Medicine Man (Page 74)

Fuck, that look.

That look made me want to shake her, so she stopped doing it. She stopped looking at me like I hung the moon.

It also made me want to kiss the breath out of her, wrap her in my arms and keep her tucked by my side, slay all her dark thoughts and drink down all her salty water.

“She was in an accident,” I tell Willow. “She didn’t die but she went into a coma. Anoxic brain injury due to severe head trauma. And her parents filed a lawsuit against me when I told them it was my fault. The board asked me to step down from my position until the matter was resolved, and I did. I wasn’t going to stay anyway. Not after what happened.”

“Is she…”

She trails off, her eyes wide and so blue I want to drown in them.

I am drowning in them.

I am drowning in this fucking wait to see what she has to say to my confession. I know it’s a distinct possibility that she’ll send me away after this, and I honestly don’t know what I will do if she does.

“What happened?” she whispers at last, and my next breath comes easy.

I still have time. I can still be in her presence. I can still look at her, hear her voice.

“They took her off life support. I was going to stop them. I was driving up there.” I shake my head. “But I decided not to. I decided to let her go.”

 “Why?” she asks, frowning, so fucking perfect in her confusion.

“Because my dad’s nurse called me saying that he was lucid. He seemed to remember me. She told me I should see him.”

“D-did you get to talk to him?”

I smile sadly. “No. By the time I got to him he was… not lucid anymore.”

“I-I’m sorry.”

Even if she hadn’t called, I wouldn’t have been able to make the entire drive, anyway. I wouldn’t have been able to leave Heartstone.

“It’s okay. It was the right thing to do. Letting her go.”

That night when I turned around, I felt the pressure easing off from my chest. I didn’t know it then but the act of driving back to my father was my way of moving on, and letting Claire go.

Maybe that’s what acceptance does. Eases off the pressure, the friction. That’s why Willow started laughing more when she confessed her lies in the group a long time ago.

Beth was right. I tell my patients to fight but I, myself, forgot.

“Well.” She sighs, wiping off her tears and straightening her spine. “I’m happy for you. That you’ve moved on. But I need to get back to work so –”

“I lied,” I tell her, then.

This time when her eyes go wide, there’s more than sadness in them. There’s awareness. An electricity that seems to flare whenever we’re close. I noticed it the first time she came into my office. That was the reason I kept asking her to meet me against traditional practices, against all reason.

“Lied about what?”

I walk closer to her and she steps back. “About everything I said that night.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

Actually, I noticed that spark even before that. When she was on her knees, collecting pages of her book. Maybe that electricity was why I knew I had to kneel. I knew I had to help the silver-haired girl.

This is what they call fate, I think. This electricity, this magnetism. This strange call from the gut.

I shouldn’t crowd her and cage her against the door she came out of, but I can’t stop. I put both my palms on either side of her head and whisper, “I do have feelings for you. I’ve always had them.”

She purses her pretty mouth. “I don’t care.”

I keep going, though. “I always thought that my feelings for you were my weakness. I thought every time I watched you walk down the hallways, every time I strained my ears to hear you laugh or talk, every time I called you back into my office I was failing. You were my patient, I wasn’t supposed to feel that. I wasn’t supposed to look for you in the dining hall or on the grounds. I wasn’t supposed to hear your voice in my head or think about your skin when I saw the moon. I wasn’t supposed to imagine touching your hair every time you swept your bangs off your forehead. I thought I was failing.”

“Simon, I told you –”

“I wasn’t failing, Willow. I was living. Waking up in the morning is hard for me too. Sometimes, I don’t want to. More often than not, my first thought used to be of the day I found my mother. It would terrify me, every time I opened my eyes in the morning, going through the same cycle of emotions I went through that day. I always found it better to just not go to sleep, at all. But then I met you.”

Her chin tips up and she arches toward me. Her voice doesn’t have the stern cadence she probably wants to portray when she whispers, “I d-don’t care.”

I lean down, bringing us even closer. “I met you and every thought I had became yours. I started looking forward to waking up in the morning. I started to look forward to going to work. Walking the same hallways as my father did. It wasn’t a chore. Living. It wasn’t something I had to do. Living became something I wanted to do.”

I hear the rustle of her soaked jacket that was draped around her arms falling to the floor. She puts her hands on my chest, pushing me, and despite the situation and the unresolved issues between us, my cold body heats up at our first contact after months.

“I told you I don’t care.”

Taking my hands off the door, I cup her soft cheeks. “I never believed that I could love. I never thought I even knew what the word meant. I was too broken. Too cold and buried inside myself. I was too much in hate with my past and all the things that happened. And then, you happened to me, Willow. I never thought we could have something beyond Heartstone. Every day I counted down the days I had left with you. I was counting down the days of my life. Because I knew the moment you walked out of those gates, I’d die. I’d stop living.”

I wipe her tears but more keep coming, tightening that band around my chest. “You’re… fucking perfect. So perfect and beautiful and innocent. A princess. You deserve a king. A true hero. Someone to fight alongside you. I never thought I could be that hero. Not with my mistakes and hang-ups and my battle with the past. But then, I realized a hero isn’t someone who doesn’t fall. A hero is someone who knows how to rise.”

And then, I say it. The three words I never thought I’d say to anyone. I never thought I’d even feel them. But she knew. She always knew that we had something between us.

“I love you, Willow,” I whisper, raggedly. “I fucking love you so much.”

She sobs, and her hands become fists in my shirt as she tries to push me again. “Then why did you leave? Why the fuck did you leave? Why did you say all those things to me? Why did you break my heart to the point where I lost my mind?”

Her words make me bleed. Her words make me think of all the times I wanted to knock on her door and apologize. The times I’ve wanted to confess, to tell her everything.

“Willow –”

“No, stop talking.” She shakes her head, trying to control herself. “Just stop talking. You don’t get to come here and say all these things to me and expect everything to go back to normal.”

She slaps my chest. “You broke my heart, Simon. You fucking shattered it. Do you know I looked for you? The next morning. I fucking looked for you. I waited for you every night in my room. Even after you said all those things to me. I waited for you. But you never came back. Not once did you come back. So I don’t care if you love me because I hate you. I fucking hate you so much.”