Dr Sawyer Read online

  “The wedding is off,” I told her, and her mouth dropped.

  “What?” she asked in a hurried voice. Her voice actually rose by a whole octave.

  “Yeah. I called it off.” When I looked at her I saw the very thing I needed.

  Understanding that only she could give. The good thing about us was we’d been a couple, but we were friends. Really good friends. I shared things with her that I never shared with anyone else.

  There was a part of me that she got that no one else could reach.

  That was the part of me that was reaching out to her now.

  It was funnily enough the part of me that wanted her back in my life. In every essence of what that meant.

  I gazed at her sitting there across from me, looking both worried and sad for me. I knew she was genuinely sad to hear that something bad happened to me.

  “What happened Devon?”

  “I caught Melanie cheating on me a little over a month ago with Todd.”

  She sucked in a sharp breath and a bout of color rushed to her cheeks. “Todd? As in your brother Todd?”

  When I looked back to her and didn’t answer she blinked and pressed her lips together.

  “I don’t know when it started but she’d been seeing Todd behind my back. We got back from the Middle East six months ago, so it must have been then. Or, I don’t know. Her family is close to my Dad, although I’ve never met them. Maybe she’d seen Todd before. I actually don’t know.” I didn’t ask a lot of questions. Questions I actually deemed unimportant. What was important was what I’d seen.

  She brought her hands together and kept her gaze trained on mine. “It’s awful Devon. It’s awful. I’m sorry. I can’t imagine what you must be going through.”

  “Thank you.”

  “And this happened last month?” I noticed a slight tremor in her hands.

  “Yeah. I decided I needed to get away. I got back today.”

  “And messaged me?” Something dimmed in her eyes. It was like the spark had gone from her previous lighthearted mood.

  “Yeah. I just wanted to see you.”

  She pulled in a ragged breath and continued to stare at me. “Why? Why me? It’s a little weird…”

  Sometimes when you needed a person it was hard to explain why. Especially when the bridge had been burned between you and them.

  The short answer to that question was simple.

  I wanted her back. The long answer would involve me confessing that I wanted her back well before Melanie cheated with Todd.

  I didn’t think either of those explanations would suffice. They both made me sound like an asshole. Like I was picking her because of the shit that happened with Melanie.

  “I wanted to see you,” I answered.

  “Devon…” She shook her head at me. “It’s good to see you too, after so long. But I can’t do this.”

  I gave her a skeptical glare. “What do you mean? It’s just dinner.”

  “It’s not. It was when I thought you were engaged.” She did up the zipper on her purse and stood up to go.

  I stood too. “Kelly, that’s crazy.”

  “It isn’t. You wouldn’t understand. I’m sorry…I don’t know what this is and what plan you have, but I can’t be the one to comfort you because the woman you picked to spend the rest of your life with cheated on you.”

  I’d expected some weird vibe once I told her the wedding was off, but not this.

  “Kelly, I’m not asking you to comfort me. And if I were what would be so wrong about that?”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Because I loved you.”

  Now it was my turn to be shocked. Eleven months and she could never say the words that would have made a significant difference to me and all that happened over the last two years.

  She told me now—in past tense—as if it was something I should have known.

  At least I got one answer to the series of questions that had always mystified me. She did love me. Had.

  Without another word she turned on her heels and left.

  It was the sort of flight that meant not to follow her.

  I wondered what she’d think when I turned up for work on Monday morning.

  Chapter 2

  Kelly

  Ice cream for breakfast…

  I didn’t care. I grabbed the tub of Ben and Jerry’s and munched away as if it was six in the afternoon and not six in the morning.

  I honestly didn’t care about expanding my waistline.

  There was no wedding to get ready for, and I didn’t have to look amazing in two months. Hopefully thinner than the bride and a sight to make Devon jealous and see what he’d missed out on.

  I did that Saturday night.

  He’d seen me look fabulous, dropped a bomb on me I never saw coming, and I’d been eating everything in sight ever since. I hoped to never see him again.

  It may seem like I was acting like a crazy person, with no reason for my actions, but I knew what I’d gone through over the last two years.

  No one besides me knew.

  It took me a long time to get my head past the fact that Devon was getting married. I didn’t plan to go to the wedding, then I realized it would hurt me more if I didn’t go. I didn’t want to live with that on my conscience because he was the first guy I actually gave my heart to.

  I’d never met anyone who I’d been so intensely and wildly physical with, but could hold that flame of friendship with too. He’d been my boyfriend, but he was also my friend.

  Then he left.

  He left and I was a fish out of water, never understanding why he left things to the last minute the way he had. It was cruel and incredibly selfish.

  He’d gone from asking me how I truly felt about him the week before to leaving me the week after.

  That was how I saw it. All because I couldn’t confess my undying love for him.

  Maybe if I were some complete ditz who had a great life and wonderful upbringing I would have been more accepting that what I had with him was love.

  Maybe if I had the type of life most people with two parents who loved them had I would have been able to tell him when he kept pressing me for an answer that I did love him. At the time, I wanted to tread carefully and be logical.

  Eleven months was a long time. Close to a year. It could tell you a lot but there were some things it couldn’t tell you. Like if the crazy emotions and passion you felt for a guy would last.

  So I thought I did the sensible thing. Only it crushed me to no end when he broke up with me and left.

  I’d just sat on the sofa when the click clack of the front door sounded.

  Other than me, the only person who had keys to this place was Paige.

  We shared the house until she moved in with her now husband.

  I never thought to get another roommate. Some people were irreplaceable, and since I could afford to live here by myself, I did so.

  Paige came into the sitting room and stopped at the entrance.

  She had her blonde hair piled on top of her hair in that messy bun. Her bright green eyes stared at me wide and she pouted, pressing her lips together, clearly mad at my ass.

  There were several reasons for being mad at me today.

  All those missed calls was just the first thing, and possibly the most pressing thing to bring her down to my house at six on a Monday morning.

  The other thing could be that I’d called one of her guy friends a pig right to his face. It was because he’d stood up one of my friends and then I’d heard him talking about how he couldn’t go out with her because he wanted to go out with someone else.

  I didn’t think Paige could be mad at that because she knew I’d been right to call him that.

  “What?” I asked, taking a big everlasting spoonful of ice cream.

  Now she frowned. “Are you kidding me?” she spat back. “Kelly, I’ve been calling y
ou all weekend. I came to check if you were still alive.”

  “Wasn’t all weekend.” It would have been from Saturday night. I’d told her the part about seeing Devon, because I was so shocked to get a message from him out of the blue. What she didn’t know was what happened when I saw him.

  “Kelly, don’t. Just don’t. You know what I mean.” She huffed and made her way over to sit next to me. “Okay spill it. What happened with Devon? The fact that you’re sitting here eating ice cream isn’t a good sign.”

  I set the tub down and shuffled so I could rest my head on the back of the sofa.

  Maybe it would be wise to stay in today.

  This was the first week of my fourth year of residency. It was a very important week in my life. It was a week I’d been so excited for.

  And look at me…

  Paige kicked out at my leg the way she used to when we were kids.

  “Ouch!” I winced.

  “Serves you right. I’m suffering here.” She tilted her head to the side and regarded me with that keen expression.

  I straightened up and looked at the one girl who I could consider my friend for life. We’d been friends since we were five. At twenty-nine years old, we still shared the same closeness we’d had then.

  If I couldn’t talk to her, then who could I talk to?

  “Devon’s not getting married. The wedding is off,” I said quickly.

  Her mouth fell open and she probably looked the way I did when Devon gave me the news.

  “What the hell happened?”

  “His fiancée was cheating on him with his brother.”

  Yup. The look on her face was definitely comparable to what mine had been like.

  “Jesus. That is terrible. Oh my God.”

  “Yes. I agree.” I did. I definitely agreed that the whole thing was awful and I couldn’t imagine what Devon must have gone through, but that was as far as my sympathy went. “So…that happened over a month ago. He gets gone for a while and comes back and calls me.”

  She stared at me and I could see it. Realization dawning in her eyes. It was why she was my best friend. We shared the same thinking pattern and shared the same wave of thought that would have definitely placed his actions in the category of weird.

  “Does he want you back?”

  It occurred to me that it could be that, but I wasn’t sure. What made me leave wasn’t the possibility of that, which would have been unacceptable, it was what I’d gone through. All that I’d gone through to get over him.

  “I don’t care. It would be a straight up no for me if that were the case.”

  “Kelly.” she said my name in that contemplative way I knew heralded a discussion of logic.

  “What?”

  “What actually happened?”

  I closed my eyes, took a moment, and then told her about my very brief meeting with my ex.

  “Paige…it took me awhile to get over him. You saw what it did to me. Hearing he was getting married crushed me and I knew I’d lost him. He found someone that quickly and was over me. You also saw I had to pick apart stuff in my mind to accept his wedding invite. The point is, I got over him. I accepted he was no longer available and that was all. The end. Now he’s not getting married. So where does that put me?” I drew in a ragged breath and willed myself to continue. “To me, it places me right back to the point where we broke up. He broke up with me. I didn’t break up with him. I just had to learn to undo all that I felt for him, suck it up, and move on.” That undoing part was actually still a work in progress.

  “I get it. I do. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t get it.” Paige nodded, showing the understanding of which she spoke.

  “I know it’s harsh and leaving him in the restaurant like that may have been mean but I have to guard my heart.”

  She gave me a long contemplative stare. One I wasn’t sure was agreeable to what I was saying.

  “What’s that look for Paige?”

  “Kelly, you know how we’re the kind of friends who just hash out all possibilities and we’re not known for being accepting of what something may look like at face value,” she surmised. “I mean, we don’t just do something because it looks like we should do it, or not. That was my exact situation with Ryan a few years back.”

  Ryan, her husband, had been her mentor when she started her residency. I’d gone through a lot of shit in my life but Paige had definitely had it rough. She was involved in a car accident that killed her twin sister and robbed her of a year of her studies.

  She came back from that determined to succeed. Ryan, being her mentor, helped a lot and that was how they got together. Except he wasn’t supposed to be dating any of his mentees. His father was the medical and course director of the study program at Pittsburgh University and St. Michael’s. That was the law he laid down for him, but it didn’t stop them from seeing each other. They saw each other in secret and kept going until they overcame the obstacle.

  She could have given up so many times on him but she kept going.

  The thing was, if she’d been me the whole situation would have been a no from the start. So, it was kind of fruitless to use herself as an example.

  “Paige…you know what my mother did to my father.” That was all I needed to say. It was enough.

  The slow nod she answered with told me she understood. “I know. I remember. But sweetie, there’s going to be a point where you have to make your own path. That was theirs. Not yours.”

  “It was a lesson. I don’t want to end up like my father.” I didn’t want to end up like Dad at all. Chasing after a woman for years who never loved him.

  Mom walked out on us when I was ten. She was pregnant with another man’s child. Some rich guy. I saw him once and he looked like a mobster.

  Her leaving came after a good few years of being a horrible wife and a mother who obviously wasn’t fit for motherhood.

  Mom was a drug addict and an alcoholic. Part of me also thought she made some money on the side as a prostitute.

  If she wasn’t high most days, she was with some guy. Some strange man in the house with us when Dad was away on business trips. Dad was a software developer and he was doing fine now with his wealth and riches. Back then though, Mom nearly destroyed him.

  It always got to me how he knew what she was like and he loved her anyway. Then when she left, that was it for him. He never got with anyone else.

  It was hard for me to open my heart to anyone with all that I’d come from.

  I brought my hand to my head and drew in a sigh. “Devon was the only guy I’d ever met who I could see myself with long term. Forget what happened. That’s how I felt when I was with him. Then I didn’t have him anymore and everything was different. It was almost, I guess, the first time too that I got an ounce of what my father must have felt like when my mother left him.” That was the best way that I could describe it.

  “I do understand. I could see that was how you felt too at the time. Remember…we’ve known each other forever,” Paige sympathized.

  Sometimes I forgot we were friends at the time Mom left. Maybe because what happened then felt so big it swallowed me up and sometimes I felt alone.

  “I don’t mean to compare this to that. What Mom did was so awful. It was just that I promised myself I’d never allow anyone to treat me like that and leave me crushed the way she left my dad. It’s why I’ve always been so careful in my relationships. I date, yes. But being in a relationship is different for me. It’s harder.”

  “I know. I see that too. I also see that sometimes in your relationships you may be too careful.”

  I frowned at her. “What? You can’t be too careful.”

  “Yes, there is such a thing as being too careful. I wouldn’t be a friend if I didn’t point out that when you and Devon were together you rocked it as a couple. He loved you and it was so clear that you loved him too. I also wouldn’t be a friend…if I didn’t point out that there was a point just b
efore the breakup when you seemed to be holding back. Before you guys broke up, you told me he asked you how you felt about him and you told him you cared deeply for him. That’s the thing you say when you want to keep someone at arm’s length, and let them know that’s as far as your feelings go for them. No more. Not love.” She kept her gaze trained on me and bit the inside of her lip.

  I placed my head in my hands and sighed. I knew all of that, but hearing it like that in such a raw way made me feel bad. And guilty, because I hadn’t wanted to keep Devon at arm’s length at all or make him feel like caring deeply for him was all it was.

  Paige had never called me out like that before. Not then. We hadn’t really had this talk yet, mainly because just after my breakup she was in that accident and realistically she had bigger fish to fry. My heart was broken but she’d just lost her sister forever.

  “I loved him,” I mumbled.

  “But he didn’t know that.”

  “Okay… so yes, I was being very careful.” And sure, admittedly, too careful.

  “Since I know you loved him, I feel compelled to highlight that I think you chickened out and he wanted more.”

  “You’re right. I did chicken out. But that doesn’t change anything.” I shuffled and set my shoulders back. We both had to be at work soon and I wanted to shake off this funk I was in. “It doesn’t change anything. Devon and I have been over for a long time, and I’m sticking to my guns. It’s better.” Now that I knew what it felt like for the man to break my heart, I didn’t think I should be dumb enough to put myself in the same situation again. Even as a friend.

  Paige raised an arched brow. “This isn’t going to be one of those times when you regret a decision, is it?”

  “Nope. It most certainly will not. This is gonna be a great year and I won’t allow anything to spoil it for me. I sympathize with Devon, but I’ve decided I won’t be seeing him again.” I gave her a firm nod.

  Yes, that was my decision.

  I wouldn’t be seeing him again and I wouldn’t be making any form of contact.

  I got to the hospital three hours later ready to start my fourth year of residency with the determination of everything in me.