At high school, without a mom to talk me through teen romance and heartbreak, I’d just stayed away from guys. So I hadn’t learned the flirting that seems to come so effortlessly to all the other women. I was clunky and awkward. I’d only had two brief relationships since I’d come to Mount Mercy, one with a guy from the mining company, one with a guy who planned to open a hardware store here. Both had fizzled out after a few weeks. I was shy, sexually, and they hadn’t known how to bring me out of myself so they’d thought I was cold.
With Corrigan, it was different. I only had to hear that accent or look into those eyes and it was like a switch had been thrown inside me. He said my name and I got wet.
But I knew his reputation. All he wanted was a one-night stand and I didn’t want that. I couldn’t think of anything worse than going to bed with him and then seeing him move onto the next woman. And the hospital gossip machine would go crazy. Everyone would be talking about me. The thought was terrifying: it took me straight back to high school and everyone teasing me. The only safe thing to do was to stay away from him.
But he’d protected me—maybe even saved my life. And he’d helped me when I was trying to reassure Rebecca.
I was going to have to work with him. I couldn’t just blank him.
One drink. I’d have one drink.
I headed for the exit. Just as I was about to step outside, a blast of heat warmed the side of my face. I turned to see Maggie emerging from the door that led down to the basement, wiping her hands on a rag. “Been working on the furnace,” she explained. “There might be some bad weather heading our way and I don’t want it dying on us.”
Maggie is our maintenance chief and she’s been with the hospital so long, she’s almost part of the building. She can fix anything, from a worn-out ECG machine to a leaking oxygen pipe, and without her the whole place would have fallen down years ago. She’s in her fifties, with a close-cropped afro dyed golden blonde. She can come across as sort of gruff, especially when someone breaks something, and I was intimidated by her for about a year, until I realized she’s just fiercely protective of the hospital. She lost her husband some years back and it’s almost like looking after the hospital is a replacement.
“I’m heading to the tavern,” I told her. “Want to come along?”
“Nope,” she said, and walked past me without breaking her stride. But a few feet further on, she stopped. “... thanks,” she said, without turning around. “But I’ve got a fuse box up on the third floor to rewire.”
At nine in the evening? I bit my lip, staring at her back. I could hear the pain in her voice. Staying here, working late into the night, was safe. Safer than being around people, and remembering how lonely she was. “Some other time?” I asked.
“Yeah,” said Maggie. “Sure.” And she set off down the hallway. She needs to find someone, I thought sadly.
Outside, the air was gloriously fresh and just cold enough to make me catch my breath, and there was still only an inch of snow on the ground. Krista, who was a local girl, had told me stories about the blizzards that sometimes hit the area but it looked like my second winter here was going to be as mild as my first.
Mount Mercy’s main street looks incredible at night. There are very few street lights: the town preservation committee doesn’t like them and so instead we have ball-shaped lanterns and strings of fairy lights bathing the sidewalks in a soft, warm light. A lot of the buildings are over a hundred years old, so it still feels like a frontier town. And the fact we’re so isolated, with so few lights, means the sky at night is amazing, deep blue with a billion points of shining light. We’d get star gazers here, if we weren’t so far from a highway.
I’d always loved living there, but that night, it felt different. I kept thinking about Corrigan, traveling the world on a whim. I’d never even been anywhere hot: not proper, soak-it-up, warm-your-bones hot. I could feel my life ticking away, each day spent in the same room of the same hospital in the same town. I’d found a cozy burrow, but was I sheltered... or hiding?
Midway down Main Street is Krüger’s Tavern, our one bar. For a while, we didn’t even have one: the bar closed down and fell into disrepair for about six months. Then a guy from Germany passed through the town, fell in love with a local and bought the place. He’d modeled it on German beer cellars, combined with a bit of alpine hunting lodge: there were thick furs on the wooden benches and a huge open fire, and they specialized in oversize tankards of cold beer and bowls of fries dripping with melted cheese.