Page 8 of Falling into Place
It might be marginally better to have someone familiar, soft-spoken, and kind be the one to tell him his fashion sense sucked. Sort of like the way food poisoning was marginally better than the Ebola virus.
Sasha dropped her hands to her lap. She swallowed, her eyes turning glassy. “Please, Brooks?”
He closed his eyes.Dammit. He wanted to help her, but it sounded miserable. Just a step shy of torture. “I don’t know. I need time to think about it.”
She opened her mouth as if to argue, but seemed to think better of it. “Fine.”
He went for more nachos and had only gotten his hands on one chip when she spoke again.
“How long do you think you’ll need?”
“Don’t rush him,” Macy said quietly.
Sasha sighed. “Okay, you’re right. Sorry. I’ve just been thinking about it nonstop, and I got excited. There’s so much we could do with it, and I can’t wait to see my brother finally fall in love.”
He snorted. “Doubt that’ll happen.”
“Name one thing I put my mind to that I’ve failed at.”
“Basketball,” Brooks said at the same time Macy shouted, “Chess.”
“Something I actually care about!”
Brooks swung his gaze to Macy. “She didn’t specify.”
“Agreed.”
Sasha tried to glare at her older siblings and failed, never having been able to stay mad at them for long. She gave up and smiled, eyes bright. “Just wait. If you agree to this, I’ll put every connection I have at your disposal, including all the available women in the greater metro area. Watch—you’ll meet the love of your life, and who will you have to thank?”
“The stylist, probably, if things are as bad as you say.” He angled his head. “Macy, too, because if anyone can talk me into this, it’s her.”
Turned out, it wasn’t Macy who talked him into it. Brooks came to the conclusion on his own with a little indirect help from his friend James.
They’d hit the coffee shop near the hospital a few days after the meeting with his sisters, and while they waited for their drinks, Jameshad surreptitiously tilted his head toward the barista. “What do you think of Aly?”
It had taken Brooks several seconds to realize who he was talking about. “What do you mean?”
His friend, usually confident bordering on arrogant, had appeared almost sheepish. “She’s cute, right?”
Brooks blinked, disarmed. Now that he considered it, yeah, she was cute. Beautiful, even. “Definitely. Why?”
James shrugged, and Brooks could have sworn he blushed. It was hard to tell with his russet-brown skin and the fact Brooks could count on one hand the number of times he’d seen his friend embarrassed ... but still. This was new. “I noticed her several weeks ago. I’ve come in a few times without you, and we’ve talked some. I was thinking about asking her out.”
Something shifted in Brooks in that moment, a troubling internal realization even as he said, “Do it, man. You’re a catch.”
Brooks hadn’t noticed Aly before.
He never noticed anyone. At least, not once he left the hospital.
Inside those sliding doors he felt at home. He felt prepared, confident, and useful. While he wasn’t super social or one of the physicians that sat around cracking jokes in the break room, he knew everyone’s name and they knew his. People respected him and took what he had to say seriously. He’d worked his ass off to become an intensivist, and watching over the people lying in those beds, their bodies at their most vulnerable, gave him the sense of purpose he’d been searching for.
But when he left, he just sort of checked out.
If he wasn’t standing here right now, he wouldn’t have been able to recall any of the employees working at this shop, which he frequented often. It wasn’t that he didn’t care—he loved this place. He tipped well and smiled and said thank you with every interaction. It was just ... he’d been inside his own head for so long. Always studying, thinking about his patients, his next shift, that email blast with new clinical trial results he wanted to read, and when he’d be able to crash on his couchwith his cat and a beer to watch the game without the code-blue alert screaming in his head. Honestly, he hadn’t thought much of it, because it seemed normal to decompress after a shift, especially with the kind of work he did. Until he witnessed James, his colleague and friend who had just finished the same kind of grueling training program and kept the same schedule as Brooks, comment on a complete stranger he wanted to get to know.
Socializing with people other than his colleagues had become so foreign that he hadn’t even realized he’d forgotten how to do it. Even though he’d never admit it to their faces, maybe his sisters were right. Maybe he was a little lonely. He just hoped Macy’s worst-case scenario was on point and this whole dating thing wouldn’t crash and burn.
He waited a couple of days just to make Sasha sweat, but he finally called her with his answer.
