Chapter Text
June
The first thing I learned about Forks was that the rain wasn't charming. It didn't tap gently against windows while you drank coffee and pretended your life was a movie. It fell the way it must have fallen a thousand years before anyone built a hospital here, cold and relentless, out of a sky the color of a healing bruise. It hung in the air more than it fell through it, found the gap between my collar and my neck no matter how tightly I closed my jacket, and settled into my hair before I'd made it twenty feet from the car.
By the time I made it from my rental car to the employee entrance of Forks Community Hospital, the bottoms of my scrub pants were soaked through, the two lighter pieces I always clipped back from my face had sprung loose and curled into corkscrews, and one of the coffees in the cardboard tray balanced against my hip was threatening to make a suicidal leap onto the pavement.
"Don't you dare."
I caught it. Barely.
The automatic doors opened with a mechanical sigh, warm fluorescent light spilling across the wet pavement. I stepped inside, and immediately missed the sun.
Not sunshine. The sun itself: the enormous, merciless ball of fire I'd apparently taken for granted my entire life.
Back home, warmth wasn't something I had to think about. It lived in everything. Sand hot enough to burn the bottoms of my feet. Salt drying white on my skin. Sun-warmed shoulders after too long near the water. Sunscreen and coconut oil baking under a sky that never apologized for itself. Even after sunset, the heat lingered, radiating up out of the sidewalk like the day was reluctant to let go.
Here, everything felt wet. Cold. Green.
The forests surrounding Forks were so dense they didn't read as scenery so much as something alive: ancient trees disappearing into fog, black branches dripping, mountains erased behind cloud.
Beautiful. But not inviting.
The trees didn't care that I'd arrived. That indifference was its own kind of unsettling, like I'd crossed into a world where humans weren't necessarily at the top of the food chain.
I shook the thought away. Fantastic. Six minutes in Washington and I'd already developed wilderness-induced paranoia.
I looked down at myself. Navy scrubs. White sneakers that were rapidly becoming gray. Whatever was left of my Hawaii tan, fading out of my arms like a photograph left too long in the sun, which felt like a cruel joke given the current, aggressive lack of sun. Hospital badge clipped crookedly to my chest.
JUNE FOSTER MEDICAL STUDENT
I straightened it. There. At least one thing about me looked competent.
Today mattered. I'd survived two years of lectures, anatomy labs, examinations designed by people who apparently hated happiness, and one pharmacology final that had made a grown man openly sob into a vending-machine Pop-Tart.
Now came the part I'd actually wanted. Patients. Real medicine.
For the next eight weeks, I'd be completing a rural clinical rotation at Forks Community Hospital. Population: tiny. Rainfall: apocalyptic. Cell reception: apparently a privilege.
I took a breath.
"Okay, Foster."
Eight weeks. I could survive anything for eight weeks.
I pushed through another set of doors.
The hospital was smaller than the sprawling teaching centers I'd trained in: no armies of residents speed-walking identical hallways, no fifteen-person teams swarming one unfortunate patient at six in the morning. It felt intimate instead. Quiet. Almost sleepy, the way a small-town clinic gets when the rain has kept everyone sensible indoors.
The scent of antiseptic mixed with stale coffee and something vaguely lemony. A monitor beeped somewhere behind a curtain. Rubber soles squeaked against linoleum. Rain whispered against every window.
"Please tell me one of those is mine."
I turned. A woman in purple scrubs stood behind the nurses' station staring hopefully at my coffee tray.
I lifted it. "I was told bribery improves clinical evaluations."
She grinned. "You're gonna do just fine here." She came around the desk and rescued one. "Linda. Charge nurse."
"June. Desperate medical student."
"I figured." Her eyes dropped pointedly to my badge.
"Right." I laughed. Some of the tension loosened between my shoulders.
"So, who am I looking for?"
"Depends. Who'd they assign you to?"
I pulled my phone from my pocket even though I'd read the email enough times to have memorized the punctuation. "Dr. Cullen."
Linda stopped with the coffee halfway to her mouth.
"Oh."
I narrowed my eyes. "What does oh mean?"
"Nothing."
"That was absolutely not a nothing-oh."
Another nurse walking behind us overheard. "She got Cullen?"
"Apparently."
The woman looked at me. Then gave me a strange little smile. "Good luck."
I stared between them. "Why does everyone keep reacting like I've been assigned to Hannibal Lecter?"
Linda nearly choked on her coffee. "No. God, no. He's wonderful."
"Then what's the problem?"
"There isn't one."
"Linda."
She sighed. "He's just..."
"Perfect," the other nurse supplied.
Linda rolled her eyes. "I was going to say exceptional."
"Same difference."
"Perfect how?"
"Brilliant physician. Great with patients. Never loses his temper. Never seems tired. Somehow remembers everything anyone has ever told him."
"Annoying."
"Extremely."
The other nurse leaned against the desk. "And then there's the face."
I blinked. "The face?"
Linda groaned. "Don't."
"What? She'll find out eventually."
"Find out what?"
The nurse looked at me with the solemnity of someone preparing to disclose a terminal diagnosis. "Dr. Cullen is offensively attractive."
I stared at her. Then laughed. "That's the warning?"
"You laugh now."
"I've worked with attractive doctors."
"Not like this one."
Linda shoved a chart into her hands. "Go do your job."
"I'm trying to save her."
"From what? Developing a crush?"
The nurse disappeared down the hall laughing.
I shook my head. "Please tell me everyone here is like this."
"Give it a week. You'll hate us."
"Looking forward to it."
Linda checked the clock. "He should be here any minute."
"Anything I should know before he gets here?"
"About Dr. Cullen?"
"About working with him."
She thought about that. "Don't bullshit him."
My pen stopped halfway out of my pocket. "Good rule."
"He'll know."
I stared at her. "That's slightly ominous."
"He's kind about it."
"Somehow worse."
"Exactly."
I opened my notebook.
DON'T BULLSHIT CULLEN.
I underlined it twice.
"What does he usually pimp students on?"
Linda smiled sympathetically. "Everything."
Great.
By seven fifteen, I'd discovered three things. The coffee in the physicians' lounge tasted like someone had dissolved a tire in hot water. My locker required blunt-force trauma to close. And Dr. Carlisle Cullen was late.
Seven sixteen. I checked the clock again. I'd arrived forty-five minutes early specifically because I refused to be the medical student an attending had to wait for.
Seven seventeen. I stood beside the nurses' station with my notebook tucked against my ribs, pretending to review patient information while wondering whether I'd misunderstood the email. Maybe there were two Dr. Cullens. Maybe I was supposed to...
Something changed. Not dramatically. No flickering lights. No ominous crash of thunder.
I just became cold.
It started at the back of my neck, in the little strip of skin my scrub top didn't cover, and moved downward beneath the fabric. I rubbed at it.
The hospital wasn't cold. If anything, I'd been overheated five minutes ago. Hospitals always ran at the exact temperature of somebody's grandmother's house, thermostat wars be damned.
But this wasn't air-conditioning. It was the specific, stupid sensation of opening the freezer at two in the morning and leaning too far inside.
Deep-freeze cold. The kind that hurt your teeth.
Gooseflesh stippled both my arms.
"Morning, Dr. Cullen."
Someone said it farther down the hall. I looked up.
And saw him.
My first thought wasn't that he was handsome. My first thought was:
Oh.
Not even a complete thought. Just that one stupid syllable.
Because the nurses had failed spectacularly at explaining him. I'd been expecting some hot small-town doctor. Nice jaw. Good hair. Maybe the sort of man who caused nurses to suddenly remember they needed something from the supply closet whenever he walked by.
This wasn't that.
He looked... wrong. Beautiful, yes. But wrong first.
He didn't have the kind of face people usually mean when they say beautiful. No dramatic cheekbones. No photogenic pout. Nothing that would have stopped you on a phone screen. What he had instead was proportion, and stillness, and a nose so cleanly sculpted it looked drawn with a straightedge, the one deliberate feature on an otherwise soft, unremarkable canvas of a face. His hair was a full, pale gold, pushed back loosely from his forehead, dry despite the weather outside, as if the rain had made an exception for him. He read older than I'd expected, somewhere in his forties, the kind of distinguished that made you trust a man's hands before he'd ever touched you. Not a resident playing dress-up in a white coat. Someone who had clearly been doing this a very long time.
But it was his skin that bothered me. There was no pink in it. None. No warmth around the nose. No flush beneath the cheeks. No tiny unevenness in tone.
Human skin is messy when you spend enough time looking at it. Capillaries. Pores. Old acne scars. Broken blood vessels. Sun damage. Little betrayals of circulation everywhere.
His gave me nothing. It reminded me unpleasantly of the anatomy lab. Not because he looked dead. Because he looked preserved.
I tightened my grip on the chart in my hands. That was a horrible thing to think about someone I'd never met. Especially someone that attractive.
He walked toward the nurses' station reading from a tablet. And I noticed something else.
He didn't waste movement.
That sounds ridiculous until you start spending your life in hospitals. People are constantly doing something. Pulling at sleeves. Scratching their nose. Wetting dry lips. Cracking knuckles. Shifting weight from one aching foot to the other. Doctors especially develop entire catalogs of nervous habits after enough fourteen-hour shifts.
Dr. Cullen did none of them. He simply moved. Smoothly. Quietly. Like his body had been given exact instructions and saw no reason to improvise.
Behind my ribs, a small warning bell went off, low and quiet.
Then he lifted his head. His eyes met mine.
He stopped.
And suddenly I understood why prey animals freeze. It wasn't a decision. My body did it without consulting me. My shoulders locked. My lungs forgot where they were in the breathing cycle. Even my fingers went still around the chart.
Carlisle Cullen stared at me. The attention felt terribly intimate, more than a glance has any business being in a hospital corridor.
He wasn't checking my badge. He wasn't giving the polite once-over people do when they're matching a new face to an email. He looked at me the way you look at something that shouldn't be possible and is standing in front of you anyway.
His eyes were gold, the warm amber of good brandy held up to a light, with lashes dark enough that the color looked lit from within rather than merely present.
And they widened. Barely. If I hadn't been staring so hard, I would've missed it.
His mouth opened perhaps half an inch. Then closed. A muscle moved once in his jaw, and for just a moment a single crease appeared in his forehead, there and gone, the only visibly human thing about an otherwise perfectly composed face.
That was it. But on a face that had been almost unnaturally still, those tiny movements felt enormous.
I had the bizarre feeling that I'd startled him. Me. My badge literally said MEDICAL STUDENT. I had rain-frizzed hair, wet socks, and half a granola bar smashed somewhere at the bottom of my purse. There was nothing startling about me.
His gaze moved over my face. Slowly. Not leering. That would've been easier. This felt more focused than attraction.
His eyes paused at my mouth. Heat unfurled beneath my sternum, unbidden.
Then his gaze traveled lower. My neck. Every autonomic system I had went on alert at once.
My pulse gave one violent kick. I felt it. Actually felt the artery beat beneath my skin. And his eyes sharpened. I stopped breathing.
There are moments when the body understands something before the conscious mind has gathered enough evidence to form an opinion. You touch a hot stove and your hand is already gone before hot reaches your brain. Your foot slips near the edge of something high and your stomach drops before you've even looked down.
This felt like that.
My nervous system had reached a conclusion about Dr. Cullen. Dangerous. The rest of me hadn't caught up.
Which would've been useful if fear were the only thing I felt. It wasn't. My body had apparently confused fight-or-flight with whatever hormone makes you want to climb a man like a tree.
My pulse pressure climbed by a margin I could have quoted in numbers. Heat rushed up from my chest and spread across my throat, the exact place his eyes had gone. I became humiliatingly aware of everything warm about myself. My palms. The breath trapped inside my lungs. Blood moving beneath my skin.
I'd spent my whole life somewhere hot enough that warmth had never felt like a personality trait.
Back home, heat was background noise. It lived in sun-baked concrete and leather car seats that branded the backs of your thighs. It was walking barefoot toward the ocean because the sand was too hot to stand still on. It was salt drying white at the edges of a swimsuit and waking up after a beach nap with one side of your face warmer than the other.
I'd never thought of myself as warm. Not until Dr. Cullen looked at me like he could see the heat leaving my body.
The air between us felt refrigerated. My cheeks felt feverish. For one disorienting second, I had the sensation that if he touched me, one of us would change temperature.
Then he caught himself, visibly, like flipping a switch. His expression closed, like a door pulled shut from the other side. The surprise disappeared. His mouth settled. His shoulders loosened by an amount so small I wondered whether I'd imagined the tension in the first place.
And suddenly he was a doctor again. Calm. Pleasant. Civilized.
He started toward me. My body objected. One involuntary step backward almost happened before I stopped my heel.
That embarrassed me more than the attraction. He hadn't done anything. Hadn't said anything. Hadn't even come within ten feet of me. And some deeply unevolved part of my brain was standing in the forest screaming that a predator had found me.
The more evolved part had apparently decided this was fantastic news.
He came closer. Five feet. Four. The cold intensified.
By the time he stopped in front of me, I could smell him. That was another mistake.
I had expected cologne, something drugstore-bright and forgettable. What I got instead smelled like money and weather: cedar and clean rain and something mineral underneath, like a fire lit in an old stone house, the kind of scent that belonged to a man who owned very good coats and never had to check a price tag. It was the least clinical thing about him, and some idiot part of my body wanted to lean into it before my brain finished the sentence.
My brain immediately wanted another breath. Traitor.
His eyes flicked down to my badge. Finally.
"Miss Foster."
His voice was quieter than I expected, unhurried, pitched low enough that I felt it as much as heard it, a warm current running under the hospital noise. My name sounded different in it. Which was absurd. It had two syllables. He hadn't discovered a new pronunciation. Still, I felt the words somewhere beneath my ribs, like they'd bypassed my ears on the way in.
"Dr. Cullen."
His gaze returned to mine. Again, that tiny pause. Like looking directly at me required some internal adjustment.
"I'm sorry to have kept you waiting."
"You're three minutes late."
The sentence escaped my mouth before the cerebral cortex could tackle it.
Carlisle stared at me.
Fantastic. First interaction with my supervising physician, and I'd apparently chosen insubordination as an opening move.
"I..."
His eyebrow rose. Just one. Then something happened around his mouth. Not quite a smile. The beginning of one.
"An unforgivable offense."
Oh. Oh, no. He was funny. That seemed unnecessary.
"I've already documented it." I lifted my notebook because apparently humiliation had caused me to double down.
For the first time, he smiled properly. And that frightened me more than the staring had. Because his face suddenly looked warm while the rest of him remained impossibly cold.
The smile was gentle. Beautiful. Human. It made me want to trust him.
My body still didn't. That contradiction lodged somewhere under my breastbone.
"I'll endeavor to improve," he said.
"Please do."
Was I flirting with him? No. Absolutely not. My attending physician had smiled at me and my reproductive system had apparently suffered a temporary administrative failure.
Carlisle tucked the tablet beneath his arm. "Welcome to Forks Community Hospital."
He offered me his hand.
I stared at it for half a second too long. Something inside me whispered: Don't. Not language exactly. Instinct. The same animal part of the brain that doesn't need a lecture on venomous snakes.
Then the rational part reminded me that refusing to shake my attending's hand because his face had given me existential anxiety would be difficult to defend during an evaluation.
So I took it.
The cold hurt. Actually hurt. My fingers closed around his and every muscle in my forearm tightened.
Jesus.
His hand wasn't cool. It wasn't poor-circulation cold. I'd held cadaver hands warmer than this.
The thought hit me so hard I nearly pulled away.
Then Carlisle reacted. His fingers stopped around mine. Something dropped out of his expression entirely, and the pleasant doctor disappeared so quickly it felt like watching a door slam.
His pupils widened, fast. Too fast. His jaw locked. And he looked at me. Not politely. Not professionally. He looked at me the way a starving person might look through the window of a bakery.
Except there was horror mixed into it. His horror. Not mine.
My heartbeat stumbled. Once. Then accelerated. His eyes dropped instantly to my neck.
That was when fear finally arrived properly. Cold swept over my scalp. I could hear my own pulse now, thick and ugly inside my ears.
Thud. His eyes stayed on my throat.
Thud. The muscles around his mouth tightened.
Thud. He released my hand.
Fast. Not rude. More like he'd touched something burning.
His hand disappeared into the pocket of his white coat. I stared at him. He stared somewhere over my shoulder. For the first time since he'd walked into the corridor, Carlisle Cullen looked like a man trying very hard not to do something.
I had no idea what. And some deeply stupid part of me wanted desperately to find out.
"Cold hands," I managed.
Brilliant. Years of medical education. Hundreds of thousands of dollars. Cold hands.
His gaze lowered briefly to his pocket. "So I'm told."
"Poor circulation?"
A flicker crossed his eyes, there and gone, like a light behind frosted glass.
"Something like that."
I gave a nervous little laugh. He didn't.
For a moment he simply watched me again. No. Not watched. Listened. That was the word that came into my head. He looked like he was listening to something.
Except I hadn't spoken.
Then his gaze flicked toward my throat one last time.
"We should begin."
By nine thirty, I hated him. Not genuinely. That would have been convenient. I hated him in the particular way medical students hate physicians who know absolutely everything and still manage not to be assholes about it.
"What are you thinking?"
I looked through the glass at the patient we'd just examined. "Forty-six-year-old male. Chest discomfort, nausea, fatigue. Initial ECG isn't showing an obvious STEMI, but the pain radiates into his jaw."
Carlisle waited. I'd already learned that silence was one of his favorite weapons.
"Could still be ACS. GERD. Pericarditis. Anxiety. Musculoskeletal."
"What concerns you most?"
I looked back at the patient. Something wasn't right. His color. The way he'd described the pain. I replayed his history.
"He said it started after he got out of bed."
Carlisle said nothing.
"Sudden onset."
Still nothing. Then it clicked.
"Aortic dissection?"
The faintest smile appeared. "What would you expect?"
"Severe tearing chest pain radiating to the back. Pulse deficit. Blood-pressure differential between arms."
"Good."
"But he described pressure."
"Patients rarely read textbooks."
I looked at him. "Do you think that's what it is?"
"I think we should find out."
It was the certainty underneath the words that caught me. Not I suspect. Not possibly. He sounded like he already knew.
Twenty minutes later, imaging confirmed it.
I stared at the scan. Then at Carlisle. Then back at the scan.
"How did you know?"
"I didn't."
"You knew."
"I suspected."
"You knew before I finished the differential."
"Experience."
I looked at him. He couldn't have been much older than his early thirties. "How much experience could you possibly have?"
The question escaped before I could stop it. A flicker crossed his eyes again, there and gone, like a light behind frosted glass.
"Enough."
He walked away.
I watched him go and noticed something almost embarrassing: the cold left with him. Not all at once. It just became easier to breathe once he'd turned the corner.
I rubbed my arms. What the hell was that?
The rest of the day disappeared into medicine. A fractured wrist. A febrile toddler. An elderly woman with pneumonia. A seventeen-year-old who'd put a fishing hook through his thumb and was significantly more concerned about his mother discovering he'd skipped school than the piece of metal currently embedded in his flesh.
Through all of it, Carlisle was extraordinary. That was becoming a problem.
I'd wanted to find something wrong with him. Arrogance. Ego. A God complex. Anything that would make my attraction inconvenient rather than catastrophic.
Instead, he was gentle. Not performatively gentle. Actually gentle.
He crouched beside frightened patients instead of towering over them. He remembered names. He listened. Really listened.
An elderly man with dementia had been agitated for twenty minutes before Carlisle entered the room. Within thirty seconds, he was calm. Carlisle rested one pale hand against his shoulder and spoke to him so softly I couldn't hear the words. The man's entire face changed. He smiled.
My chest did something complicated I didn't have a differential for.
Damn him. Dr. Carlisle Cullen appeared to be exactly the kind of physician I'd spent years hoping to become.
So I watched him. Too much. And because I watched him, I noticed things.
He never drank coffee. Fine. Psychotic, but medically possible.
I never saw him eat. Also possible.
He never sat down. Strange.
He never looked tired. Infuriating.
But it went beyond that. Carlisle didn't experience the tiny inconveniences of having a body at all. He didn't rub his eyes. Didn't stretch his neck after standing over a chart. Didn't crack his back. Didn't take a deep breath after something stressful. Didn't absentmindedly touch his face. He didn't even blink as often as everyone else, like it was a formality he'd been told to observe but didn't strictly need.
Dr. Cullen, I decided, was failing basic mammalhood, and doing it with tremendous personal composure.
Once I'd noticed it, I couldn't stop noticing it. People were messy. Bodies were needy. Dr. Cullen's wasn't.
And sometimes, sometimes he knew someone was approaching before anyone else did. We'd be talking and his eyes would suddenly move toward a doorway. Two seconds later, someone would appear.
The first time, coincidence. The second time, good hearing. By the fifth time, I was paying attention.
At three fourteen, the emergency department exploded.
"Incoming trauma!"
Everything changed.
A logging accident. Thirty-two-year-old male. Crush injury. Massive blood loss. Two minutes out.
Adrenaline flooded my bloodstream. My palms dampened immediately. My mouth went dry. The body really had a sense of humor.
I turned. Carlisle was beside me. I hadn't heard him approach.
The softness was gone from his face. Not the kindness. Something else. Focus.
"Miss Foster."
Our eyes met.
"Stay with me."
There was nothing romantic in the words. There shouldn't have been. Still, my pulse answered before I did.
I nodded.
The ambulance arrived. Then there was blood. So much blood.
The metallic smell filled the room almost instantly. Blood never smelled the way people expected. It wasn't dramatic. It wasn't theatrical. It was warm pennies. Wet iron. Something animal beneath antiseptic.
Paramedics rushed the patient inside.
"Thirty-two-year-old male, crush injury to the lower extremity, hypotensive en route..."
Voices overlapped. Monitors screamed. Shoes squeaked. Gloves snapped.
I moved automatically. Training took over.
Then I looked at Carlisle. And the world narrowed.
He had stopped. Completely. Not frozen in shock. Carlisle Cullen did not look shocked. His eyes were fixed on the blood soaking through the patient's clothing. His face had gone blank. Too blank. The way it had when he'd held my hand that morning.
It frightened me more than the blood did.
His jaw tightened. Once. His nostrils flared so slightly I might not have noticed if I hadn't spent all day studying him like an exam question.
Then his eyes changed. Darkened. It had to be the lighting. Had to be.
But the gold looked swallowed from beneath, drowned by something darker, like watching brandy turn slowly to ink. Hungry. The word arrived in my mind so fast it embarrassed me.
No. Ridiculous. He was a physician. He'd seen more blood than I had.
His hand closed around the edge of a stainless-steel cart. I heard something creak. Metal.
My eyes dropped. His fingers loosened. There was a shallow indentation where his hand had been.
My stomach fell so hard it almost hurt.
No. I blinked. It was still there.
Carlisle closed his eyes. One second. Two. His face remained perfectly still.
I waited for his chest to rise. It didn't. Maybe I missed it. Of course I missed it.
Then his eyes opened. And Dr. Cullen was back. Whatever I'd just seen had been packed neatly away behind that calm golden stare.
"Pressure's dropping." His voice was perfectly controlled. "Two large-bore IVs. Type and cross. Activate massive transfusion."
I turned toward the supply cart. The monitor screamed.
"Pressure sixty over palp."
Someone swore. I grabbed what I needed. Turned back. And stopped.
Carlisle had been across the room. I knew where he'd been. I'd just looked at him. Now he was beside the patient. Ten feet away.
No blur. No rush of white coat. No footsteps. Nothing. Just...
there.
My brain rejected it so aggressively that for a moment I wondered whether I'd moved instead of him.
"Foster."
His voice cut through the noise. I looked up. His eyes found mine.
That was all. But I knew. He knew I'd seen.
His expression barely altered. To anyone else, he probably looked calm. I had already learned his face better than I should have. The hard set of his mouth. The fractional narrowing of his eyes. His shoulders held too still.
For the first time all day, Dr. Carlisle Cullen looked genuinely unsettled. Not because a patient was bleeding out in front of us. Because I was looking at him.
Then the patient groaned. The moment shattered. And we worked.
The rain was harder when I finally left. Of course it was.
I sat behind the wheel of my rental car with the engine running, heater blasting against my damp scrubs. I held my hands over the vent until my fingertips started to sting.
Warmth. Thank God.
I closed my eyes. For a moment I went home. Not literally. My brain just did that thing it does when you're exhausted enough that memory becomes almost physical.
Sunlight. Salt. A tropical beach glowing gold beneath an enormous sky. The wet slap of a swimsuit against skin. Tiny grains of sand caught between my toes. Ocean water warm enough that stepping into it didn't require courage. The plastic smell of sunglasses left baking on a towel. A car steering wheel too hot to touch with your bare palms. Heat sinking through my skin until it felt stored inside my bones.
Back home, I used to complain about it. I'd stand in front of an open refrigerator and curse the humidity while my mother yelled about the electric bill. I'd spent years wanting cooler weather. The universe, it turned out, had taken that personally.
I opened my eyes.
Forks. Gray sky. Black trees. Rain. Cold.
And Dr. Carlisle Cullen.
My brain replayed the trauma room. His hand. The metal. Across the room. Then beside the patient.
No.
There were reasonable explanations. Adrenaline distorted perception. I'd been distracted. Maybe the cart had already been dented. Maybe he'd moved while I wasn't looking. Maybe...
"You're being insane."
My voice sounded too loud inside the car.
My phone buzzed.
FIRST DAY???
I smiled. My mother.
I typed:
Survived. Hospital is cute. Attending is terrifyingly smart. I am slowly developing gills. Send sun.
I hovered over the keyboard. Almost added:
Also I think my attending might be a serial killer.
Deleted it. Then:
Actually scratch that. Possibly a very attractive corpse.
Deleted that too.
Sleep. Clearly I needed sleep.
I tossed my phone onto the passenger seat. The windshield had begun to fog. I reached for the defroster.
Then stopped.
Someone was standing beneath the hospital awning.
Carlisle.
He wasn't wearing a coat over his white one. No umbrella. He stood at the very edge of the shelter watching the rain. Still. Perfectly still.
Everyone else I'd seen outside today hunched against the weather. Shoulders up. Chins tucked. Hands buried in pockets. Carlisle stood as though temperature were something happening to other people.
Of course he did.
I stared at him. From this distance he looked different. Lonelier. Without a patient beside him or a chart in his hands, he looked oddly removed from the hospital behind him. Like he'd been placed in the wrong century and was waiting patiently for someone to notice.
That thought came from nowhere. I frowned at myself.
Then his head turned, and every plan my lungs had for the next several seconds fell through.
He looked directly at me. Not toward the parking lot. At me.
I was halfway across it. Rain hammered against the roof of my car hard enough to blur the world beyond the windshield. My windows were fogged along the edges. There was no possible way he could know I was watching him.
But he did.
Those strange golden eyes found mine immediately. And the deep-freeze feeling returned. Even with the heater blasting against my legs.
My skin pebbled despite the vents aimed at my knees. My heart slammed once, hard enough that I felt the beat against my seat belt before I'd consciously clocked the second one.
Carlisle didn't move. He simply looked at me. The distance should have made his face impossible to read. It didn't.
His head tilted slightly. Not enough to be obvious. Curious, almost. Intent.
That was what bothered me. People glanced. They noticed. They stared. Carlisle looked, and the looking had weight, like a hand pressed flat between my collarbones, holding me still from thirty feet away.
When those eyes landed on me, I had the absurd sensation that there was suddenly nothing else competing for them. Not the rain. Not the ambulance pulling into the far side of the lot. Not the nurse hurrying beneath an umbrella behind him.
Just me, pinned in place by a stare I couldn't have looked away from if the car had caught fire around me.
My pulse jumped again. His face changed, minutely. His mouth softened. Then tightened.
The expression made no sense. It wasn't lust. At least not only lust. It looked almost painful. Like wanting something and regretting the wanting at exactly the same time.
His gaze lowered. Toward my throat.
My stomach dropped.
No. Impossible. He couldn't see my pulse from here. He couldn't even...
I felt it anyway. That little flutter beneath my jaw. My own body betraying me.
His eyes remained there. One second. Two. And heat crawled slowly under my skin, moving like it had somewhere specific to go.
Fear should have made me colder. Instead warmth collected just beneath my collarbones, stubborn and specific, like my body had rerouted its own wiring.
My mouth went dry. My fingers tightened around the steering wheel.
There it was again. That awful contradiction. It reminded me, oddly, of wading into the ocean back home in January just to prove I still could: gasping through the first ten seconds because every nerve in my body swore the cold would kill me, and going in anyway, because some stubborn, idiot part of me always needed to know what was on the other side of the shock.
Run.
Closer.
Every animal on earth had instincts for predators. Freeze. Flee. Fight. Apparently mine had developed a fourth option.
Flirt with it.
Carlisle looked back into my eyes. And smiled. Small. Barely there. Knowing.
A shiver moved slowly down my spine. Not the quick shake of being cold. Something deeper.
My hand rose before I consciously decided to move it. Two fingers pressed against the pulse fluttering beneath my jaw.
The instant I touched it...
Carlisle's smile disappeared. My hand went still. So did he.
For one terrible, thrilling second, I had the sensation that I'd answered a question I hadn't heard him ask.
There was no parking lot between us. No windshield. No hospital. Just those golden eyes. My heartbeat beneath my fingers. And the strange certainty that, impossibly, he knew exactly how fast it was going.
Predator and prey staring at one another through the rain.
Except prey was supposed to want to escape.
I didn't.
That frightened me more than the impossible movement. More than the dented metal. More than his freezing skin. Because I could explain away all of those things if I tried hard enough.
I couldn't explain why the warning bells in my body only made me want him more.
Carlisle stepped backward. The connection broke. He turned and disappeared through the hospital doors.
I watched the empty space he'd left behind. Even from inside my heated car, I could almost feel the temperature rise.
I stared at the entrance for another ten seconds. Then twenty.
One thought settled into me. Cold. Certain.
Something was wrong with Dr. Carlisle Cullen. Something my education couldn't explain. Something my body had understood long before my mind caught up.
And whatever it was...
I wanted to get closer.
