2
Gavin
“You are such a prick.I told you last week, we’re done. D-O-N-E. The wedding is off.” Lacey has a death grip on the metal scalpel she’s holding, her knuckles white, and I think about backing up, because by the look in her eyes, she just might be considering plunging the sharp point into my heart. Or jugular. Whichever would kill me faster. And she’d know, considering she’s a doctor.
Even in ugly lima bean-green scrubs and a long white coat, she still manages to look poised and, of course, pissed.
Not that I’m afraid, but I step around the stainless steel patient table and put some space between us. The cold smell of antiseptic pinches my nose, and the patient room, barely big enough for two adults, much less the swabs, gauze, cupboards, syringes and scalpels, presses on me.
Ever since I was a kid I hated being inside, hated being stuck, and this six by eight room, with anatomy posters on the wall and a flickering, buzzing light, is making my skin itch. I want to grab Lacey’s hand and pull her out to the fresh air. Take us back to the lush jungle where we first met, to the perfume of orchids and vine-covered trees instead of the tang of antiseptic, to the hum of insects instead of the buzz of artificial lighting.
“Do you remember when you saved my life? How I fell in love with you while you saved me from that snake bite?”
She narrows her eyes. “A good deed never goes unpunished.”
It’s then that Lacey realizes she has a death grip on the scalpel. She carefully sets it on the cracked laminate counter and lets out a long-suffering breath.
“Gavin.”
The way she says my name makes me step around the stainless steel table and reach for her. The room, the way sounds are muted inside, with all the cupboards and boxes and clutter, makes me feel trapped. It also makes me feel like I’m nine again and I’m standing in my dad’s office, my head bowed, waiting for him to say whatever it is he called me in to say. I’d breathe in the harsh cleaning solvent used on the tile floors and eventually that smell became synonymous with his disappointment.
“Gavin—” he’d say. My name, I came to realize, meant a thousand things, all of them bad. Gavin meant—Why can’t I sit still? Why can’t I remember the multiplication tables? Why can’t I read better? Why can’t I be more serious? Why can’t I be more respectful? Why can’t I be more like Will? Why can’t I stop being a disappointment? Why can’t I be anyone, anyone at all, except me?
The way Lacey says “Gavin” is exactly the way I hoped to never hear again.
It hits a sore spot that I’ve buried deep and run away from. I’ve spent years avoiding any situation where I got close enough to someone for their disappointment to matter. To trap me. Until I met Lacey.
“Please. I love you. I messed up.” I reach out, and although Lacey’s face is colder than the winter I spent in an igloo in the Arctic Circle, she still lets me take her hand. I pull her close and fight against the overwhelming urge I have to run, to fly to New Zealand for cliff-diving, or to Iceland to chase the Northern Lights. That’s not me anymore. I love Lacey and I’m going to prove it. So instead of focusing on the pressing claustrophobia of this closet-sized patient room at this depressing free clinic where Lacey’s volunteering, I’m going to focus on her.
Her hand is cold, her fingers dry from scrubbing with sanitizer and constantly changing out rubber gloves. I rub the back of her hand, and her eyes narrow.
“Honestly, Gavin, you don’t know what love is. I value myself too much to waste my life on a man-child who thinks so little of me that he believes a bunch of old ladies when they tell him another woman is his soul mate. It’s asinine. I knew you were having a hard time adjusting to the idea of settling down. The idea of picking out kitchen towels terrified you, for goodness sake. Fine. I understood you didn’t feel prepared to run a charity with me. I was prepared to make accommodations and compromises with your desire to roam. What I’m not prepared to do is marry a man who can’t discuss his hesitations like an adult and who kisses other women days before our wedding.”
Lacey’s eyes cut me, not with the anger she’s wielding like a scalpel, but with the disappointment so clearly written there.
I grip her hand and struggle to draw in a bracing breath of the antiseptic-coated air. “I know. I know I was wrong. You’re right, I was an idiot. I was scared. I let my fear cloud how much you mean to me—”
“How much?” She tugs her hand away.
“What?”
“How much do you care? Would you be willing to give up your lifestyle for me? Give up all your international trips for me? The skydiving, the parasailing, the climbing, the scuba diving, the rafting, visiting all the exotic locales, would you give all that up for me?”
My skin goes cold at the thought, but… “Of course—”
“Really?”
“Yes. I love you. I want a home. A family.”
Lacey crosses her arms over her chest. She taps her heel against the old cafeteria style floors, the click, click, click, loud in the suffocating room. “I’m not sure which of us you’re trying to convince when you say that.”
I shake my head in denial. “When I saw you for the first time, all woozy from the snake bite, your face shining above mine, I knew we were meant to be.”
Lacey studies me, her blue eyes as cold as the stainless steel table. “Would you still think that if I told you I wanted us to live here the rest of our lives?”
She gestures around the dingy room.
I raise my eyebrows at the peeling, cracked walls, the cupboard full of blue cotton exam gowns, the smell of antiseptic, and below that a hint of mold, and grimace at the “Remember to wash your hands” poster circa 1978.