The One Day You Were My Husband (27)

“Pucko? Yes. Want one?”

“Absolutely I do. Although nothing beats Milo.”

“You’ll see, Carrie Cole.” Johan got up, chuckling. He walked over to his fridge, got out a couple of bottles, and put one in front of me.

Then he crouched down next to my chair. “I saw you one night,” he said. “In a curry house. You were with a group of friends. Other doctors, I think. I nearly went up to you because I felt sure that that would have been OK.”

I stared at him. His finger traced slowly around that same spot on my neck and I could hardly breathe. “I was there with the very friend who’d told me I couldn’t get in contact with you. I asked if I could talk to you. He said, no. You’ve got to wait.”

“He was right,” I whispered. Nobody had touched me in this way.

“And I had to sit with my back to you in the end because I could hear you, you were talking to a guy about the day you passed your driving test and how you put a giant stuffed orange elephant from your childhood into the passenger seat for the first few solo journeys because it was so unnerving, driving across Dartmoor with nobody there next to you. I was laughing, but God, Carrie Cole, I’d never wanted anyone so badly.”

He leaned in and kissed my neck again. His hand traced down my sternum, rib cage, navel, along my legs.

“I was always going to come back for you,” he said again, into my hair. “I’ve thought about you constantly.”

He moved his hands up the inside of my thighs, and I no longer cared about the Pucko or anything else. Somehow I was up, and our clothes were coming off. Fast, but not fast enough.



* * *



—

    I’d planned to go into the hospital to help the next day, even though it was my day off—even though it was my birthday.

I didn’t go. Eric, the other core trainee, was back after his stint with D&V, although I’m not sure I’d have gone in even if he wasn’t. All I wanted to do was exist in this space with Johan Kullberg, learning the planes of his body, the unexpected capabilities of my own.

We began the day eating the birthday cake I’d bought myself. Johan left me in the shower and when I emerged he was waiting in bed with it on a plate. He’d found a candle. He sang “Happy Birthday,” still naked, and then smiled at me and said, “Sk?l, Carrie.”

Dad called to sing “Happy Birthday,” too, and Johan politely left the room to find a knife. Mum had missed several birthdays but Dad had called at 8 a.m. every one since I’d left home to study medicine. He wasn’t in London this week; he was calling from Devon, where he was doing his usual twenty-minute circuit of the village. I could hear birds.

“Is this your ideal cake?” Johan asked when he came back. He cut me a slice, and in so doing spilled a few crumbs on his duvet. He scooped them up with his fingertips. I found myself able to resist pointing out the ones he’d missed.

“I actually really love cheap coffee cakes. But I know for a fact that two of my consultants like a traditional Victoria sponge, so I bought this. In case…”

“…They fired you? Is that how things work in the NHS?”

“It can feel that way sometimes.”

“I see.” He thought about this. “But surely nobody’s going to fire you on your own birthday.”

“You’d be surprised. Medicine’s bad, but surgery’s something else. I was thrown out of a consultant’s operating theater last month because I was wearing perfume.”

“Was it a bad perfume?”

“I don’t know. It was the anesthetist’s medical student wearing it, not me.”

“That’s appalling!”

“That’s surgery. I have a woman there who’s kind of like my mentor, though, and she went at him like a wolf later on. He actually tracked me down and apologized.”

Johan handed me a piece of cake. “I’m glad women like that exist in your line of work.”

“There’s not many of them.”

“You’ll be like that one day. When you’re a consultant surgeon. I’ve seen you in action. There was fire in there, Carrie Cole.”

“Hmm. I hope that’s out for the foreseeable.”

“I don’t,” he said. “That fire really worked for me.”

The cake was put to one side.



* * *



—

I showered again at around six in the evening. When I came back into his kitchen he was leaning against the worktop, writing a message to someone on his phone. I felt something new, something old, fill my body as I watched him.

It was a sense of belonging, I realized after a moment. A sense of the correct order of things, and it was not something I had known in a long time.

I didn’t think I could stand it if this was a one-off, if he disappeared again.

“You’re looking intense,” Johan said, looking up. “What’s happening in there?”

“Intensity,” I admitted, and he just laughed, put his phone down. He was naked.

“About this?”

“Yes. I like you a lot,” I said simply.

“You know I feel the same.”

I couldn’t help smiling. “Well, yes. And that’s caused a lot of thinking. For me, at least.”