Six days later I sat with Bri at the nurses’ station in the emergency department at Royaume Northwestern. I hadn’t seen her over the last week
—mostly because we didn’t have any shared shifts, and I was too busy with my brother to talk on the phone or do the drinks we’d planned. Derek left on Saturday, back to his new wife, after telling our parents that he was leaving for good.
Dad, as expected, completely lost it.
He didn’t say it, mostly because I don’t think he had time to gather his thoughts in the chaos of Derek’s NDA and marriage announcement, but I could sense the disappointment descending on me, like he was realizing that I was all that was left of the great Montgomery/Royaume legacy, and all was to be lost.
Derek had always been the golden child, so it hadn’t mattered that I was always mildly disappointing in terms of my accomplishments. I didn’t want to publish papers in medical journals or do speaking engagements, like he did. I hated the spotlight. I just wanted to help people.
But now as the only Montgomery on staff, anything other than complete and total professional domination would be considered an embarrassment to my prestigious lineage—and I was already off to a bad start. I wasn’t a surgeon, I wasn’t pioneering any medical advancements, my face would not appear on magazine covers. It was like Dad just found out the most useless princess had ascended the throne.
Bri clicked away at her computer next to me. She was charting her patients. Her brown hair was tied up into a loose bun, and she had her stethoscope draped around her neck. She looked like the results of a Pinterest search for “beautiful physician.”
Briana Ortiz was an ER doctor like me. We’d met in med school. She was thirty-four, Salvadorean, and very good at her job.
“So,” Bri said, “are you going to tell me what happened? The rumor mill’s chugging out a story that Derek quit?” She did a final tap and turned to me.
I looked at her over my reading glasses. “It’s not a rumor.”
“They’re also saying he was wearing a wedding ring.” She gave me a raised eyebrow.
“That I cannot discuss,” I said, doing my own final tap on my keyboard. “I signed an NDA.”
“Your own brother made you sign an NDA,” she deadpanned. “He did. It’s been a whole week of firsts.”
A nurse came out of room four. “Nunchuck Guy’s here. Again.” I groaned.
“Send him to CT,” we called in unison. Bri looked back at me. “So what’d you do all week?”
I sighed. “Hung out with Derek and my parents. We went to that new restaurant in Wayzata on Friday, and Mom decided it was the time and place to give me her Team Neil speech about going with him to couple’s counseling. Said he deserves a second chance. I feel like he’s asking people to talk to me. This is the second attempted intervention this week.”
“The man boned an anesthesiologist. Who you have to work with. What doesn’t your family get?”
I rubbed my temple tiredly. It wasn’t just Neil’s cheating. Bri and Derek were the only ones who knew the real reason why I wasn’t giving him another chance. Bri wouldn’t pee on Neil if he was on fire after what he’d put me through the last couple of years.
But everyone else? Everyone loved Neil. My parents, our friends. He was the life of the party, everyone’s buddy.
“I mean, they all started off sympathetic enough,” I mumbled. “How could he? I hope you threw him out on his ass. Blah blah blah. But then Jessica’s birthday came up and everyone went to the lake house, and Neil and I weren’t there, and I think it finally started to hit everyone that life as we all knew it for the last seven years is over. Then it suddenly flipped to, Well, have you considered counseling? It was just that one woman, he made a mistake and he knows it. I think he’s sleeping on a futon at Cam’s,” I added wearily.
Bri made a disgusted noise. “The man’s a surgeon. He’s gotta sleep on his twenty-two-year-old’s sofa? He can’t get a damn apartment?”
“I think the second he does, this whole thing suddenly becomes real.” “Good. I hope his dick shrivels up and falls off. For real.” She picked up
her iced coffee. “What did your dad say about it?” she asked, talking around the straw.
“It’s going to piss you off,” I warned. “Tell me.”
“He said that Neil is brilliant and that sometimes brilliant people make mundane mistakes.”
She scoffed. “Yeah, well, you’re brilliant too, and I don’t see you humping anesthesiologists.”
“He also said he hopes I come to my senses soon because the summer holidays are coming up.”
“He didn’t.” She gasped.
“Oh, yeah. He did. And Derek left me alone, trapped for three days in Cedar Rapids with this.”
“I want to cage fight your whole family.” I snorted. “Yeah, me too.”
“Why didn’t you just tell your dad to go to hell?” My laugh was for a joke much funnier than this one.
“You do not tell Dr. Cecil Montgomery to go to hell.” No one did.
I was raised to have an almost godlike deference to my legendary father
—I didn’t know anyone who didn’t. You did not argue with him, you did not disagree with him, and you certainly did not tell him to go to hell.
I went to the university my father told me to go to. I pursued the career he demanded. In fact, the only time, and I do mean the only time, that I ever dared disregard my dad’s wishes was when I went into emergency medicine instead of surgery. He only let it go because Derek was the family front- runner anyway, so I didn’t really matter.
That backfired.
Bri poked at her ice with her straw. “Your dad terrifies me. When he used to come to the ER, everyone would scatter like cockroaches. And then your mom would come in after him to do a spinal consult, all sweetness and light, mopping up the tears of the nurses. Why’s there always a nice one and a mean one?”
“Because there are two types of people in the world, difficult ones and easy ones, and they marry each other.”
“Ha.”
She paused for a moment and eyed me. “Okay. So tell me about the hickey. Telling everyone you burned yourself with a curling iron—are we in
tenth grade?” I laughed.
“Did you have hate sex with Neil?”
I recoiled in horror. “No! Why would you ask me that?”
“Because you’ve been avoiding talking to me, so I can only assume that’s because you don’t want to tell me the hickey origin story. And the only kind of sex I’m gonna begrudge you is sex with Neil.”
I let out a deep breath. “I did not hook up with Neil.” She waited. “Well?”
I made eye contact with her for a long moment, and she made a give-it- to-me gesture with her hand.
“I met someone last week.”
She pulled her face back. “You did? When? Where? What app are you using?”
“No app. Remember the guy who towed me from the ditch?” “The middle-of-nowhere guy?”
“That’s the one. I went home with him.”
She blinked at me. “You didn’t…” she breathed.
“I did. And then I ran out at four-thirty in the morning without waking him up.” I cocked my head at her.
“Why the hell did you do that? Something wrong with him?”
I shook my head. “No. There was absolutely nothing wrong with him.
He was nice, and sweet…” I looked over at her. “And twenty-eight.” She grinned. “Daaaaamn! You get it, girl.”
“Shhhhh,” I said, hushing her, looking around. “I can’t date a twenty- eight-year-old, Bri,” I whispered. “He’s a baby.”
“He’s not your baby.”
“Cam is twenty-two,” I said.
“Yeah, well, Cam is not your kid, and the only reason your ex had a twenty-two-year-old son was because you were dating a man ten years older than you.”
I shook my head. “I didn’t even date twenty-eight-year-olds when I was twenty-eight.”
“Well, you missed out. They’re just old enough to not be annoying and they have all that sexual energy. And you can train them. They’re so eager to learn at that age, like puppies.” She dipped her head to look me in the eye. “Does he have any friends?”
I laughed.
He did have energy…My cheeks went hot thinking about it.
“I’m going to be thirty-eight this year,” I said. “I can’t date a guy that young.”
“Who says? If you were twenty-eight and he was thirty-seven, nobody would bat an eye. Nobody batted an eye when you dated Neil—and they should have, that guy was an asshole.”
I pressed my lips into a line.
“Look,” she said, going on. “You’re new to this whole single-in-your- thirties thing so you don’t know what it looks like out there, and I’m here to tell you, it doesn’t look good. It’s like picking through a garbage heap looking for the least disgusting thing. Last week I had a guy bring me funeral flowers. Like, they were a cross and they had a picture of the dead guy in the middle.”
I barked out a laugh.
“I don’t think he noticed until I pointed it out,” she said. “Oh, remember the Hawaiian-shirt guy with the porn ’stache and all the cats who kept saying I looked like his next ex-wife? Like, seriously? These are the men
we’re supposed to get a UTI for? If you found someone you like, date him. Trust me.”
I was still laughing about the funeral flowers. “I didn’t even get his number,” I said.
“You get his name?” “Yeah. His first one.”
She shrugged. “So go find him. You said the town is small. How hard can it be?”
I didn’t answer her.
“Was the sex good?” she asked.
I scoffed. “The sex was incredible. In-credible. He did this thing where he lifted me against a wall,” I whispered. “We went three times. He was back up in under two minutes flat. I got tired before he did, and he was doing all the work.”
“See, that’s some twenty-eight-year-old shit right there. You think your cognac-drinking, receding-hairline, pushing-fifty-year-old Our Time date is gonna give you that acrobatic sex? He’s not. He threw his back out playing golf.”
I laughed so hard a nurse wheeling someone into a room turned to look at me.
I was still snickering. “Okay, but really though. I can’t. I mean, what the hell am I even doing? What does he have in common with my friends? My family?”
She looked me dead in the eye. “You know you can just fuck him, right?”
I gasped.
“I’m serious. You do not need to marry this man. You can just use him for sex. You are aware of this option?”
“Of course I’m aware of the option,” I whispered. “But it wasn’t like that though. I kind of liked him. He was charming.”
“You had a one-night stand with a man you knew for how long?” She waited.
“Well?”
I glanced at her. “Three hours.”
She nodded. “Three hours. And it wasn’t like that?” Her face called bullshit. “You are very capable of casual sex, I promise you.”
I blew a breath through my lips.
“So what’s this guy look like?” she asked.
I scoffed. “Scott Eastwood in The Longest Ride, only with a beard. Oh, and he had a baby goat in pajamas.”
“He didn’t.”
“He did.”
Her eyes were wide. “I’d follow a clown into a storm drain if he had a baby goat in pajamas.”
“His hands were rough,” I said, somewhat distantly. “I know it’s weird to say, but I really liked it. He smelled good too. I stole his hoodie.”
She arched an eyebrow. “You stole the man’s hoodie? That’s a serious crime.”
“I’m going to hell, I know.”
I couldn’t stop wearing it. It smelled like him and it smelled good.
My friend Gabby told me once that she sent a blanket over to the breeder where she got her Lab, so the puppy could get used to her smell before he came home. I felt like it was like that. Like I was getting used to Daniel via his sweatshirt pheromones, and he wasn’t even here.
I’d be lying if I said the fading scent wasn’t making me want to go back and smell the real thing…
I seriously couldn’t stop thinking about the sex. I was thinking about it more now, almost a week later, than I had the day after it happened, like I’d developed a taste for it and now I was craving it.
“How old do you have to be to be a cougar?” I asked. She laughed. “Older than you.”
“I can’t believe I had a one-night stand,” I whispered. “Who am I?”
“You know, it’s only a one-night stand if you don’t go back and do him again.”
I had to cover a snort, and she laughed. “What? It’s true,” she said.
I shook my head. “There has to be science behind that kind of attraction,” I said quietly. “Something with the genes.”
“That good, huh?”
“That good,” I said, turning to look at her. “And it felt extremely
mutual.”
It had been so long since I’d been made to feel like I was irresistible.
Come to think of it, I wasn’t sure I ever had.
I was never this horny with Neil. Well, not unprovoked anyway. Our sexual relationship had always required lots of lead-up. Foreplay and wining and dining. But with Daniel…
It didn’t escape me that I’d wanted to see him naked an hour after meeting him.
I’d pulled out my vibrator last night. The one that a week ago I was perfectly satisfied using as a full replacement for an actual sex life. I stared at that little pink contraption and realized that the one reason why I’d been ready to hang up my dating belt was because I’d never had sex good enough for me to go in pursuit of it. Now I had, and a vibrator wasn’t going to cut it anymore.
It sort of made me wish I’d stayed blissfully ignorant.
“You should have seen how I came home,” I whispered. “I got accosted by a loose pig while I was there—don’t ask. My dress was caked in mud. I had a snout print directly on my ass, goat fur all over me. Then I stepped in a pile of dog poop in my black Manolos. The motion sensor lights went on and I panicked, so I ran and left it there.”
“You left your shoe,” she deadpanned. “Like Cinderella.”
“Yeah. I did. And the hoodie I was wearing was camouflage.”
“So you came home in a muddy two-thousand-dollar dress wearing one shoe and your fuck buddy’s camo hoodie.”
I nodded. “That is correct.”
“Like an Old MacDonald walk of shame. Did you have hay in your hair?”
I started laughing. “Shut up.”
It was sawdust, actually, but I wasn’t telling her that.
“I would pay to replace that dress for one screenshot of you coming home in the Ring camera.”
“Well, your birthday is coming up…”
We were still giggling when a small huddle of brand-new first-year residents touring the hospital came down the hallway and froze to stare at me, wide-eyed.
“Oh, God,” Bri groaned. “Yes, it’s a Montgomery,” she called. “You will be seeing them on occasion, this one is your attending, be happy she’s not her dad. Please move it along.” She made a shooing motion with her hand and they scurried off. She rolled her eyes.
“Do you ever get sick of that?” she asked, turning to me. “I don’t even notice it anymore.”
She leaned back in her seat. “God, you guys are like the royal family. So what are you gonna do about all that? Derek’s gone, so you’re sort of ‘The One’ now, right? You have to, like, kiss babies and christen pediatric wings?”
I squeezed my eyes shut. “I hate this so much.” I looked over at her. “You know the Star Tribune called me yesterday? They wanted to know what my plans were for the hundred-and-twenty-five-year anniversary now that the ‘torch has been passed on to the new generation.’” I put my fingers into quotes. “Apparently I am now delivering the keynote speech at the quasquicentennial gala in September.”
She made a face. “Damn. Can you just not do it? Say no?”
I shrugged. “Sure. And then the hospital will lose a million dollars for cancer research, the Montgomery scholarship program will cease to exist, half the initiatives for low-income families will be defunded, construction on the new transplant center will grind to a halt, and I’ll become the shame of the Montgomery legacy.”
“Wow. No pressure.”
“Seriously. Mom made sure to remind me that the international donors won’t fly in for the galas unless a Montgomery is in attendance. So I will be expected to be at every fund-raiser to schmooze the elite from this day forward.”
“Derek loves to schmooze the elite.”
“Well, right now Derek is loving something else far more important.” I sighed. “I love what we do, I just hate the pageantry of it. It’s like this unrivaled, bottomless tool for good and I’m the last one that can wield it, and I just wish it wasn’t me.”
“With great power comes great responsibility.” I smirked, but she wasn’t wrong.
“That’s kind of cool though. You can save lives just by showing up in a cocktail dress. Hey, remember when Forbes called you guys the last great American dynasty and then Taylor Swift used that as the title of a song?”
“STOP.”
“What?! It was hilarious. You’re fancy. I’m proud of you. Also, can you autograph a few Post-its for me? I sell them to the first-year residents. I have student loans.”
I flicked a pen at her, and we cracked up. Then Neil rounded the corner.
The second we saw him, our humor ground to an abrupt halt. He made his way to the nurses’ station in his sky-blue scrubs.
At forty-seven, Neil had a full head of silver hair, a strong square jaw, and a chin dimple. He was annoyingly good-looking, and what was more annoying was that he knew it.
I saw him almost every day that I worked. He was the chief of surgery so I was constantly handing patients off to him. But we didn’t have any today, so this was probably a personal call. Yay.
Bri crossed her arms as he approached. “Dr. Rasmussen. What can we do for you?” she asked dryly.
He ignored her and looked at me. “Alexis, I’d like to speak to you.”
“You can say anything you need to say to her in front of me, Wreck-It Ralph,” Bri said. “She’s gonna tell me everything anyway. Saves her from having to do the sleazebag accent.”
I saw the flicker of annoyance on his face, but he pushed it down. I crossed my arms too. “What do you want, Neil?”
He glanced at Bri and then back at me. “It would be better if we talked in private.”
“Better for who?” Bri said. “You?”
His jaw ticked. “We need to discuss the house.” The house. Actually, we did need to discuss it.
We hadn’t been married, but we had bought the house together five years ago. We were both on the title. He’d paid his portion of the mortgage the last two months, but it wasn’t fair to expect him to keep doing it given that he wasn’t living there—even though in my opinion it was the least he could do.
“I’d like to buy out your stake in it,” he said. My arms dropped. “What?”
“I’d like to buy you out. I want the house.”
I stared at him, incredulous. “I’m not selling you my house.”
“It’s not your house. It’s our house. My friends are there, it’s close to work when I’m on call, it has the running trails I like—”
Bri pressed her lips into a line. “Uh-huh. Well, guess you should have thought of that before you boned what’s-her-face over there.” She gestured vaguely to the exit.
“You’re not getting the house,” I said again. “I’ll buy your share, and you can buy something else.”
His eyes narrowed. “You don’t need it. It’s too big for you.”
“But not too big for you?” My voice was a touch too high. “Fuck you, Neil.”
I felt Bri jerk in her chair and stare at the side of my face.
Nobody was around but the three of us. Nobody heard it. But I hardly ever stood up to Neil. I didn’t know what was fueling this momentary surge of bravery.
No—I knew exactly what was fueling it. It was the clarity from months of therapy. The realization that he was a manipulative, emotionally abusive asshole.
And something else.
For some reason knowing that Neil wasn’t the last man who’d given me an orgasm fortified my courage. I think it did more for this situation than any of the rest of it. The other night was proof that I was attractive and desirable, despite everything Neil had tried so hard to make me believe.
Bri smirked, and we tag teamed glaring at him.
His jaw set. “You don’t know how to deal with the house. The pool needs to be opened for the summer, the sprinklers are shut off and blown out, there’s a dead tree that needs to be removed before it falls on the roof, you need to put salt in the water softener—”
“You don’t do any of that,” I snapped. “You hire someone to do it.” “Hiring someone to do it is part of what it takes to run it. There’s a
hundred and one things I manage there that you have no idea about. You’re not capable of running a property of that size.”
“My answer is no,” I said. “I will not have you uproot my life.” I leaned forward. “And anyway, if you got the house, how would you ever get the smell out?” I cocked my head and watched him take the hit. It was an inside jab that only he and I understood, and one that made its mark.
He pressed his lips into a line. Then he turned and stalked off.
“Oh, my God!” Bri whispered when he was far enough away that he couldn’t hear her. “Holy shit, I’ve never seen you tell him to fuck off like that.”
“What happened?” I muttered. “I blacked out.”
We watched Neil push through the double doors and disappear.
Bri shook her head with a grin. “Look at that man-trum. Eight thousand nerves in the clitoris and still not as sensitive as a white man not getting his way.” She beamed at me. “I like this new you.”
“My therapist says being consistent is the only way to deal with someone like him. That what you allow is what you teach. I have to set clear boundaries and enforce them.”
“I’d say that was pretty damn clear. God, he’s annoying. He’s like that hair stuck to your shirt and you know it’s there ’cause you can feel it on the back of your arm but you can’t get rid of it?”
I laughed. “I’m never giving him that house.” “You shouldn’t.”
“I’m not. I spent an entire year furnishing it. I use those trails more than he does, and my friends live there too. That is my damn house.”
Then we sat there for a minute.
I faced her. “I think I need to call that guy.” “I think so too.”
“I mean, I should return his hoodie, right? That’s the right thing to do.
What if it has sentimental value?” She looked amused.
“What?”
“Let’s call this what it is. It’s a booty call. You need this rebound. Someone to make you feel safe and beautiful and give you all the good sex you didn’t have for the last seven years. And he sounds perfect for the job. Too far away to be up in your shit. Too young to want a commitment.”
“And we have nothing in common, so no way I’ll get attached,” I added. She nodded. “Not even a possibility.”
