The Scenic Route (5 page)

A
ustin kissed the back of Naomi's shoulder.

He wanted to wake her. He was afraid that each moment she slept was a moment they didn't get to spend together. Well, technically they
were
together. But he wanted to be talking. He wanted to be kissing. He wanted to be inside her.

What he didn't want to do was sleep. He could do that when he was back in Michigan, which was going to be all too soon. The clock on the nightstand said it was 8:10 a.m., which meant he had less than four hours to spend with her before he had to get to the airport.

He felt like a kid on Christmas morning wanting to open his presents but having to wait. Except it was the person he was waiting for who was the present. Or maybe not a present so much as an amusement park. Was that a sexist thought? Or just a sign of how much he enjoyed being with her?

In his mind, he was already rearranging his call schedule to go to Miami as soon as possible. The next weekend was out, because there was no way Len was going to let him have two weekends off in a row. But the weekend after was a possibility, if Austin was Len's bitch
until then. That was assuming Naomi would even want him coming to Miami, which was a big assumption given that he barely knew her.

But he didn't feel like he barely knew her. He felt like he had always known her. Always known how to make her laugh. Always known how to make her moan. At that moment, if someone had offered him the presidency of the United States, he would have insisted there was no power he could be granted that was greater than the power to make Naomi Bloom smile.

He leaned over to see if her eyes were still closed. They were. He yearned to see the warm azure pools beneath her delicate eyelids, but he forced himself to let her sleep. The question was for how long: thirty minutes? Sixty? It was impossible to believe he had missed out on twenty years with her. Not that he would have been “with” her in elementary school. He had a vague recollection of a short girl with thick eyeglasses and a shy smile who sometimes came over to his house to play with Mandy. He wondered what would have happened if he had kissed her back then. Would everything in his life be different? Would he have lived in Italy and played guitar in a rock band?

As if. He wasn't interested in kissing girls when he was ten years old. He was interested in winning swimming and tennis trophies. He wondered if Mandy might have ever showed Naomi his trophies. They were hard to miss, sitting on the mantel in the living room of their three-bedroom condo. He wanted Naomi to know about his athletic prowess. He wanted her to know everything about him. And he wanted to hear the details about every place she'd ever lived. Every meal she'd ever cooked. He felt like his heart was going to burst through his skin. He reminded himself that was physiologically impossible, but it didn't stop the sensation.

He had never felt like this. Whatever “this” was. He didn't know what to call it. Lust, yes. But more than lust. He leaned over again. Her eyes were still closed. He checked the clock. It was only 8:14. He
lifted the white duvet and nestled closer beside her, listening for a change in her breathing. No such luck.

Part of him wanted to wake her and proclaim everything he was feeling. But that was the impulse of an overtired and overstimulated mind. There were chemical reactions going on in his brain that had nothing whatsoever to do with the real feelings one has in a real relationship. It hit him how much he wanted a “real” relationship with her, and he didn't want to skip over the introductory steps. Like finding out where she went to college and whether she was gluten tolerant. She was a pastry chef, so she was probably gluten tolerant. But again he was assuming things. And assuming things was precisely what he didn't want to do. The biggest thing he didn't want to assume was that she was feeling the same way he was feeling. If he blurted that he was falling for her, it could totally freak her out. It was already freaking
him
out.

But if he didn't say something to her, then he'd never know what she was feeling. There was something to be said for taking a risk. For throwing caution and scientific protocol to the wind and just saying out loud what he was thinking.

“I'm sorry,” Naomi said, startling him. He hadn't noticed that she had opened her eyes.

“What are you apologizing for?” he asked, nervous that she was somehow privy to his inner thoughts.

“What I said yesterday,” she said softly. “About you choosing to become a doctor when you were so young. I forgot your father was a doctor.” She paused, seeming hesitant. “And I forgot about the accident. I mean I forgot at that moment.”

“I wouldn't expect you to remember,” he said.

“I definitely remember. I wrote you a card. At the time. I don't know if you ever got it.”

He remembered a bunch of cards from kids at the elementary school. Some in crayon. He didn't remember if he had responded to them.

“I remember wanting to give it to you in person and being very upset when my mother insisted I had to mail it. Isn't that silly?”

“It doesn't sound silly.” It sounded sweet. He traced the outline of her shoulder blade with his pinky. Then he cuddled closer.

“What are you doing down there?” she asked as he pressed against her.

“Just saying good morning.”

“Good morning or wood morning?”

“Can it be both?” He kissed the nape of her neck, detecting a salty scent that was part her, part ocean breeze wafting through the diaphanous curtains at the open window.

“Why did your family move away so quickly after the accident?” she asked him.

Because his mother was having a breakdown. Because his sister freaked out every time she saw the ocean. And it's hard not to see the ocean when you live in a beach town. “Just seemed the thing to do,” he said.

“I never got to say good-bye,” she said. He hadn't said good-bye to anyone really. Other than Stu. Naomi turned around to face him. “Is that when you decided to become a doctor?” she asked, her burgundy velvet lips only inches from his own.

“It wasn't a final decision, but yeah.” He kissed her again, a deep kiss, like he was immersing himself in her. When he finally pulled away, there was less space between them.

“So when did being a doctor become a final decision?” she asked, rubbing her nose against the stubble on his chin.

“The day I graduated medical school,” he said. He loved the way her smile spread across her face and then curled upward, catching the corners of her eyes. It was like her eyes were also smiling.

“What about the day before you graduated?”

“What about it?” he asked, rolling on top of her.

“What were you planning on doing with your life?” she asked.

“Stu was trying to convince me to partner with him on his start-up,” he said, while delivering small kisses down her neck in between every few words.

“No way. On EZstreets?”

“That wasn't the name at the time, but yeah. I've loved computers since I was a kid. Stu and I even took a computer programming class together when we were in the fourth grade. Total geeks. Right?”

“I took a computer programing class. Am I a geek?”

“Maybe you should team up with Stu,” he said, licking the nook above her clavicle.

“I failed the course,” she said with a throaty laugh.

“You don't seem like the type of person who fails courses.”

“Okay, I got a C, but in my house that was considered failing.”

“Hey, in my house, all it took was a B. And a B-plus usually invoked a sad sigh,” he said, starting to gently rock against her.

“I know that sigh,” she said, joining in the rhythm of his movement. “It's like you're letting down generations of ancestors, who are sitting around in heaven playing mah-jongg and waiting to see what you do next to disappoint them.”

“I can't see you disappointing anyone,” he said, and she blushed. He couldn't deny he was trying to score points, but he also meant what he was saying. He couldn't imagine anyone being disappointed with someone so talented and beautiful. He looked around for where he'd left the condoms.

“My mom's kind of the queen of disappointment,” Naomi said, turning her head away. “Mostly with my dad, but there's plenty to go around. I'm sorry. That was a stupid thing to say. And I'm making my mother sound much worse than she is. She just cares too much. About too much. And says
way
too much. Now you're thinking I take after her.”

“I wasn't thinking that.” He was thinking how vulnerable she looked and how much he wanted to protect her. “What about your dad?”

Naomi got quiet. “I don't know,” she said, examining her thumbnail. “Fathers and daughters are tricky. Don't you think?”

“My father pretty much adored my sister,” Austin said, surprising himself by talking about his father, which was something he rarely did. “Mandy could do no wrong.”

“I'm jealous,” Naomi said, then winced. “No, not jealous. Sorry. What I meant was it's great she was able to have that kind of relationship with her father.”

“In some ways,” Austin said, wondering if the opposite were more true. He didn't want to go there. But it was too late. His brain had shifted gears. Synapses were firing in the wrong region. “There are things you can't control in life,” he said, rolling off her.

Naomi nodded as if he had said something meaningful, but it wasn't meaningful. It wasn't even coherent. And he wanted to be coherent. He wanted her to understand who he was. Which was expecting a lot, since he wasn't even sure he understood.

“My point,” he said, “is that there are also things that you
can
control. And I think it behooves you, I mean, it behooves me, to take responsibility for the things I can control.” He had never said that out loud before. He had thought it many times, but he hadn't shared it with anyone. Naomi nodded again, but she didn't say anything. So he kept talking.

“Every endeavor in life has an odds ratio associated with it. So while people say you can't predict the future, it's not entirely true. You can predict your probability of success. Which means you can choose to do things with a high probability of success. Or you can gamble, and I'm not a gambler. I don't even play poker.”

“Huh.” She sat up. He immediately regretted half of what he'd said. But he wasn't even sure about which half. “I'm trying to figure out if I've ever before slept with a guy who didn't play poker.” She smiled mischievously. “I'm guessing I could whip your ass in a game.”

Great,
he thought. One more thing they didn't have in common. But there was no point in pretending to be someone he wasn't. “I'm never going to be a billionaire, but I'm also never going to lose everything. I could never do what Stu's doing.”

“You never know.”

“Not going to happen. In every career, there's a ladder you have to climb, but Stu not only has to get up the ladder, he also has to build it. The great thing about medicine is that the ladder is already there, and it's not going anywhere. It may not always be easy rising from step to step, but it's usually clear what the next step is.”

“Does that get boring?” she asked.

Austin stopped and thought about it. “No,” he said. “It's comforting. I'm a junior partner in an established practice. And I know that when the senior partner retires we'll buy him out, the same way he bought out the senior partner before him. And the same way someone will buy me out when I'm ready to retire.”

“Wow. You have it all worked out.”

What had he just done? He'd just mapped out the next thirty years of his life without leaving room for including someone else's plans. Someone like her. “But it's not like everything's set in stone,” he assured her. “More like sand,” he said, trying to undo the damage. “In fact, we recently lost our other junior partner, and we're scrambling to find a new one. So things can get pretty wild and wooly.”

“Wild and wooly?” she teased.
Oh God
. He sounded like a character from
Ice Age 2
.

“My life is just so different,” she said. Meaning their lives were so incompatible. “I could be fired tomorrow. Technically, I'm on a contract, but that doesn't mean much in the restaurant business, especially when the owner's making noises about going in a more Latin-fusion direction. And I'm kind of overdue for trying something new. Someplace new.”

“In Miami?”

What he really wanted to know was if moving to Michigan was even a remote possibility, but it seemed presumptuous to ask. And he doubted someone who had lived in Miami, Rome, Los Angeles, London, and Vienna would want to settle down in a suburb of Detroit.

“I'm not married to Miami,” she said. That was the opening he'd been waiting for. He took a deep breath.

“Oh my God,” she exclaimed, looking at the clock. She jumped out of the bed. “I've got a plane to catch.”

And that was it. He had just wasted their last remaining minutes together talking about retirement plans.

“Would it be okay if I used your shower?” she asked.

“Depends,” he said, thinking fast. “Would it be okay if I joined you?”

She giggled as she scurried into the bathroom, and he took that as a yes.