Heart Conditions (The Breakup Doctor Series Book 3)

by Phoebe Fox

  “Okay. That’ll be good.” I heard the words through the curtain of my hair as I kept my gaze determinedly focused on shutting down my laptop. Slowly.

  It felt like a long, long time before I heard footsteps and then a soft click, and only then did I dare to look up, staring at the door that had shut behind Michael.

  sixteen

  Michael had decreed that I could do my radio show that afternoon, with the caveat that if the offer from the station was lacking, I would be willing to play hardball and sit out further appearances while he negotiated.

  I was ridiculously grateful not to have to miss it—particularly today. I needed to take my mind off of what had just happened.

  I’d known that whatever had once been between me and Michael had never fully died on my part. And he’d made it perfectly clear since he’d come back that his feelings for me were very much alive as well.

  But the clear physical evidence of it had made everything feel much more real. And immediate.

  I couldn’t put off letting him know my decision forever.

  By the time my ninety-minute radio segment was finished, my thoughts had begun to settle and the ground underneath me felt solid again. I couldn’t imagine if I had to give these shows up as a bargaining chip in Michael’s business plan. I loved when someone who called in sounding broken or defeated hung up after our conversation with a burst of strength in their tone. With the radio shows I was able to help more people—at least on some level—than I could reach in that amount of time any other way, and I thrived on that.

  I worried that Michael and I would find that I needed the show a lot more than the station needed me.

  As soon as I went off-air at six thirty I trucked back down Winkler to my house and picked up Jake. No matter how brief a time I was gone, he was always as happy to see me as if I’d been away at war.

  This was why people loved dogs, I thought as I clipped his leash on and wrangled him into my Accord: because we got enough uncertainty and indifference from the people in our lives—at least our dogs made no secret of their giddy delight in our company every time we showed up.

  Unlike their humans, I thought disappointedly as I pulled into Ben’s driveway, the front of the house dark. He must be working especially late tonight, but I was surprised he hadn’t texted to tell me so.

  Although maybe it was for the best, I reflected as I fetched the key from under the paving stone. I’d been able to back-burner my muddled thoughts while I handled other people’s problems on the show, but as soon as we were off the air, worries swarmed my head like no-see-’ums.

  I’d been trying to keep things on an even keel with Michael, hoping to move slowly, not only to find out what might still be there between us, but to give myself time to figure out what was going on with me and Ben.

  But I was no closer to an answer.

  I fumbled with the lock in the deep shadows on the porch, reaching inside to grope for the light switch so we didn’t stumble in the pitch-black. But as Jake pushed past me, pushing the door wider, I noticed a faint spill of illumination from the back of the house.

  Ben never left lights on.

  Suddenly I heard voices.

  A chill passed through me, literally raising the hair on the back of my neck. Jake, whose vaunted Pyrenees hearing and finely honed guard instincts were responsible for his endless alert barking in the middle of the night, somehow failed to respond to this actual threat, glancing up at me contentedly and wagging his tail.

  I knew what you were supposed to do with a suspected intruder: Leave the house immediately and call the police. But that excellent advice fails to take into account the surge of adrenaline and outrage that courses through you when someone has breached the security of your home—or the home of someone you care about—and before I could stop myself I had in my hand the canister of pepper spray I always carried and was charging back to where the voices were coming from.

  “Get the hell out of here!” I barked in as ferocious a growl as I could manufacture, my lips pulled back in a snarl as I rounded the corner still holding Jake’s leash in one hand, wielding the pepper spray in the other like Lady Liberty with her torch.

  Only to find Ben and Pamela standing in the kitchen, a bottle of red wine open on the counter between them, one glass held in Perfect Pamela’s beautifully manicured fingertips. Her perfect mouth was open in a perfectly round O as she took in my aggressive entrance, and Ben was looking at me as if I’d walked in with my hair on fire.

  I felt my face heat. “Oh—sorry. I thought you were a burglar.”

  “Hi, Brook,” Pamela said, recovering her composure in an instant. Of course.

  “Hello, Pamela,” I said brightly, trying (and failing) to match her poise. “How lovely to see you. You’re looking great. As always!” And she was—in a black-and-white wrap dress that hugged her wasp waist before flaring out in a feminine spill, and perfect sensible black low-heeled pumps. Instead of the jeans and well-fitted cotton shirt I’d grown used to in the last week, Ben wore khaki pants and a white button-down.

  Understanding dawned. He had a date.

  With Perfect Pamela.

  And I’d walked in on the middle of it.

  Nausea boiled up in my stomach.

  I laughed somewhat maniacally as I tried to casually drop the pepper spray back into my purse, as if it were a lipstick I’d just used. I was thrown by the homey, intimate scene, Pamela occupying the position against the counter I’d already come to think of again as mine, Ben standing a few feet away, hands jammed into his pockets.

  He was frowning. “Why did you come tearing into the kitchen if you thought we were intruders, Brook? That’s dangerous. You should have left and called the police.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Yes, I know. Good thing I didn’t, though, right? Wouldn’t want you two hauled off to the pokey together or anything—ha, ha, ha! Oh,” I rambled on. “Congrats on the Doctors Without Borders interview, Pamela. I hope you win! I mean, I hope you get it. Get chosen, I mean. Not that I want you to move halfway across the world or anything! Ha, ha, ha!”

  Ben was eyeing me with concern. “Would you like a glass of wine, Brook?”

  No, but maybe a Valium? I thought wildly.

  But Pamela, of course, was gracious enough not to react to my verbal incontinence, just arced a glance across to Ben with a secret smile that sent a sudden shard of ice sliding into my belly. “Funny you mention that,” she said. “We were just talking about it. There’s a partner program that works with the Doctors Without Borders organization to help build the clinics in various villages. That sounds right in Ben’s wheelhouse, doesn’t it?”

  The ice spread to my fingers and toes, and the bottom dropped out of my stomach. Ben was thinking of going with her?

  To freaking Africa?

  If I’d needed clarification about the mixed messages I thought I’d been getting from him, they’d just become utterly, painfully clear.

  Suddenly I was more than a little concerned about the prickling heat building behind my eyes. I might be able to pass off my mania as an overindulgence in caffeine, but it was going to be a lot harder to explain to Perfect Pamela why her boyfriend’s pal and dog-sitter was blubbering in his kitchen.

  “Brook?” Ben asked, his eyebrows bunched together, and I realized I hadn’t made any response in too long a time.

  “Oh…mm-hmm,” I managed, having long forgotten Pamela’s question and hoping it would do as an answer. All I wanted to do was get out—quickly, before I embarrassed myself. And Ben. “Well, I don’t want to horn in on…I mean interrupt…Friday night—date night, amiright?” I sounded like a bad Vegas comedian. “I’ve got plans of my own. Definite plans. I need to get going. Catch you later!” I said inanely.

  I turned on my heel to block out the sight of Pamela and Ben and Jake in a happy huddle i
n the kitchen, but the cozy scene was still burned onto my retinas. The only thing intruding on the sweet little picture of domestic bliss was me.

  I was moving so fast I had the door to my car open before I heard the hydraulic arm of the screen door slam it shut behind me.

  My phone rang just as I pulled into my garage—Ben.

  I debated whether I should answer. I pictured Perfect Pamela standing at his elbow, an expression of concern across her lovely face as she kindly exhorted Ben, You should call her and check on her. She seemed upset.

  But not answering would only confirm it. Swallowing, I closed my eyes and hit answer.

  Sure enough: “Hey…just wanted to make sure you were okay.”

  Mortification heated my face.

  “I’m sorry about that,” I said. “I know that was weird.”

  “It wasn’t weird,” he protested halfheartedly.

  “It was weird.”

  “It was a little weird.”

  “Sorry. I…I had a long day,” I said. “A long week.”

  There was a pause, and then: “Listen, about what Pamela said…”

  “Yeah, sorry, I was just…It was unexpected. You didn’t mention you were considering that.”

  “That’s because I wasn’t. She just mentioned it to me before you came in.”

  There was a long silence in which my grief warred with relief. So this hadn’t been planned all along. And Pamela had asked him…not the other way around. I wondered whether he was clarifying that on purpose. And whether Pamela was right next to him, hearing everything both of us said.

  I didn’t know whether Ben had ever told her we’d dated. Knowing him, I assumed so—he wasn’t a big fan of keeping secrets (as I knew from painful firsthand experience). And in that case, she was too smart not to realize that my freakish reaction could only mean that I still had feelings for him.

  If so, I’d put him in a very awkward position. And he wasn’t making it any better by calling me with her there. Whatever this meant, now wasn’t the time to talk about it.

  “I really need to go, Ben.”

  “Listen, Brook…” There was another lengthy silence, the sound of an exhaled breath, and I finally understood the phrase “heart in mouth” as I waited to hear his next words. “If you’d rather not watch Jake on Monday—”

  “No! I’ll watch him.”

  “Are you sure? I can—”

  “I’m sure.” I had only a few more days before Adelaide came home. A few days left to find out whether there was any hope at all for me and Ben.

  “Well, then…thanks. I’m glad.”

  “Me too,” I said. Relentlessly, I wondered whether his words were only borne of gratitude.

  “Okay, well,” I said finally, “you guys have fun tonight.”

  “You too. What are you—”

  I broke the connection.

  seventeen

  Nine thirty that night found me at a place I never thought I’d come back to.

  Sticks and Stones was a local S and M club filled with both curious 50 Shades looky-loos and hard-core BDSM devotees. I liked occasional silk-scarf blindfold-and-bondage recreation as much as the next person, but I fell into neither category: My ill-advised trip to the club last summer was a result of following a shy, circumspect client here to stop her from doing anything she might regret in the desperation of her relationship woes.

  Which I had, but that was also the night I’d run into Chip Santana, a former client and inappropriate crush I’d nearly crossed ethical lines with once before, then severed contact with to maintain professional boundaries. Seeing him here had reopened that explosive can of worms—which had ultimately resulted in my breakup with Ben.

  Good times.

  I pushed all that out of my head, though, as I pulled my Honda into the ill-lit concrete lot outside the club.

  “What the hell are we doing here?” Sasha asked from the passenger seat.

  She and my brother had her own history with the place—after my memorable-in-the-bad-way evening here, they had decided to check things out for themselves, because apparently there was no sexual line they would not gleefully leap across (and then insist on telling me about in unwelcome detail). But Sticks and Stones proved too much even for them—they got groped like the newest inmates at Sing-Sing, and pushed their way back out the doors minutes after they’d gone in.

  “Trust me, you guys—there’s a reason we’re here,” I said. It felt good to be doing something in my comfort zone, where I felt in control and competent, not the idiotic boob I’d acted like earlier in front of Ben and Pamela. I let myself out of the car and turned to open the back door, where Stu was still sitting, making no move to get out.

  “Come on, baby bro. Trust big sissy,” I cajoled.

  He looked to the front seat, where my best friend was also still planted. “Sash?”

  “What are we doing here, Brook?” she asked again.

  I leaned down to look at her directly. “I can’t tell you. I just have to show you. Come on.”

  Sasha’s arms were crossed over her chest, her eyebrows pinched together. “Stu?” she asked. “What do you think?”

  I watched my brother take a deep breath and manufacture a game smile. “It’s up to you, babe. If you want to go in, I’m with you.”

  Sasha’s face relaxed like she’d had a mega injection of Botox, and then pulled into the reckless grin I absolutely adored. “What the hell. Let’s do this.”

  I wanted to hug my brother: Stu had taken my admonition to heart and was trying to stop babying Sasha—pun unavoidable—and she looked like her old self again.

  The inside of the club was just as I remembered: wall-to-wall bodies that seemed to close in as we made our way through the crowd, dim lighting, thunking bass, and hands roaming all over us, their owners invisible no matter how much we scanned our surrounds. The cool, moist air carried a musky scent and the underlying sharp tang of bleach. I turned to Sasha and Stu and made vague military hand signals—You two, with me, that way—and we pushed through to the back of the club and the warren of semiprivate rooms where the boldest took things a step further, and the voyeurs watched.

  It got quieter in this part of the club, the walls sectioned off with office-cubicle partitions carpeted in thick sound-absorbing black carpet, and the crowd thinned the farther we ventured as the various fetish rooms winnowed out their aficionados. Finally we came to a back room, moving almost freely through the makeshift halls now, and we stood in the doorway taking in the scene.

  At first it seemed like a toga party where only some of the guests had bothered to come in costume. But it took only a moment to figure out what we were looking at: About half the bodies milling around in the fifteen-by-twenty room were in street clothes; the other half wore diapers.

  “What. The. Fuck,” I heard Sasha say beside me.

  I let out a self-satisfied grin. “You said you’re afraid of babies and you only know how to talk to adults. Et voilà: adult babies!”

  Stu looked shell-shocked. “That’s a thing. It really is a thing,” he was repeating, as if he couldn’t believe it.

  “It’s a lifestyle,” I corrected. “And what we have here are a group of babies Sasha can converse with. I thought it might be a good way for you to learn to interact with infants in a way that feels more comfortable,” I said to Sash.

  She turned a flat stare on me that I couldn’t read. “You are a total idiot,” she said calmly. “And also possibly a genius. This is insane, Brook—but it might be the perfect thing. Let’s do it.” And into the room she went.

  It took Stu a few more moments, and possibly a loving shove from me, but eventually he followed her in and I trailed behind them, ready to help grease the conversational wheels if need be.

  But I should have known Sasha would take
care of things herself—this was her gift, meeting strangers from every walk of life, offering them interest, respect, and no judgment, and getting them to open up to her. By the time Stu and I caught up to her she was already deep in conversation with three people—a tall, bald man in street clothes, a man wearing only a diaper and clutching a blankie over his shoulder like Linus, and a woman in what appeared to be a full-size onesie, a pacifier in her mouth.

  “Hey, guys,” Sasha said casually as we approached. “This is Richard.” The bald man nodded in my direction and reached a hand to Stu.

  “Hey, man.”

  My brother managed the handshake and even a tepid smile. “Hi.”

  “And this is his…what do I say?” she asked Richard.

  “My baby,” he supplied helpfully, wrapping an arm around the woman. “Little Lulu.”

  Sasha nodded. “This is Lulu,” she went on, “and this is Johnny B. Guys, Brook and Stu.”

  Lulu just waved, fingers opening and closing as she sucked on her binky, but to my surprise Johnny B offered a hand to both of us.

  “Welcome!” he said. “Sasha says you’re new at this.”

  “Entirely,” my brother said.

  “Don’t you have to talk baby-talk?” I asked, confused.

  He grinned. “Nah, there’s no rules. You do what feels right, you know? Sasha here says she’s not real comfortable with kids and is trying to learn to be, so I turned it off for now.”

  For a fleeting moment I wondered whether she’d actually told this group she was pregnant. If she had, it was the first time she’d said it to anyone besides me and Stu.

  “So, what is it you want to learn about?” Johnny B asked, and then he reached into the front of his diaper.

  My eyes widened in alarm—things were about to get weird—but he drew his hand right back out, holding a pack of Marlboros. “Smoke?” he offered us.