Page 6 of Resisting You

He looked and acted like he belonged on a runway, not roaming the halls at three in the morning, taking care of belligerent patients. He also had an attitude that clawed its way under Renato’s skin and burrowed there.

If he was worse at his job, Renato would have assured that he never worked in their city again. But he wasn’t. He was irresponsible and unprofessional with the staff, and he was also attentive and clever and calmed anxious patients like it was his superpower.

So Renato bit his tongue. Mostly.

And he suffered.

He suffered watching Frey smile and laugh. He suffered watching him charm his colleagues and even the goddamn board president, who visited a handful of times a year. And as much as he tried to understand it all, he couldn’t.

Which drove him to the point of madness.

Renato was too old for this shit. Really, he was.

He wasn’t ancient by any means—he was just approaching fifty, which, for doctors, was his prime. His back ached, but that could be handled with a couple of Tylenol and a smear of Tiger Balm before and after his shift. His hair was greying but not fully silver yet. He had a few wrinkles but still got the occasional pimple on his chin.

He could dress up and dress down and blend in with crowds, and he felt good about himself.

But was also tired in ways most people didn’t understand. He’d lived more life than most people. He started university younger than his peers—his brain was more sophisticated, but his emotional growth was stunted. His parents preferred if he had no friends and high marks, so he finished his undergrads with almost no social circle, painfully virginal at twenty-one the day he set foot in the United States for medical school.

Life might have continued that way, except people in the US found his bad attitude and thick accent charming. The way his tongue curled over English was probably the sole reason Grady had asked him out in the first place.

Grady was an aspiring actor who had gotten a handful of chorus roles in a few Broadway shows and was working at the only café in the city that Renato could stand. Renato noticed after a few weeks that Grady was the only person who ever served him, and they played a sort of cat-and-mouse game of bad flirting until one day, Grady threw down his hand towel, plopped in the chair in front of Renato, and said, “So, are you ever going to ask me out?”

It was a risk back then, Renato knew, to openly admit that he liked men. Things were complicated for people like him, and he fully expected to just keep it to himself. If he ever had a lover, no one would ever know.

Except Grady was a force that would not be tamed. He was a hurricane over calm seas, and Renato was almost instantly swept away. He risked everything for Grady but managed to graduate with honors, and he was placed in Boston for his residency, which meant they were only a little long-distance.

And then things happened. They got older. Grady took jobs where he could, knowing full well that his acting career wasn’t going anywhere. They got a house on the coast, and Grady was contracted by the MoviePlex franchise to voice their ads and previews, and the residuals paid for his expensive coffee habit.

And Renato paid for the rest of their life because he had money, and they had no plans for kids. They got married the moment it was legal, and life just…went on.

Until it didn’t.

Until it was deep winter, and Grady was walking to get his goddamn coffee because he wouldn’t drink it at home, and a car lost control on the ice and smashed into him before Grady could get out of the way.

Once he could think straight again, Renato became internally hateful because he had no one to pin the blame on. No one was at fault. The driver had been careful, but the ice was thick, and even at the slowest speeds, sometimes things just happened.

Grady was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and then life as Renato knew it was over.

For a while, he wanted to bring Grady back from the dead just so he could scream at him for being stupid enough to walk to a café during an ice storm. A little while after that, he fantasized about meeting the man responsible for destroying his life and cutting him to pieces with his favorite scalpel.

Eventually, he learned to breathe again. He stopped reaching over in the middle of the night and finding empty space. He got comfortable in the center of the bed—he learned to like spreading his limbs out and taking up as much space as he could.

He stopped seeing Grady around every corner and hearing his voice coming out of strangers, and it got easier to exist alone. He was living again, but he was also done. He’d had his great love, so what was the point of trying to find someone simply for the sake of not being alone.

He’d never love anyone the way he’d loved Grady. Their relationship had been easy, and simple, and kind. He knew the state of the world. He knew something like that didn’t come around more than once.

But he could live with it.

He had a small collection of friends, and while he had little family left, that was fine. He had enough money to pay for his own care once his brain started failing him, and he could only hope he’d sink into a happy delusion until his body stopped.

There were worse ways to live and far worse ways to go.

“Ren.”

Renato glanced at the doorway at the sound of the nickname he despised, but only one person in the entire hospital network was brave enough to use it with him. Renato had met Foster Banks in medical school, and by a stroke of luck, Renato had been hired on at St. Joseph’s a year after Foster took a job there. They ended up working at the same practice, and while Renato hadn’t been thrilled at first, it was a small comfort to have someone near him who had known him a good portion of his adult life.

Their relationship was antagonistic at the worst of times, but he was there when Renato had lost Grady, and there was a sort of bond between them now that couldn’t be broken.

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