Medsi

[Jay Carpenter]

Minutes passed and Jay was about to get up and walk out. Maybe lay down on the floor and take a nap. Something. When he heard voices in the distance, he ignored them, short of his own name sounding across the waiting room.

But it was the footsteps that made him look up.

He kind of hoped Natalie was asleep when he sent the info about Medsi. But despite it being middle of the night, a swell of relief rose upon seeing her. And the coffee.

His brows lifted when she spoke to Carter right out.
“Uh, no,” he muttered when the ‘old friend’ came up. That was already a landmine and he wasn’t about to step on it. Not here.

Natalie was as tight lipped about her family as Jay had been about his. But he recognized it when Carter assumed Natalie was her older sister.

He climbed to his feet as a means of interrupting (and snatching the extra coffee). “Natalie,” he corrected on an attempt to regain her attention. He showed her his hand, and with the good one, sipped coffee. It was black and blue by now, and the knuckles all but swollen into oblivion.

[Natalie Grey]

By his expression she was surprised Carter even managed to get that close. The name came a little unbidden, like he hadn’t quite intended to admit to the struggle to place her. There was a certain faux pas to it, if Natalie were the sort of woman to care about these things, but she only laughed a little in reaction.

“A little less polite, a lot more troublesome I’m afraid.” The smirk which followed was not an expression ever to be seen on her exalted sister’s face, and she was fairly certain Isobel would have been mortified had the roles been reversed and she had been misrecognised herself. Especially by a man like Carter. “I’m not sure if she’d be pleased you’d remembered her name, or terribly disappointed to know you thought I was her.”

Natalie wouldn’t have bothered to correct him with her actual name, but Jay seemed to motor back to life then. She wasn’t sure if it was gallantry or irritation on his part that caused him to loom like that. Carter was storybook handsome after all. Boring, but handsome.

“You know there’s no point waving that about at me like a flag. It won’t earn you any sympathy.” Her tone was morbidly dry as he paraded the swollen ruin of his hand, which she couldn’t have missed even had she tried. She didn’t wince at what she saw, perhaps because it was the least of the savagery they’d witnessed between them over the past year. Little ever visibly ruffled her composure. The look up at his eyes was softer though; quieter, more private in connection. She moved onto his gravity naturally. Her free hand pulled at the sodden edges of his coat, travelled down the buttons without ever quite touching the body inside, though she could feel the heat of it. There was a ghost of a smile. “You’re soaked through too. Did you know?”