Page 26 of Healing Her

“There’s professional, and then there’s being a stone-cold bitch,” Maria replied with a snort. “I’d almost rather get back to the days when she clearly had a problem with you.” She waved a hand at the door. “Go after her, will you? I can’t bear to see you moping.”

“I don’t,” Jen began, but she shut up when Maria started to struggle to sit up and looked like she was going to try to swing her legs out of the bed. “Okay, okay.”

She darted out of the room, glancing left and right to see which way Ashley had gone. Fortunately, she hadn’t gone far; she was standing at the nurses’ station tapping away on the tablet. Swallowing hard, Jen stepped up next to her. “Doctor Proctor, can we speak for a moment?”

Ashley looked up, eyes wide as if she were being hunted. As if she wanted to be anywhere but here.Ouch. “Um… certainly, Doctor Colton.”

There was a conference room on the VIP floor. At this hour, it should be empty. Jen took Ashley by the elbow and led herthere now, closing the door behind the two of them. “Ash…ley,” she began, tripping over the nickname she’d been chastised for using just this morning. “We need to talk about what happened earlier.”

Ashley leaned back on the conference table and frowned. “What happened, exactly?”

“This morning? When you shut me down for calling you Ash when we were in an elevator together, alone?” Jen drew herself up taller. “I felt that was a little uncalled for.”

The look on Ashley’s face was what could only be described asuncomfortable, as it always was when they discussed anything to do with their situation anywhere but in one of their bedrooms. “If I was a bit sharp, I’m sorry. I had to get immediately into planning mode, I didn’t need any distractions.”

“It wasn’t just sharp, and…” Jen shook her head. “Honestly, it’s not even just about that. Ashley, you’ve been treating me like garbage at work for weeks, ever since we started this thing between us.”

“No, wait,” Ashley protested, standing up straight. “That’s not fair. We agreed that work and our personal lives were to be kept very, very separately.”

“We did, but you are drawing that line extremely sharply. I feel like we can keep things separate with a bit more humanity to it than you’ve been demonstrating.” Thinking the words made her tremble, saying them aloud was threatening to close her throat up. “You barely treat me as a colleague. At least when you detested me, I knew you respected me. Now, you make me feel like a dirty secret.” She picked at her cuticles. “It hurts my feelings. I think we can do better.”

“Wow. Wow, okay.” Ashley pushed herself off the table and began to pace the room. “I am sorry to have hurt your feelings. But I hope you can see my perspective here. This…” She waved a hand between the two of them. “This, anything like this, isvery new to me in general, without even getting into the fact I’ve never dated a colleague before. I’m still learning to navigate all of it. And I am terrified of making missteps at work that I can’t come back from.” It seemed to take her some considerable effort, but she walked over to Jen and took her by the shoulders. “I have to be careful.”

“There’s careful and then there’s chastising me for using a private name in a private situation, there’s ignoring me and treating me like an intern during a major surgery or in front of patients, there’s refusing to make so much as a plan for a meal together unless we can do it by text while we’re here…” Jen pulled herself away and it was her turn to pace the conference room. “I can’t even start on how we get to work in the mornings. Thesubterfuge, it’s so…” She shook her head. “This is not how I thought this was going to be.”

“I just,” Ashley began, then she stopped and took a deep breath before going on. “I’m sorry. I need to be careful, and I need that boundary respected. It’s going to take me time. I truly don’t like to hear that I’m hurting you, but I am asking for some understanding while I find my footing with this situation.”

“Can you at least acknowledge me at work? Stop treating me like some kind of pariah, don’t freeze me out like this?” Jen pleaded. “I won’t call you Ash, I’ll keep my distance like I have been, but please, I needsomethingfrom you. God, you could go back to sneering at me if that would help. At least then you wouldn’t be ignoring me entirely.”

This seemed to shock Ashley, and she looked stricken. “Well, no, I can’t do that. I can’t just bemeanto you.”

“But youhavebeen. I don’t know how to make you understand that this way you have of icing me out at the hospital is so much worse.” Jen’s hands opened and closed at her sides, aching with the strain that was tensing up her entire body.

For a moment, she thought she might have gotten through. Ashley stepped forward, reaching to take Jen’s hands. Her eyes were still wary, but they seemed soft, maybe even understanding.

In the next moment, all of Jen’s nascent hopes were dashed. “I just need more time,” Ashley whispered, lifting one of Jen’s hands to her lips for a butterfly-light kiss. “Please? But let me try to make it up to you tonight. We can have dinner…”

Jen looked down and swallowed down the lump of disappointment. “Do you want to go out to a restaurant with me?”

Ashley’s hesitation, the way she froze in place, was the final straw. “We can order dinner at home. Yours or mine, you choose.”

She knew without asking that once again, they’d be driving separately, uniting in the darkness of the Beverly Center parking garage. They’d drive to one of their homes, they’d have an amazing sex-filled evening and a gorgeous long talk deep into the night… and tomorrow it would all begin again the same way.

Jen understood that Ashley needed time to figure out how to handle things. But that was something they should do together, discuss together, yet Ashley wasn’t entertaining that or indeed any idea that wasn’t her way of doing things. Jen felt unheard… even dismissed.

“Not tonight,” she heard herself saying softly, and Ashley’s eyes widened in surprise and, she thought, a bit of hurt. “It has been a long, long day and I think I would like to be alone for a bit.”

“I…” Ashley didn’t seem to know how to respond to that. Jen decided to continue with her strategy of being kind, yet direct.

“We are both tired. I think we are talking past each other, and maybe things have gone very quickly and intensely in the last few weeks.” She inhaled and willed herself to settle, and tohold firm. “Today was a longer day than we had expected. Things are being felt more deeply than maybe they normally would. So I would like to have a night to myself, please.”

“I… okay. Yes.” Ashley released Jen’s hands and stepped back. “Tomorrow?”

“Maybe,” Jen replied. She smiled, but she knew it was weak and uncertain. Moving past Ashley, she made her way out of the conference room and out of the hospital to her car. The drive back to her apartment passed in silence; she didn’t even want to turn on the radio.

Once home, Jen discarded her clothing in favor of a soft, ancient t-shirt that had once belonged to Nina. It no longer smelled like her, no more of that essence of citrus shampoo, vanilla perfume, constant hand sanitizer and green tea hand lotion. But Jen still felt her wife’s presence around her as she crawled into bed and faced the photo on the bedside table.

“Oh, Nina,” she whispered as her eyes began to well up with tears. “I think you’ve spoiled me. Was I asking too much of her? Too soon?” Her breath began to shudder as she couldn’t hold back the sobs any longer.

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