Only, she had been thinking about it ever since, letting his touch invade her dreams, craving more, and then firmly telling herself she shouldn’t. The fact that he’d apparently been too busy even to talk to her about it any further had hit her harder than it should have, and she’d erected a wall, she supposed, as she’d always done whenever something threatened her equilibrium. He was back to being at arm’s length, where nothing he said or did could affect her from ploughing forward as she always did.
Well, that had been her plan, anyway. It wasn’t exactly working. And now here was his mother Rosa, in her own clinic, needing both of them.
‘I had to leave Javi with your dad as he just got home from school...’
‘Don’t worry, he’ll be OK,’ Gabriel reassured her, getting her a cold glass of water from the tap and arranging a cushion behind her.
Rosa sighed, her voice laced with worry as Ana examined her, pressing gently on the skin around her belly and navel while Gabriel pressed a cold towel to her clammy head. ‘The pain just started up again a few days ago, but it’s getting worse. I was hoping it would go away on its own, but...’
Ana nodded empathetically as Gabriel gently took a blood sample and conducted a vitals examination. She supposed it must be tough, treating his mother like a patient all of a sudden. Her heart went out to him as she assisted, admiring his expertise and patient bedside manner, and how he managed to put his emotions aside, knowing his mother was sick and in pain. Her gaze lingered on his handsome face a moment longer than necessary, till he caught her and she had to look away again, annoyed with herself all over again.
‘Will I need surgery?’ Rosa asked them now, eyes wide.
Ana leaned in, keeping her voice soft and reassuring. ‘We’ll see about that. First I’ll order some imaging tests and we’ll have to see what the blood samples show.’
Gabriel chimed in, concern evident in his eyes. ‘Have you experienced any other symptoms, Mama, like nausea?’
As Mama Romero described some occasional nausea, and Ana explained what she could do to curb it in future, Gabriel met her eyes again briefly, an unspoken understanding passing between them. They had both been making things awkward all week, but they were still irrefutably a team when it came to what really mattered.
They discussed Rosa’s symptoms and, as they spoke, Ana couldn’t help feeling more moved than she wanted to be by the love and respect the Romeros had for each other. Gabriel’s family had always been so wonderful and warm; no wonder he had always wanted to base his life here amongst their love and support. Her own parents loved her too, of course, but it had always been easier to relate to Gabriel’s, who had never smothered her the way hers had.
Ana performed the ultrasound, taking care not to apply too much extra pressure. Gabriel’s eyes never left his mother, and she felt a pang of remorse suddenly at how she still shut her own mother out sometimes whenever she became overly protective and concerned. Ana had never enjoyed the close connection to her parents that Gabriel had forged with his—her fierce independence had seen to that. Their overbearing tendency to wrap her up in cotton wool had done nothing but make her want to run away, but they were all older now, and wiser. Maybe she should make more of an effort to show her parents that what they’d done for her had been appreciated, she thought...for the most part. Look where she was now!
‘Thank you, Ana,’ Rosa was saying now, straightening out her clothes as Ana helped her sit up on the exam table. ‘Look at you, both like this, making such a great team. It’s so nice to see. And you’ve really made this place your own, Ana, I do love all the bright colours.’
‘Thank you, Rosa.’
‘Everyone loves the colours,’ Gabriel said, looking directly at her. ‘They’re just so... Ana.’
Ana avoided his eyes once more as a vision of her clothing on his bedroom floor swept into her mind. How graceful he had made her feel the whole time, almost as if she had no disability at all. In fact, she’d felt perfect. He had treated her so wonderfully.
Stop it, brain!
Dutifully she wheeled the bulky ultrasound machine away again. The hernia had grown a little larger, according to her records, but all they could do at the moment was refer Rosa to a specialist and send her through to Sandrine to discuss how to manage and alleviate her discomfort with some small changes to her lifestyle.
‘Did you decide on a time for tonight?’ Rosa said to Gabriel as she straightened her light-pink cardigan. ‘I mean, we can eat whenever you both like. But let me know when you think you’ll arrive, so I can tell Juan and Martina.’
Ana frowned with her back to them. Juan and Martina, her parents? She spun round to find Gabriel was pulling a face, as if he’d been busted.
‘He didn’t ask you yet, did he?’ Rosa said with a harried sigh at Gabriel.
‘To dinner, tonight? No, Rosa, he didn’t,’ Ana responded as he helped his mother towards the door a little more hurriedly than he should have. Her words had come out snippier than she’d intended them to, but why hadn’t he asked her yet?
‘I guess I didn’t get round to it,’ he explained with an insouciant shrug. ‘We’ve both been so busy.’
Ana ordered her face not to display how utterly irked she was now. Maybe he didn’t want to have dinner with them all and had been planning to wriggle out of it. Well, so much for that plan. Mama Romero had gone and dropped him in it—ha! Ana realised she was scowling at him now, and Gabriel was scowling back.
Rosa shook her head, lips pursed. ‘You two! Always too busy,’ she scolded them softly. ‘Well, I think both of you deserve a night off with your families. You will come, it’s an order.’
‘I’d love to, thank you, Mama Romero,’ Ana told her, picturing their old house and kitchen suddenly. The sink was always warm from the sun streaming in through the window. She remembered the moment she hadn’t been able to reach the sink any more, when Gabriel had first brought her into his home in the wheelchair. There had been some happy times spent there as children, though, she and Gabriel running around the kitchen, getting in the way under the guise of helping to make dinner. There’d always been the warm, yeasty smell of baking bread, or the cinnamon scent of dark chocolate melting on cakes beside the stove. His grandmother would sing along to her favourite tunes, high-pitched and off-key. Baking on a Sunday was a weekly ritual at the Romeros’. Fridays were usually for family sit-downs.
‘That’s settled, then,’ Rosa said brightly, smoothing down her dress one last time. ‘We’ll see you both at seven o’clock sharp at our house.’ With that, she dropped a kiss on Gabriel’s cheek and glanced back at them over her shoulder as she made her way back to reception. Rosa was the sweetest, Ana thought, watching her stop to admire the marigolds on the desk one more time. She’d always been so encouraging and kind, but she’d also always hinted that she’d love to see the two of them together some day, as more than friends. If only she knew...
No. She would never know, Ana decided. It would just make things even more awkward.
‘So, were you going to invite me yourself?’ she said to Gabriel when they were alone, unable to keep the shadow of a smile from her face now.
Gabriel dropped to the swivel chair and tapped a pen on the desk, unbuttoning his coat at the top, as if he needed more air than the room could offer. Outside the rain was still pattering at the windows.
‘Of course I was,’ he said, meeting her gaze head on. ‘OK, so maybe I waited because I wasn’t sure you’d say yes.’
‘Why wouldn’t I say yes?’ She tapped her nails on her knee, matching the rhythm of his pen, and refused to drop his gaze. It felt like a challenge.
‘You know why, Ana.’
She feigned nonchalance. ‘We said it wouldn’t be weird between us.’
‘Except it already is. You know it is.’
She screwed up her nose disparagingly. For a moment she almost caved in, almost moved closer and asked him outright if being friends was really such a good idea, and did he even remember how good the sex had been and how that was probably because they’d been friends first?
But then his phone rang, and he cringed, which meant it was Ines again.
‘I should get this,’ he said. She watched him walk to the window to talk and sighed to herself, pretending to check the schedule. Now she remembered exactly why it was pointless reminding him how good it had been between them. It wouldn’t work, going forward, never. He had no time for her. His priority would always be Javi, as it should be. And hers was the clinic, as it should be. They were both too busy. Already the door was opening again, and Maria was sending in another patient.
The timing was always wrong for them, and it probably always would be. And now, not only did she have to find the strength to accept that, but she had to endure a whole dinner with both sets of parents present. How had her life suddenly got so complicated and confusing?
The house was just as she remembered it as she came to a stop outside and psyched herself up to go in. Just being here was bringing it all back. Gabriel’s childhood home was a pale pink brick house of two levels, with a low roof of whitewashed slate and a funny-looking satellite array on top that his dad had erected some time in the early nineties for TV and radio and had left there even as more modern methods had been introduced. The antennae up there still turned in the wind sometimes, but surprisingly it had never fallen off.
