Page 20 of Attached At Heart
Definitely fake, of course.
I mean, he’d been my friend for years, and he’d never made a move, even though I’d been single the entire time. He’d go on dates with other women instead, trying to find someone to settle down with. And sure, we’d had our moments, little comments that some people might misconstrue as flirting. But that was just us, our humor. That was just Blake. And he had said that he wanted to take a break from dating for a while, so this was probably just a convenient excuse to delete his apps.
Living together and getting married wouldn’t change a thing. I’d stayed over at his place before—during med school and our fellowship at Mayo. Sometimes the roads heading home would be bad, or getting off his couch to drive across town seemed like too much work. Sometimes he’d have nightmares—I knew because I heard them, not because he told me about them, not at first—and then I’d come up with excuses to stay over more often. Sleep on the couch, in case he needed me to pull him out of the past.
So, sure, Blake and I had never been married before, but we certainly knew how to coexist. Knew how to be there for one another. And this was just that. It was real, in the sense that our friendship was real.
But the marriage?
It was definitely fake.
Totally fake.
Totally.
ten years ago
BLAKE
“What is your why?”
Delaney clicked her pen as she said each word, her lips forming the pronunciations deliberately.
I really shouldn’t have been staring at her mouth—again—but here we were.
“I hate this icebreaker shit,” I grumbled. A lie. I didn’t mind them. Actually, I kind of liked them. It meant I got to talk to her at the beginning of every class.
But I hated this specific question.
Because I didn’t want to answer it.
I’d just say something cliché, something surface-level, something about how I got a scholarship to be here and couldn’t turn down a funded education in this day and age, and leave it at that. I mean, it was the truth. Part of it.
Baring my soul in the front row of a lecture hall was not something I planned on doing today. And to Delaney Delacroix? I didn’t need her to know this about me.
“The future Dr. London doesn’t want to get to know me, huh?”
I sighed. “I already know you. We’ve been sitting next to each other the entire semester. You’d think she’d stop with the daily cohort questions already.”
“But do you know my why?”
Delaney’s lips spread in a smile because she knew I didn’t.
Gritting my teeth together, I admitted defeat. “What’s your why, Delaney? Why did you decide to go to med school?”
Her grin faded before she answered softly, “My brother. He has AVSD, atrioventricular septal defect, which means he was born with a hole in his heart. So I decided a long time ago that I want to learn everything there is to know about the heart. For him and for other people who have Down syndrome.”
Her words were a punch to the gut and a reminder that I was being an ass.
“I’m sure you will,” I said with sincerity. I could tell that Delaney would blow the medical world out of the water one day.
“Thank you,” she murmured before looking at me expectantly. Waiting for my answer—the one I’d been planning to lie about. But I couldn’t do that now, not after what she said. After she’d been honest about something that clearly meant a lot to her. The whole world to her.
“I failed to save someone once.” I choked the words out. “And I’m trying to make sure that never happens again.”
Delaney stared at me, unfazed by the intensity of my answer. She was never fazed. Not by me. “I’m so sorry, Blake,” she said, and I could tell she meant it.
“Me too.”
