Dead Ringer: Chapter Twenty-Six

Go here for Chapter Twenty-five.

CHAPTER 26

Miller Wytheman and I had known each other a good deal longer and a whole lot better than we should have. I was a junior at NC State when we met at the campus dive bar I frequented. I was ostensibly majoring in psychology but mostly majoring in how to avoid despair, having lost both mother and father in the previous year. I thought enough alcohol and the occasional one-night stand would help.

Miller, a newly-minted neurosurgeon, was young and blue-eyed and absurdly golden, ridiculously handsome. He swore up and down he was separated from his wife. He’d snaked an arm around my waist and pulled me close. Through his starched white dress shirt I felt the hard iron of his biceps, and I didn’t hate it. “Paperwork’s been filed,” he said. “Just waiting for the attorneys to hash things out.”

I wanted to ask him what he was doing in a campus bar, but I already knew. I let him buy me a beer, and then I let him buy me another, and then...well, I let a lot of things happen over the next three months that today I look back on with a good deal of regret. I was desperate and needy and angry at the world and thoroughly lost. No excuses, just context.

Now, with Dr. Miller Wytheman the only other passenger in the elevator and standing a matter of feet away from me, my mouth went dry. I remembered his smell — sandalwood and something sharply citrus. I remembered his touch, lingering and hot. And I remembered his voice. Like deep brown velvet soaked in a dangerous drizzle of bourbon and honey that left me wondering if his patients ever actually needed anesthesia, or if he just talked to them so soothingly that they obediently went off to sleep so he could slice into their skulls.

He took a step toward me but didn’t come too close, probably still carrying the memory of the last time we’d seen each other when I’d thrown a hard roll at him at a tony French restaurant, making a scene right out of a bad romcom and leaving a small cut on his chiseled cheek.

“Blainey Blair,” he said, and I hated how hearing him speak my name set up some vibration in my blood. I hated how easily I remembered the mind-blowing sex. Most of all, I hated that I’d been so willfully naive that I’d let the affair go on even after I discovered he’d lied about a pending divorce. The divorce did come later, of course, because, duh, I wasn’t the only one Miller kept on the side.

It was never my hope he’d ditch his wife and turn to me. I had no desire to be showered with diamond tennis bracelets, had no interest in being taken to conferences in St. Lucia and Stockholm. I wasn’t looking for anything permanent.

He helped me…pass the time, is the best I can say it. Until I got my feet back under me. Father Jerry helped me with that, but that’s another story for another day.

I could see from his forehead’s glossy patina and uplifted eyebrows that he’d had work done, and I confess, it pleased me greatly to think of him as that insecure. “Hi, Miller,” I said. “What brings you to St. Regis? The last I heard, you’d gone to Michigan?”

Look at me, making small talk. Also, please, Jesus, don’t let him say he’s taken a position here.

“Oh, yes. We were in Detroit for quite a while. We moved back to North Carolina several years ago and I’m now at Duke. I’m consulting on a case today. And you…” He trailed off as I watched him take in the lettering on my name tag, stumbling over the words.

I wondered who ‘we’ referred to these days but didn’t ask. “I’m a chaplain, yes,” I said to help him out. I angled myself toward the door that, according to the subtle shift I felt from the elevator car slowing, should open any moment now.

“And you work here?” he asked.

A soft chime announced our arrival on the first floor. “I do, yes. In the Pastoral Care department while the director is on leave.”

“How interesting,” he said. I ground my teeth as the door took its sweet time opening. For a brief, terrifying moment panic roared through me — what if the Universe chose right now for a little cosmic joke and left me stuck in an elevator with a man who’d made the top five list of people I wished I’d never set eyes on again?

“It is interesting!” I spoke too loudly, too brightly because of said panic, and then, as if a motor somewhere had been engaged, my mouth started to run. “I was in Pennsylvania but I moved back here and Fred, that’s the director, Fred Moseley, had to take a leave of absence to care for his wife because she’s dealing with a recurrence of breast cancer, and he asked me…”

The look on Miller’s face stopped me, and thank God for that because I was starting to feel like a semi that had lost its brakes on a very steep hill.

“Good old Fred,” Miller said, but his eyes seemed to relay something shadowy and unreadable. The door slid open and we stepped out into the lobby together. “He and I briefly crossed paths in med school.”

“Yeah, I forget how small the medical community really is,” I said. He’d unnerved me with the momentary reaction that I was beginning to wonder if I’d imagined. I peered up at him for a moment, searching his face for a sign of…well, anything, but his expression remained utterly impassive. Botox or a very accomplished recovery. Or both.

He reached out and briefly put a hand on my arm. “Listen, let’s get a drink sometime and catch up. Do you have a business card?” and I realized he’d misread, as vain men will, my upward gaze as interest and attraction.

I thought of all the things I could say, that I’d love to say, but in my ear was my counselor’s voice urging me to remember the sanity-preserving wisdom that I was paying actual dollars for: Do. Not. Engage. I took a deep breath and a step back.

“Oh, golly, there goes my pager!” I pulled it out and faked peering at the message that wasn’t there. “Gotta run.” I walked past him toward the ER and didn’t look back even once.

Go here for Chapter 27.