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Mel needs a thesaurus, a lava lamp, and a Shirley Temple. The order of the lava lamp and the drink don’t really matter, but she undoubtedly needs the thesaurus first. Under furious, she’ll find all the other words to describe the exploding feeling in her chest. Under betrayal, she might find a word that doesn’t sound so harsh. Once she has found the words she needs, she’ll stare at her lava lamp and let them float with the globs of colored wax. Afterwards, she’ll drink a Shirley Temple, because it is the only drink she knows how to order at a bar, being that the last time she was face-to-face with a bartender was at a wedding when she was ten.
Mel has been able to legally drink for seven years and can count on one hand the amount of times she’s had alcohol. She has been to a club a total of three times, and each time she has denied the attempts made by the group she was with to drink alcohol, because of all the what if’s surrounding her sister. What if Becca called and needed something, but she couldn’t answer quickly enough because she was drunk? What if the money spent on a ridiculously overpriced drink was needed for something else, like when Becca wanted a large bucket of popcorn or when she wanted extra popping boba?
Which is fine, because Mel has never cared much for the taste of alcohol, and she’s too busy to even know where she’d spend her money if she had the time. She’s fine with all of that. She’s fine.
She’s fine.
She’s furious. She’s furious that she’s not fine.
The realization hits over and over again like a freight train plowing through brick walls. Becca is having sex. Becca is having sex with her boyfriend. Her boyfriend, who Mel doesn’t even know about and who Becca won’t tell her anything about. Other than, of course, that they are having lots of sex.
Mel has never had sex. Mel has never had a boyfriend that has been serious enough to have sex with. Mel has never, without good reason, kept a secret from Becca.
Which is why she’s standing outside in the sweltering heat of midday July, staring at the manicured shrubs while the sounds of the city fight the sounds of her turmoil. Not by choice, but because Dr. Langdon had told her to and because she had lost control.
The guilt of yelling at Becca didn’t sit nicely with the hurt of knowing Becca was keeping secrets, and Mel was getting tired of staring at the shrubs. Compartmentalizing was proving difficult when the whole of the day swelled like a knot of muscle. All she wanted to do was finish the shift, go home, and soak in the bath with the lights off.
“Hey,” a familiar voice calls from behind her back. “You okay?”
Langdon is looking at her with an expression that reads he might actually care how she answers. It reminds Mel of how he had sounded when he asked about her deposition, and she wishes she could talk about it now without feeling like a dissected cat on display.
“Mm.” Mel hums in approval, because she cannot stomach lying to him but she cannot seem to get honest words to form. “Thanks for uh…thanks for taking care of Becca.”
“I’ve gotta respect HIPPA, but we can talk about how you’re feeling.” Langdon gestures between them with the hand not shoved in his scrubs. “F— co-worker to co-worker.”
To acknowledge the lack of friendship Mel has within her occupation would cause a wave of hurt on any other day, but today it is just another ripple in the water. Still, Mel doesn’t know how to answer. She swallows and looks at the laces on Langdon’s shoes, which happen to be the same shoes he wore when she met him ten months ago.
“You got pretty upset in there. I think we should talk about it so it doesn’t affect the rest of your shift.”
Mel perks up at the mention of her shift and the lack of a mention of her sister. Langdon wears an even expression across his face and his arms have moved to cross over his chest, which stirs up a feeling in Mel that she can’t quite grasp.
“I’m sorry,” Mel says. “I just care about my sis- about Becca so much, and seeing her in here scared me. But then she…she kept something pretty big from me.”
Langdon nods and somewhere off in the distance a car honks twice in a row. Mel can feel a layer of sweat forming at the base of her neck.
“Don’t apologize for caring about family, Mel.” A half-beat of silence passes as Langdon casts a look to the ground. “And don’t apologize for being upset that someone in your family kept a secret from you. Sometimes it’s just not easy to reveal something you’ve kept hidden.”
Mel feels like a baseball has hit her trachea and someone has handed her a microphone to sing the National Anthem. “She’s my sister.”
“I know.”
“We aren’t supposed to keep secrets. We’re supposed to tell each other everything.” Mel feels a prickle in her eyes, so she stares at passing clouds until the stinging stops.
“Did you tell her about your deposition?” Langdon asks.
“Well I, no. I didn’t, exactly.”
“Why not?”
“Because I was protecting her. She didn’t need to worry about it,” Mel answers.
The shade provided by the pavilion is much appreciated, but the sweat gathering under her armpits is getting to be too much to handle.
“Do you think Becca might have been doing the same thing?”
The question doesn’t make sense. Why would Becca hide the status of her relationship with someone in the name of protecting Mel. Mel didn’t need to be protected, least of all from something as important as her sister having a boyfriend.
“That doesn’t make sense. What would she be protecting me from?” Mel is sweating almost excessively now and she wants a bath and she wants Langdon to stop looking at her like that.
“You’re busy, Mel,” Langdon says. He uncrosses his arms and sticks his hands into the pockets of his pants. “You work a demanding job where you see the worst of the worst.”
“Before… well before rehab, and even before my addiction and my injury and everything that did to my relationship, Abby struggled to talk to me about her day. There was a time her dad got really sick and she didn’t tell me until a week later, because she felt like I was too busy.”
Mel’s eyebrows raise into the crinkles of her forehead before she can stop herself from reacting. It might be the heat or it might be the day catching up to her again, but Mel fails to see the correlation.
“I have a brother,” Langdon says. Mel’s eyebrows stay positioned upward as he continues. “And he never tells me anything. I had to pry the information about the girlfriend he had in high school out of him, and I didn’t get an answer until after I bought him Skyrim and took him to get ice cream for a week.”
“At least you got to spend time with him,” Mel offers.
“He got a double scoop. Every time.” Langdon looks less than pleased. “Little twerp.”
Mel cracks a smile after sympathetically oh-ing the dent in Langdon’s wallet after a week of double scoop ice cream. Langdon smiles with her, and the sweat at the small of her back doesn’t seem as big of a deal as it had a minute ago.
“Becca and I aren’t supposed to keep secrets, though. I tell her everything-“
“Mel.”
Mel stops and searches the expression on Langdon’s face for something to clue her into what point she seems to be missing. She’s coming up blank.
“Sometimes people are private,” Langdon says.
“But she’s my sister,” Mel repeats for what must be the thousandth time. It’s almost painful how clear that point should be by now.
“Even sisters can be private, Mel. People can be private.”
Langdon is standing closer to Mel than he had been before and the proximity disorients her as equally as his words do. In the rattling of her thoughts, the morning resurfaces and Mel can see the patient that had flirted with her— the one that had asked her about what she liked to do for fun. Mel didn’t know how to answer and all she could think about was the Renaissance Festival, which she had been to three years in a row before her mom died and life got too busy and expensive.
She can’t remember the last time she did something fun that had been entirely her decision. Sure there was Kennywood, but that was because Becca enjoyed going. Movie nights were fun, but Becca got to pick what they watched most of the time. Which was fine, because Mel enjoyed the same movies as Becca. All of the sacrifice was enough, because it made Becca happy.
“She’s your sister, Mel, but everyone has parts of their life that they don’t want to share.” Langdon’s hand makes contact with the exposed skin above Mel’s elbow, and it feels warmer than the day surrounding them.
“What do you like to do for fun, Dr. Langdon?” Mel asks before she can convince herself otherwise.
Langdon blinks once more than normal before responding. “I play a lot of online chess and I uh hang out with my kids. I’ve probably seen every episode of that blue dog show.”
“That’s nice,” Mel says. “It’s nice that you get to spend time with your kids.”
“Yeah. I couldn’t do all of this without them.”
Neither of them talk for a moment, and the movement of the city fills the auditory void between them. Off in the distance, Mel can spot a red blurb with spinning lights and the reality of her job takes over the reality of what little life she has outside of it.
“What do you do for fun, Dr. King?”
The ambulance drowns out any reasonable level of volume, and Mel’s answer gets lost in the chaos of her duties. The back doors of the ambulance swing open, and she and Langdon rush forward to do their job.