He chuckled softly. “In case you didn’t notice, it’s five o’clock in the afternoon. Lunch was a long, long time ago.”
He was right. I looked around in surprise and saw the sun was much lower in the sky. “When did that happen? Wait. You let Tuck go alone? What if the Petersmith guy talks him into moving away?”
“Tucker canceled. Texted me to say something had come up.”
I stopped in my tracks and stared at him. “Is he okay?”
Carter shrugged as if the answer wasn’t important. It was. It was really important.
“Is he okay?” I repeated, this time much louder.
Carter held up a finger and pulled out his phone. After dialing it, he held it up to his ear. “Hi, Jenn, it’s Dr. Rogers. Is Dr. Wright available? … Mmhm. Okay. No, it’s not urgent. I’ll call him later. Thanks.”
He put the phone back in his pocket and said, “He’s with a patient right now. He’s fine. You, however, are not fine. Let’s get you home and in bed. You’re swaying so badly you’re going to fall on your face.”
“Am not.” I took a step toward the car, missed the curb, and fell on my face.
17
Tucker
18-Across: Plan, contrive, concoct (6 letters)
“Ah, motherfucker,” I hissed as my penknife once again slipped against the wisteria in my hand and sliced into my fingertip. “Welp, there goes the pinkie.”
“Y’okay, Doc?” Vienna stuck her head into the open door of my office. She glanced down at my vine-covered desk sympathetically. “Need another Band-Aid?”
“No,” I muttered around the finger in my mouth. Then, realizing I was being both petulant and unhygienic, I changed my mind. “Okay, maybe.”
Vienna winked and ducked back out.
It was absolutely ridiculous that a grown man couldn’t twine a vine without needing five—now six—Band-Aids, but nobody had warned me how dangerous this shit was.
As it turned out, wisteria vines were more like big honking wisteria branches, at least when you were the one guy in all of Licking Thicket who hadn’t had the foresight to source some cute, whippy little ones weeks ago and didn’t have time to soak your branches overnight to ensure what Jay Proud called “maximum twinin’ compliance.”
The only branches Jay had left were wrist-thick, hardy ones that had grown in their own peculiar patterns over the years. They weren’t even what a person could call minimally compliant. This morning, high on love and optimism, that had seemed kinda symbolic of me and Dunn—solid, strong, unique. I could totally work with that.
Five Band-Aids later, I’d begun to doubt.
“I just wanna make a heart,” I’d told Jay in a quick, panicked phone call around the time I was supposed to have been sitting down to lunch with Dr. Petersmith at the lunch I’d hastily cancelled. “But this vine is all twisted and won’t lay flat. I think it’s defective!”
“Nah, nah. You gotta work with the vine, Doc,” Jay the wisteria guru had admonished. “Let it be what it’s going to be, and don’t stress so much about perfection.”
Which, okay, was maybe even more symbolic.
I’d scrapped my original wreath idea and come up with something better. Something more me and Dunn.
And now it was finally, finally done.
“Here we are!” Vienna came bustling back in with a bandage and a tube of antibiotic ointment. “Well, now.” She glanced down at the wreath on the desk. “Isn’t that a mighty fine, ah… twisty shape… you’ve got there.”
“It’s a clinch knot,” I informed her. “You know, the kind of knot you use to tie the lure to your fishing pole?”
“Nope.” She smiled blankly. “Not a clue.”
“Oh. Well…” I took a deep breath and admitted, “It’s for Dunn.”
“Yeah, honey, I figured. But…” She pursed her lips as she wiped off my cut and dabbed ointment on it. “I sorta wondered if you mightn’t be making something a teensy bit more… romantical? Not to say your clutch knot—”
“Clinch knot.”
“Right. It’s cute, but it doesn’t exactly scream, ‘Let’s stop dillydallyin’ and start shackin’ up,’ if that was what you were going for.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Wait, you knew? About me and Dunn being…?”
“An item? Well, sure.” Vienna blinked and wrapped the bandage around my finger. “Was it meant to be a secret? Anyone who hasn’t known about you two for months must be willfully blind.”
I didn’t bother correcting her about how long Dunn and I had actually been together. I was starting to think the two of us fell in that willfully blind category.
Vienna gasped. “Oh, wait! So does that mean that the other morning when I saw him clomping down the back stairs, and his eyes got all wide and he dropped to the ground and somersaulted himself into the mudroom yelling, ‘You haven’t seen me, Ms. Vienna!’ he was actually trying to be sneaky?” She shook her head. “I thought he was just being Dunn.”
I rubbed my bandage-covered hand over my forehead.