Medicine Man

I was always going to be lovesick. Heartsick. Just sick.

“You so do, Willow,” Renn says. “Do you know how crazy it is? I don’t even know what to say right now. What if he’s not what you think he is? Do you really know him?”

“I think I do. Where it counts.”

“What if you guys get caught? What then?”

“I… I hope we don’t.”

That’s such a lame answer. But the truth is I really hope that we don’t. I only have seven more days here. Once I’m out, it doesn’t matter what we’re doing, right?

Who cares?

We only have to be careful for the next seven days.

“Willow, I have a bad feeling about this, okay? He could lose his job. You could, I don’t know, undo all the progress you’ve made. You said it yourself. We’re buried under our issues. You don’t need this. You don’t need another issue in your life. Please, tell me you’ll be careful. Just please.”

“I promise,” I reply, blinking back my tears, love rushing for my BFF.

Who knew I’d find my Best Friend Forever on the Inside?

“Do you judge me?” I can’t resist asking.

“What? No,” Renn insists. “I just want you to be careful. And I don’t mean be careful around the hospital. Be careful with him. Because people like him and people like us… we’ve got a line between us, Willow. There’s a big, huge divide. There’s a reason why they wear lab coats and navy-blue scrubs and diagnose us. And there’s a reason why we’re here, away from the real world, our lives interrupted. It’s not something to be ashamed of but it’s also not something to be taken lightly.”

He said the same thing to me, when he made me promise that I won’t let anything come between me and my treatment.

And I won’t.

My feelings for him have nothing to do with my illness. They are independent, separate. They are mine. They are not a result of a deficiency or a faulty gene.

My feelings for him are me.

Not a lot of people will get it, in fact.

They’ll think I’m crazy to fall for a man like him. My psychiatrist. The cold and distant ice king. They’ll think it’s anything but love. They’ll think I’m a statistic. An insane girl falling for the man who’s trying to save her. It’s a doomed love. A love born to die.

A broken girl falling for her fixer.

But what they don’t know is that my fixer might be a little bit broken too. There’s something haunting him and it’s more than the fact that I’m his patient and he’s my psychiatrist.

And I have seven days to convince him that it doesn’t matter who we are or what we are, we’re made for each other.

***

Thirty minutes later, I climb down the stairs to go to breakfast and find him in the hallway. We look at each other across the space, his eyes pinned on me in a way that I now understand.

I begin walking toward him and he does the same. A few patients flutter past me. A tech carrying a file throws me a nod. A few nurses greet him. We do what we’re required to do. We smile, nod back, all the while gravitating toward each other.

Or at least, it feels like gravitating. Because in this moment, there’s nowhere I’d rather be going than toward him.

We come to stop in front of each other, a little further down the dining room.

“Dr. Blackwood.” I nod at him.

“Willow.” He doesn’t nod back; he simply eyes me, my face, and my t-shirt.

My nipples wake up, as if he’s touching them, not with his eyes but with his hands.

Oh God, his hands.

He shoves them in his pockets as he stares, and I have to ask, “Why do you always have your hands in your pockets?”

“To control myself,” he rumbles, his voice thick and syrupy, like his eyes.

My heartbeat jacks up. “From what?”

He looks up, his gaze dark, as dark as last night. “From doing the things they shouldn’t be doing.”

I swallow, my heart in my throat, preventing me from saying anything to that. Although I want to say things. So many things.

“Interesting shirt,” he murmurs.

My nipples become engorged, painful. So fucking painful. And so do my breasts. There’s a tingling in them that only ever comes when I’m on the verge of losing myself to an orgasm. Too bad I’m standing in the middle of a hallway, with the morning bustle of a hospital.

“Thank you. It’s, uh, Harry Potter,” I say lamely, like I did the first time I chatted with him in the hallway. As if I want to talk about fiction and magic, instead of begging him to ease the pain in my tits.

He knows what I’m thinking. He has to. Something flashes on his face. Something carnal, and I have to cross my arms at my back so I don’t touch him. I wish I had pockets too.