Chapter 3: The Last Appointment
For the first time in a year, he's waiting for you.
You arrive at three fifty-eight with your shoulder stitched and your jaw set, determined to be early out of pure spite, and the door to his office is already standing open. He's at the window with his back to you and his hands in the pockets of his white coat. His glasses are back on. His hair is neat again. Everything about him has been put carefully back in its place, and you hate it, because you saw him kneeling on the concrete in a parking garage with frost on his hands, and you know now what the neatness is for.
Dr. Haldane is sitting at the end of the examination table with a clipboard on her knee and a lollipop in her mouth. She raises it at you in greeting.
"Right on time," she says. "Look at that. A miracle."
"Sit," says Zayne, without turning. "Please."
You sit.
He's thorough. Of course he's thorough. He goes through every test from the last twelve months with Haldane in a low, even voice, numbers and dates and scan results, the shape of your core on resonance imaging, the frequency of the episodes, the treatments that helped and the ones that didn't. He hands her printouts. He hands her a list of medications, annotated in that beautiful illegible script. He tells her to call him at any hour if the pain spikes above a certain threshold, then corrects himself and says to call the on-call surgeon, then stops talking for a second and corrects himself back.
He doesn't look at you once.
You sit on the table with your hands knotted in your lap and listen to him take a year of Thursdays apart, piece by piece, and hand them to someone else.
When he's done, Dr. Haldane takes the stack of paper, squares it on her knee, and stands. She looks from him to you and back again.
"Well," she says. "I think I've got what I need. I'll be right outside, eating an inappropriate amount of sugar." She heads for the door, then pauses with her hand on the frame. "Zayne."
"Mm."
"Close the door properly this time. The whole floor heard you last week."
She goes. The latch clicks shut behind her, loud and ordinary.
Then it's just the two of you, and the cherry trees outside the window, and the hum of the monitor on the wall.
"I need to listen one more time," he says. "For the file. So Haldane has a baseline."
"Fine."
You unbutton your shirt. He hooks the stethoscope into his ears and comes to stand in front of you, and for a moment he just holds the bell in his palm to warm it, which he has never once done before, and then he leans in and presses it gently over your heart.
You look at the ceiling. You count the tiles. You think about Wanderers, about noodles, about the forty-two-step pre-hunt checklist the Association makes you memorize. It doesn't work. It never works. You feel your pulse climb under his hand like a bird beating against glass.
He takes the earpieces out. He doesn't step back.
"One hundred and twelve," you say. "Right? Etiology unclear."
He's quiet. Then he reaches past you to the desk, and you hear a drawer open, and he puts a file in your lap.
It's the thin one. The one with no name on the tab.
You look at him. He nods at it, once, and turns away to the window again as if he can't watch you read it.
You open it.
The first page is dated the week of your first appointment, a year ago. It says, in his perfect frost-script handwriting, which up close is not illegible at all, just very small:
16:00. Baseline 64.
16:04. New patient enters. Hunter. Core anomaly. Argues with the intake form. 81.
16:31. She laughs at something I said. I was not attempting a joke. 90.
Note: likely caffeine. Reduce coffee.
You turn the page. Another Thursday. And another. He's recorded every single one. His own resting heart rate at four o'clock; the number when you walk in; the number when you argue with him, when you're late, when you're hurt, when you fall asleep in the waiting room once and he has to wake you up. The notes beside them get longer as the pages go on.
16:12. She brought me coffee. It was terrible. 88.
16:20. Patient refers to her condition as "chronic Thursday." Unhelpful. Accurate.
16:40. Patient left. Rate returned to baseline at 16:58. Eighteen minutes.
Note: caffeine ruled out.
Further in, the handwriting starts to change. It gets less tidy. Words are crossed out.
Episode in office. Used Evol without thinking. Her head on my shoulder. 131. Unacceptable.
And on the last page, dated two days after the parking garage, a single line, pressed so hard into the paper that the nib has nearly torn through:
I cannot be her doctor. I can't hear her heartbeat over my own.
You look up. He's still at the window, very straight, his hands still in his pockets. The glass in front of him has fogged over in a perfect circle around where he's standing. Frost is creeping in from the edges of the pane, little white ferns of it, spreading across the view of the cherry trees.
"I tried to find a medical explanation," he says, to the glass. "For you. For both of us. I ran every correlation I could think of. Your episodes don't track with exertion, or stress, or time of day. Not reliably. What they track with, more often than not, is proximity. Your core flares worse when I'm called away. It settles faster when I'm close." He exhales. The frost spreads a little further. "My own heart doesn't track with anything at all except you. I've been a surgeon for six years. I've held people's lives in my hands and never once had my pulse go over ninety. You walk in late with a scratch on your arm and I can't keep my hands steady enough to tape a bandage."
"Zayne."
"It's unprofessional. It's dangerous. If I let it affect my judgment and something happened to you..."
"Zayne." You slide off the table. Your shirt is still half-unbuttoned; you don't care. You cross the room and stand next to him at the frosted window, close enough that your shoulder brushes his arm. "Look at me."
He doesn't, for a second. Then he does.
His eyes behind the glasses are dark and wide and absolutely terrified, and you realize that he has stood in front of a lot of hearts in his life, opened them up, fixed them, put them back, and never once in all that time been asked to hand over his own.
"Your notes are wrong," you tell him.
He blinks. "Wrong."
"You wrote 'etiology unclear.' Every week. Fifty-two times." You reach out and take one of his hands out of his coat pocket. It's freezing. You hold it anyway. "It was never unclear. I've known since about the third Thursday. I just didn't think you'd ever look up from the file long enough to notice."
You lift his hand and press it, palm flat, over your heart, the way he did when the pain came. Your pulse is hammering. He can feel every beat.
"That's not the core," you say. "That's just you."
His breath leaves him in a long, unsteady rush. His fingers spread over your sternum. You feel the cold of his skin, then something else: the cold ebbing, slowly, as if his hand is warming from the inside out. Behind him, the frost on the window stops spreading.
"You're not my patient anymore," he says quietly. "As of four forty-one, your file belongs to Dr. Haldane."
"I know. You told me. Several times. Very thoroughly."
"Which means," he says, and swallows, and you watch the most composed man in Linkon City come apart a little at the edges, "that there is no longer a professional reason I can't ask if I may kiss you."
You laugh. It comes out shaky and wet.
"Doctor," you say, "you're allowed to just do it."
He takes his glasses off. He folds them, very carefully, and sets them on the windowsill. Then he cups your face in his free hand, and his thumb brushes your cheekbone once, as if checking a measurement, and he leans down and kisses you.
It's careful at first. Precise, like everything he does, a question he's been rehearsing for a year. Then you rise onto your toes and put your arms around his neck, and he makes a low, helpless sound against your mouth and pulls you in, his hand still spread over your heart between you, his other arm wrapping hard around your waist. He kisses you like someone who has been very cold for a very long time and has finally found the fire. The window behind him gives a soft crackle. When you open your eyes for a second, you see the frost on the glass has turned to tiny flowers.
When he finally pulls back, he doesn't go far. He rests his forehead against yours. His breath is ragged.
"One hundred and forty," he murmurs.
"Yours or mine?"
"I've stopped being able to tell." He laughs, quietly, and it's unmistakably a laugh this time, low and warm and astonished at itself. It's the best sound you've ever heard.
Then you feel it. Under his palm, under your sternum. The core.
It isn't hurting. For the first time since you can remember, it isn't cold or sharp or wrong. It's warm, a steady, glowing heat, and when you both look down, there's light spilling out between his fingers. Not the sick blue of an episode. Gold. Soft and bright as afternoon.
Zayne goes very still. You can see the doctor in him wake up, his eyes narrowing, his focus sharpening on the light under his hand like it's the most fascinating thing he's ever seen.
"That's new," he says.
"Is that bad?"
"I don't know." His thumb moves slowly over the glow. "I'll need to run some tests."
"You're not my doctor anymore."
"No," he agrees. He looks up at you, and there's something in his face you've never seen there before. It looks a lot like hope. "So I'll have to run them over dinner. Friday. Seven o'clock." A pause. "Don't be late."