The night of Sam's party he comes out of the men's room at Ike Ryan's and finds Neela waiting in the alcove, leaning against the ancient pay phone. "There you are," she says. "I couldn't find you."
He smiles a little, he can't help it. He likes the idea of her noticing when he's gone. "I'm right here."
"I see that." She puts her hands up, palms out, and he laces his fingers with hers. He's a dumbass, but he can't not touch her. They stand there for a moment. "Do you hate me very much?" she asks.
Ray almost laughs. "No."
"Well." Neela exhales. He wonders if it's exhausting to be her, to carry around all that worry and guilt all the time. "Good. "
"Okay," he says. He expects her to let go of him, but she doesn't. He waits. He can hear the music from the jukebox piping in through the speakers, some ridiculous R. Kelly slow jam that Morris must have picked. He thinks again of the football player from this afternoon whose wife coded, the guy who couldn't read. Ray doesn't like the idea of needing someone so much. It's freaking him out. "Look, Neela, we should--"
He's going to say get back--seems he does have one shred of self-preservation left after all--but she kisses him first this time, her hands tightening around his. Goddamn. He wasn't expecting--he would never in a million years have pegged that as her next move, but she's always had that random impulsive streak and anyway it's not like he doesn't want her to, like he hasn't been thinking about it all day. All year. Whatever. He kisses her back.
"I'm sorry," she says after a moment, pulling away, resting her forehead on his shoulder. "This isn't fair to you."
"Hey." His hand goes to the back of her head, like an instinct. There's a drum solo happening in his chest. She's going to destroy him, and he can't do one single thing to stop it. "I'll worry about me, okay?"
Neela takes a deep breath. "Yeah," she says softly, though she doesn't look convinced. "All right."
All right.
He kisses her again, hooking his fingers in her belt loops, pulling her close. It's soft. She smells like the soap the surgeons scrub with but under that like herself, spicy like cinnamon, like how the apartment used to smell before she moved out. The wall is cold against his arm. She makes a little humming sound, the murmur of it vibrating down his backbone. Ray tries to concentrate. Last night in the car his head was too noisy to pay attention to anything and now he wants to remember, in case he doesn't get the chance again.
That guy this afternoon, he couldn't understand the signs.
Ray already kind of knows it's hopeless.
He kisses her anyway.
*
"Are you okay?" Tony wants to know. He's caught her standing at the admit desk, staring blankly at the board. "Every time I see you you look like you want to throw up."
Neela blinks. Truthfully, she's miserable. She can't quiet her thoughts. She's spent her whole life flinging herself into work in order to escape whatever personal garbage she can't control but lately even that's a gauntlet, Lucien and Crenshaw and Park making up some kind of bizarre unholy trinity, the witches from Macbeth. The ER is frenetic with news of the closing, and Katey Alvaro shot her a particularly nasty look in the elevator today. Your face will freeze that way, Neela almost snapped. Honestly.
One thing she learned when she was living with Ray is that she doesn't have to like every girl he dates.
Or any of them.
She's nervous all the time. She doesn't know what steps to take. She feels exposed, laid out for everyone to see, and frankly all she wants to do is hide out in her apartment listening to Norah Jones and thinking dark thoughts. She knows Ray would disapprove (of Norah, at least--while they were living together she used to play that CD so frequently he came up with alternate lyrics to every track on it, including but certainly not limited to don't know why this song's so dumb) and that just makes her want to do it more.
She's a bit pissed at him, actually. She doesn't know why he had to go and make things so complicated.
She can't stop thinking about his face.
Nobody has ever looked at her like that before. Certainly not Tony.
Not even Michael.
Oh, God.
She's sorry. She's terrible. She's so sorry, she is, because she can't look at Ray without remembering every time he put his arm on the back of the sofa and she didn't move over, every time she stared at that blasted tattoo on his pale, freckly back. Every time she stood too close or told too much or felt too jealous of the girls in his bed, their mouths at his jawline, their legs around his narrow hips. God in heaven, she's a surgeon, she spends her days and nights rearranging people's insides, and never in her life has she felt more aware of someone else's body. It was madness. It was too much.
So she put some space between them--she tried to fix it, to sew it up--but it was too late. It wasn't love. It wasn't. She was married to someone else, so it couldn't have been. But it was something. Neela was never unfaithful to her husband, though she might as well have been, and if being with Tony occasionally makes her feel like a bit like a merry widow, at least she doesn't feel like a traitorous wife.
"Mayday," Tony says now, waving a hand in front of her face. "Are you listening to me?"
No, actually. She blinks again, shaking her head. "I'm fine," she tells him. "Just a bit tired."
"You work too hard," he decides. One thing she liked about Tony initially was how everything he said had an air of authority about it, like he'd never once in his whole life worried about making the wrong call.
Lately she suspects it's mostly bullshit, but still.
*
So he's waiting it out.
He's trying, anyway.
He meant what he said to the violin kid. He believes in patience. It just kind of sucks, that's all. Ray tries to keep his head down, clear the board, get through the day without looking too outwardly pathetic. It's spring so they get a lot of bee stings and hay fever, meatheads who can't grill a hot dog without damn near burning the house down. He works. It's fine. And if every time he sees her with Gates it feels physical, like his fucking ribs have parted ways, well, that's nobody's business but his own.
Jesus. He doesn't know what his deal is. Never in his life has his relationship with a girl been so...intense. Not on his end, anyway. He imagines every single chick he never called back sitting in a Starbucks and having a giggle at his expense. What goes around, right?
It's actually not that funny, though. He feels weird all the time. He thinks he's probably drinking too much and he can't get over the notion that something bad is about to happen. His mom moved to Louisiana not that long ago and now she's always talking to him about voodoo, about witches who sit in the park and charge five bucks for your future.
Also about tropical storm warnings, and whether or not he got his tax return in on time.
Whatever. He's just saying, something's off the last few weeks.
He feels like a total douche for the shit he pulled with Katey, is the other thing, and he's never been that guy. He's not saying he hasn't hooked up with a lot of girls, because he has, but he never strung one along like that before and in the back of his mind he knows it was a dick move. And he liked her, honestly. He was almost grateful when she called him out like that the other day, like at least there's one person at County who's finally had enough bullshit.
Unlike, you know, some other people he could name.
He's pretty sure Neela feels something for him, at least. He's been pretty sure since they lived together, the two of them biting at each other like middle-schoolers and he just--he's not usually wrong about girls. He's not usually wrong about Neela. He knows her.
He's pretty sure she knows him, too.
Ray sighs, grabbing a couple of charts out of the rack. He was straightedge for awhile in college. He could try that again, he guesses. He feels like he needs a change.
"Oh, quit being such a little bitch, Barnett," Morris tells him, thrusting three more charts into his hands. "None of us are interested in your brooding, pseudo-artistic man-pain."
Well. Ray snorts. So much for not looking outwardly pathetic. He's going to get his act together. Really. At the very least he can tell you right now that he's going to stop doing emo self-destructive shit like listening to Tupelo Honey in the truck on the way to work and getting weird pangs when he sees couples with dogs on Lakeshore Drive. What kind of woman is he, anyway? Jesus.
He prints a picture of a donkey off the Internet, writes sorry I'm an ass across the bottom, and sticks it in Katey's locker.
The days are getting longer. He tries to picture his summer, and can't.
*
Several nights later she steals up to the roof for some air and finds him waiting by the helipad, hands in the pockets of his long white coat. "Pileup on 90," he explains, when she comes to stand at his side. "Abby'll be up in a sec."
Neela nods. It's quite nice out here, now that the weather is getting warmer. The city is glowing, office buildings and purple sky. She scans the horizon for the chopper. "You want me?"
"Well." Ray smirks.
Well. Something in her middle kicks up a bit. "Shut up," she manages. "That's not what I meant."
"You started it."
"You started it," she retorts automatically, but something about that doesn't ring entirely true. "Well," she repeats after a moment. She glances over at him, at the light playing on his good, familiar face. "Perhaps we both did."
"Oh yeah?" He rocks back on his heels. "Perhaps?"
"Perhaps." Neela takes a deep breath. She's exhausted with all of this, the endless two-step they've been doing, feeling mean and guilty and homesick for something she can't quite name. She doesn't want to lie. That's what was wonderful about Ray to begin with, how completely unnecessary it was to posture in front of him, how stupid it always seemed to be anything but honest. "Ray," she begins.
This is will not be casual, and Neela is so afraid.
She tries again. "Ray."
"Yeah." He squints a little; his green eyes are very dark. The way he looks at her is terrifying, like he sleeps behind her heart. She can hear the helicopter approaching. There is not enough time in the world.
"I'm glad you shaved that rubbish off your face," she says finally, calling out over the rising sound. "You looked like a total wanker."
"Thanks." Ray grins and leans close to her, speaks right into her ear. "You're killing me, Rasgotra, you know that?"
She does know that.
The door slams behind them; Abby is crossing the roof, hair flying. "You want in on this?" she yells in Neela's general direction.
She looks at Ray. His white coat billows out behind him, and it makes her think of wings. "I think I might," she shouts, but her voice gets lost beneath the chop of the rotor, disappearing into the noise.
Soon, then.
*
He's working up in peds while the ER is under construction, which is half a great time and half a total bummer. He likes kids. They're a hoot. There's an eight-year-old with CF who kicks his ass at Wii baseball every time he stops by on rounds, and a fourth-grader with giant glasses and two busted kidneys who asks him constantly if he's got a girlfriend. She's scheduled for a transplant this weekend, actually, and Ray makes a mental note to see who's scrubbing in.
Neela texts him on Thursday afternoon (he's off so he's cleaning the apartment, which was on his List of Things to Do to Stop Being a Miserable Waste) to make sure he's going to this thing tonight. There's something about an ER dinner that sort of smacks of eighth-grade mixer to him, but MANDATORY was all over the memo in 36 point Helvetica, so he writes her back no doubt and slips his phone into his pocket. He's carrying a week's worth of empty water glasses to the sink when he hears it chime again:
Save me a dance?
Huh.
Ray pokes his tongue into his cheek, willing himself not to smile. He waits five minutes. He is playing it cool. Absolutely, he keys in. You. Me. Macarena.
That's noncommital, right? That's low-key.
It beeps again ten seconds later.
Was thinking something a bit slower.
Ray stands there for a minute, reading it over.
Come to think of it, he did pretty well at the eighth-grade mixer.
He gets kind of lazy with the cleaning after that. He wants to leave a little early anyway so he can swing by work and see if he can grab that CD out of his locker, so he throws some dirty clothes in the hamper, gives the sink a halfhearted swipe with a bath towel he finds on the floor, and hops in the shower. He irons. He messes with his hair for awhile. He tries not to think about the possibility of this whole ridiculous thing going his way after all, but when he catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror he sees he's grinning like a fucking chimp.
A bit slower.
Oh, man.
Ray takes one last look in the mirror, and then he walks out the door.