Thin Love (13 page)

“I don’t do thin love, Kona. I’ve seen what it does. I’ve seen how pathetic it is my whole life.” Keira caught a quick memory of her mother and stepfather from three weeks ago, sitting at the dining room table quietly taking their meal. They never looked at each other and in six years, Keira couldn’t remember them touching once. She was baring more of herself to Kona now, slipping him secrets she knew he’d only forget, but she wanted him to understand, to see what she needed. “I don’t want easy. I want the impossible. I want love so thick, I drown in it; it’s the only thing worth having and, I’m sorry Kona, you’re a nice guy when you’re not acting like an entitled jackass, but I really don’t think you’re capable of being anything more than that.”

Kona’s reaction was swift; a jerk back from her as though she’d leveled a quick fist into his stomach and he grabbed the doorknob. Keira saw the tension instantly return to his face. She guessed the headache had reemerged, that her words had erased any comfort her fingers had given him. But Kona didn’t complain, didn’t do more than open the door, funneling his anger away from her as he stared into the hallway.

“You don’t know me, Keira, and you don’t have a fucking clue what I’m capable of.”

Dr. Steven Michaels, heart surgeon, was a nice enough man. He was intelligent. He was handsome enough and he was very safe. Keira liked to think of her stepfather as, vanilla, as beige. He was straight lines and defined boxes and expectations that one should never deviate from. Ever. “Planning,” he’d told Keira, “is the hallmark of sanity.”

Steven was also very boring.

When Keira watched her mother with her husband—at the dinner table, out at the movies, at parties with their friends—she often wondered if her mother had somehow acquired a lobotomy between her father’s death and her marriage to Steven. The two men could not be more different. Steven was a starched, cotton sheet that scratched against the skin. Keira’s father had been a vibrant old quilt, with soft threads woven and fitted together by time, by color, by heartache.

Steven—he insisted that Keira call him by his first name—also had little time for his stepdaughter. Keira was fourteen when her mother married the good doctor and he seemed about as interested in a relationship with her as he would be in getting a full-body tattoo. He treated her as decoration. She was a lamp. She was the silent little lamp that should be dusted, should fit in with the rest of the furnishings; perhaps interesting if there was a lull in the conversation, but not curious enough to invite a lengthy dialog.

And so Lamp Keira sat in the waiting room of Dr. Beige’s office because her mother had insisted, for at least the tenth time, she have lunch with her stepfather. Her motives edged toward the obvious and Keira suspected that the mysterious Mark Burke would make an appearance.

She really didn’t want Mark Burke to make an appearance.

“Keira,” she heard the middle-aged nurse say, peeking her head out of the office door.

She stood, the plastic, grey chair in the waiting room creaking as she moved. “Is Dr. Michaels ready?”

“He said he’d be about ten minutes. Here,” she passed Keira a dollar bill, folded in half. “Dr. Michaels said to grab a water out of the vending machine and he’d be ready for you by the time you get back.” The nurse’s mouth twitched, her eyes shot to Keira’s left and the shadow that approached behind her. A little nod of her head and Keira knew who to expect. “Mark will keep you company until your stepfather is ready.”

And just like that, Mark Burke stepped into Keira’s life. It only took a moment for the anger to surface, but unlike the freedom that Keira enjoyed at school—where she could lash out, argue against whatever situation made her angry—in Dr. Beige’s environment, Lamp Keira had to clamp down her temper.

Keira didn’t want to face him. She didn’t want to do anything but walk down the hallway and pretend that Mark Burke didn’t exist. She knew what this was: step one in her mother’s Grand Plan. She and Mark were supposed to meet. They were supposed to date and then decide, sometime later, that they should connect their Five Year Plans.

On her own, Keira would never be enough. Her mother wanted a Stepford Daughter. She wanted her to marry well, study hard and conform into someone Keira never had any hope of being. Pretty smile, pretty life, broken spirit.

Keira managed a smile, something she’d perfected as a kid, and then a quick nod to Mark before she led him out of the office and into the hallway.

“Nice to meet you.” Mark’s voice was pleasant, even, practiced, just like it should be and Keira tried not to laugh at the frozen smile on his face. He had a nice face, handsome with high cheekbones, a long, straight nose and full lips, smooth and very pink and his teeth were perfectly straight. Too straight. Too perfect. The idea came to Keira then, as Mark held onto that practiced smile, that he looked like a clone of every other boy she’d met in her mother’s social circle.

Hair: perfect.

Skin: flawless.

Teeth: expensive.

And just as something rude, something very un-Stepford began to make its way out of her mouth, Keira realized her expression likely mimicked Mark’s; that her hair and skin and everything else of hers was just as polished as his.

She felt like a hypocrite.

The vending machine was to her right and Keira stopped, staring up into Mark’s hazel eyes, hoping she would see something flicker, something alive and real and not practiced, moving there.

“I’m sorry,” she finally said when that too polished smile began to fracture, “but this was not my idea.”

And then the flawless Mark Burke laughed. Keira liked the sound. It was melodic, like the vibration of a wineglass, and kept tension from binding up her shoulders.

“I know that. Trust me, I know how this all works.” Mark ruffled his thick hair, scratching his nails through his bangs and Keira noticed that it was mildly floppy. It fell just an inch or two against his forehead, was dark, wavy. “Our parents,” he said, nodding toward the vending machine, “have ideas about status.” Mark waved off Keira’s offer of the dollar her stepfather had left for her and pushed his own into the machine, handing her a sweating bottle of water. “I think it’s in the water, personally.”

“What is?” Keira leaned next to him against the wall, relaxing when Mark rested his head back.

“This idea that we should be something they couldn’t, which is stupid because what they really want is for us to be just like them.”

“You think so?”

He looked down the hallway and then took a sip from his bottle. “They’ve screwed up their own lives, Keira and think we’re their second chance. They want us to get it right, but they haven’t got a clue what that right way is. So we are expected to do what they did, what their parents did.”

She picked on the label of her water, scratching the sticker until it clumped under her thumbnail. “My mom wants me married off before I graduate.”

“You’re eighteen?”

“Yeah.” Keira stood away from the wall and drummed her finger on the top of the water bottle, trying to gage Mark’s reaction, to see if he was just saying words he thought she might like to hear. When he only smiled at her, a relaxed, easy expression, Keira continued. “I’m barely out of high school and she’s already talking about me settling down.”

“And I thought my mom was bad.”

“No one’s mom is as bad as mine.”

With another of Mark’s warm laughs, Keira decided that she liked not being alone in the Stepford Five Year Plan. It seemed to Keira that Mark, like her, had no intention of fitting the in-need-of-breaking mold Keira had been working up the nerve to avoid her whole life.

“My advice—”

“You have advice?” she said, walking next to Mark back toward Steven’s office.

“Probably more than you want. I am very old compared to you.”

“How old are we talking?”

“A good four years, so I’m quite wise and ancient.”

Keira’s smile grew and she let herself enjoy the sensation of Mark’s hand on the small of her back when he opened the door for her. “So what’s this wise and ancient advice?”

Mark stopped her, a gentle pull on her fingers before they reached the lobby that separated her stepfather’s office and the hospital entrance. “One day, when you’ve had as much as you can take, tell your mother to kiss your ass.”

“Oh?” Keira said, between laughs. “Is that all?”

“That’s all there is to it.”

The sounds of the active hospital just a few feet down the hall collected around them as Mark slid his fingers away from her hand. He had a kind face and was relaxed now that the pretense of their first meeting was out of the way. She hated that her mother had been right about him. She hated that she’d judged him by the same standards she’d been held to her whole life. Her own expectations were a bundle of stereotypes she’s never challenged, but there Mark stood, looking at her as though he was surprised that she wasn’t a Stepford clone either.

“Have you done that yet?”

“Told my mom to kiss my ass?” At Keira’s nod, Mark frowned, but it was an expression of disappointment, not sadness. “In a roundabout way. She wanted me to do cardiovascular work like your stepdad. She even worked out this internship hoping I’d change my mind.” Again, his hands went to his bangs and Keira decided she liked that nervous tick; it made Mark seemed blissfully imperfect. “There are enough cardiologists and not enough ER docs. That’s where I’d like to be. Really, I’m just trying to figure things out.”

“Well, I hope you get you want, Mark. I hope we both do.”

A small step and Mark moved out of the way when two nurses ran in front of him, toward the hospital entrance. He smelled like sandalwood and his shoulder brushed against her arm. They watched the nurses join the activity down the hallway, but stood still when the ER doors flew open, ushering in gurneys and paramedics and all the chaotic madness of the hospital.

“I hope we do too, Keira.” Mark’s smile was easy again and his eyes went straight to hers, holding her attention, making her think of things that had nothing to do with her mother or her plans.

She was going to tell Mark she had enjoyed meeting him. Keira even thought she’d be bold enough to ask for his number, or at least give him hers. But then her stepfather darted through the office door.

“Keira, I’ve got to take a rain check. We’ve had an emergency come up.” And then he was gone, jogging down the hallway. Keira’s gaze left Mark and that big smile and his sandalwood scent were forgotten.

An EMT-guided gurney swept into the ER on a wave of piercing sirens and Keira stepped forward, led by something she couldn’t understand as Kona barreled in right behind it.

“Was he complaining of chest pains?”

“I’m not sure, he was in and out—”

“Has he ever experienced an episode prior to this one?”

“Episode? He has a bad heart.”

“I’ll need a list of his medication.”

Count to ten. Breathe. Just breathe.

“I don’t have that. My mom would know—”

“Do you have his insurance information?”

“No…I don’t—”

Kona’s temper was a thorn, piercing and sharp, but he had learned to control it. With time. With patience. Standing in front of this nurse in the green scrubs, her asking him a thousand questions he could never answer, made the urge to lash out hard to resist.

“What about his driver’s license?”

“No, he doesn’t drive—”

He had to step back, look away from her pink face and chapped lips. She kept asking questions, wanting to know what she could about his tutu kane. But Kona had never been good when shit got hard and this was the hardest shit of his life.

“What about his primary care physician?”

Two…three…four…

“I don’t know. I think—”

Five…six…

“Is there any information at all you can give us, son?”

“No, dammit, there isn’t! I don’t know shit, okay?”

Kona’s voice broke over the loud commotion of the ER. Everywhere he turned there were people. Sick people, crying people, nosy people, gum-smacking people, people getting further under his skin with every question they asked. Everything had spiraled out of control and Kona hated it. Controlling things, keeping everything settled, in his hands, was often the only thing that kept Kona sane. He teetered away from that sanity, from his calm and it showed in his loud shout and the instant pause in all that activity around him.