His Forbidden Love (Manhattan Billionaires #2) - Ava Ryan Page 0,19
whole. To inhale her. Absorb her. I want to touch her and imprint the feeling of every part of her body on every part of mine. Most of all, I want to stop keeping secrets and just tell her—for once—how fucking beautiful she is.
All the wanting knots up inside me, making my throat tight and my voice gruff.
“You did a good job,” I tell her. “You’ve learned a couple of things.”
“I can only hope,” she says. “You’ll have to tell me your surgeon origin story one of these days.”
That’s a new one on me. “My whatty-who?”
“Your surgeon origin story. What happened to make you want to be a surgeon? I’ve always wondered.”
“Forget it,” I say when the light bulb goes off over my head. “That’s classified information.”
“Oh, come on,” she says, her expression brightening as she puts her hands in prayer position under her chin, her body all but quivering with excitement. “Now you have to tell me.”
She’s right. Because there’s no way I can resist being the center of all this rapt attention. “This goes no further. I don’t want the residents to start calling me the Sap instead of the Sphinx.”
“Deal.”
“There was this commercial for UNICEF or something, when I was about eight. A crying baby with a cleft palate from some Third World country. I had a cousin who was a baby at the time, so it hit me hard. Just this gut reaction. This alarm. How could that baby drink his bottle? What would happen to him? Who was going to do something? It was a whole thing. It became an obsession.” Even now I feel the same visceral reaction and driving need to do what I can. “To my parents’ credit, they indulged me. I think they thought I was crazy, but, on the other hand, who doesn’t want their kid to grow up and be a doctor? So they got me all kinds of books and, I don’t know, showed me documentaries and magazines and medical journals and stuff. I was amazed that someone could have a condition at birth or a grave injury in a car accident or from a dog bite and you could fix it. I mean, don’t get me wrong, no one would sign up for this shit unless they were a stubborn Type A personality, but…” It dawns on me that I’ve been talking for a long time, so I stop, feeling exposed. “Anyway. That’s my origin story. Tell no one.”
“No promises. Just know that I have the material I need to blackmail you at any time.”
“Glad you asked?” I say, laughing.
“I am glad I asked.” Her gaze is steady. Warm. Absolutely addictive. “There has to be something, you know? Unless a person is a complete psychopath, there’s gotta be some reason he or she signs up for all the schooling. The exhaustion. The expense. The grueling work. The delayed gratification and sacrifice. I love what I do, but there were plenty of times when I thought about quitting. I’m not sure my friends or even my parents always understood why I did it.”
“My ex-wife never understood,” I say before I think to stop myself, and then it’s out there: the hidden fault line buried deep beneath my marriage. The shaky foundation upon which it was built. In the sort of extremely personal information I’m not sure I’ve ever told anyone.
Ally’s interest sharpens. I feel it.
“What do you mean?”
I shrug, struggling to put it into a few succinct words. “I mean, she thought I was crazy for being happy on five hours of sleep a night, if that, and no vacations and on-calls and nearly half a mill in student loan debt. She resented the fact that I had so little time with her. I don’t blame her for that. She needs what she needs. And I need what I need. Two different things. No harm, no foul. We spent five years being unhappily married, but that’s better than six years being unhappily married. But anyone who doesn’t understand that about me doesn’t understand anything about me. Period.”
She nods thoughtfully, a vague frown marring her forehead.
Having reached the end of my impromptu soliloquy, I should shut the hell up. I want Ally and I to get to know each other better, but this is not the kind of thing I normally get into, and we’re still at work. A place where boundaries are appropriate and required.
But I’ve got a couple more sentences that won’t stay in my mouth.