SIX WEEKS HAD PASSED SINCE she and Michael had struck up their arrangement, and they had settled into a rhythm. They worked out the logistics of their meetings in between flirtatious texts. Neither had been joking about their punishing work schedules. Darby’s shifts could be erratic, depending on her patient load at the hospital. If one of her charges was in crisis, she had to stay late. It meant she flaked on plans sometimes. But true to his word, Michael never gave her shit about prioritizing work, no matter how late she was or how many times she cancelled.
“The cold flatters you.” Michael smiled, smoothing the backs of his warm fingers over her rosy cheeks. He’d been waiting at the bar at GT Prime for twenty minutes. Even when she looked like an underslept hag, he always found a kind thing to say.
Unwrapping her cream-colored cashmere scarf from around her shoulders, his fingers grazed that spot on her neck. It was the first of many small gestures that would ground her. Kissing her cheek hello, he extended the pressing of his soft lips a moment longer than he needed to. She shivered from his fingertips on her neck again as he swept her hair over one shoulder before slipping her white woolen trench down her arms.
GT Prime was the latest eatery by a restaurant group that had won Darby over with their first two offerings. The decor had a cavernous feeling to it, despite its two-stories and the unlikely combination of exposed concrete and reclaimed wood. Eclectic accents such as fur-lined bar chairs and lighting that was slightly reminiscent of playing jacks fit together so tastefully that even in her tired state, Darby felt like she was dripping with style.
Michael had disappeared to the coat room after coaxing her onto the high-back bar stool he’d been sitting on when she arrived. She was glad they had a spot at the end of the bar closest to the open kitchen, where she could feel the warmth of the grilling ovens with their open flames. Taking a long, relieved sip of something with rosemary and plenty of gin, Darby began to relax. It felt good to be off her feet, to be among people whose focus was having a good time. With the weather getting colder, she was craving comfort food and a large glass of red wine.
They had been eating together more and more. Between their acrobatic sex, the fact that they both forgot to eat when work got crazy, and a general aversion to cooking after a long day, one or both of them was always starving. When Michael returned, she had just set the nearly-empty drink down on the bar. He plucked it up and took the last sip before motioning to the bartender for the check. He looked down at her, sweeping his eyes over her face, smiling gently as if he were happy to see her. She wanted to lean in to him, to feel his touch again.
“Thank you for lunch,” she said, ignoring her impulse. She had to remind herself that they were in public.
The bartender arrived with a receipt, and she watched him pen what looked more like an elegant insignia than a written-out name. Though the “M” and the “B” of Michael Blaine were discernible, the whole thing was very artistic.
Even his signature is beautiful, she thought. She didn’t know why she hadn’t noticed it before.
“You’re welcome.” He touched her neck softly once again before helping her out of her chair. This was almost as good as the sex—the way the forces of their magnetic fields pulled them together at the same time they kept them apart.
After they had moved from the bar to a table, she perused the menu hungrily. She was about to ask Michael what he would order when a buxom waitress approached, looking only at him. The waitress leaned over—unnecessary since the restaurant was full, but not loud—and spoke directly to Michael.
“Can I help you choose a wine?”
Michael kept his eyes on the menu for a moment before flicking his eyes straight up to hers, ignoring her ample breasts, despite her obvious display.
“My girlfriend knows what I like,” he said smoothly, the corner of his mouth crooking upward in a knowing smile. “I think you’d better ask her.”
The waitress’ face soured as she turned to Darby.
“Do you have the Bodega Catena Zapata Malbec?” Darby asked, not bothering with the menu.
The waitress nodded curtly.
“We’ll take that,” Darby said dismissively, shifting her eyes back to Michael.
“Good choice.” he returned, smiling conspiratorially and keeping his eyes on her.
It wasn’t the first time Michael had thwarted the attempts of a blatant, hopeful flirtation, though Darby felt disconcerted by how often women did it right in front of her. She didn’t blame Michael for playing up their relationship when he needed to, either. If she were his real girlfriend, she might be annoyed, and if she were the insecure type of girlfriend, she might even feel threatened. But for now, she was just a clever decoy.
She could tell he didn’t like this kind of attention. Witnessing him have to deal with so many unwanted advances from strangers showed Darby they were more alike than she’d originally thought. Both of them were targets for the shallowest of reasons.
“I’m sitting right here”, Darby mouthed, shaking her head in disbelief.
“Shameless hussy,” Michael whispered. Darby stifled a laugh. The waitress was still within earshot, and had glared at them at least once.
She couldn’t help but think about her exes and compare Michael’s behavior to theirs. None of them had a wandering eye—Darby never would have put up with that—but none of them had ever set boundaries like Michael did either. Most guys relished female attention no matter how often they received it. But when it was objectifying, and cheap, not to mention rude for being delivered in front of a date, Michael let them know the score every time. She had heard of men like this, but never really believed they existed. If even only a little, Michael was restoring her faith in men.
“So what’s the psych ward like?” Michael asked after the wine had been poured. The question startled her a bit. They’d been seeing each other for nearly two months. How was it that they’d managed not to talk about their jobs?
“Either totally quiet, or totally insane,” she admitted.
He raised an eyebrow at her choice of words. She shook her head and tried not to indulge him with a smile.
“It’s not designed for patients to stay long-term. It’s usually a family member who brings in a relative when they can’t handle a psychotic episode alone. We stabilize the patients and then work with the families around longer-term strategies.”
He hadn’t tuned out yet. In fact, he was looking at her expectantly, so she continued.
“I get a fair number of patients from the ER—mostly overdoses or people who need to be on suicide watch. I also get calls for consults in other parts of the hospital. And when I’m not dealing with whatever walks through the door, I do my research.”
“What’s your research about?”
“Do you seriously want to know? Isn’t this boring?”
“I’d rather find out sooner than later whether your research involves overachieving professional men who solicit brilliant women to become their companions.”
They both smiled.
“Try permanent changes in the brain among people who are addicted to opioids.”
“So you’re trying to prove that opioids cause permanent changes in the brain?”
She shook her head.
“That’s already been proven—I’m looking for patterns in the changes that do occur so that we can learn how to treat opioid addiction more effectively.”
“Will your research lead to the development of a drug?”
“Maybe,” she continued. He already knew that her specialty was psychopharmacology, a subspecialty of psychiatry that deals with prescribing medication for psychiatric disease.
“Right now, we treat opioid addiction by getting addicts off the drug, often by giving them substitute drugs like methadone. It’s an old way of thinking. The logic is that if you wean people off of the drug itself, they’ll be able to progress from physiological dependence to psychological dependence. And once it’s out of their system, we treat the psychology. The problem is, psychological approaches to managing opioid addiction aren’t working. The recidivism rate for opioids is higher than for any other drug class, which suggests that we may be wrong about our ability to eliminate the physiological addiction. Opioid addiction might need a new treatment model—different from what we use for other drugs. If we understood brain changes related to opioids more specifically, we would be in a better position to understand the best courses of treatment.”
“Wow,” he said simply. “How close are you?”
“Not as close as I want to be,” she said, and it felt vulnerable for her to admit. “My boss isn’t exactly on board.”
She didn’t mention how she wasn’t making nearly as much progress as she had hoped, mainly because Huck was giving her loads of busy work. Darby suspected that this maneuver was specifically designed to keep her away from her research.
“I can prove persistent and specific changes within the brain that are different from previous observations but nothing that offers a clear path to treatment. But, they just gave me three hundred grand, which will buy me another six months.”
He put down his glass and leaned toward her.
“That’s really important work. I’m not surprised that you’re doing something great, but I’m still impressed.”
“I’m impressive.” She shrugged.
“Yes, you are,” he said, his voice a bit lower.
He’s not flirting with you for real, she had to remind herself. She’d had to remind herself of that a lot, lately.
“What’s your work like?” she asked, genuinely interested as well. “Like, what do you do every day?”
“It depends on where we are in the project life cycle,” he replied. “When we’re in design phase, I spend a lot of time drafting at home or in my office. It’s creative work and it’s fairly solitary.”
She nodded, sitting back in her chair and taking a long sip of wine.
“Once I have concepts to show, it’s a lot of internal meetings to decide which ideas we’ll show to clients, what changes we need to make. When plans get approved, projects go into planning and I’m minimally involved unless questions come up that would impact the build.”
“So, why architecture?” she asked, voicing a question she’d had for a while. “Is it something you’ve wanted to do since you were a kid?”
“Not exactly…growing up, we didn’t have a lot of money. My dad was out of the picture. My mom was the head housekeeper for this family in Glencoe. She worked for them since before I was born until the day she died. When I was a kid, she would have to take me to work when there was nobody else to watch me. We’d be driving through all those nice neighborhoods, and she would point out the houses she liked. She knew the Victorian Gothic from the Italianate, the Georgians from the Tudors. She loved the Mansard roofs, and I loved to draw. Soon I was drawing the kinds of houses I saw. It became kind of a game—I would show her my drawings, and she would tell me what she liked about them.”
As he told the story, he intermittently looked between Darby and a place that seemed worlds away. She wondered how many people he had ever told this story to.
“One day—I’ll never forget it—I was in our kitchen, just sketching whatever was in my brain. She had a pot in her hand, but she put it down on the table when she saw what I was drawing. She gave me this look, this smile, and she said, in a voice I’d never heard before, ‘That’s my house, Michael. Will you build it for me one day?’ But she got so distracted by the picture that she forgot about the pot and it made a big heat stain on the wood. Each time I saw the stain, I remembered her face that day.”
Even in low light, she could see the subtle shining of his eyes.
“When did she die?” Darby asked softly, not shying away from the topic. She knew it was so much worse when somebody mumbled an ‘I’m sorry for your loss,” rather than giving you the chance to remember the person you loved.
“When I was twenty-one.” He looked back at her with a sad smile. “She didn’t live long enough to see me build it, but she lived long enough to see the plans.”
He reached into his pocket, pressed a button on his phone, and handed it to her. His screen saver was an architect’s color drawing of a beautiful house, landscaping and all, with a woman’s name written on the bottom.
“Tara.”
Darby’s own eyes were wet with tears.
“It’s beautiful.” She didn’t relinquish his phone, but pressed the side button so she could look at the drawing again after the screen went dark.
“Will you build it?” Her voice was hopeful.
“I’ll live in it one day. It’s all part of the master plan. My mom is why I’m so involved with The Frigg Foundation.”
She tore her eyes away from the phone and finally met his gaze.
“Breast cancer?” The sad story finally came together. “My grandmother too,” she said. A silent understanding passed between them as she gently handed him back his phone.
“Have you always wanted to be a psychiatrist, since you were a kid?” he changed the subject. “I can picture a 5-year old version of you psychoanalyzing your teddy bears.”
“Actually, no,” she admitted. “Growing up, I always wanted to be a writer. I loved stories—I still do. I spent a lot of time surrounded by people, but alone, you know? Always on the campaign trail, nobody my age to play with. I took my journal with me everywhere.”
“What happened?” His voice was deep and soft. His eyes were clear and curious.
“Apart from the fact that I was presented with a very short list of acceptable professions as a requirement if I wanted my father to pay for school?”
Michael raised his eyebrows.
“Yeah, my dad is like that.” He subtly shook his head in disapproval.
“It was the year I had to pick a specialty when my mother overdosed on pills. I was angry. And confused. And on a crusade to rid the world of the pain suffered by addicts and their families. So I chose psychopharmacology—”
“—so you could save people like your mother,” Michael accurately concluded.
She nodded confirmation.
“What was she like, your mother?” he asked in a soothing tone.
Darby’s eyes prickled with tears. “She was beautiful. We loved each other a lot. It sounds stupid, but even though she went down a bad path with pills and alcohol, she was the sanest person in my family.”
She hesitated before asking her next question. Michael was thirty-one, and had been without his mother for more than ten years. Yet, for Darby, it had barely been four and in many ways, her pain felt fresh.
“Does it get easier?” She barely looked at him as she said the words, still feeling emotional from their exchange.
From across the table, she felt his larger hand cover hers. Her instinct was to turn her palm up and take his hand. Michael’s comfort felt good.
“It changes, for sure. But, easier? No. I don’t think so.” His thumbs stroked her knuckles as he said the words.
“Do you want to see a picture?” Darby sniffed.
“Yes,” he said without hesitation.
Reluctantly, Darby freed the hand Michael was holding in order to recover her phone. She clicked to reveal her screen saver, handing it to Michael. His face brightened.
“She was beautiful…” His eyes were fixed on the image of the two of them and he smiled. “And she had your energy. I can see it.”
And then she really did want to cry. Because it was true.
“What would she think?” Michael asked. “If she knew what you were doing with your life?”
Darby laughed through unshed tears. Nobody had ever asked her that. “She’d tell me to be a writer. What would your mom say if she could see you now?”
Now it was Michael’s turn to smile. “She’d tell me to quit dicking around with skyscrapers and build her fucking house.”
Darby laughed harder as Michael handed back her phone.
“My mom was always bugging me to settle down. She wanted me to meet a nice girl, start a family, not get caught up in my job…pretty much the opposite of what I’m doing now. I think she had a lot of guilt around us growing up without a dad. Her highest hope for us was that we would create the families we never had.”
Darby understood.
“My mom always wanted me to be my own woman,” Darby offered then. “She was kind of…trapped in this awful marriage. She’d been raised to find a good husband and be a good wife, but that life suffocated her. She wanted it to be different for me. She really saw me, you know? It was a big fight when my mom told my dad she would pay for me to go to whatever school I wanted to go to. She went to bat for me. But Frank Christensen always wins…”
Now it was Darby who must’ve been a million miles away, because when she looked back at Michael, she felt as if he had been studying her for a long time.
“What does that mean?”
“Having status like his does more than just open doors—it closes them, too.” She’d only ever told this to Ben. “Two weeks after I got my acceptance letter from Oberlin, I got a second letter rescinding the offer.”
The look on Michael’s face was a broad spectrum of shock, anger, sadness, and pity.
“I hope you don’t take this the wrong way…” he began, “…but, at this wedding we’re going to, do you need me to pretend to like your father? Because you’re making him sound like kind of a dick.”
She cast her eyes to the side, uttering bitterly, “You don’t know the half of it.”
Her mind went someplace else for a moment, to a single memory that was better-left in the past. When the sound of his voice pulled her back, he had a strange look on his face.
“Are you’re sure you want to go to this thing?” He asked it with caution.
“We’ll make an appearance,” she muttered. “But believe me, we’re not staying for long.”