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“In all my public and private acts as your President, I expect to follow my instincts of openness and candor with full confidence that honesty is always the best policy in the end.
My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.”
“This is still so crazy,” Darcy said, shaking her head, squinting through the gap in the curtains to see the small, grainy screen of the nearest television as the camera stayed close on Gerald Ford’s face during his inaugural address. “I can’t believe we watched the president quit his job today.”
“I can’t believe I forgot that Gerald Ford was the one who said that thing about the national nightmare being over,” Steve commented before he glanced up from the Newsweek he’d been flipping through and smirked. “But your amazement is kind of adorable since…didn’t you already know this was going to happen?”
She looked over and smiled. “Knowing it and seeing it in real time are two different things.”
“Fair enough,” he shrugged.
“Although,” she shifted in her hospital bed and grimaced as the movement sent another shock of pain from her ankle. “This is not the way I wanted to be celebrating this momentous occasion.”
Steve frowned and shifted his chair closer to her bedside. “Want me to go check and see how much longer we have to wait for a doctor?”
She shook her head. “They’re just going to tell you the same thing they told us when they brought me back here.”
“Not if I threaten them to say something else,” he suggested with a shrug.
Darcy glared. “You’re staying here.”
He sat back with a huff. “Like a screen door on a submarine.”
“I won’t be mad if you want to go do something else,” she said, though she wasn’t entirely sure that was true. “You can just come back later and pick me up.”
It was Steve’s turn to give her a look. “I’m staying here,” he repeated before he stretched his legs out and offered her a smile. “Anyway, this is considerably more entertaining than the lesson planning I was going to start this afternoon.”
She smiled back as he laced his fingers with hers. “Who needs lesson plans when you can sit with your clumsy-ass girlfriend in the emergency room all day?”
The day had started out on a pleasant note. She’d taken the day off work to stay home and watch Nixon officially leave office, sipped a mimosa while he walked down the red carpet to his waiting helicopter, flanked by secret service agents, asked Steve if it was too early to think about ordering Chinese for lunch (it wasn’t), then walked downstairs to the mailboxes and broken her ankle.
Well, maybe broken.
Definitely sprained. Her right ankle was the size of a softball with an unpleasant purple bruise blossoming slowly over the joint and down the top of her foot. She could still wiggle her toes, but she remembered her sister telling her that didn’t mean really mean as much as TV doctors made it seem.
Luckily, she hadn’t laid at the bottom of the stairs for very long. Mr. Martinez, from the second floor, had walked in a few minutes after her initial tumble and helped her to sit at the bottom of the staircase while he ran up to get Steve and tell him what happened.
And now, after two hours in the waiting room, when she’d finally been moved back to a bed where she could rest her foot on something other than his knee, Steve smiled patiently. “You’re not clumsy.”
Darcy rolled her eyes. “My current deformity says otherwise,” she reminded dryly before her stomach rumbled. “I would love for them to hurry up though,” she frowned. “I’m starving.”
Steve looked like he was just about to agree when the curtain separating them from the rest of the room swished open, revealing an Asian man in a white coat. The name Dr. Yang embroidered on the left pocket. “How are we doing today, Mrs.—” he faltered and grabbed the chart from the end of her bed. “Uh, Miss—sorry—Miss Barrett.”
She offered a tight smile. “Like I fell down the stairs and messed up my ankle,” she said bluntly. “Like an idiot.”
The doctor smiled in response as he scribbled in something on her chart. “Well let’s see what the damage is,” he approached the right side of her bed and gingerly placed a hand on her ankle. She hissed in pain. From the corner of her eye, she saw Steve had tensed considerably. “Painful to the touch?”
“Mmhmm,” she said through her clenched jaw.
“Can you move your foot?”
“Is that really necessary?” Steve asked with an edge to his voice. “Just look at it. You’re hurting her.”
“Steve—”
“I need to assess her level of pain,” the doctor said, less pleasant than before.
“Then ask her to rate it,” Steve suggested tightly.
He tipped his head to one side. "I'm sorry, are you a doctor?"
“It’s a six,” Darcy interrupted, irritably. “Six out of ten, but it spiked to an eight when you touched it.” To her relief, the doctor lifted his hand away from her joint. “As for movement? Toes yes; ankle no,” she admitted, hoping he wouldn’t try to test her word.
Dr. Yang frowned thoughtfully and tilted his head from one side to the other. “It’s either a small fracture or a bad sprain,” he decided, making another note. “We can’t know for sure until you get an x-ray. I’ll grab a nurse and get you a wheelchair.”
Steve waited until he’d left before he spoke. “I could just carry you down to the x-ray.”
She rolled her eyes. “No you couldn’t,” she assured him before she clarified. “I mean you could. I know you could. But I’m not going to let you.”
“It would be faster—”
“You’re already making me nervous with the caveman vibes that me being injured has wafting off of you,” she cut him off. “Just let these incredibly slow-moving medical professionals do their job and stop being a dick, and hopefully I’ll be out of here before I have to order any hospital food.”
Steve was not invited to tag along to the x-ray suite downstairs, but when she was returned to her curtained slice of the ER with her ankle tightly wrapped in white bandage, he offered her a Clark Bar and a sheepish, apologetic look. “I’m fuzzy on the lore, but I think chocolate is the uh,” he coughed, “traditional caveman apology.”
Darcy eyed him for a moment before she sighed and shook her head. “Steven Grant,” she muttered under her breath as she snatched the candy from his hand. “Seriously, though,” she warned before she tore into it. “When the doctor comes back: be nice.”
His eyes narrowed, considering this. “Would you settle for quiet?”
“Nice quiet? Yes. Silent, obvious and completely unnecessary hostility? No.”
“Nice quiet it is,” he grumbled before she let him help her out of the wheelchair and back into bed. He had commandeered another pillow in her absence and placed it under her swollen ankle, elevating it better than it had been before.
“Thank you,” she said quietly, with a small smile before she ripped open the wrapper and broke off a piece of her chocolate bar. She offered it to him. “I’ll share.”
He shook his head. “You eat.”
She did, hoping she’d feel better with something in her stomach. But she didn’t. She felt just as anxious as she had before, only with the taste of peanut butter in the back of her throat instead. “How long do x-rays take to process or develop or whatever in 1974?” she asked, leaning her head back and directing the question more toward the ceiling than Steve.
“I’m sure it’s not too long,” Steve said. “Otherwise, wouldn’t they have sent you home or back to the waiting room?”
She sighed and rubbed at her eyes beneath her glasses. “I don’t know. I just hope they aren’t charging by the hour. I really don’t even know if I’m going to be able to afford this.”
Steve paused, mid-reach for his magazine and frowned. “What do you mean? Your insurance will cover it.”
She glanced over. “It might,” she shrugged. “If I had any.”
He blinked. “You…don’t have health insurance?”
She shook her head. “No. Do you?”
“Of course I do,” he said instantly. “You work in a hospital; how do you not have health insurance?” He frowned. “If I’d taken you to OMC would you have been covered there?”
He hadn’t taken her to OMC because Alta Bates was a closer drive and their reputation claimed a more efficient ER. And she hadn’t wanted to go to OMC anyway, since she was embarrassed enough without the risk of running into a co-worker.
Not that it mattered. Because she wouldn’t have been covered there either. Steve looked deeply confused when she told him as much. “It’s not a big deal,” she shrugged. “I mean, if this had happened at work, I’m sure they would have fixed me up, no problem, but it’s fine. I’ll just get on a payment plan or something if it turns out to be more than I can afford.”
“Darcy,” Steve said seriously. “We can afford to pay whatever medical bill is going to come with this visit. Don’t worry about that.”
She felt a little better hearing him say that, but not by much. Steve had sounded more than confident in their combined ability to pay for her hospital stint, but she had no idea if that was true. They didn’t talk about money or sharing expenses beyond the 50/50 split of the rent, utilities and groceries like they’d always done. When he’d been hurt and in the hospital before, the construction company had covered all the expenses, and any medical care she’d sought in the last four years—birth control and an eye exam for new glasses once—had all been inexpensive enough that she hadn’t had to stress.
Carefully, she twitched her toes, trying to keep them from falling asleep. “Regardless,” she said after a moment of thoughtful silence. “Broken or sprained, this is going to make getting up the stairs at home a real pain in the ass.”
“Depends on how stubborn you feel like being,” Steve said casually.
She rolled her eyes. “Is that a thinly veiled threat to carry me everywhere I need to go for the next six weeks?” she asked. “Because we’re venturing back into caveman territory.”
He smiled. “I wasn’t planning on cracking you over the head before I did it.” He glanced toward the closed curtains for a moment before he went on. “Anyway, I thought you liked it when I picked you up.”
Darcy’s cheeks turned pink and she pressed her lips together. “In…certain situations,” she said carefully. “Not because I’m a broken invalid.”
“Hey, you don’t know,” he said encouragingly. “You might only be a sprained invalid.”
She huffed and reached for the nearest magazine from the pile Steve had brought her from the waiting room. He accepted her unspoken request for silence and seemed content to let her read about the dismal state of the economy in Barron’s while he crossed his arms over his chest and appeared to be thinking something over.
The first article she chose was too dull to hold her attention. The second was too depressing. Darcy huffed out another sigh and flipped the page. “What’s up?” she asked without looking up. “You’ve got pensive face.”
“You’re not looking at my face,” he reminded.
She pulled her attention up and out of the mounting oil crisis and smiled. “I can hear it,” she said. “You have a very loud brow.”
He smiled briefly before his look of concentration took over again. “No, I’m just thinking about this insurance thing.”
“Please stop,” she insisted. “It’s not a big deal.”
“No, it is a big deal,” he countered. “It just doesn’t have to be. I mean, there’s no reason you—” he paused and seemed to change the direction his words had been heading. “You’d be covered under mine if—”
Darcy felt her face wrinkle in confusion. “If…?”
He looked twice as flustered and shook his head. “Not that that’s the only reason—I mean, it is a reason, but it’s not obviously not the reason—”
Her brain clicked his stumbling words together and she narrowed her eyes in disbelief. “Please don’t tell me you’re trying to do what I think you’re trying to do.”
He looked up, caught mid-thought in headlights. “… What do you think I’m trying to do?”
Darcy sighed and dropped her face into her hands. “Please tell me you’re not about to ask me to marry you for your health insurance, Steve. Because you can’t be asking me to marry you for what might be the least romantic reason of all time.” She shook her head and dropped her hands, only to suck in a gasp of surprise at the sapphire and diamond ring Steve was holding out to her. Her eyes widened. “What is that?”
He cleared his throat and let out another flustered breath as he shoved back his hair. “It’s the, um, engagement ring I’ve been carrying around for the last three months, trying to figure out how to do this.”
She let out a shocked little laugh and tore her eyes away from the vintage setting to look at him again. “And this is the moment you’re going with?”
Steve rolled his eyes and scooted his chair closer to hold her hand in his. “Yeah, I guess so,” he said, sounding more confident than he had a moment ago. “Because after having this thing burn a hole in my pocket for the last three months, waiting for the perfect moment, I just realized that no one moment is going to be more perfect than any other. Because…” he let out another shaky exhale, seeming to urge himself to continue. “Because I…love every single thing about you, Darcy.” She felt her heart leap up somewhere into her throat and an unexpected swell of emotion sting at her nose. “From your messy hair,” he took her hand and kissed the tips of her fingers, “to these insanely cold hands you always need me to warm up,” she laughed as he glanced down at her elevated ankle, “to your black and blue but still perfect ankles,” he curled her fingers into his to kiss the top of her hand. “And since every moment with you is perfect, and since I’m hoping you realize that this doesn’t have anything to do with health insurance,” he added, almost as an afterthought, “I don’t want to waste any more time not asking you if you’ll marry me.”
Darcy’s vision blurred as a barrage of memories flew through her mind. Of how Steve’s cold and indifferent exterior had melted away in every kindness, every sweet and thoughtful way he’d cared for her since they’d met. How he’d kept her safe and encouraged her and been her best friend before anything else. How she knew she’d never love anyone as much as she loved this man fate had dropped into her path—who had rewritten the story of her life into a love story sweeter than she could have ever imagined.
She didn’t realize she’d started nodding until she saw the relief paint onto Steve’s face and she laughed as she tried unsuccessfully to blink away her tears. “Yes,” she managed the moment before he slid the ring onto her left hand. “Yes, I will marry you.”
Her hands slid into his hair when he pulled her in for a kiss. Close enough that she could feel the way his heart, usually so steady and controlled, was racing as fast as hers. He pulled back first, just as she was about to need a breath, and let his forehead rest on hers. “You sure?” he asked, his voice a whisper with a hint of disbelief.
“Yes,” she repeated, unable to help the smile that spread across her face. “Of course I am.”
He pressed his lips to hers again; slower this time. Softer and more gentle before his smile broke their kiss a second time. “Good… because originally I was gonna sing you that Bruno Mars song but I know how you feel about—”
She cut him off, pulling him again. “Don’t you dare,” she warned between kisses.
The curtains flew open without warning. “Good news, it’s only a sprain,” Dr. Yang said cheerfully before he stopped short at the sight of them, looking embarrassed before Steve jumped to his feet.
“Thanks, Doc,” he said placing a hand on the doctor’s chest and pushing him backwards through the curtains. “I’m good to take her home then?”
The doctor looked bewildered as he found himself moving with Steve’s assistance. “Uh, yeah, rest and elevation—”
“Great, great; thanks for everything,” Steve said quickly and pulled the curtains shut again. “We’ll call you if anything comes up.”
Bright pink, Darcy hid her giggle behind her hands before Steve sat down on the edge of the hospital bed. “Can we get out of here?”
He grinned and kissed her again. “Yes ma’am.”
When they got home, Steve asked first if he could carry her up the stairs.
And she didn’t mind at all.