boiling over, he sat at the table, the abandoned food still smelling heavenly.

He wanted to punch something.

All of this made the very real and visceral fact that his grandpa was falling apart somehow more abstract. The interaction between his grandpa and Madge seemed perfectly normal, cognitively fluid, from a distance. That was how everything looked, though, right? It all looked okay from far away. Life didn’t get complicated and sad until you got up so close that you could almost taste it.

The yearning inside him that had drawn him to go to the appointment, to ask her out for coffee, still pulled at him. Her form faded as she marched down the street, as far away as quickly as possible from him, and something in him loosened. It was a sense of need. Not sexual need, an emotional need to bring her back, to apologize, to hold her, to have her arms snake around his waist, her cheek pressed against his chest, to go for long walks, to drink coffee, to make her dinner, to explore and have fun, and have not-fun. What would it be like to just do laundry together? To clean the house? To have a baby? To go on big trips? The banal, simple things that everyone took for granted.

What would it be like if he could take back that doctor crack? Oh, if anything could be pulled back on the thin string of second guesses, and shoved back into his mouth, eagerly chewed and swallowed, so that the words were not out there anymore, he would do it. His principles were valid. Under no circumstances did he want his grandfather’s research trial jeopardized. The information could help thousands, if not tens of thousands of people, even if it meant that Ed experienced no benefit. That was how science worked.

Alex trusted science. Rigor, objectivity, measurement, re-measurement, trial and error, replication. All of those principles were absolutely critical for a drug’s success. You couldn’t do much of that with emotions. Could you measure them? Not really. Could you be objective? Hell no. Could you be rational at all times? If you could, he wondered how that would feel. He did a pretty good job of being mellow, but on the inside, he was just as wracked with indecision and confusion as everyone else, maybe to a lesser extent, but those feelings still ricocheted inside him.

Half stalking her at work when she hadn’t replied to his many communication attempts, he hadn’t been sure whether she wanted anything to do with him. Perhaps she was spurning him by not answering him, but now? Now he was certain he had managed to make her believe he was just a big asshole.

An image of Dylan’s hairy butt flashed through his mind when he thought the word “asshole.” This was not one of his better days.

Her phone rang. Great. She cringed and held her eyes half shut, like watching a horror movie scene you can’t bear to handle full-on, as she looked at the phone number. Not Alex. Whew.

Why was that
whew
tinged with disappointment?

Darla. Her niece. Cousin. Whatever you call her. Her cousin who was seven years younger and who called her Aunt Josie because Josie had helped raise her. Josie picked up the phone.

“Darla, what the hell are you doing calling me?” That was one hell of a way to greet someone, but Josie knew this wasn’t going to be good news. Someone had died, her mother was in jail, or Darla was pregnant. Or maybe it was buy-one-get-one-free day and two of those had happened.

“Oh, just slumming.” Darla’s tone was clear—Josie was being a jerk.

She softened and laughed. “You okay? You finally going to take me up on my offer to move out here?”

“Nope,” Darla replied, the word clipped and clear. Hmmmm, Josie wondered. No mention of a death or jail. That must mean…

“That’s not what I want to talk about.” Here it came. A baby. Everyone around her was having a baby. Maybe Josie needed a baby so she’d be part of the “in” crowd.

“You talk about what you want to talk about, then.”
Just get it out, Darla.

“I need to talk about a man.” Darla’s accent had always amused Josie. You would think that they would both have the same post-Appalachia, not-quite-Yinzer Pittsburgh accent, but they didn’t. Maybe because Josie’s dad hadn’t been from the area, or maybe because Darla was so bold in how she spoke, but Josie had ditched most of her central Ohioisms from her speech patterns, while it seemed Darla had absorbed them all and more.

“A man? How can you talk about a man? There aren’t any
men
out there.” The last guy back home Josie had dated was Davey Rockland, who had managed to fail out of the police academy because he couldn’t keep track of how many bullets he’d shot from a clip. When you can’t manage basic arithmetic up to fifteen or so, it’s time to just go become roadkill.

“No kidding,” Darla muttered, “but I actually managed to find one.”

“So, who is this man you found?”

“I
literally
found him, Josie. He was naked, wearing nothing but a guitar on the side of the road.”

Huh?
Did Darla just actually say what she thought she said? The cat leapt onto the counter and headed toward the salad Josie was working on. One good shove later and she had an offended cat, tail up and puckered asshole sauntering away.

“What?” Josie barked, struggling to pin her phone between her cheek and shoulder while covering the food with plastic wrap to protect it from the feline menace.

“I’m not kidding.” Darla’s mantra. Even at three or four her stock phrase had been “I’m not kidding,” one hand jauntily on her cocked hip, an insulted expression on her face.

“He was just standing there on I-76, wearing a guitar and a collar and sticking his thumb out, and so I stopped.”

“Did you fuck him?” This sounded like the start of a good
Penthouse Forum
story.

“Wow, way to be blunt, Josie.” She paused. Josie could imagine Darla biting the cuticle of her thumbnail, shoving her giant mane of blonde curls over her shoulder, buying time to decide how best to tell the truth. “Yeah, of course.”

Victory!
“How can I be blunt if I’m right?”

“You can be both.”

“I often am, but don’t accuse me of being too blunt when, in the end, the direct question I’m asking relates exactly to what you’ve actually done.” Boy, that sounded wayyyyy too officious, even in Josie’s head. She opened her mouth to say something to lighten the conversation when Darla spoke.

“I don’t want to talk about
that
, either,” Darla snapped.

“So, what do you want to talk about?” Where was this going? Was she pregnant or not? If she was, she would just blurt it out. Darla wasn’t the type to keep
anything
to herself. Whatever was going on had to be complicated if it didn’t pour out of her in the first few seconds.

“I want to talk about this man.”

“What’s his name?”

“Trevor.”

“Trevor what?”

“Trevor Connor.” Josie could hear the grin in Darla’s voice. Trevor Connor. She knew that name.

“Trevor Connor…where have I heard that name? Why is that so familiar?” Josie asked. She knew it wasn’t someone they’d grown up with. How was Darla dating someone whose name she knew?

“Wait a minute!” she practically screamed. “Trevor Connor? From Random Acts of Crazy?” A year ago one of the teenage granddaughters of one of Josie’s patients had been blasting a song that Josie loved. One thing led to another and she’d downloaded “I Wasted My Only Answered Prayer” and sent it to Darla. The rest was history. Her niece had become a serious groupie for this tiny little local band, but Random Acts of Crazy was growing. Were they touring in Ohio already? If so, why
Peters
? Of all the places you could perform in Ohio…

“Yup.”

“Darla.” Calm seeped into her voice. It occurred to her that Darla might be calling her, high as a kite, and rambling on about something that wasn’t real.

“Yeah?”

“Are you on something? Because you don’t just conjure a naked man on the interstate, wearing nothing but a guitar, who happens to be the lead singer of your favorite band.” Compassion filled her. This was not what Josie had expected, and her shift in focus went from her pending date to her far-flung niece. “Honey, do you need me to call someone?”

“I swear to God, Josie, I am not making this up.” The tone in her voice was believable. If this were true, then how did Trevor Connor get to Peters? It was all too crazy.

And random.

“
Okayyy
,” Josie said, skeptically. “And you fucked him?”

“Yup.”

“Any good?” Wincing, Josie forced herself to ask the question. While Darla and she were adults now, there was still an ick factor in talking about sex.

“Hoo boy,” Darla chirped.

“That good?” A flicker of her and Alex pressed up against the stone wall by the river sent shivers through her.

“Yup.”

“So what’s your problem?”
Please don’t be pregnant.

“My problem is that I don’t know what my problem is and Trevor is about to leave any minute now and I’m going to pick up his friend Joe, who—”

“Joe? Joe as in Joe Ross, the bass player?”

“Yup.”

“Quit saying ‘yup.’” This one-word answer shit drive Josie nuts.

“Yes, ma’am. Is that better?”

“Actually, yes.”

“Okay then,
ma’am
.”

“You’re telling me that you’re hanging out with the bass player and the lead singer of your favorite band in the middle of Peters?”

“Yup—yes, ma’am, I mean.”

“You know they’re from Boston, right?

“Well, outside of Boston, some suburb named Sudborough.”

Josie snorted. “More like Snob-borough.”