Page 68

The sound was short and surprised. She covered her mouth with her hand. Marcus looked up from the notes. Delphine was still at the window. Her shoulders shook. She was laughing at something on the street. He couldn’t see what. He didn’t ask. He watched her laugh. The sound filled the clinic. It was the first real sound she had made in twelve days that wasn’t a question or an answer or the careful noise of someone learning to breathe again.

He went back to the notes. His pen moved. The words came easier than they had in weeks.

On the seventeenth day, dawn came to the clinic.

The monitors were quiet. The leads had been disconnected. The crash cart stood against the wall with its drawers closed and its oxygen tank full. The reagent smell had faded to something almost clean, antiseptic and wool blankets and the scent of a space that had been lived in hard and was finally being put back in order.

Delphine sat on the gurney with her legs over the side. She was fully dressed in jeans, boots, and a wool sweater that hung loose on her frame. She had lost weight, less than Marcus had feared but enough that the sweater sleeves covered her hands. She had rolled them back twice already. They kept falling.

Her healed palm rested open on her knee. The cut was a thin, flat white line now. It would never fully disappear. Some marks stayed.

Marcus stood beside her with his stethoscope pressed to her back. The bell was cold against her sweater. She didn’t flinch. He listened to her breathe, in and out, sixteen per minute, strong and clear, with no rales and no wheezing. The lung fields were clean. He had auscultated them every morning for seventeen days. This was the last time. He had decided that sometime during the fifteenth day, though he hadn’t said it aloud.

He moved the stethoscope and listened again, lower left lobe, then the right. The sounds were normal and uneventful, the kind of normal that doctors spent years training to recognize so they could move on to the things that weren’t.

He pulled the earpieces down around his neck. The tubing settled against his collar. He didn’t speak for a moment. The clinic held its morning quiet. The workbench was clean. The vials were racked. The failed slides had been discarded. The rune on the concrete floor had been scrubbed away with bleach and a stiff brush. Nothing remained of the blood or the chalk or the iron except a faint stain that would fade with time.

“Good,” Marcus said.

Delphine’s hand found his where it rested on the gurney rail. Her fingers were warm and steady, fully her own again. Marcus turned his hand over and let her take it. Her pulse was there under his thumb, steady and strong at sixty-eight beats per minute, the radial artery reliable and present.

Outside, the sky was going pale at the edges. The deepest dark had given way to the gray that preceded sunrise. In another hour, the streetlamps would click off. The storefronts would unlock. Main Street would fill with the sounds of a town that had survived something and didn’t yet know what came next.

Delphine’s pulse held under his thumb. Sixty-eight. Sixty-nine. Seventy.

Marcus didn’t let go.

That evening, Marcus carried two plates upstairs instead of another tray of clinic food. Delphine followed at a slower pace, one hand on the rail, but she refused the arm he offered. When she reached the apartment, she looked at the small table set with candles, real dishes, and a bottle of wine he had bought despite being unable to drink it.

“You said dinner,” he told her. “I’m asking now. Delphine, will you have dinner with me?”

She leaned against the doorframe and considered him with deliberate seriousness. “You made me wait seventeen days.” A smile softened the accusation before he could defend himself. “Yes, Marcus. I’ll have dinner with you.”

He had ordered from the Italian restaurant near the courthouse because cooking for a living woman required practice he hadn’t attempted in decades. Delphine ate half the pasta and all the garlic bread while he drank warmed blood from an opaque mug. The arrangement should have felt absurd, but her boots rested beneath his table, and he’d already gotten used to the sound of her laugh in his rooms.

When she set down her fork, Marcus reached automatically for the questions he had asked every evening. Delphine raised one finger before he could begin. “No pain, no dizziness, no shortness of breath, and my pulse is none of your business until tomorrow.”

“I was going to ask whether you wanted more wine.” Marcus leaned back in his chair, although the lie fooled neither of them. “The medical questions might have followed.”

“You were going to ask that second.” She lifted her glass and took a sip. “Tonight I’m not your patient. If you can’t manage that, I can go downstairs and let you examine the empty gurney.”

Marcus put his mug aside. “I’ve spent all this time making sure you stayed alive.” His gaze traveled over her face, her throat, and the hands that no longer trembled. “I don’t know how to stop doing it in a single evening.”

Delphine rose and came around the table. She placed his hand against her waist beneath the loose edge of her sweater. “Then start with this. Touch me because you want me, not because you’re checking whether I’m about to collapse.”

The warmth of her skin came through the thin cotton beneath his palm. Her posture was strong, her breathing steady, and he chose not to analyze either. “If I touch you the way I want to, dinner is over.”

“Good. The pasta was getting cold.” Delphine bent and kissed him, her mouth firm against his as her fingers closed around his tie. She pulled until he stood, and the chair scraped across the floor behind him.

Marcus caught her face in both hands and kissed her back. He had imagined this during every hour beside the gurney, then hated himself for imagining anything beyond her survival. Now she was upright, warm, and impatient, pressing her body against his and demanding an answer he was finally allowed to give.

Delphine opened the knot in his tie and dropped it across the abandoned plates. She worked through the buttons of his shirt while he pushed her sweater over her head. A dark green bra covered her breasts, plain except for a narrow line of lace, and Marcus ran his thumbs beneath the lower edge.

“I want a clear answer.” His restraint had narrowed to a single thread, but he held it. “Do you want me to keep going?”

“Yes. I want your mouth on me, your hands on me, and your cock inside me.” Delphine unfastened his belt and held his gaze while she opened his trousers. “Was that clear enough, Doctor?”

“Completely.” He kissed her hard enough to drive the teasing from her expression. Delphine made a low sound into his mouth when he filled both hands with her ass and lifted her onto the edge of the table. Her legs opened around his hips before he set her down.