Doctor Dearest

A few minutes pass. I’ve lost track of the conversation, but when I hear Natalie’s name mentioned, I snap back to paying attention. Noah’s trying to work Daniel up to go over and talk to Natalie.

“You’re into her, aren’t you?” he asks, prodding him.

“Uh…yeah, sure,” Daniel says, scratching the back of his neck and looking deeply uncomfortable. “But—”

“C’mon, you have to go for it,” Noah says, hyping him up.

“Since when are you interested in pimping out your sister?” I bark brusquely.

“Since one of my friends, who I happen to really respect, is interested in her,” he says to me with an easygoing laugh before tipping his beer bottle to Daniel. “I think you guys would really get on well.”

Daniel can’t meet any of our eyes. His narrowed gaze is focused out across the garden as he makes some murmured excuse about having to use the restroom.

When he’s gone, I glare at Noah. “Stop pushing Daniel on Natalie.”

He laughs, slightly buzzed, and holds up his barbecue tongs, banging them together like crab claws. “Why do you care?”

The volume of chatter spikes as the back door opens. Voices carry out here as more people join.

I shake my head and drop it. “It’s nothing. Forget I mentioned it.”

The night takes a turn for the worse when Natalie comes to find me to tell me she’s leaving to go home with Lindsey.

“This thing doesn’t look like it’s going to wind down any time soon, and I’m exhausted.”

I frown, wishing I could go with her, wishing the renovations were done on my house so we could just escape there together. “You sure? We could get a hotel?”

She smiles and glances at my lips. I think she’s about to press up on her toes and kiss me before she realizes we’re still in the middle of the party. “Don’t worry about it. Lindsey and I haven’t had a girls’ night in forever. It’ll be fun.”

So I’m forced to watch as she leaves with Lindsey and not act totally deflated. I’m a kid at his fifth birthday realizing some shithead ate his entire cake before he even got to blow out the candles. What’s the point now?The next morning, I walk downstairs nursing a pounding headache to find Noah at the stove, scooping bacon from a skillet and dropping it onto a plate. He looks like hell. His hair is sticking up in every direction and he’s wearing a faded T-shirt and sweats.

I doubt I look any better. Last night after Natalie left, I stayed up too late with the guys, sitting outside in the garden around the grill. Even after we’d finished cooking and eating and the party had died down, no one was in a hurry to leave. It’d been a while since we all had time to sit together like that. We reminisced about med school days. Noah recalled the time he and I walked into the wrong lecture hall at the start of a semester—one filled with a hundred nursing students—and ended up staying through the whole class just so Noah could ask for this one girl’s number. Idiots.

We laughed a lot, drank too much, and went to bed way too late.

“I feel like I got hit by a train,” Noah says when he sees me walk in and shuffle toward the coffee pot so I can pour myself a cup. I dig the heels of my hands into my eyes, wiping sleep away, trying to muster enough energy to blink myself awake.

It’s only 7:25 AM. We should be asleep, but our bodies are used to waking up early for work. I don’t think I’ve slept past 8:00 AM in two decades.

“Want some bacon?” he asks, shoving the plate toward me.

There’s nothing else to go with it. No eggs or toast or cereal. Just a mound of bacon on a plate like that’s enough to sustain us.

I shake my head. I’m not hungry. Not this morning. Not while we’re alone and sober and I know what’s about to come. First, though, I want to drink my coffee.

“What time did everyone clear out last night?” he asks.

“Had to be after 2:00.”

“Miguel insisted on doing those shots. I should have just told him to shut up,” Noah says, leaning forward against the kitchen island and propping his head in his hands.

I sip my coffee, trying to work through all the possible scenarios for how this will go down in the next few minutes. Noah’s an easygoing guy, and sure, he has a slight temper, but nothing out of the ordinary.

“—talk to me about last night?”

I pull myself out of my thoughts, realizing I missed the first half of his sentence.

“What?”

He chuckles and shakes his head, rubbing his sore temples. “Last night—you kept hounding me about something. What did you want to talk about?”

All right, so here we go.