Hello Stranger

He smiled, and I waved. I actually waved. I waved and I backed out of there and Gina came along too, and if embarrassment painted you yellow and not pink, I would have out-burnt the sun.

“Do you know Dr Hall?” Gina asked, as we walked along.

I shrugged. “I get the train with him, in the morning.”

“Cool,” she said. “Looked like you knew each other, that’s all.”

I shouldn’t have said another word, but I needed to. I needed to voice it and make it real.

“We read books,” I told her. “Both of us, I mean. We show each other what we’re reading. On the train.”

She smiled. “Nice. I’ve seen him with books sometimes. He doesn’t talk to me about it though.” She laughed. “He doesn’t talk to me about anything. Maybe he’ll be different with you.”

Somehow I doubted it.

Gina pointed out rooms, and staff members and a load of other Franklin stuff, and I thanked her.

I headed back to my own ward after lunch and felt the bubble of familiarity, so kind and safe.

Too kind and safe to ignore.

Wendy Briars met me between patients as my shift drew to an end. She beckoned me up close with a nice professional smile and told me she’d heard I’d scoped things out with Gina.

“What did you think?” she asked. “Are you ready for Franklin? She said you seemed a little… nervous… and that’s ok, Chloe. It’s ok to be nervous and not sure if that’s the ward for you. It really is.”

It was her face, so intense, and her questioning so sincere, and right then in that heartbeat I wasn’t sure.

I wasn’t sure I could handle it, not being next to that man being so… cold…

I dunno. I didn’t even mean cold. I didn’t even know what I meant.

I shrugged. “I’m not sure,” I told her. “I’m just… I just want to be right for it…”

“I understand that,” she said. “And it’s a hard one. I know it’s a hard one.”

I looked around at the ward I was making so much difference in, with the team who’d given me a place I could belong.

“I’m quite happy here,” I said to Wendy, and she nodded.

“And everyone is loving you being here,” she said, then paused. “How about you have a think about it? We have a few days before training starts with Gina next week. I can assign the role to Rhonda in Leadon Ward if it isn’t suited to you.”

I know she was being helpful, and I felt it.

I felt so much.

I was a crazy mess of crazy, not quite sure where to go.

“Thank you,” I told her. “I’ll think about it. Thank you very much.”

I felt tingly and sick all the way home to Eddington. I felt dithery on my feet when I made Liam’s dinner for his lap on the sofa, and I couldn’t take it anymore. Not the excitement, and the fear, and the tingles. Not the insanity for a guy I didn’t know.

But there was more than that.

I couldn’t take the rest of it, either. I couldn’t take the flipside of the very same coin. The flatness, and the disappointment and the nothing.

Because that’s what this was now, my life with Liam.

It was nothing.

There were a whole different type of tingles when I sat down next to my boyfriend on the sofa that night and I summoned up the strength to speak his name.

He barely shot me a glance over his game, didn’t give a shit what I had to say to him. So why was I so worried about how I said it? I just spat it out and made it real.

“This isn’t working, Liam. I’m leaving.”

I’m not joking, it took him about ten seconds of playing before he even began to register what I’d said. He shot me some looks, and then one of them held, big eyes staring at me as he let out a huh?

He may have panicked a bit and asked me what the hell I was talking about. He may have followed me around shaking his head while I packed a bag for my folks’ place, but honestly, I don’t think it hurt him – not truly deep down where it mattered. This was as dead to him as it was to me, he just hadn’t given it enough attention to really think about it.

I told him so before I left, and he cursed and told me he loved me, and I was mental as fuck and should get some sense in my head. But he didn’t mean that. He’d be back to his game the second I was out the front door. That’s what the sense in my head was telling me loud and clear.

I waited for Dad to come get me, and he bundled my stuff into the backseat. I sat in the passenger seat all the way back to theirs, and Mum was waiting there like I’d be some devastated wreck, but I wasn’t.