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Giving name to his emotions was not a strong suit of his. To most it appeared his Evol matched perfectly to his slate-textured demeanor, cold to the touch and dull in color. Joy, melancholy, stress, grief, and the like all lay dormant in his chest, the back of his throat, as if it were the dust on the upper most collectibles shelf.
It was neither here nor there in his mind. From birth he had been this way, and it was not for a lack of positive experiences, it simply was.
Perhaps it was why he had chosen the heart. Literature and interests in legends aside, it was a foolproof mechanism of flesh and errors were easily spotted. Vena cava, atrium, ventricle, valve, arteries, veins and back again through the aorta. If at any point the heart steered from this programming there were no positive results. He likened himself to it. It seemed any veer or misstep on the rigid face of his mountain of routine would end in tragedy for himself or his patients, let alone his personal relationships, of which he didn’t have many.
It was a shame, then, she could scale any cliff she came to face.
Contrary to arbitrary love stories that would have him swooning at the sight of her, Zayne was not particularly interested in her reintroduction to his life. It was true she was held in higher regard on his internal scale for simply knowing her longer, but it was not as if he thought anything particularly other than it was a fortunate circumstance she had him to watch over her medical needs.
He recalls it being June when it happened, something akin to arrhythmia.
“Sometimes on days off I’ll watch these medical dramas, the super corny ones, you know?” It was one of said days off, and she swung her legs as the blood pressure cuff tightened on her bicep.
“I’m familiar. I’m sure you’re aware how dissimilar they are to real-world hospital work.” The diaphragm of the stethoscope was cold, she jolted when it made contact with her arm.
”No, I know, that’s not what I’m talking about,” a rip of velcro signaled her to relax, “I was just thinking about doctors. In general. When Caleb told me you were a doctor now, I was shocked!”
“124/81. Looks good. What for?”
“Well it’s like…I don’t know how to say it without hurting your feelings, honestly, but you and I both know you’re not sending out the doctor vibe? Like the…’I’m serious under pressure but I also have some kind of personality trait that makes me likable to people’ thing. I was just kinda’ thinking you don’t have that.” She brushed some dust off of her pant leg to appear occupied; Zayne rolled to the wall to hang up the cuff.
“I would…think my serious nature is what appeals me to my patients. My patients from twenty-four to geriatric, at least. Hold your finger out.” Zayne pointedly stared at the oximeter, not entirely sure where the conversation was going.
“Yeah, I thought about that after and pretended I was like…terminal or something. Ok wait, that’s horrible—anyway—I’m sure a lot of people appreciate the no nonsense you dish out, but I guess it got me leading into this whole idea where you ended up a pediatrician; it was killing me thinking about it, like, some poor seven-year old just seeing your deadpan face and bursting out crying! Or a toddler slowly fading into the lovely dreamless sleep of anesthesia forever traumatized by Dr. Zayne and thinking you’re the harbinger of demise.” The oximeter had long given a reading by then, and Zayne clamped his hands together to listen to the ramble before he moved onto the GAD-7.
“I don’t deny my specialties do not land me in pediatric work, but I do need to point out that I have not and will not ever be present until the patient is long put under. That’s anesthesiologist work.”
“Oh. Ok, well—“
”Over the last two weeks, how often have you felt the following, ‘feeling nervous, anxious, or on edge’?”
”More than half days. I guess…seeing you ‘doctoring’ is a lot different from how I thought Zayne from my childhood would be ‘doctoring’,” she wrung her hands, crossing one ankle over the other.
“‘Not being able to stop or control worrying?’”
”Same. More than half.”
Zayne rested the clipboard on his thigh, “I’m assuming you’re giving me a compliment?”
She shrugged, the left corner of her mouth twitching.
“I mean. Sort of? It’s more curiosity, than anything. It’s like how you told me you were surprised to see me as a Hunter. Same feeling.”
His shoulders set beneath the white coat, lips flattening into a thin line.
“Mm. I see. ‘Trouble relaxing’?”
Her grin came at full force as she leaned back and rested her weight on her palms, the crinkle of paper sounding.
“None at all!”
Following that occasion in June he was listed in several articles for his health initiatives. She texted him about the sandbox. He treated himself to dinner that evening for no reason in particular.
When he first settled on ‘fondness’, it was after she ridiculed his aversion to carrots. He found it fitting, his emotional illiteracy that led him to tease her at every opportunity bit him back. Zayne didn’t think much on what he enjoyed and what he didn’t, and to find something so minute was met with skepticism and glee gave him the opportunity to build a seal snowball outside of the cafe that afternoon. An offering. Perhaps it was a piece of himself he had given her.
She wore her uniform slacks that day, but a well-worn crew neck made up the rest of her ensemble, ‘for the sake of not being bothered during my well-deserved lunch break’. Sweat flattened the close cut hairs on her nape, and the heat of the sun brought color to her cheeks then. Emotive descriptors were lost on him, but adjectives were not.
Oafish. Clumsy. Airheaded. Pretty. Smiling. Pretty.
It was no medical phenomenon that occurred between opposite sexes either, though his mind jumped to it as a conclusion. No. Fifteen minutes of freedom inside his office stuttered the mechanism of his thoughts, and again his hindbrain sounded off.
Pretty.
It was fondness, then, he concluded later that evening after comparing the word ‘attraction’ in a thesaurus.
Fondness, Zayne decided, was insufferable.
They were friends after that. Mornings were the most common time to receive messages from her. He factored it into his routine mountain, generally setting aside a minute to reply. Fondness was a vice, it turned out, because Zayne, established chief cardiac surgeon was sneaking glances at his phone during ‘well-deserved lunch breaks’ and was met often with nothing.
The beginning of the fall of fondness started in September, nameless.
‘Today was finally my turn to volunteer at the animal shelter!’
‘How was it?’
‘Fluffy tails, Zayne!’
‘It appears you are head over heels. Tails are interesting, they maintain balance and express general emotion in animals.’
‘Oh my gosh. Do you think if you had a tail, you’d express yourself more? Would it wag when you see me?’
Perhaps, he thought, letting out a scoff when his thumbnail caught on his coat, fitting his phone back in his pocket.
It was later after a full up night of surgery he opened the conversation back up to three attached images, her in all her….glory? Accomplishment? Her accomplishment, in various poses with a bristling, muddy tabby cat that, according to the following message ‘only scratched me twice!’
Zayne chewed his lip and thought, is she stupid?
It occurred to him as he lay awake thinking of it, that perhaps fondness that didn’t dissipate through someone’s stupidity had a different name.
He landed on affection when she pulled him along by his sleeve into a street arcade, and having never seen such desperation, dropped nearly an hour’s wage into a balance claw machine for a polar bear stuffed toy. Zayne’s mind supplied how stupid it was, and he quieted it, smiling as she lifted the toy high in the air, spinning and nearly stumbling headfirst into a mailbox.
I’m so fond of her, he thought.
His stomach clenched with the foreign feeling of not enough.
I feel for her, he tried again, I feel affectionate towards her.
It satisfied the hunger in his soul, albeit briefly.
Affection was comfortable. Despite all of the difficulties the fallout of fondness brought, affection was…easy. A steady, gentle thing. Everything she did now, he simply felt the thing in his chest, giving it name, and moved on.
As time went on, he found that it truly was everything.
A smear of sauce on the corner of her lip, a spill of salad dressing on her shirt, being underdressed for the weather, mismatched socks, bangs curling the wrong direction, everything was affection, affection, affection.
“You’re staring,” she was slicing apples, Zayne turned his head back to look at her from his place on the couch, the movie paused a half hour in for the purpose of her snacking.
Zayne cocked his head to the left. Before getting in a word, she cut him off with a shrug. “Just something I noticed lately. You’re like a cat. Or rabbit. I don’t know. An animal that doesn’t blink a lot? You don’t blink much.”
He was unsure of what to do with this information.
“I hadn’t noticed. Apologies.”
“No—don’t be stupid, Zayne, I was just pointing it out. What do you even look at when you zone out like that? What do you even think about?” The sink made a metallic noise on the discarded knife.
“I wouldn’t say I’m thinking of anything in particular. Descriptors, mostly. I have been…challenging myself lately.”
“Oh? How so?” Her face curled into something sly.
Zayne pursed his lips, breaking their shared eye contact in favor of worrying a loose seam on the navy sofa. “It’s come to my attention that I’m not too certain what I feel is called, sometimes. Like a robot, as you’ve said.” A breath escaped him, she slid her hand along the cutting board to transfer the slices onto a plate.
Met with silence, he looked at her and saw confusion. Affection. “You know I’m messing with you right? You’re pretty easy to read. I mean…not to sound like a romance novelist over here or anything,” she huffed as her weight settled back down on the couch next to him, Zayne’s thighs temporarily becoming a table, “your face doesn’t really move much, sure, but your eyes get all weird.”
“Weird?”
”Yeah. When you have a good day at work your pupils are really big, but like…when you’re failing miserably at the claw, they go like—shwoop! Little pinpricks.”
Papers linking oxytocin and other neurotransmitters to the dilation of pupils came to mind; something else, too.
“And? How about now?”
She snickered, taking the plate and propping her socked feet on his knees, “they’re huge. The lights are off in here though, so I regret to inform you I cannot form an accurate hypothesis at this time.”
He swallowed, thumb finding the play button on the remote, noise filling the room again. “I’m sure you can.”
The sound of breath escaping gave him the confidence to glance her way, and he saw the color in the tips of her ears climb to her cheeks.
Affection, affection, affection. Eyes back on the screen, he heard the crisp sounds of her enjoying her snack, muttering, “maybe.”
The explosion spelt the end of his comfort. Affection, in its innocent wonder and gentleness, was a fine point. A point that gored his chest the day she came to his door, two weeks after it all.
When she edged in the door with her shoulder, she urgently expressed her need for normalcy, her disdain for coddling, comfort of any kind. Her hair shone with grime, her frame malnutritioned told him otherwise. Zayne held her gaze when she sat on his sofa, propping up her feet and pressing remote buttons. Unmoving for hours, she seemed to root into the cushion while he worked at the dining table. Affection was something horrid, he decided, massaging the muscle of his jaw he hadn’t come to realize he was clamping down on.
“Zayne.”
Hollowly she said it, just as he joined her there, a foot of breadth between them as per her earlier request. A ‘hm’-ed response..
“Do you remember when I came to visit you? And that little girl…”
“Yes.”
”How could you go on like it was nothing? How do you—how do I? They’re dead.”
“The reality of my career forces me to do so.”
A huff escaped her, falling back into the sofa as if something in her cut loose from a spool of thread.
“Must be nice.”
“It is not.”
The superhero on the television broke the glass of a skyscraper. Coming to realize her words were laced with misguided disdain, she crossed her legs over one another. “Sorry.”
Zayne said her name, stern. “I am not an emotional person. But I am not immune to the effects of grief. I do not know many of my patients on personal levels. I may have shed no tears for that child, but I did carry her. Every surgery that followed that week.” The wind of a sigh.
“My competence in my field, I thought would prevent me from this, but nonetheless I think, if I held the clamp just seconds before, could I have prevented it? Just as you think arriving earlier, being quicker could have changed the outcome. Could have saved them.” Affection bled through him when her shoulders set close to her ears.
“It would not have. It will not. Then or now. It will not.”
Noah had told him as such during his residency, privy to his cold demeanor from childhood. What was done is done, no amount of yearning or bargaining could repair it. No amount of affection could spare her from it.
That evening she slept on his sofa, in the morning she pillaged his linen closet for a towel and washed the grime from her hair, the mourning from her morning. He made porridge that day, not remembering much else aside from her finally eating.
He could watch her pick grout and it would fill him with affection, fondness, love.
They made an effort to spend their free time together after that. She scaled her way to the top of his mountain, climbing through lunch breaks, late nights, and PTO days.
She laced their fingers together over the car console when he drove her home a February evening.
I love her. The touch of her skin, the pad of her thumb on the knuckle of his forefinger. The tear in the knee of her uniform pant leg, the smudge of pen ink on the inside of her wrist. ”—is raspberry. Change my mind.”
“Hm?”
The car rolled to a halt in front of her apartment building; she let go with a reassuring squeeze.
“Zoning out again? I was very thoroughly discussing macaron flavors, Zayne.”
“I’m sorry.”
The leather squeaked; she leaned across the console to drop her lips on his cheek, face alight with a smile.
“All good, Doc. Go home and sleep, I’ll see you Wednesday?”
”Yes. Wednesday.” She patted his thigh, opening the car door and stepping out with a wave behind her.
Wednesday. Wednesday. What day was it? He loved her. She was so pretty.
They took a train to the beach in May.
“Please tell me you have one of those full-body swimsuits. Blue and white stripes? It would make my day.” Her breath was soft on the side of his neck; his arm was slung around her shoulders.
“Just a normal swimsuit, I’m afraid,” Zayne said, placating her by tucking a flyaway piece back against her scalp.
She watched the scenery pass, expectantly holding out her arm to him. He took it, thumbs resting on the dips beneath the meat of her palm, just to feel her pulse. He traced his fingers in patterns along the flesh of her forearm, goosebumps rising, her shoulders lowering in contrast.
“Yes.. You’re the best,” she inched in to rest nearly half of her entire body onto his, forcing a puff of air from his stomach because I love the weight of you.
“Oh shut up, you’re fine. This is my right as your significant other, sir,” emphasizing each syllable of ‘significant’.
The connection following their discussion of grief left him unsteady; unlike before his unlabeled emotions had too many names. Devotion, sentiment, warmth, endearment, friendship, weakness. Was he meant to choose just one? How could he come closer to expressing the need he felt in his entire body when she said those words? Significant other. Yours. Mine.
“You’re right. Please, go right ahead.”
Words came easily to her from then on. They always had, of course, though it seemed the occasion on the train cemented her ability to lambast her dignity every hour they were together.
‘Thank you sweetheart; See you Sunday, love you; Just leave your toothbrush here; What can I bring you to eat;’
It wasn’t necessarily a special day when he said it back. A late night at Akso led to a string of text messages interrogating him about whether or not he had eaten, if he wanted her to wait for him. Zayne turned her down, assuring her they would meet for dinner sometime later that week.
One in the morning came when he finally slipped his loafers off in the entryway to his apartment, hanging his scarf up. Lamplight shone into the hallway, eliciting a sigh from him as he had sworn he turned it off. A step, two, until—
“Zayne? You home?” She was standing from the sofa; her feet were hitting the hardwood; coming to stand in the dimmed light a meter ahead of where he stood, groggy.
She came to meet him there, wrapping her arms around his middle. “Long day, huh? Welcome home. I got you some—“
Her name came softly to him then, and she directed her attention up into his gaze.
“Hello. I love you,” He said, dipping down to peck her cheek, patting her back a few times.
“Uh—me too? In the fridge there’s—“
“Thank you. For welcoming me home, I mean. It was a surprise.”
She took a step back, triumphantly resting her hands on her hips, “wasn’t it? I’m a lovely lover, aren’t I?”
“The loveliest.”
“I know it. Come have something to eat.”
The months wore on into a year, and on the eighteenth month of their relationship he asked her to marry him. To draw any other conclusion was a pointless resistance, and he labeled his emotions for her plain and simple when they lie together the same evening. Terrified, anxious, aghast.
“What is aghast, Zayne. No. If you start doing pride and prejudice speak on me I’m divorcing you. I’m marrying you then divorcing you.” She rolled to her side, his hand dropping to the dip of her waist.
“Aghast is horrified.”
“But old.”
“Yes. But old.”
She reached out to card a hand through his hair, humming with triumph at the admission. Her hand came away; she lifted the glimmering band to the lamplight, softening.
“I’m relieved, honestly. I was running out of names for you. I can add ‘hubby’ to the repertoire.” She sat up, reaching for her discarded tank top to slip over her head. A shame, really.
“I’m very happy for you, dear.”
“Are we eighty? Dear?”
“I find it charming.”
“I wouldn’t have said yes if I knew my future husband is geriatric. You’re lucky you have assets.”
Zayne quirked a brow, “assets?”
He sat up, clasping her wrist and tugging her back down onto the mattress.
“If we’re speaking of assets, I am going to financially advise you to remove your top.”
“You’re stupid.”
He knocked the bridge of his nose into her cheek, humming, “I love you,” he said against the plush.
He likened himself to the heart, cycling through the motions of vena cava to aorta in a daily process until his life cycle ended, affection and fondness and love forever cold in his chest. Triumphantly she bested his efforts to program himself into a blood pumping machine. Every piece of himself was his gift to her. A reborn life; her gift to him.