Author's note: I have to apologize to my two fantastic beta-readers for not properly acknowledging them last chapter. Susan ( susan_metadi) and Becky ( TrekBecky), thank you both for being my beta-readers and for helping me out with facts about GH history. Some aspects of Kevin and/or Laura's history and Kevin/Lucy's divorce will be different for the sake of the story but I needed their help to get the basic backstory right.
Kevin did end up thinking about what Elizabeth Webber had said, more often than he wanted to think about. Not consciously. The thought of asking his closest female friend in years on a date came into his mind at the most inopportune times. Like when he was refilling his coffee at work in the five minutes he allotted himself in between patient sessions or when he had to squint to try and read his own handwriting when he attempted to organize client notes at the end of a day of work. When he tried to use all of his cryptology powers to unlock the next set of Helena's clues based on whatever latest information he had discovered because inevitably that caused him to think of Laura and reminded him all over again how brave she had to have been her entire life to deal with the Cassadines. When he was at home using the precious little free time he had to set up designated times that worked for both of them to be able to FaceTime with his daughter in France. The time difference between New York and France combined with his work schedule meant they only talked via FaceTime once a week and it was always the highlight of his week when he saw her face pop up on his laptop screen.
And here he'd been thinking the last six months had gone well for him, considering. Working on Helena's mysterious clues and going on what amounted to a scavenger hunt in and around Port Charles had done a lot to break up the monotony of his life when he wasn't working and he'd made a new friend in the meantime. At least he had spent all this time thinking she'd been a friend. Not once in the last half-year had he thought of Laura as anything other than a client or a friend. Now, because of what Elizabeth had said, for the past three weeks he hadn't been able to get her out of his head. He tried, but she was determined to stay in his mind.
Kevin wanted to be able to blame Elizabeth for bringing the situation to his attention entirely unprovoked - he had only talked to her for couple of minutes and even when he rewound the conversation in his mind couldn't remember that he had said anything to encourage this notion of hers - but that wouldn't be fair to Elizabeth. He wasn't a psychiatrist for nothing and his inner psychiatrist told him that deflection was just another form of denial and that Elizabeth couldn't have gotten this type of reaction out of him if the thoughts hadn't been buried deep inside him in the first place. Sometimes he hated his inner psychiatrist.
Not long after his and Lucy's divorce had been finalized his daughter had shown up at his new apartment and told him that enough was enough, she'd given him the requisite one month to wallow in self-pity and she wasn't going to let him shut himself off forever and eventually he did have to go on some dates and open himself up to the possibility of love again. It had taken the better part of eleven months for Christina to forgive her mother for the divorce and even now their relationship wasn't what it was. Lucy had tried to blame him for that but Kevin shut that down fast. Kevin purposefully had refused to tell Christina the whole truth of what Lucy had done and why he'd filed for divorce but Christina had found out, somehow, and without reservation she'd taken his side. (Because Lucy humiliated you in front of the whole town, he thought to himself.) Christina had gone running to his friend Mac Scorpio not long after that visit and they had conspired against him. Barely two months after the ink on the divorce decree dried, Mac had started setting Kevin up on dates.
Once-a-month dates had quickly become twice-a-month dates until it became every other week and finally once a week, and that had been when Kevin had to ultimately put his foot down and put a stop to the blind dates because it wasn't fair for him or any of the women for him to be on any sort of date when he didn't want to be. He and Lucy had been married for seventeen years, he'd raised her daughter since she was a toddler - the greatest joy of his life was having Christina call him daddy - and the end result of their marriage was that Lucy had broken most of if not all of his heart when she had openly cheated on him with their daughter's adoptive father.
Three years had passed since the day the the divorce papers had been signed by the judge and he was officially recognized as a single man, even though it would take him even longer to consider himself single. Three years that Kevin had thrown himself wholeheartedly into work and maintaining a bi-continental relationship with his daughter. The only dates he'd been on were the ones set up entirely by Mac, no matter how well-intentioned Mac might have been.
Three years since he had even thought about wanting to date - until now. Elizabeth Webber had opened the floodgates to the idea of Laura and him together in a romantic sense and he couldn't think of anything else now except how the idea honestly appealed to him. Which forced him to think about how embarrassing it would be for both of them if he stumbled through an attempt to ask her out on a date, considering he hadn't done anything remotely like that in years.
Kevin glanced at the bottom righthand corner of his computer screen and did a double-take. He had been so lost in his thoughts that he hadn't realized he'd stayed an extra thirty minutes tonight and Sofia wasn't there this week to keep him on schedule. He shutdown his computer and gathered his files and locked them in the appropriate cabinets so he wouldn't have to spend his first fifteen minutes tomorrow looking for the Anderson file. He picked up his briefcase, pushed in his chair and locked his office door. He was in the elevator and halfway to the ground floor, where he got off to take the stairs to the parking garage, when he for whatever reason pressed the button for the floor of the emergency room. If he remembered correctly from an earlier conversation he'd had with a colleague, Nurse Webber was on shift tonight. Kevin intended to share some of his most recent thoughts with her.
Namely that General Hospital wasn't a place for gossip and that he didn't intend for himself and Laura to be the newest target of made-up stories. He'd worked at the hospital long enough to know that the hospital gossip train worked faster than the regular Port Charles gossip track, a feat Kevin privately found fascinating in of itself. Elizabeth was a nurse, surely she could use her time more wisely with actual medical emergencies and not spend her time trying to start something where nothing existed. Yet. Maybe what bothered Kevin more than the gossip was the thought that something might exist between him and Laura that other people seemed to know about.
People like Elizabeth Webber, someone who was a close friend of Laura's, her former daughter-in-law and mother of three of her grandchildren. Laura had told him once that Elizabeth would always be a daughter to her no matter her relationship with Lucky. It was because of Elizabeth that any of this was happening - if she hadn't said what she had said about Laura coming back to him because she enjoyed spending time with him and told him to think about it, Kevin could have spent his Saturday working on code-breaking and speaking to Laura on the phone in the evening as usual, maybe even meeting her at the MetroCourt for lunch, and everything would still be all right. It was hearing Elizabeth put words to the feelings and saying those words out loud that had brought Kevin's hopelessly confused feelings kicking and screaming to the front of his brain and once they were there he couldn't have put them back again even if he wanted to. Laura was suddenly in the forefront of all of his thoughts as an attractive woman. Here was an attractive woman that knew him, was close to him, and who he might possibly want to ask out on a date. And multiple dates after the first.
The elevator dinged and opened its doors to the emergency room floor and as luck would have it, Kevin didn't have to wait long until he saw Nurse Webber coming to the front desk from the direction of a patient's room. He stood back for a few minutes to allow her to do what she needed to do for her job but as soon as he saw her close the chart and go in the direction of the snack machines, he followed her.
Kevin waited patiently as she inserted her dollar into the machine, took a few seconds to consider her options and pressed the button for the snack she wanted. "Nurse Webber, if it's not too much trouble can I speak to you for a few moments, please?"
Elizabeth didn't even do the socially acceptable thing of trying to hide her wide smile when she noticed who was speaking to her, something which annoyed Kevin greatly. "Is it something personal again? About Laura?" Oh, how was your date, by the way? She's being very mysterious about the whole thing, just so you know. Won't tell me anything."
"You talked to her?"
"I texted her to ask if she wanted to meet the boys and I for dinner a few nights ago and I might have dropped your name into the conversation on purpose. She didn't have a clue what I was talking about." Judging by the look on Kevin's face, this was a very big deal. She grinned. "Are you two trying to keep things discreet? That's so sweet. I won't tell anyone, I promise."
"Are we trying to keep what discreet?"
She went on as if she hadn't even heard the question and reached into the little compartment of the vending machine to take out her candy bar. "Or if you don't care and the two of you are okay with making this thing between the two of you public, that works too. Word of advice: follow her lead. Whatever route she wants to take is the one you should go with."
Kevin squeezed the bridge of his nose and practiced his personal relaxation techniques and counted to ten. Somehow they had only been talking for two minutes and he felt like he was missing entire chunks of the conversation. She reminded him a lot of his ex-wife that way. "Elizabeth, what in the world are you talking about? I came down here to tell you that I very much do not want Laura and myself to become the topic de jour of hospital gossip and intrigue so if you could keep our last conversation to yourself I would appreciate it - how was our what?
Elizabeth looked at him blankly. She had already pushed the button for and retrieved a second candy bar, which she broke off a piece and offered half of the second one to him. Kevin politely said no. He had dinner on the slow-cooker waiting for him at home. "Your date," she repeated, speaking slowly as if she were speaking to a toddler. "You did ask Laura out on a date and took her out somewhere nice and romantic, didn't you? Please don't tell me you took her to Kelly's or The Floating Rib. Come on, Dr. Collins, she deserves so much better than that."
Kevin swallowed back the urge to give up and walk away. He hadn't realized until right this minute what a blessing it was that he and Nurse Webber specialized in different areas of medicine and thus worked on different floors. From the little he knew of her professionally she was an excellent nurse, but she made him uncomfortable asking questions he didn't want to answer. Though he assumed that was more his fault then hers given that he was the one that had sought her out. He could only hope she hadn't actually used the word date when she spoke to Laura about him. "Not that this is any of your business, but - no, I didn't take Laura on a date."
Her expression fairly screamed we talked three weeks ago, what the hell have you been doing all this time? "I'm...sorry, I thought you would have by now. You looked like you wanted to the last time we talked."
He didn't want to tell her that was part of the problem - he wanted to ask her out and hadn't actively asked a woman out on a first date in at least fifteen years. "I'm thinking about the best way to go about the part of doing the asking," Kevin heard himself admitting. Why he was admitting any of this to Elizabeth Webber of all people, General Hospital gossip extraordinaire, he wished he knew. It was possible that part of him was hoping that by talking it out with a woman that knew Laura well and knew what she liked and didn't like, she would be some help for him. "I am afraid when it comes to that subject I am woefully out of practice."
Elizabeth had deposited her wrappers in the trash can, turning to walk back to the main desk and get back to her charting when she rewound in her head what Dr. Collins had just told her. "It's been three years, almost, since your divorce, isn't that right, Dr. Collins?" she asked hesitantly. He nodded after a few seconds and she boldly continued on, damned the consequences for her professionally if Dr. Collins was so insulted that he wanted to get her fired. Jake's grandmother was chief of staff here, she couldn't be fired. "You've been on dates since Lucy, haven't you? You're a good-looking man, you've had to have gone on some dates." Dr. Collins shook his head and Elizabeth bit her lip nervously. "You - haven't been on a date since your divorce?"
"Blind dates set up by my well-intentioned but meddling best friend and my daughter," he said with reluctance. Elizabeth saw it clear on his face how he looked like he wanted to retreat back from this conversation as soon as possible. "I haven't asked anyone out since my divorce, no, to answer your question. Haven't wanted to, honestly -"
"Until now." Kevin sighed when Elizabeth felt the need to finish his unfinished sentence. It wasn't her fault he hadn't asked Laura on a date. But it didn't mean he had to appreciate the intrusive nature of her questions. "Until you started spending so much time with Laura."
"Nurse Webber, I will make you a deal," Kevin said quietly. "If we talk next week and I still haven't asked her on a date yet, you have my permission to, within reason, get on my case to get it done. If and when I do ask her on a date, what I had originally stopped on this floor to tell you stands: Laura Spencer and myself, or my love life, or my lack of of a love life, is not a subject for on-call room conversations amongst the staff or any sort of hospital gossip. Am I making myself clear?"
She instinctively knew she had pushed her luck with Dr. Collins and didn't feel it necessary to bring up that she wasn't the one initiating these one-on-one conversations nor was she discussing these conversations with Sabrina, Felix or any of the other nurses. Dr. Collins was respected enough and had more than enough professional clout to get her fired if he wanted. "Oh, absolutely," she nodded. "I wouldn't want to hurt Laura for anything."
Kevin nodded. "Please see that you don't."
He headed back to the elevators and to his car in the garage and in under half an hour was parking his car in his driveway and unlocking his front door. Going inside he immediately shed his sports coat and hung it on the back of a kitchen chair and set his briefcase on the counter. Lastly he took his phone out of his coat pocket and have it visible on the counter with the ringer on in case someone decided to call him, however minute the chance was. Christina or calls from work were the only ones he felt obligated to answer right away no matter the time, and he had a specialized ringtone for Christina. Laura Spencer, though, was rapidly working her way into that exclusive three-person group. Kevin always enjoyed his phone calls with her.
He went to grab a beer and checked the slow-cooker to see for himself just how slow dinner was actually cooking. While he was waiting he retrieved a bowl from the cabinet, a spoon from the drawer, and went back to the refrigerator to see if there was anything in there that looked appetizing or if he needed to go to the grocery store this weekend. He was just closing the refrigerator door when he saw it stuck to the side with a magnet, the original scrap of paper Laura had written her phone number on six months ago. Her cell phone number, so they didn't have to communicate solely by email or message boards anymore. And even though Kevin had faithfully programmed her number into his phone and watched her do the same with his when they first met in person and agreed to work together to unravel Helena's mysterious clues, he had just as faithfully kept that paper scrap and stuck it to his fridge so it wouldn't get lost.
Over the course of their six months of working together and their friendship, it would be the first of many things he'd done for Laura without knowing at the time why he was doing them.
But now he thought he did know. It was quite possible that all of those little things he had done for her or with her in mind had led him to this moment right now.
Kevin forgot about what was simmering on the stove in the slow-cooker and set down his beer on the counter without sliding a napkin underneath like he always did. As if on autopilot he looked around his apartment and belongings, almost like he was seeing them for the first time. Books on cryptology and code-breaking piled high on a table in his living room because Laura had called him last night with a new development. Intermingled in the notepads and his papers half-filled with his notes were pieces of paper with a decidedly feminine handwriting, from their informal meeting sessions at the MetroCourt. There was even a reminder in her handwriting for him to remember to buy coffee filters the next time he was at the grocery store because she'd noticed he was running low. Laura's phone number on his refrigerator and her picture instead of her name as his contact in his cell phone. (Kevin had a hunch that if he went online to check his cell phone bill he would find that Laura was his most-called name of the last two months, not counting his daughter.) He had gone the extra step to set a reminder in his phone, even, to get in touch with Laura once a day every day by email or phone if for no other reason than to pick her brain and see if she had any new ideas for what Helena's mysterious clues could represent or a new angle they hadn't yet explored. Kevin spotted in his trash can the remnants of their Chinese take-out from earlier in the week when he'd invited Laura to his apartment last-minute because he had made an important discovery in regards to Helena and hadn't felt like going all the way out to Wyndemere. (The inner voice in his head told him that he easily could have just called her or sent her a long email but wanted to see her in person instead.) It had been close enough to dinnertime when Laura had arrived that he had felt compelled to feed her.
And from thinking about all of that it was a short step for Kevin to all of a sudden realize exactly just how much of his non-work related life revolved around Laura Spencer especially in the last six months, and how much he liked it that way.
Kevin's eyes tracked back to his refrigerator, to that scrap of paper with her phone number on it, to Laura's handwriting, and he made up his mind to stop talking himself out of the idea of trusting a woman. Laura wasn't like Lucy. She wouldn't hurt him the same way Lucy had. It scared him to put his faith, not to mention the small, unguarded piece of his heart he still had left, in Elizabeth Webber and to trust her that she was telling him the truth about Laura's feelings, simply because if he had learned anything in the last three weeks it was that he had feelings for her, too, and they weren't going away just because he wanted to push them down and ignore anything that had to do with it.
But he had to try. If she said yes or if she said no he had to try. Kevin couldn't ignore anymore the fervent hope that she'd say yes to a date with him.
Kevin took his beer back to the refrigerator and the bowl and silverware back to their assigned places. He reached for his phone and scrolled right away to Laura's phone number in his contact list, dialing her number and tucking the phone between his chin and his ear while simultaneously grabbing for his car keys and unplugging the slow-cooker with his other hand, dumping the entirety of its contents into the sink and running the garbage disposal. He'd get something to eat when he was in town. He might ask Laura if she wanted him to pick something up for her, too.
He was halfway to his car already when he heard Laura's soft and melodic voice on the other end of the line. "Kevin?" she asked. Kevin checked his watch and was surprised to see it was only six-thirty. When he called her in the evenings to talk Helena he usually called her between seven and eight because they'd discovered that was a time when both of them were for the most part free, no wonder she sounded surprised to hear him now. "When I said to call me when it was convenient for you, I didn't mean you had to call so soon after you got off work."
"I'm not calling to ask you anything about Helena or talk to you about Helena. Sometimes, Laura, I like hearing your voice and I get the urge to call you. Imagine that," he teased, smiling to himself when he was rewarded with her quiet laugh. He set the function for his BlueTooth and reversed his car out of the driveway. "I'm calling because I wanted to talk to you. Ask you something, if that's okay. Are you in the middle of something? I'd like to come out to Wyndemere to talk to you in person."
"It might be because I've trained myself to look for the hidden meaning in everything, but - that sounds more than a little ominous. Is everything alright?"
Kevin would have banged his head on the steering wheel in frustration if he hadn't been absolutely sure Laura would have heard him and asked him what was wrong. He was approaching this wrong, he knew it, and he hadn't even asked her out yet. He hadn't even worked it out in his head what he was going to say. Maybe he should have listened to that voice in his head and talked this asking-Laura-on-a-date plan over with Christina or Mac beforehand and gotten some advice. "Yes, everything is fine, Laura, I don't mean to scare you. That's the last thing in the world I want to do right now. Clearly I'm not prepared for this. Are you absolutely sure it's fine for me to come to Wyndemere?"
Kevin smiled in spite of himself because he could practically see her confused face in his mind. "Not prepared for - never mind. Nikolas is in nonstop emergency meetings with lawyers and he's probably thought up another scheme to keep ELQ out of Quartermaine hands even though Jason has been legally declared alive, and Spencer is with Dante, Lulu and Rocco for the night. I've got the house to myself for the night and you can come over whenever you want. I'll be here."
'Whenever he wanted' apparently translated to right now for Kevin because she had only just finished putting in the dishwasher the tupperware from the leftovers she'd heated up for dinner. Spencer would be appalled his grandmother was eating leftovers and hadn't insisted the help made her a new meal, not to mention how she had put the dishes in the dishwasher herself. Laura heard the persistent vibration of her cell phone and wiped her hands on a dishtowel, checking it even though she had a pretty good idea who it was calling. Sure enough it was a text from Kevin telling her the launch was scheduled to arrive in five minutes and he'd get the rest of the way there himself.
Impressive, Laura thought to herself, considering he had first spoken to her about coming over twenty minutes ago and the launch ride from Port Charles to Spoon Island was fifteen minutes. Whatever he had to say to her that he couldn't say over the phone must be important.
Laura attempted to keep herself from inexplicably worrying about Kevin and cleaned up the kitchen - why leave it for the Wyndemere staff to clean when she could just as easily clean it herself, and unfortunately despite her best efforts to instill those same values in her grandson Spencer didn't agree with her on that point - when there was a knock at the door. She wiped her hands again on a dishtowel and went to open the front door of the mansion. Kevin Collins stood in front of her and for the very first time that she could remember, he looked unsure. He was looking at her and he looked unsure.
She immediately motioned for him to come inside. She didn't know when Nikolas was going to be home and if she was being perfectly honest being all alone at Wyndemere frightened her sometimes, even with the guards. Maybe if Kevin haven't eaten she could convince him to stay for awhile and she could fix him something. They could watch a movie after or just talk, it didn't matter to her. She just liked spending time with him. She liked spending time with him very much.
"You sounded serious on the phone," she murmured. "You, um, Kevin, we're friends, aren't we? You'd tell me if something was bothering you? You've been helping me so much with my troubles, I don't want this friendship to be one-sided." Laura took a few steps forward to put her hand on his arm, her eyes widening when she just thought of something. "Oh, Kevin, your daughter...Christina? Did something happen to her? Did Lucy call you and tell you something?"
Kevin looked into Laura's bright blue eyes filled with nothing but concern for his daughter, and his heart dropped to the lowest pit of his stomach when all he could see in her face was how honestly worried she looked for him. He hadn't approached this correctly at all. He'd scared her, made her think something was wrong when all he wanted to do was ask her to have dinner with him. No wonder Mac had taken it upon himself to schedule dates for him. Laura looked at him expectantly, those bright blue eyes just oozing concern, and if he was forced to be honest the only reason he wasn't taking her in his arms and kissing all her hurts and doubts away was that it would be incredibly inappropriate under the circumstances and would drastically reduce his chances of getting a date with her from a cautious maybe to a definitive nil and nada. "Oh, Laura, no, no, Christina is fine and I'm fine. It's nothing like that. I really didn't intend to frighten you by coming here unexpectedly and not telling you why. I'm so sorry, honestly. There's just something in particular I wanted to ask you and I thought it warranted more of an in-person visit rather than over the phone."
Laura's eyes softened and she motioned for him to follow her into Wyndemere's living room. "Well, now you've got me curious," she admitted. "Feel free to ask me anything, whatever it is that you felt compelled to come out here for."
Kevin followed her into the den but didn't sit down. Those chairs at Wyndemere were awfully comfortable and he was afraid that if he sat down in one he wouldn't be able to get back up, and to be frank he was too nervous to sit. He stared in the bright, caring eyes of a befuddled Laura and hesitated for only a moment before he took her hand and held it between both of his, and without thinking about implications, started to stroke the inside of her palm with his thumb.
He stopped when the logical part of his brain realized that what he was doing was far too intimate a gesture for their relationship as it was now, but if he would have looked closely Kevin would have seen the confusion mired by the flash of disappointment in Laura's eyes when he took his hand away even that slightest amount. "Laura, will you have dinner with me?" he asked quietly, tentatively, after what he felt like was far too long of excruciating silence, but in reality was less than a minute at most. "Not a casual dinner like what we've been doing, either. I - I like spending time with you and I like listening to you. I thought we could talk and learn more about each other. Not talking about Helena or anything to do with her mystery clues. Talking about you, and me, and whatever is happening in our lives that we want to talk about that isn't Helena Cassadine."
It felt far too long to Kevin that she didn't speak and if he had been cognizant of anything but his heart thumping beneath his ribs with nervous energy in a way he couldn't remember it doing since Lucy Kevin would have noticed Laura step closer to him. All of a sudden there she was, close enough that he could smell her perfume, and he had to stop himself from physically reacting to her close proximity and allowing his hands to wander to her hips and pull her into him. He didn't speak or even move and to his amazement Laura's hand lifted up to touch his cheek, and she cocked her head to the left and gave him a soft smile. "Kevin Collins, are you asking me out on a date?"
Kevin swallowed. "Yes. Yes, I am. Was that not clear?"
Laura quickly moved her hand from his cheek and placed it over his mouth before he could say another word, worried that he'd find a way to talk himself out of what had obviously taken him a lot of courage to come over to Wyndemere and do. "No, you were perfectly clear. So I'd like to be clear, too. Yes, Kevin Collins, I'd like to go to dinner with you. It's a date."