That Space In Your Heart

Chapter 6. Certain of You





Elizabeth had called Chris and asked her to put Ella to bed.

She had just finished a meeting with Weaver and risk management, trying to defend her treatment of Jonathan Fish. Even for Ella, she couldn’t return to her dreary, closed house for another night of playing around with Eddie, denting the surface of a lonely ache that seemed especially gnawing today. His interest was as persuasive, smooth, lighthearted as he was himself and she couldn’t believe that was all she’d been wanting, needing, today.

Last night, after he got home from the conference, she’d been telling him about the lawsuit, as she’d discussed another with Mark long years ago. Eddie had held her face in both of his perfect, beautiful hands and given her a warm kiss on her forehead. “I know you, Elizabeth,” he’d said. “You’d never do that kind of thing.”

I know you. Spoken so coolly, so surely, like the extent of her life, her character, her past was encompassed in the knowledge he gained in her bed at night. His faith in her was like Mark’s had been: simple and ingenuous.

Maybe Eddie was right to believe her. In spite of all the shit she’d taken, she believed her motives had been pure… this time.

But he – whose address copied from the hospital directory was scribbled like a brand on her hand – had spent enough time parsing her for vulnerability to know there was a coldblooded streak that superseded her better judgment once in awhile. There would always be a part of her that was wholly capable of what Eddie thought she’d never commit.

Elizabeth had been pacing the sidewalks of the city for above an hour, and the autumn night had driven a chill deep within her skin. There were only three blocks left to travel, unless she managed to get ahold of herself before she made a mistake.

Wildly afraid, deliciously giddy, she stood at the doorstep and rang the bell. The house was bigger even than Lucy’s youthful hyperbole had once described it; its beauty darker. Maybe he had chosen the house for its gloom, wanting to warn intruders away before they could spoil his simmering solitude.

After several minutes, during which Elizabeth did not ring the bell again, the door crept open.

He was wearing jeans and a flannel shirt unbuttoned at the neck, revealing a slender triangle of luminous skin at his neck and a few wisps of soft hair on his chest. He wasn’t wearing his prosthetic, so one sleeve hung at his side in defeated limpness.

Robert’s face had been disinterested and annoyed, but when he saw her his expression changed completely, growing wary. His eyes gave him away, burning with flat, helpless welcome.

“Did I wake you?” she asked.

“I hate sleeping now,” he said. “I’m glad for anything that keeps me awake.”

She swallowed. “Can I come in?”

He pulled the door open further in curt invitation. Elizabeth stepped inside and peered around at an expanse of hallway, unlit but for the bleak overflow of the porch lights through the window. The walls were bare, as if he had just moved in and hadn’t had the time to make himself at home.

Then she turned her attention back to Robert. His face had always been more legible to her in the shadows, when he lost the defenses that daylight demanded. She detected his helpless awkwardness, the wavering between his inclination to be kind to her and his need to be brutal.

Romano reached out to help with the coat she was shrugging off, folded it with practised, one-handed ease, and laid it on a nearby hall table. “Uh, sit down. Please,” he said, his pointed courtesy belying the fervent curiosity in his eyes.

Elizabeth nodded, and they walked side-by-side into a cavernous, fantastically tidy room. At last he put a light on, dispelling the strange, subliminal intimacy that always sprung up between them in darkened spaces: living rooms, offices … lounges. Watery yellow light leaked out to illuminate a den with a gargantuan flat-screen TV in one corner and a silky mahogany grand piano in the other.

Romano motioned her politely to a circle of leather seats in front of the TV but remained standing himself, as if to defend his territory. Instead of sitting, she perched on the high, wide arm of a sturdy chair and faced him, defiant.

“So where’s Ella?”

“At home with Chris.”

“Did she ever go to see her sister?”

“She stayed one night, but she came back right away. It was only a scare, nothing serious.”

He caught sight of her hand, with his address still scrawled in black marker on the back. Narrowing his eyes to see better, he lifted her hand in his and traced his thumb over the writing, with his other fingers supporting her palm. Elizabeth closed her eyes, choked with the sensation of his unconscious caress. The ache that had tortured her all day like a physical hunger spread outward, downward.

“No paper?” he asked, releasing her hand as easily as if it cost him nothing to do it.

Elizabeth forced her eyes open. “I’d left the building already,” she breathed. “I ran back in to look up the address and I was too rushed to find a Post-It.”

“Rushed,” he repeated skeptically. “To get here, at two in the morning.”

“I just finished a hernia. I’m sorry it’s so late.”

He scrutinized her with all his assured, piercing acuity. Behind that examination she could sense an encouraging nervousness: he was trying to smother his involuntary hope. “Well, what is it?” he asked. “What’s so desperate it couldn’t wait till morning?”

She paused, enjoying his suspense. “You remember, don’t you?”

His eyes clouded over with caution. She could barely hear his murmured answer. “Remember what?”

“The amp – the operation. I scrubbed in, and—”

“Yeah,” he said before she could continue. “They told me. I’ve been meaning to ask you how it went?”

How it went? Elizabeth had not often spent a more draining day than those hours sitting over her rival’s damaged limb, trying to be professional as she secretly mourned the end of a brilliant career and a tormented fight. Swallowing wounded rage at the callousness of the others. Sneaking a glance over the curtain at his slackened face as she handed over the instruments that would sever his arm. “It was… difficult,” she said slowly.

“I used to love the bone saw,” Romano said unexpectedly. “They’re dramatic, you know? Powerful. Did you get to use one on me?”

“No,” she said briefly. “I refused to.”

“Oh, I see, you sicced Edson on me, no wonder the thing hurts.” He paused. “You wouldn’t do it?”

She smiled a little bit. “There’s a reason they tell us not to operate on people we…”

Just as she slowed down and frantically wondered how to finish the sentence, Romano cut in. He had recognized her awkwardness, she knew, but he pretended he was being his typical abrasive self. “Used to work for?”

She assented to that. It was an easy enough answer, for now. Then she returned doggedly to her original question. “What about afterwards?”

“After?” His posture was stiff and expectant.

“I was closing up a bleeder and you woke up a little and said—”

“I know what I said,” he cut her off sharply. “At first I thought it was a dream – I hoped it was a dream – but I asked Shirley. She found the whole thing pretty damned amusing, by the way.”

He took a moment to swallow, to lick his lips. Elizabeth found herself watching the tip of his tongue, wondering how his mouth might taste to her own. Then he said carefully, “I was sedated.”

Fine, she thought irritably. If he wanted her to pretend to him, act like nothing had changed in that moment, then she would oblige him. With a vengeance. “I know that,” she said. “I know what that type of medication does to people. I’ve had dozens of patients say bizarre things while they were—”

“Cut the crap, Lizzie,” Romano said wearily. “We both know it wasn’t just the medication.”

She exulted, realizing that in spite of his pretense of heartlessness there were certain things between them that he held sacred. Robert was always a revelation to her. He could create distance just as she tried to talk seriously, only to sweetly and unexpectedly appease her with momentary gentleness when she in turn became aloof.

But a moment later he said with brittle hostility, “If I’ve answered your question, I think you should go home and get your beauty sleep. I know I need mine.”

His eyes were alert, glittering, angry. She’d finally got him on the defensive.

“Is that why you’ve been acting so cold?” Elizabeth said. “Because of what you said while you were out of your head?”

He gave her a slightly amused look. “I know I’ve had a few lapses in control where you’re concerned, Elizabeth, but I didn’t mean to give you the impression that I was completely warm and fuzzy.”

Oh, right, she thought. I forgot – you’ve always been a prick. But still… “You know as well as I do,” she insisted, “nothing’s the same since you came back. But that’s your plan, right? You said what you really meant just once, to the only friend you have, and now you want to shut me out for the rest of your life.”

“I can’t shut you out,” he murmured hoarsely. “I shouldn’t even have let you in here, not tonight. –But I’m helpless.”

Something about the plain, soft way he added the last sentence led Elizabeth to place light fingertips on his wrist, sliding just under the loosened cuff of his shirt. A light, almost innocent touch, where the smooth strength of the hand met the taut muscles of the forearm.

Robert froze, his eyes crackling with a moment’s fierce conflict. Then he lifted that hand to her waist, ruffling the hemline of her shirt, warm wide fingers spreading over supple skin: neither light nor innocent, the way she knew he’d always wanted to touch her. Jerkily, as if trying to stop himself, he stepped closer to her. His movements were defeated, pleading, sorrowful.

He sought her lips with a restraint that infuriated and thrilled her past self-defense or control. She arched her back towards him, trying to close every space that separated them. His mouth tasted warm and sweet and stale, the taste of lonely glasses of beer on empty nights.

A brief, instinctive reluctance braced his body, and then he drew a ragged breath through his nostrils and gave himself up. His fingernails raked across her skin, drawing her yet closer. She broke the kiss to gasp in delicious pain, and her name escaped breathlessly from his lips.

Through soft, warm flannel she distinguished muscle and rib, sliding her hands up his chest. She pulled a button from its snug hole at his throat, and then another, opening the shirt at his shoulders. Traced the smooth sharp line of a collarbone, the deep valley underneath it, the undulation of shoulder muscle.

Then, as her playful explorations seemed too close to the ravaged site of his left arm, he twitched away from her hands. She tried to retreat, to return to undressing him, but he tore away, almost recoiling from her touch.

They faced each other, both uneasy. Whatever crazy certainty that kiss had brought her faded away as Elizabeth looked at his dark, closed face. “Did I hurt you?” she asked quietly.

He shook his head.

“What is it, then?” Elizabeth could hardly speak for the aching confusion that tonight had wrought. She had not come here for this. Had not, even in their charged, unsettling silences, believed she wanted it.

For a second Robert hesitated, his face pensive, and then he lifted his hand to her face, tracing her cheekbone with his thumb. Elizabeth, this time, did not pull away. His eyes searched her, probing for the uncertainty she couldn’t hide.

After a long, sweet moment, when he detected her hesitation, he snatched his hand away. “What are you doing here?” he asked. “Did you come here to comfort me? To make this better?”

She fumbled to explain the motives she didn’t understand herself. “No. I don’t know. It was an impulse.”

His voice was low and forced. “You shouldn’t have come here unless you knew what you were doing.”

“Look,” she said, trying to explain herself and melt the coldness that had permeated his face, “whatever this is, it’s not, it’s not… pity.”

The word was almost impossible to spit out. As she knew it would, speaking it deepened his distrust. “Elizabeth,” he said, “you don’t know the difference. You and Mark –”

She choked. “Robert—”

“No, let me talk,” he said relentlessly. “The years that you knew Mark Greene were a series of disasters accumulating on top of him. His parents, the brain tumor, your daughter, the Ecstasy overdose. You stuck with him, thinking that was the same as a marriage. And now you want to make it better, you want it to be all right, the arm and its goddamned inescapable ghost and the fact that I can’t do a single thing for myself anymore. But it can’t get better, there’s no way to get it back.”

“You,” she said slowly, trying to hide her reaction, “are always a treat to watch when you’re intoxicated.”

Robert seemed vaguely surprised to hear that he was drunk. Elizabeth, no longer caring what he thought she wanted from him, stepped back, so she was standing several feet from him.

She felt suddenly, deeply violated. How thoughtless she’d been to trust this bitter wreckage of a man. To forget his true nature because she caught a glimpse of another side that must have been feigned, only to have him tear into her past and try to strip her of the meaning she had found in it. He didn’t love her. He’d only liked her face, or maybe what he could see of himself in her. She didn’t believe he was capable of more than that.

“Well, you were right,” she said. “I wouldn’t have come at all, if I’d been thinking straight. I’m sorry.”

A brief nod. Stoic, cold, final. She wanted to see remorse in his eyes, but in spite of her fervent wish she had to admit to herself that there was none.

Her coat was still lying on the hall table. She walked out of the room and picked it up, throwing it over her arm, then straightened the hem of her shirt. Blood smeared her fingertips where his nails had ripped through her skin.

The heavy oaken door slid open with a melancholy groan, allowing a burst of coldness from the October air. Elizabeth drew her coat tightly around her shoulders and flung herself out into the night.





Chapter 7: Hyperbaton