"Okay, seriously." Jay's voice cut through my concentration as I examined the mottled bruising spreading across his ribs. "This is going to drive me crazy. I know we've met before, but I can’t quite recall…."
"You're a professional hockey player. Your name is on the jerseys so I didn't need to know you personally to know who you are." I pressed gently along his ribcage, checking for fractures. "Does this hurt?"
"Everything hurts. That's not the point, stop deflecting." He tried to shift toward me, wincing at the movement. "It's your eyes. I keep looking at them, and there's something… I don't know. Familiar. Like I've seen them before, but in a different context."
The words landed somewhere soft and unprotected.
He'd seen these eyes a thousand times—in our house when he came to sleepovers, in the stands at his games, at Nathan's birthday parties where I'd hover in corners pretending to be interested in my phone while secretly watching him laugh with people who actually mattered.
Then I’ve mentioned something in my periphery: the almost imperceptible shift in Xavier's posture.
Not a movement, exactly. More like a stillness with opinions.
"I just have one of those faces," I said flatly. "Very generic."
"That's definitely not true." His good hand reached out, fingers brushing my wrist as I pulled back from the examination. "There's nothing generic about you. Trust me, I'd remember meeting someone who looks as beautiful as you."
You saw me almost every day for four years. You walked past my locker between the third and fourth period. You sat four rows behind me in AP English.
You borrowed a pen from me once, sophomore year, and you handed it back without ever looking at my face.
You just never bothered to really look.
I said none of that. What I did do was glance, very briefly, at Xavier.
His jaw was doing the thing. The almost invisible tightening along the hinge that happened when he was processing something he'd decided not to act on.
He was looking at his chart while absolutely not looking at his chart.
"You know," Jay’s eyes tracked over my face with quiet intensity. "I think you're must be the most gorgeous woman I've seen in—"
"I'd recommend conserving your energy for recovery rather than conversation, Mr. Callahan."
Jay's attention finally shifted to Xavier, and something flickered in his expression. Assessment, recognition of a challenge, maybe. Even if he couldn't identify its source.
"Dislocated shoulders and injured ribs require rest with minimal stimulation," Xavier continued with a cold and professional smile. "And Dr. Ellis has other patients who require her attention."
Jay's eyes moved between us—Xavier's rigid posture, my careful non-expression—and his interest seemed to sharpen rather than diminish. The corner of his mouth quirked up, just slightly.
"Understood. I'll try to behave myself. Though I make no promises about keeping quiet once the good doctor comes back to check on me."
Xavier didn't respond, simply made a note on the chart, nodded to me with professional detachment, and walked away. I watched him go, feeling the complicated tangle of gratitude and frustration that always accompanied his protectiveness.
As if I couldn't handle Jay Callahan's flirting on my own.
But maybe he was right, maybe I couldn't. Maybe standing this close to the ghost of my teenage heartbreak had stripped away all the composure I'd spent years building.
"Your boss is intense," Jay said quietly, still watching the doorway. "Seems like the type who runs a tight ship."
"Dr. Hale is an excellent physician. We're lucky to work under his supervision."
"I'm sure you are." Jay's gaze returned to my face, searching. "So. You really won't tell me where we've met before? Because I'm going to figure it out eventually. I'm very persistent, ask anyone."
"We haven't met." The lie tasted bitter on my tongue. "Now please try to rest. The reduction is going to hurt, and you'll want whatever reserves you have left."
I stepped back before he could respond, pulling the curtain closed between us. My hands were shaking and I pressed them flat against my thighs, breathing through the tremor until it subsided.
The rest of the shift passed in a blur of duties and surfacing memories. I checked vitals and administered medications and documented charts, but underneath the routine, my mind kept sliding backward.
The thing that burned most wasn't that Jay never saw me.
It was that he'd had every opportunity to—and still hadn't bothered.
At high school there had even been rumors that my brother Nathan and I were dating that he didn’t deny for my safety. The quiet girl always hovering near the starboy, or the way he'd walk me to classes, or protected me from bullies.
Jay had been Nathan's best friend through all of it. He'd known I was Nathan's sister.
And he'd never even once asked my name.
I was just "Nathan's sister" to him. The ugly one, the forgettable one. Not worth the basic courtesy of a first name, not worth remembering as anything other than an inconvenient extension of his best friend.
But I wasn't that girl anymore. I'd shed her like dead skin, transformed myself through sheer stubborn will into someone impossible to overlook.
And only now he was really looking.
The shift ended eventually and I tried not to think about Jay's voice saying there was something familiar about my eyes. I was two minutes into the walk to the bus stop, replaying the evening in increasingly unhelpful detail, when headlights slowed beside me.
The car’s window came down and I saw Xavier in a leather jacket, one hand on the wheel. He looked at me for a long moment without saying anything.
"I'll drive you home," he said finally. "Get in."
I got in the car without debating and he drove in easy silence for a while. One hand on the wheel and the city doing its nighttime thing around us. For a while neither of us said anything, which was its own kind of comfortable.
I watched storefronts blur past and let the shift drain out of my shoulders, before his hand found my knee around the second traffic light. Warm and easy and familiar.
"So," he said, after another block, conversational. Almost too conversational. "That was quite a performance."
I turned to look at him. "What?"
"Your patient." The corner of his mouth moved—not quite a smile, something more private than that. "Very committed to the bit. 'It's your eyes…'" he said, dropping his register into a rough approximation of Jay's delivery.
"Xavier." I turned to look at him then, letting the smile out just a little. "Are you jealous right now?"
"He was flirting. Shamelessly so."
"Patients flirt," I said, easy, dismissive, waving a hand like Jay Callahan was a minor inconvenience. "It didn't mean anything."
He said nothing. Which was its own answer.
"I'm serious." Though I was also, quietly, delighted by the tension in his jaw, which I would be taking to my grave. "You have absolutely nothing to be—"
His hand moved higher, to my inner thigh, and I lost the end of that sentence entirely.
"Nothing to be what?" Xavier asked, tone perfectly pleasant, eyes perfectly on the road.
"Concerned about," I finished, after a pause that was a half-second too long to be smooth.
"Good to know."
Xavier was quiet for a moment while his finger made one slow pass upward between my legs and I gripped the door handle on pure instinct. "You're doing that on purpose," I said breathlessly.
"Doing what?"
"Xavier."
"I'm driving." He sounded genuinely serene about it. "Though both hands should be on the wheel, actually. You're right—"
"Don't you dare."
His hand stayed and he smiled at the road—I saw it in profile, small and private and entirely too pleased with itself. And I was absolutely not charmed by it. That would be ridiculous.
I was extremely charmed by it.
Then he pulled over—not his apartment complex, not my building. Just a quiet street corner under a streetlight, somewhere that was nowhere in particular.
"Come here," he said.
Two words. That's all it took.
I unclipped my seatbelt, swung my knee over the console, and settled into his lap facing him, hands braced on his shoulders. His hands immediately went to my hips, pulling me closer. The space between us was gone entirely and I could feel exactly how the evening had affected him.
Oh… How I’ve missed that.
His mouth found my throat and he smiled against my skin. When his hands found the hem of my t-shirt and slipped beneath it, brushing the underside of my breast, every rational thought quietly packed its things and left. "Xavier…"
"Still want me to stop?"
I answered by pulling him to my mouth instead.
It was harder than usual, more desperate. His mouth consumed mine like he was trying to erase every second Jay had spent looking at me, every flirtatious word.
It was slow and certain and devastating in the specific way that only Xavier could manage. Like he had all the time in the world and intended to use every second of it to make a point that didn't require words.
The point being: you are here. You are mine. Nothing about tonight changes that.
His one hand splayed against my back, the other unbuckling and sliding in my jeans. When his fingers finally found me wet, when I gasped against his lips and my hips rolled forward without asking my permission, he made a low sound against my mouth that I felt in my spine.
"There she is… my sunshine." he murmured.
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