On Rotation(34)

I respected that. That’s how it should have been from the beginning. After all, he thought I was a cool person, and I felt the same about him. No reason to complicate things beyond that.

After all, dating Ricky would be complicated. I’d tried the “make a relationship work in medical school” thing once already, and it had almost ended with me throwing the last six years of grinding down the drain.* And Frederick had popped into my life at just the right time—about two years before I applied to residency, just enough time for our relationship to stabilize for me to factor his needs into my rank list determinations.* What business did I have pursuing a fledgling attraction to a guy who threw up more flags than a football referee and probably had more ex-girlfriends than DMX* when I had my hands full trying to become a whole doctor? Besides, Momma would pitch a fit if I tried to bring home a Mexican artist.

“Okay,” Shae said, disbelieving. “Whatever you say. Your sexual tension just happens to be thick enough to cut with a knife, but yeah, neither of you are interested.”

“Shae,” Nia warned, leaning over the back of the couch to kiss them on the cheek. Then to me, “Please pardon my eager little beaver over here. They were not a huge Camila fan.”

“And I was right not to be!” Shae said. “Have you seen what she’s been posting these days?” They didn’t wait for my answer to pull out their phone and hurriedly pull up Camila’s social media page. Indignantly, they held it up to my face for me to see.

Poor Ricky. Camila’s most recent photos featured a new addition: a well-dressed white dude with great hair and even better pectorals. She had some plausible deniability for the first few pictures, but as I scrolled up through her feed, the photos got more and more compromising. There was no doubt about it; Camila had a new boo, and, judging by the timing of her posts, he’d overlapped with her old one. I cringed at the most recent picture: a photo of Camila in a hot pink bikini, staring up at her “kicked out of the third episode of The Bachelorette contestant” boytoy like she was about to rip off his swim trunks. The tag? #Mancrushmonday. Yikes.

“This is . . . bad,” I admitted. No way that Ricky didn’t know about Camila’s new Instagram-official boyfriend, and yet, during all our interactions, he seemed fine. We talked about his patients, about what nerdy show we were watching, and never about his ex.

“It’s fucking disrespectful, is what it is,” Shae fumed. “Can you imagine?”

I couldn’t. I had thought that Frederick had done me dirty, but at least he hadn’t flagrantly dumped me for another person and then announced his infidelity to the world.

My phone buzzed in my pocket—Tabatha was video calling me. She never video called me out of the blue; Tabs couldn’t bear to be seen “looking anyhow” even by her sister, and so our calls were always planned. My heart took off at a gallop. This could mean only one thing.

“I think Chris proposed,” I said to Nia.

“Oh my god, what?” Nia said, ripping off her apron and running around the couch to stand over my shoulder.

Shae watched us, confused. “Who’s Chris?”

I gave Shae an apologetic glance.

“One sec,” I said, and answered Tabatha’s call.

Sure enough, Tabatha answered the call with her hand to the camera, a glittering hunk of a rock on her ring finger. Before I could stop myself, all three of us were squealing in excitement, all while Shae looked on in bewilderment.

“My sister!” I explained. “She’s engaged!”

Even during the Knocking, it hadn’t felt completely real. But now that I could see a ring on her finger and her damp, mascara-tracked face, it hit me. My baby sister, the same kid who used to cry when she didn’t get a chocolate in the checkout line, the girl I would read bedtime stories to on the nights when both of our parents worked late, was getting married! Before I could stop myself, I was crying too. Nia, a softie at baseline, had already fetched tissues.

“When?” I asked.

“Just now!” Tabatha said. She swung her camera to the side and suddenly Chris was in view, beaming with pride. “It . . . It was perfect.”

As she described Chris’s proposal, I let myself bask in her happiness. Chris was such a good guy. He’d reached out to me for help with the Knocking, anxious to honor both Tabatha and our family properly. For the proposal itself, the advice he sought was much more vague. I’d told him what she told me—private, meaningful. And so he’d taken her on a trip to Michigan and rented a room at the resort they had stayed at during their first trip together. They had spent the last three days lazing by the river, hiking along the trails, and enjoying each other’s company. Tabatha had, of course, been suspicious, but when two evenings came and went without Chris popping the question, she had let her guard down . . . only for Chris to drop down on one knee the evening before they were set to return.

Sitting here, surrounded by love so sweet it made my teeth ache, I felt a deep, throbbing longing. “Why do you want to be in a relationship so badly?” Michelle had asked me months ago, when I was still swiping through dating apps in search of the one. “You know they can suck, right?”

I don’t remember the answer I gave at that time. It had been something flimsy, a dismissive response to what I’d thought was a dismissive question. Who didn’t want a relationship? Hadn’t we all grown up watching the same romantic comedies, reading the same young adult vampire novels, and dreaming of the day that another person looked us in the eyes and declared themselves ours?