Whisper

Catherine doesn’t know where I go at night. I am grateful that she has yet to ask. I want to tell her now more than ever. 

I can see the death in her eyes. The lies are dissolving what was once a mystery. In its place is suspicion. The corroded threads of our relationship are exactly why I wish she knew, but also reinforced why I simply cannot tell her.

“How was work?” I ask and her attention jumps to me. Her eyes work me over. I wonder if she looks at her patients the way she’s looking at me. Wondering what the hell is wrong with them. I wonder what her diagnosis would be. What kind of medication or procedure might she recommend for a boyfriend who never sleeps in her bed. Who comes back to their shared apartment in different clothes than he left in. A variety of odors and stains he cannot account for.

“It was hard,” she says.

“Want to talk about it?” I ask because I wish she could ask the same of me, but also because I like being able to bear the weight of her worries. It balances out the burden of my guilt.

“A patient died," she says. Her mouth twists and I know she is fortifying the damn to her emotions.

I want to tell her that someone died on my watch last night too. I had desperately wanted to fall into her arms when I had arrived home this morning but almost fell apart when the mist from her shower and the scent of fresh coffee indicated I had missed her by minutes. As I'd curled up into bed, I'd imagined that I could feel her warmth still in the bed, but even my heightened abilities could not read the temperature of my environment through my skin. 

Instead, I say, “I’m so sorry Cat. Are you okay?” 

Her head swings and her curls follow as she shakes her head. Their bounce captivates me.

She glances at the clock she’d hung herself when he first moved in. It reads two-thirty in the afternoon, though it is actually eight in the evening. A spike of shame jams into my spine. I should have replaced those batteries a month ago when she’d asked. 

When she turns back to me, her brown eyes are made softer with her tears. She looks beautiful when she cries: tender and open. I hate that I like this. I don’t enjoy her sadness, but I like her cracked open. Trusting. And yet, it must be projection or hypocrisy, because I will never let her see me beyond my fears. I can’t. I can’t risk her knowing. 

“No?” she asks and tells.

“I should have…I could have…” She’s falling apart.

“You’re a wonderful doctor, Cat.”

She snorts, “You don’t know that. How would you know?” 

Because I’ve dropped off half-dead victims right at the doors of your hospital and handed them to you with little more than a grunt of vague gratitude, I don’t tell her. Because you have saved more people than me by hundreds, maybe thousands.

Instead, I say nothing at all.

She snorts and pulls her knees up to her chest.

I have to say something. There’s a filament holding us together and it’s fraying. I worry. She will be fine without me, but I? Where will I go in my untethered state? What will I fall into?

“I don’t mean to be presumptuous. You’re right. I only know what you tell me, but I really do want to listen to you, Cat.” 

“I might have a lot to say,” she says softly, like she’s putting her foot into a pool water. Testing my temperature. “It might take a while.”

“As long as you need,” I agree. I can’t tell her about my shitty days at work (or the great ones, for that matter), but I can listen.

“I need forever,” her words are a challenge.

I swallow. I want that, too, I want to tell her, but I know what this is. I have been in love before - not as long, and I have not fallen quite so hard as I have with Catherine, but the ends have always been the same. I'd told my first love. And the moment it had soured between us, she'd run right into the arms of the criminal known colloquially as The Pope and it had almost gotten me killed. It had gotten her killed.

There had been others. I know an ultimatum when I hear one. And I'd heard the anger borne of resentment and rejection that came after.

She, like the others, wants to be the most important thing to me. She wants to be my everything.

She wants me to stay the night.

She, unlike the others, is the most important thing to me. She is everything.

But my nights are not mine to give. They belong to my obligations. To the citizens who rely on me when I suit up and fall into the night as she falls asleep in the bed we share - but not together.

“Catherine…” I begin, but she holds up a hand and I quiet immediately at her request. 

She stands up and walks toward me. Her sweater is white and her leggings are black, but her eyes are the darkest rum. Sweet and intoxicating and sharp. One of her knees slips between my outer leg and the shell of the chair I’m sitting in and then the other. Her sweater is softer than I expected, but my hands slip underneath it, where she is softer still.

“You have to work tonight?” she asks. This is a test. I will fail.

“Yes,” I whisper. An admission. Guilt drops like acid in my gut when I think about disappointing her, but I won’t look away. She deserves that. At least that.

“Have you ever lied to me?” she asks. This is new. I had never expected her to be cruel like this, but I will face this as I face the villains and the things that go bump in the night.

“No,” I tell her. My voice is steady and insistent. She may think what she likes, but I have never lied to her. 

“Are you sleeping with anyone else?” Seriously?

“No.” The anger seeps in a little now, but my ire does not scare her. I love her for that.

“Do you miss me? When you’re not here?” Her voice is even softer, but my response is harsh.

“Of course, I do.”

“What if something happens to me? At night?” She asks it like it’s something she’s never thought of before. “Don’t you worry about me when you’re not here?”

“I would never let anything happen to you.” She does not know about the alarms and cameras at the doors and windows that give me comfort in the night. She does not know that in the middle of my rounds if there is not something more 

She is quiet. Her liquid eyes are drowning me as they bear down. 

“I need forever.” Yes, here it is. The expected. The inevitable. The breakup. 

“I understand,” I say, because I won’t cry, and if I attempt to say anything else, I just might anyway.

She smiles a little and says, “I don’t think you do.”

“I…” maybe I don’t. She is usually right about such things and this is not the way I’m usually rejected.

“I need you forever,” she tries again and when I my expression doesn’t change, she spells it all out for me the way I like - to the point and without fuss, “Brandon, I don’t know where you go at night, but as long as those things you said were true, I don’t need to know.”

“You don’t?”

“No. I don’t.”

“I love you,” I say, which is trite and silly, but true and she makes me stupid with devotion. 

“Is that a yes?” she asks. The question is serious, but her mouth is open and her eyes are crinkling. One of her dimples is making a grand appearance. She’s so damn cute.

“A yes?” I am not following. It’s as if my brain is stuttering with the shift - a change in gears that might lead my heart to stall out.

“To marry me.” She whispers as if she’s feeding me a line.

"What," I ask as if I haven't heard her. Or understood her. Maybe I haven't.

She reaches somewhere behind me, which puts her chest directly in my face and I can’t help but squeeze her a little tighter to me. She laughs and I can feel it through my arms and into my marrow. She plops back into my lap, her face flushed pink and her mouth pinched and nervous. I want to reach forward and kiss away her worry, but then she speaks.

“Will you marry me?” She holds up a ring box, opened, with a thick silver band inlaid with sapphires. I thought I was losing her just moments ago, but now…

“Yes,” I say. My voice is broken, but my heart is so fucking solid – turgid, really, along with a few other parts of me.

“Put it on,” she whispers. I reach for the band and notice an inscription on the inside.

My hero, My heart, My husband

My heart hammers in double-time as I look up in alarm.

“You didn’t have to tell me. Did you think I wouldn't notice the chip in your front tooth or the little scar just under your chin when you drop off my patients, Whisper? I know you, Brandon." Her words soak into my skin and I nearly laugh at my own absurdity. Of course, she knew she knew my other identity. She's brilliant. How could she not?

"You don't mind that we don't sleep at the same time?" I ask as I let her take the ring out of my right hand and grasp my left.

"Who wants to sleep in bed, anyway?" she says as she slips the ring over my finger and shifts her hips over my lap. "Besides," she says, and her teeth move to nibble over my jaw, "I've caught you mid-slumber after my eight-hour shifts. You snore."