Page 18 of My Heart Before You

Get a grip. You’re not the kind of guy who hits on his support staff.

He took a big gulp from his coffee mug. “Thank you again for the help and the coffee, but I would really like to get home and take a shower.”

“Oh, sure. Do you want me to help you downstairs?” She set her mug down and went back into nurse mode.

That helped. When she acted like a nurse, it helped him forget that dark look in her eyes that made him want to wrap her in his arms, or how her unabashed laughter had lit his chest from the inside out, or that they were in her cozy apartment. Alone.

“No, my vision is back.” He turned towards the exit. “I’ll manage just fine. Thank you.”

Emilie followed him and opened her front door. “You’re welcome, Dr. Abernan.”

He stepped onto the small landing and ignored his brain’s command to walk down the stairs. Instead, he turned around. “I think after macing me, you can call me by my first name.”

“That seems reasonable.”

His mouth pulled into a broad, playful grin. “Colin.”

“Colin,” she repeated, a slow smile spreading on her gorgeous lips.

Pushing against every cell of his body screaming to lean forward, he turned and descended the stairs as her door closed behind him with a soft click.

?Chapter 7?

Emilie pulled the cold air into her lungs, crossing one leg over the other as she swiftly rounded the corner. The frigid breeze created by her own movement around the rink stung her cheeks. Being the first one on newly cleaned ice was always so satisfying. She loved the feeling of her skates cutting through the slick topmost layer, creating a path proving that she was there. While finishing her warm-up, she covered that line over and over again until the ice blurred into a slight slush.

After two minutes of edge work to warm up her ankles, she settled at one end of the rink. Taking a second to look over the halogen light-soaked expanse before her, she exhaled slowly. “Go” resounded in her mind, and she sprinted to the other end of the rink before fully stopping and racing back to the start.

She pivoted and started out again, this time stopping at the blue line before pushing hard against the edges of her skates back to the beginning. Over and over she went as the distance between her starting and stopping points decreased. She allowed herself a quick minute at the end to catch her breath before starting over again.

Emilie needed to be here today—needed to remind herself that it was her brain that sent signals to her legs to push against the ice. Too much had happened in the last week. The last three shifts had really tested her knowledge and mental strength as each shift brought not only a swamped day, but a tragic code. Seven days ago, she felt completely thrown when a certain handsome face had popped into her mind while telling Nia she wasn’t ready to date, and two days later she blasted said man’s face with pepper spray.

She’d acted on impulse defending herself that day, but the second imminent danger was gone, her heart had slammed in her chest like a wild animal trying to escape. Her body had trembled on it’s own accord, not slightly as if shivering in the cold, but violently. Anxiety had teased at every cell. Even her mantra “You are strong” didn’t help.

And then something happened that had never occurred before.

The sound of Colin’s rough breathing gave her something to focus on. It was like a switch had been flipped, and she suddenly became Nurse Emilie—tasked with caring for the considerate man who she’d accidentally inflicted damage upon, not falling apart like she’d done so many times before.

Pushing away visions of that moment in the Commons, Emilie focused on slick ice below her. The burn in her quads helped bring her concentration back to the rink, back to this moment. No sooner than she’d regained control of her mind, a tendril of frigid air snaked over her right temple.

Emilie squeezed her eyes shut tightly for a breath, futilely trying to block the memory, but awareness pinpointed over the exact spot where she’d once pressed cold, circular steel. A day after months of drinking herself into a stupor trying to alleviate the near constant physical pain caused by an emotional trauma. The day she pulled the Colt 45 from the high shelf in the closet and turned its surprising weight in her hands, examining the inert piece of metal with dangerous potential.

Her heart had raced as she’d slowly brought the barrel to her skull, not wanting this path, but not knowing how else to exist. At first, she had mistaken the unrelenting pounding on her front door as the sound of rushing blood in her ears. After she’d left with the welfare police officer that day, she had to live with the knowledge that it was her family who later cleaned and boxed up her townhouse—finding the gun where she’d left it on the filthy, unmade bed.

Emilie slammed the wall with her skates and huffed her hard breaths against the plastic inches from her mouth. Her flushed and panting face reflected back at her.

Your memories don’t control you.

“You are strong,” she breathed to her mirror image and pushed off the wall.

There were days during her detox at her parents’ house when she would wallow in her misery. Her mother would nervously flit around her not knowing how to help as she’d spend hours doing nothing but sitting on a porch chair in the backyard, living in her sorrow. Not just feeling it, but breathing it, eating it, letting it soak into her skin. It had encompassed her.

There were other days when she’d stomped down the stairs, let the cabinet slam after getting her coffee mug, and throw herself onto her chair at the table. One morning after performing her unspoken but very audible commentary on how she felt that day, her father, who had been watching her from his seat at the kitchen table, set his mug down and said three words to her that would help her more than she could have known at the time.

“Get your skates.”

She’d petulantly sat in the passenger seat of her father’s sedan as he drove them to the ice rink where she learned to skate as a little girl. As an adult, skating was something she did for fun in the winter with her sister and father.

Once they were laced up and warmed up, he unceremoniously stopped her at the red line. “You know the drill.”

---