The One In My Heart

“I stopped talking to my parents. When they sent Imogene in their stead, I basically told her that she had to choose sides, and that if she wasn’t on my side then I had nothing else to say to her either. Ever. She sat on the edge of my bed for a long time and then got up and walked out.”


He stopped for a few seconds. “When I was shipped off to England, I left the pendant behind. But four years ago it came in the mail, along with a phone number—Imogene had moved to Silicon Valley. We met for lunch that weekend. After that, it was like I told you—we saw each other every week. And once that happened I met my brother too, the next time he stopped on the West Coast.”

“And you started wearing the pendant again?”

“No, not yet. At the time it was just a sentimental relic—I put it in my nightstand drawer and went on with my residency. When we got together I never asked Imogene about our parents, and she didn’t really bring them up. But inevitably they were mentioned in passing. That way I learned bits and pieces of what they’d been doing.

“Fourteen months ago I attended a medical conference in Chicago.”

I remembered he’d told me that in all the years of their estrangement, he’d seen his parents only once, at O’Hare airport.

Something beeped in the kitchen. He stood up. “That’s the timer for the water.”

Without thinking I followed him into the kitchen. “And?”

“I was about to board when I saw them walking down the concourse. It had been thirteen years since our last meeting….” He gently swept the ravioli into the pot and set the timer again. “You know how you get used to living one way and you keep going? Because you’re used to it. Because that’s the way things have been for a long, long time.”

Oh, did I ever know it.

“It was like that for me,” he went on. “I’d been an orphan, essentially, and I’d become okay with it. Even when the topic of my parents came up with my siblings, even when they headed home for the holidays and I didn’t, that was just how it was.

“But then, fifteen feet from me, my parents stopped to look at flight information. My mom said something to my dad, he smiled at her, reached over, and tapped three times on the face of her watch. That’s their code for ‘I love you.’ They did that a lot in cars. When we were little, Imogene and I used to tease them mercilessly for it. Sometimes we’d belch together as soon as one of them did the watch tapping. Sometimes we’d shout, ‘Who farted?’ Prescott would try to stop himself from laughing, but he never really could. So my parents’ romantic moment always devolved into this fiasco of stupid kids giggling and elbowing one another in the back of the car.

“The thing was, they never minded. I mean, sometimes my dad would mutter darkly. But then he’d glance at us in the rearview mirror, and he always looked…grateful.”

Bennett took out a couple of pasta bowls and set them on the counter. Slowly, he traced a finger along the brim of a bowl. There was nothing particularly revealing in his expression, but something about the motion of his hand, the seemingly casual movement contrasted with the tension in his wrist…

I’d seen him frustrated at our lack of progress with regard to his father. Now I knew that I’d only seen the bare minimum of his reaction.

Now I knew that he’d kept a gnawing doubt—and any and all despair—to himself. Even I, his partner, wasn’t to know.

Or perhaps I, his partner, particularly.

“It felt as if I stood forever that day looking at them,” he went on, “when it was probably no more than a minute or so before they walked off. But everything changed. I wasn’t an orphan. I had parents. And I wanted to go home—badly. As soon as I landed that day, I began looking into how I could transfer to a hospital here. It took some time to arrange, but by last May I was packing up my belongings.

“And when I did that, I came across the pendant and remembered that vacation. It was our last good vacation as a family—we were pretty happy with one another and glad to be somewhere fun and beautiful together. I put it on as a good-luck charm and haven’t taken it off since.”

He looked at me and smiled. “Sorry for the rambling answer.”

Something in the wistfulness of his expression broke me. All at once I felt a fierce need to hold him in my arms—so much it hurt. So much I was dizzy on my feet.

“You all right?” he asked, concern in his voice.

I was not all right. I was desperately in love. More than I had thought I would be. More than I even understood to be possible.

I reached out and turned off the burner.

“The ravioli might need a few more—”

I silenced him with a kiss, a wild one. He took my face in his hands and kissed me back just as ferociously. We somehow crossed over to the living room, shedding clothes as we went.

I pushed him down onto the chaise and climbed on top of him. “It’s two days before my period. If you tell me you’re clean, then you don’t need a condom.”

His grunt of pure arousal made me shiver. “I’m clean.”

I kissed him again and took him inside me, every inch of me feeling every inch of him. Such sensations—such hot, reckless pleasure.