Page 11 of The Doctor

“Everything’s fine,” I lied. “Just woke a little late and haven’t had my coffee yet.”

Cosimo gave a hard laugh. “Coffee, hmm? My doctor told me to switch to tea.”

“Your doctor sounds like a wise man.” I motioned to the leather club chair in my living room. “A man with your health concerns would be wise to cut back on caffeine and alcohol.”

“You’re sucking the fun out of life, Zeno.”

His own warning, one he told me when I was just a child, rattled through my head. “Sometimes you have to make sacrifices if you want to survive.”

The old man’s spine stiffened, and he turned my way as I backed toward the kitchen door.

“Let me grab my bag and we can get started.”

Just out of Cosimo’s sight, I yanked open the cabinet where I kept a stash of my medical supplies. The small mirror hanging on the door showed a haggard man who needed a good, stiff drink. I snagged a hair tie off the hook below the mirror and tied my hair back at the base of my skull. Then I grabbed my bag, swallowed down nerves I was too fucking old to have, and went back to where my patient sat.

Beginning with a cursory exam, I listened to Cosimo’s heart and lungs. He was quiet, right up until I secured the blood pressure cuff around his arm.

“We’ve been friends a long time,” he said, gaze directed toward the picture of my parents that hung on the wall near the front window. I watched the needle on the dial tick down, counting off seconds in my head rather than spilling the thoughts running rampant in my mind. “You’ve been a loyal soldier to the cause.”

Rather than telling him we’d never been friends, that I was no longer a soldier but a lieutenant, and loyal to Paulo, not some unnamed cause, I told him, “One twenty-eight over seventy-eight,” before jotting it down in my notebook.

“Hmm.” Cosimo looked away, head raised as if he were unhappy with me for his elevated blood pressure. I bent to put the cuff back in my bag. Before I could take a seat across from him in the other club chair, he spoke again, filling the silence I often gave to my patients. “Is there anything you need?”

“Need?” I needed a certain someone under control. Under my thumb.

Under my body.

Fuck.

“Surely there must be something. Something from the old country, perhaps?”

Old country. The way he said it made it sound like I came from there. That my father hadn’t come to the United States as a young child. That my mother and I hadn’t been born right here in this great city.

That, after my father died when I was seven, my mother had the time or the money to take me across the Atlantic to a country that she’d never been to before.

Old country.

Somewhere I didn’t have the time or money to travel to so frivolously.

“What are you getting at?”

“A wife?” Cosimo looked at me like I was dumb. “I’m sure we can find someone to catch your eye. To take care of your house and your”—his gaze dropped briefly down my chest—“needs.”

I huffed out a breath, shaking my head. “I have no need for a woman. They only get in the way.”

Get in your mind, in your house, in your bed.

Until you couldn’t go through a single damned appointment without thinking of the sweet pussy you’d glimpsed as she ran, naked, up the stairs.

Cosimo lifted his eyebrows. Pursed his lips. “A man, then?”

A scoff burst from my lungs. Not hardly. “Not my cup of tea. Speaking of tea, I’d like you to make sure what you’re drinking is decaffeinated. And keep it down to one or two cups a day. Your blood pressure is better than it has been, but I’m not comfortable with it just yet.”

“Zeno.”

“I’m serious, Cosimo.”

“Yes, yes.” He waved me off. “I’ll drink your stupid decaf. I’ll cut my intake, I’ll eat the blandest food I can possibly get and go to my grave an unhappy man.”