Page 30 of Sister of the Bride

Toby nods—that apparently means something to him. “Will do.”

“Wait, am I at the hospital?” I ask. “How the hell did I get here?”

Toby looks down and smiles, giving a little shrug that jostles me enough to make my head throb. “I carried you.”

We arrive at what must be curtain three, and Toby sets me down gently on the bed, then immediately turns around and starts rummaging through drawers while I calculate the distance he carried me. Sure, we were basically right next to Mass General when I went down. But still, it was about two city blocks, which is not nothing.

“You carried me?” I say. “To thehospital?”

“Yeah. You went down like a bag of hammers. Blood was everywhere—it was pretty gnarly. It would have taken three times as long for an ambulance to get to us, and I’m pretty sure you only passed out at the sight of the blood. You probably only need a butterfly bandage. But better safe than sorry, so I scooped you up and ran for it.”

He turns around holding a handful of gauze and one of those little pen light things. He presses the gauze to my forehead and takes my hand, guiding it up to hold it in place. Then he leans in so close to my face that I swear I can feel his warm breath on my neck. I’m going to attribute the way my insides light up to the potential head injury. Am I swooning because a well-muscled, shirtless Toby is close enough to feel his breath on my skin or because my brain is bleeding? Guess we’re about to find out!

“Okay, follow the light.” His voice takes on a sort of low, smooth, authoritative tone that sends another zap of awareness straight into my running shorts. And that’sdefinitelynot the head injury.

“Yo, Dr. Baywatch, catch.” A guy in a white coat tosses a blue scrub top at Toby as he passes by the opening of the curtain. Toby catches it and shrugs it on, looking way too much like one of the hot new interns fromGrey’s Anatomy(I’ll never be able to watch that show the same way again, dammit). I studiously ignore my pang of disappointment as his tanned, toned chest disappears from view.Best friends, I repeat to myself like a mantra.No benefits.

“This is very sweet of you, but I’m fine.” I start to sit up, carefully leaning away from him, but I pause as a dull thud begins pounding a rhythm in the front right quadrant of my skull.

“Hey, what hurts?” Toby asks, once again close to my face. His hand rests on the back of my head as he helps me lie down in a motion that looks entirely too much like one of Nonna’s romance novel covers.

“My brain,” I say. “Also my dignity.”

“Be serious for a sec, Pippin. I’m trying to evaluate you for a head injury.”

I glare at him. “Who died and made you a doctor?”

“No one died. That’s why I’m a doctor, ya ding-dong,” he says, and even though my eyes are closed tight as I wait for the wave of pain to pass, I can hear the grin in his voice. This is good—the gentle teasing I’m used to. Like brother and sister. More of that.

“Well, it definitely feels like I injured my head,” I say. “The blood was the first clue.”

“Yeah, I see you’ve still got your fear of blood. Let’s get that cleaned up,” he says. He reaches up and pulls back the gauze, then sets to work gently cleaning up my forehead. He applies some kind of solution that causes me to hiss in pain, which helps with the wholedon’t have weird thoughts about Toby touching your facething. He blows gently on the wound, which works shockingly well to ease the sting but immediately undoes whatever progress I’ve made. Because suddenly I’m hoping for Toby’s warm breath on other places.

“Is that hygienic?” I ask.

“Not standard procedure, but I like you, so I don’t want you to suffer,” he says with a wink. Ugh, hehasto stop winking if I’m going to have any hope of not picturing him naked.

It takes him another minute or so to poke at the wound, treat it with something antiseptic, and determine that I don’t need stitches. When he’s done, he places two butterfly strips over the cut and covers the whole thing with a square of gauze and some medical tape. Then he stares into my eyes with that serious doctor face again.

“Any blurred vision?”

I squint at him and see that his brown eyes and long lashes are in crystal-clear focus. “Nope.”

“Nausea?”

“Only when I think about the fact that I ran headfirst into a lamppost in front of a bunch of strangers.”In front of you.

“Hey, that wasn’t your fault. That Rollerblade dude was a menace,” he says. He sits back on one of those rolling stools, his arms crossed over his chest, and yup, there it is. There’s season-one George Clooney fromER. Damn, Evie really hit the nail on the head with that one. And I really need to stop watching so many medical shows. “Okay, no blurred vision, no nausea, no slurred speech or confusion. But you did lose consciousness for a minute, so you’ll need to be monitored for a concussion.”

“Here?” My stomach roils, and this time it’s not my head wound; it’s the possibility of a bill and also of having to spend any actual time in the hospital where they brought Dad when he died. I haven’t been in the Mass General emergency department in eight years, and I have no interest in staying here any longer than I have to now.

“No, you can just have someone watch you at home. But—”

And then suddenly I’m crying. Hard. Like, end ofMy Girlwhen Vada screams about Macaulay Culkin needing his glasses, an ugly cry that comes from deep in my chest and pours tears down my cheeks.

“Pip, are you okay?” Toby’s voice is trying really hard to retain that cool, calm doctor-in-charge thing, but I hear a little squeak in his voice like when we were twelve years old and I cut my knee open falling out of a tree on the common.

“I don’t have a home!” I bark out mid-sob, my mouth operating independent of me, because if my brain were working, I’d suck it up and stop being a walking drama case right now.

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