Chapter Twenty Three

“T he practice is closed until three,” Cordelia said, crossing her legs. “There’s a note on the door, I’m surprised you didn’t see it.”

“I wasn’t exactly paying attention,” said Lydia.

She looked uncomfortable and Cordelia took a breath. She’d had enough of this, whatever it was. She was a grown adult and she knew what she wanted. Watching Toby be taken away this morning had only cemented her feelings.

There were options here. She might be the messy one, the illogical one, the one that lost the keys. But she could see that Lydia wouldn’t break out of her shell, wouldn’t bend her plans, unless somebody else gave her a reason. So maybe it was time she stepped up to be the reason.

“Magda?”

“She’s fine,” Lydia said. “False labor.”

Cordelia nodded. “You’ve done a lot whilst you were here, don’t think it’s gone unnoticed. You’re a good doctor and you’re right that I tell you you’re irritating all the time, but even I can admit that you’re good for Whitebridge.”

Lydia shuffled in her chair. “Um, thanks?”

Cordelia looked down at the open drawer, the empty bottles arrayed inside it like tin soldiers. “I was looking for disinfectant wipes,” she said. “And this is what I found.”

The drawer clinked as she closed it again. “It happens more often than you might think,” said Lydia, dark eyes serious. “Being a GP is a stressful job, it’s a lot of responsibility. Don’t think too badly of him.”

“I don’t,” sighed Cordelia. “I don’t really. And I think most of us knew, at least deep down. He was in the pub more often than not. Not that I think he was drunk in here, at least not when patients were here. I’d have said something.”

“I know.” Lydia sat forward a little. “We have special facilities, you know? Places where medical professionals go for rehab and de-stressing and the like.”

“Do you?” Cordelia lifted an eyebrow. “That sounds pretty nice.”

“One of the few perks of the job. I assume that’s where Doc Morris is. And he’s likely to be there for at least a couple more months, depending on what actually happened. I know that Max knows about it, so potentially he was involved and it wasn’t a voluntary decision, I don’t know.”

“And the doc’s close to retirement age anyway,” Cordelia said. “So there’s every chance that he won’t come back at all.”

“Always a possibility.”

“Leaving a position vacant here.”

Cordelia’s words hung in the air between them.

“I don’t know why you’d say that to me,” Lydia said eventually.

Cordelia watched her cross her legs, watched her body move, and felt a pulse of electricity run through her body. How much she wanted to crack Lydia’s efficiency, wanted to mess up that hair, wanted to… She took a breath.

“You run,” she said.

“What?”

“You run. When the phone rings and there’s an emergency, you run. I’ve seen it twice now. Once with Sylv and once with Magda just today. There’s no hesitation, there’s no thinking twice, you just go. That’s the kind of doctor I want. The kind of doctor we deserve here. ”

“I’m not denying that,” Lydia said. “Everywhere deserves good medical care. That’s not the question right now. My question is more… why are you saying this to me .” She looked at Cordelia. “You want me to leave.”

The air stirred slightly and Cordelia could smell alcohol. She hoped it was the medical kind, rather than a whiff of the empty bottles in the drawers. She had told Lydia she wanted her to leave. She couldn’t deny that. “What if I changed my mind?”

“Changed your mind?” Lydia said, half-laughing. “You literally pretended to be my date so that I’d get a job and be able to move out of your house that much faster.”

Cordelia closed her eyes. “Things change.”

“What are you trying to say?”

She opened her eyes again. “I’m trying to say…” She trailed off, then took a deep breath and plowed onward. “I’m trying to say that you’re the most irritating person I’ve ever met. That I never wanted you living in my house. I certainly didn’t want to attempt parenting with you. I wanted to be left alone.”

“You’re not making a compelling argument for me to stay.”

Cordelia looked down at the scratched metal desk. “I’m trying to say that… That you make my heart beat funny, that you make me swallow more than I should when you’re around, that I think about kissing you more often than is healthy, and I think…” She sighed. “I think I have feelings. Real ones.”

There was a long minute of silence. “Could you sound any happier about that, do you think?”

Cordelia bit her lip and shrugged. “It wasn’t my plan. You of all people should understand that. You should get what it’s like to have an idea of what’s supposed to happen and then to have that idea up-ended.”

She watched as Lydia rubbed her face with her hand. “I want to work in a big practice. I want to have colleagues. That’s my plan, Cordelia. And I can’t say that I want to stay in Whitebridge just because you’re here.”

“How did this all become about your job?” Cordelia asked, leaning back in the creaky deskchair .

“It’s not just about that.”

“Is it not? Because that’s what it sounds like. Except I’m starting to think that maybe that’s an excuse. That maybe you’d like to think that you haven’t had a relationship because you’ve been too busy having a career, but in truth, you’ve been afraid to do something that’s out of your control. Afraid to rely on anyone other than yourself.”

Lydia got up, and for a second, Cordelia thought she might leave. But she came around the desk, perching on the edge of it, close enough that Cordelia could touch her. “Okay, you might be right, I can take that. But then, what about you?”

“What about me?”

Lydia was almost looking down on her now and Cordelia saw that her eyes were tired, that her cheekbones were sharper than she remembered. “You close yourself off because you got hurt. Your ex-husband walked out on you. Tell me, did you have any idea it was going to happen?”

Cordelia shook her head, remembering that afternoon that she’d come home and Hunter was just… gone. She’d planned chicken for dinner and thought they could plan to start renovating the garden over the weekend.

“I didn’t think so. That kind of trauma… it’s hard to process. I get how people leaving would be problematic for you. I saw how you reacted to Toby leaving this morning. So how can I, a responsible adult, agree to get involved with you when I know that leaving is precisely what I’ll be doing.”

“Why?”

Lydia blinked. “What?”

“Why would you be leaving? Are you thinking about taking a job in Australia? Or perhaps New York? Where are these exotic job offers coming from exactly?”

Lydia blinked again.

“Listen, the situation is a little awkward, I give you that,” Cordelia said. “You already live with me and all, not that I particularly wanted that to happen. But moving out and leaving are two different things. Alright, I’d like you to at least consider applying for the position here, but I get that you might not want to.”

“Thanks,” Lydia said dryly.

“And that’s purely because I think Whitebridge should have a doctor as good as you. But even if you take the other job, Castor is a twenty minute drive away. It’s not the ends of the earth, is it?”

“No,” allowed Lydia. “I suppose it’s not.”

“So in the end, maybe this is all an excuse, a way of justifying the fact that you’re afraid of something happening. Or…” Cordelia took a breath but she needed to say this. “Or you’re not exactly interested in me, which is fine as well, but you have to tell me.”

“Cordelia,” Lydia said, putting out a hand and then re-thinking and quickly withdrawing it. “Cordelia.” She shook her head. “You’re more complicated than anyone I’ve ever met. You’re defensive and snappy and chaotic. You can’t hold onto a set of keys. You held Toby like he was your own, you defended him and protected him. You do what’s right, even if you don’t want people to know about it.”

She stopped and Cordelia’s heart beat a little harder. “Seems like a mixed bag to me,” she said. “But aren’t we all a bit of bad with the good?”

Lydia smiled and Cordelia wanted to stroke her face. “You make me feel things. Things I’m not always comfortable with. You make me want you, want to wake up next to you, want to make you smile. And you’re right, part of that scares me. It scares me because I don’t know how to make those things happen, and because more than anything, I don’t want to be the one to hurt you, to ruin your life.”

“You’ve already broken every promise that I’ve made to myself,” Cordelia said.

“And you say that like it’s not a bad thing,” said Lydia. She shook her head again. “You’re asking me to unleash something that I don’t know how to control and then try not to hurt you with it.”

“I know what I want,” Cordelia said. Now she was the one reaching out, her hand grazing Lydia’s knee, her fingers grasping her thigh. “It might be new for me, it might be wrong, it might be the last thing that I should be doing, but I want you, Lydia.”

Lydia sucked air in over her teeth and her eyes half-closed. “Think about this Cordelia. Think about it hard because there’s no promises here.”

Cordelia pushed herself up, put her hand to the back of Lydia’s neck, pulled her in. “Did I ask you for a promise?” she growled, every cell inside her contracting with the thought of taking Lydia right here, right now on this desk.

The phone rang.

Cordelia dropped her hands.

“I mean it,” Lydia said as Cordelia made for the door, the urgent ringing sounding loud in the empty waiting room. “Think about what you want, Cordelia.”