Before Girl

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  Copyright © 2018 by Kate Canterbary

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  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any forms, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the author.

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  Trademarked names appear throughout this book. Rather than use a trademark symbol with every occurrence of a trademarked name, names are used in an editorial fashion, with no intention of infringement of the respective owner's trademark(s).

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  Editing provided by Julia Ganis of Julia Edits.

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  Proofreading provided by Marla Esposito of Proofing Style.

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  Cover design provided by Sarah Hansen of Okay Creations.

  Created with Vellum

  For big girls who like getting some.

  1

  Cal

  It started out as a game, an exercise in observation not unlike assault drills from Army Ranger school. It kept my mind from wandering to surgeries and patients, and since I couldn't simply go on an early morning run without a mental task to keep my head busy while my body worked, I started tracking the targets.

  The moms with jogging strollers were the arms dealers.

  The serious runners and fitness freaks—the ones lunge-walking—were the insurgency.

  The rowers on the pond were the counterintelligence.

  The birds and animals were the civilians.

  And then…then there was the dark-haired woman with golden olive skin and that ass. She was built like a pinup, thick and round in all my favorite ways.

  At first, she was a welcome reminder that, even at forty-two, my libido was very much alive and I could still appreciate a beautiful woman…even if only from a distance. She walked at a brisk pace, but when I was running a five-minute mile, I had the luxury of passing her twice if I pushed hard and timed it right. I'd get her once from the back and then reverse course and get her again from the front.

  I couldn't determine which side I admired more and I thanked the god of ripe rear ends that I didn't have to choose.

  Even bearing the winter's dark, wind-chilled mornings was worth it to catch a glimpse of her and that flash of recognition in her smile.

  She was the asset.

  But it wasn't only her body that caught my eye. It was everything about her. She looked people in the eye and smiled before sunrise. She walked with her chin up, her hips swinging. Sometimes her shoulders shimmied with the music coming through her earbuds or she moved her hands with the beat. The girl had swagger and that—that was captivating.

  One frosty morning in January, I'd jogged by her and our eyes met. She'd smiled at me and called "Good morning." I couldn't wipe the sloppy grin off my face for the rest of the day. My third-year residents thought I was having a stroke. They tried to run a brain bleed protocol on me. One of them went so far as to lobby for an MRI. I let them buzz around me all day as they ran down wild diagnoses, never telling them the strange face was the result of a smile that warmed me through and through and a backside that kept me up nights. Kept me up most mornings too.

  No, I didn't tell them that. I didn't tell them anything.

  But after that smile, she became a fascination bordering on flat-out obsession. Instead of maintaining my routine of rotating through Boston's Emerald Necklace parks for my morning workouts, I stuck with Jamaica Pond. I couldn't tear myself away. Not when that meant risking a chance at saying "Good morning" back to her. Or asking her name and how she liked her coffee and which side of the bed she favored and if she'd take my name when we married.

  Despite my preference for scheduling six a.m. surgeries on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I pushed them back to eight after missing her on those days for three straight weeks. The way some relied on a morning jolt of caffeine to get them going, I needed to share that brief, anonymous connection with her. Without it, I was edgy and distracted. My residents interpreted that behavior as evidence of a frontal lobe tumor. Cardiothoracic surgical residents were off the deep end like that. They even dragged my neurosurgeon friend Nick into that go-round. He enjoyed the consult far too much.

  I didn't explain away my mood or tell them about the woman at the pond. Not to my residents. They survived on RXbars and hospital gossip, and I wasn't giving them any of the latter.

  And now, after all those mornings, all those runs spent imagining everything about this woman—her name, her voice, her interests, her history, and her future—now she was here. Perched on the back of my Jeep, smiling like she knew a secret but had no plans to share it, and bleeding in several spots.

  Yeah, bleeding. I couldn't claim credit for the smile or the secret but the bloodshed was all on me.

  2

  Stella

  Feelin' the burn.

  Sweatin' to the oldies…because late nineties boy bands now qualified as oldies.

  Gettin' my fitness on and loving every damn minute.

  Okay, none of that was true. I was dragging my ass around the Jamaica Pond path, sweating like I had a fever and pretending I loved all this healthy, outdoorsy, exercise-y crap.

  Not that I hated it. I mean, who could hate this quiet, beautiful space just minutes from the hustle and bustle of Boston? It was an oasis of green and water and calm. Now that spring was breaking through winter's stranglehold, the trees were filling in and the pond felt even more secluded and secret.

  And I needed every step in this one-and-a-half-mile path to keep my ass in check. I was in a serious, committed relationship with cheese. And wine. And my mother's Dominican cake with pineapple filling. Always the pineapple filling, never guava.

  I reserved my serious and committed for carbs and fat.

  There was also the task of preventing my brain from overheating into nuclear reactor-level stress meltdowns. Occupational hazard. My boss could give a master class in the art of tyranny. Most of my clients too.

  I'd tried gyms, including the one in my office building, but I was not interested in shvitzing all over my coworkers. Something about gym treadmills felt utterly hopeless to me, like I was a little drone walking on a mechanical road to nowhere. I couldn't do that.

  So, this was my routine, rain or shine: one full loop around the pond at six every morning, Do Not Disturb mode on, The Backstreet Boys blasting. Get my steps in and get ready for the day, even if that meant waking up, getting dressed, leaving my house, boob-sweating around the trail, and then going home only to shower and dress and leave the house all over again. All while pretending that I loved exercising at the ass-crack of dawn. It made sense in some strange world.

  There was one definite drawback to the ass-crack of dawn: some of the woodland creatures were still living it up and popping out of the bushes like they were at a fun little forest rave with a sticky-fingered toad on the turntables. On most days, it was nothing more than a squirrel or pair of mourning doves, and I could handle those dudes. Today wasn't one of those days.

  A raccoon-possum-evil-monkey-stegosaurus hybrid darted out from the brush, stopped in the middle of the path, and hissed at me. It was possible that I peed just a tiny bit.

  "Oh hell no," I screamed.

  I stopped in my tracks, holding my breath while I waited for the beast to run off but it went right on snarling at me.

  "Okay, this must be the day when the animals rise up and enslave humans because you, sir, are possessed by—"

  The words stu
ck in my throat as a pile of bricks slammed into my back and knocked me to the ground. Then again, maybe it wasn't a pile of bricks because bricks weren't known to have arms or chin scruff, and bricks didn't smell like sweaty pine trees.

  Sweaty. Pine. Trees.

  Yeah, I said it. Thought it. Whatever. It was one hundred percent accurate.

  I barely had time to register the shock of hitting the ground before the man-brick was muttering to himself and running his hands over my arms, legs, and torso, and bless us, oh Lord, for granting us these hands from your bounty.

  "Unffff," I sigh-groaned as his fingers moved over my ribs.

  His hands stilled, and then he pressed my sides again. "Did that hurt?" the man-brick asked.

  I shifted away, suddenly aware of the stinging pain in my knees, palms, and chin. My breasts took most of the impact, but several layers of fabric protected them from the trail. And it wasn't like boobs bruised. Right?

  "Just tell me the beast is gone," I said, teetering into a sitting position to tend these scrapes. "I can live knowing it's still out there, but I can't handle it being in my line of sight."

  Man-brick was suddenly beside me, hooking his arm around my waist and bringing me to my feet. Oof. That hurt. Standing, breathing. Everything hurt in that glorious everything-was-worse-after-turning-thirty kind of way.

  "I need to take care of this." He frowned at the battered skin on my hands and thin trails of blood running down my legs. "For fuck's sake. I can't believe I did this to you."

  "Can we focus on the real priority? Seriously, tell me that creature scurried back into the pits of hell," I said.

  He blinked as if he hadn't heard me correctly and then glanced from side to side. "We're about a quarter mile from the trailhead. Do you think you can make it? Is that too far? I want to know if it's too far," he said.

  "Not too far at all," I lied. "I'm fine. I can walk."

  He stared at the scrape on my chin, his jaw locked. This man-brick, he was a looker. Square jaw straight out of the Disney princehood, long limbs, frown for days. And everything he said was rumbly-grumbly. Mutters and murmurs and growls. But for all his Prince-Hans-of-the-Southern-Isles-ing, he was gentle. He brushed his thumb over my chin, his touch little more than a mild breeze.

  Please don't be a Prince Hans. Only Kristoffs allowed here.

  "Okay. We'll walk," he said. "But you'll stop me if anything hurts."

  "You can bet on it." He shouldn't bet on it because that was another lie. I didn't have a reason for this tough girl routine but I was committed to it, and sticking with things long past the point of reason was my most charming trait.

  His grip on me was fierce, and despite the fact I was not a small woman, he was shouldering the majority of my weight while also walking faster than I could run.

  He toggled between asking whether I was all right and apologizing for knocking me to the ground. He led me to an older SUV, opened the tailgate and directed me to sit while he rustled in the back seat for his first aid kit.

  I expected a wallet-sized container of bandages and out-of-date antibiotic ointment. Instead, I got a battlefield backpack stocked with more equipment than most ambulances.

  "This is handy," I said, my eyes wide as he pulled on a pair of gloves. He snapped those babies on like he meant business.

  "Started out as a medic. Army Rangers. Some habits are hard to shake."

  He pressed a gauze pad to my bleeding knee and in the process, he stroked the back of my calf with his free hand. It tickled in the best way and I yelp-squeaked. For that one moment, I studied the sweaty-pine-scented man-brick with the squee-inducing hands. And brick wasn't too far from the truth: he was broad and strong and could probably run through a fucking wall.

  More Hulk, less Kool-Aid Man.

  Oh, yeahhhhhh.

  In the morning sunlight, streaks of gold shone in his dark hair and scruffy chin. I couldn't make out the color of his eyes with his dark athletic sunglasses separating us, the type you saw on snowboarders and surfers. Neither option was likely here, a hot second outside Boston.

  "These days, I'm a surgeon," he said, interrupting my inspection of his tanned arms and decidedly ring-less fingers. I was pleased on both counts.

  "And trail savior," I added, gesturing to the gauze on my knee. "Don't forget about that."

  He chuckled, nodding, and met my gaze with a wide, warm smile. Such a nice smile. You could tell a lot about people by their smiles. This guy was honest, kind. A little reserved but not everyone needed to live their life balls out.

  "Anytime," he said. "I'm Cal."

  "Stella," I replied.

  Cal glanced off toward the trail, shaking his head before looking back at me. "Wow," he said, squeezing my calf. "It's nice to finally put a name to the face. After all this time."

  I smiled but it was one of those I-don't-get-it smiles. "'All this time'?"

  He gazed at me, frowning as if he didn't understand what I didn't understand. "I've been hitting this trail almost every day for months." His voice faded and he stopped himself. He stared at the ground for a long moment, blinking as a blush crept up his neck and across his cheeks. This sweaty pine man-brick had a shy side. "I've seen you out here a lot. I thought—I don't know. I thought you'd seen me too."

  Oh.

  Ohhhh.

  Oh.

  3

  Cal

  Most guys started off with a quippy line. I waited a handful of months to approach Stella and then I knocked her to the damn ground. That was just great. Real fucking awesome.

  After that smooth move, it was no wonder I didn't know what to say. It was easier to talk about her contusions; I owned that territory. But when I palpated her knee and ankle for more serious injuries, I couldn't keep my touch clinical. Even with gloved fingers, her olive skin felt exactly like the perfection I'd imagined.

  Yes. Fine. All right. Half of those thoughts were filthy, sweaty, skin-slapping fantasies. She was the star in every one of my dirty dreams, and until now, I hadn't even known her name.

  "Wow," I said to myself, my fingers curling around Stella's calf. "It's nice to finally put a name to the face. After all this time."

  Her nose wrinkled and she tilted her head, confused. "'All this time'?" she repeated.

  "Yeah," I said, stealing another moment to caress her leg. Memorize the feel of her. Imagine those legs wrapped around my waist. "I've been hitting this trail almost every day for months." I should've stopped right there and been done with it. I should've picked up the clear cues and choked myself with them to keep my mouth shut. I should've stopped digging myself deeper into this big, awkward hole just like I should've stopped before slamming all two hundred pounds of me into her. But I didn't. Nope. Couldn't help myself out of this mess with both hands and a shovel. "I've seen you out here a lot. I thought—I don't know. I thought you'd seen me too."

  Her eyes widened and she pulled on a tight, cautious smile. "Um, yeah. Right. Definitely."

  Ah, hell. There was a reason I didn't talk to women. It had something to do with always saying the wrong thing at the wrongest moments. And when it came to this woman? Wrong, wrong, all fucking wrong. If I could've hightailed it out of the situation, I would've. But I had wounds to tend and I didn't know how to walk away from a patient. Not even when my life depended on it. There was a bullet hole through my left leg to prove it.

  "Oh, no, no. It's okay," Stella said, leaning forward and angling her face to catch my eye. "I'm in my own world when I'm walking, you know? I get into the tunes and block everything else out. I'm sure I've seen you a hundred times. I'm positive. It just took me a minute to catch up. And everyone looks different up close. I notice shoes more than anything else." She glanced down at my sneaks. "Oh, right. Yes! Yes, of course. Orange with the blue laces. I've seen those plenty of times. From a distance, I thought it was orange and purple. Clemson colors. I don't know how you feel about Clemson but I'll just say I'm excited it's blue and not purple."

  A noise signaling s
ome form of agreement rumbled in my throat, and I turned my attention to cleaning and bandaging her knees. My brain was on lockdown and I couldn't gather a single thing to say to the curvy, confident woman I'd been lusting after for months. I couldn't tell her my blue laces came with the sneaks and I'd never given any thought to coordinating my collegiate pride with my running gear.

  As if sensing my wordless panic, Stella filled the silence with her thoughts on the weather and the Red Sox's prospects this season, her joy in seeing early buds on the lilac trees around town, and the new ducklings she noticed in the pond last week. I was nearly finished cleaning the scratches on her chin when she leveled her dark-eyed gaze on me.

  "So, Blue Laces," she said, her smile deepening until dimples appeared. "How can I thank you for peeling me off the trail and patching me up?"

  "No, that's not necessary. It was my fault to begin with." I stared at the birthmark beneath her ear. Too light for a freckle, too dark for a scar, too flat for a mole. It looked like Turkey. The country, not the bird overtaking the streets of Cambridge. "You don't have to thank me. I'm the one who knocked you over."

  Stella nodded. "Right. Coffee sounds great. How about Seven Pond? It's a cute little spot. Do you know where that is?" She patted her hips until her fingers located her key fob. Goddamn, there were hidden pockets in those leggings and now I needed to find out what else she had in there. "Either way, you can follow me."

  "You, uh—you really don't have to do that," I stammered. "You don't have to do this, Stella."

  I wasn't due in surgery until the afternoon and I had another three hours before rounds. I didn't have any reason to turn down her offer, other than my complete inability to form sentences around this woman.