Shortness of Breath

Chapter Twenty Eight

Hallie, December twenty ninth

I pulled my key from the door wondering how many collective minutes I'd spent in this apartment in the past week. Maybe four. The truth was, I wasn't ready to renounce my Casey-centric lifestyle even if I was finally ready to admit that I'd been living it. I was obsessed, but I'd known that for a while. It was only as it grew more and more apparent to those around me that it actually became lucid for me. Case in point, I had barely spoken to Jada since before the holidays, during which she'd been traveling and we'd continue to be out of each other's orbits for another week.

Casey, however, had become my full-time job, with surgery as a hobby, NA as a social group, and my fading friendships as fleeting entertainment. I had no desire to lose other relationships, but it felt like every minute I spent with someone else was just a waiting period until I could see Casey again. Sometimes, in relationships like these, we reduce the other people we love to obligations, feel guilty about it, but do nothing to change it, and let the time spent apart increase, making the reunion all the more dutiful, and the shame all the more prominent.

I felt guilty about it, yes, which was why I intentionally came home in the afternoon on the day Jada was due to get back. I'd also made dinner plans with Casey, but didn't bring those up.

"Don't say it," I pleaded as I walked in the door.

"Say what?"

"Don't say, Hallie Strickland, you dick-face, cunt-bucket, Alice-Cooper-looking, sentient chunk of human garbage, where in the world have you been?"

She took a sip from what appeared to be a bottle of water with an entire salad floating in it without breaking angry eye contact. "That was pretty good, but the Alice Cooper comparison was unnecessarily flattering."

"To him?"

"To you."

"Walked into that one."

"Well," she said, taking a seat on the couch. "I trust you had a merrier Christmas than I did?"

I laughed at the palpable irony. "Do you want to put money on that?"

She nodded almost wistfully. "Yeah, I do."

"Okay, I'll go first," I began, sitting down in the chair opposite her. "So it's Christmas Eve, right? I'm at Casey's with her wackadoodle in-laws, because even though Wilson is dead and Casey should be off the hook with them by now, they want to normalize everything as much as possible for Cooper's sake, so they decide to have the holiday together. And after everyone goes to bed, we're just in her living room talking, you know, about nothing special, and then finally she gets real deep all of a sudden, like in a totally unexpected way. And then she finally, finally tells me that she loves me. Just comes right out and says it."

"I'm waiting for the unmerry part."

"That was the good news, okay? I'm working up to it."

She just rolled her eyes.

"So then, not ten minutes later, we're sitting there having our moment, you know, I'm about to go in for the...well, you know. And then you know what happens? Both of our pagers go off, we're called in for a surgery, and we're at the hospital until five in the morning."

"Fuck," she said, sounding really unaffected. I wondered if I wasn't a very good story teller.

"But it was almost kind of romantic, you know? Like yes, we were operating in the middle of the night instead of having this wild, passionate sex in front of the fireplace that I envisioned, but there was something kind of exciting about being there, doing the thing we do every day, but now we were doing it in love. And it was like we had this big, special secret that no one else knew about. Like there was this huge, amazing, beautiful thing right there between us for just her and me, you know?"