Rota Fortunae (8/?)
Reid Oliver hated having a day off work even in the best of circumstances-and being stuck in some no-name town on the crossroads of brainlessness and insanity was hardly the best of circumstances. Back in Dallas, even on the rare occasions when his Chief of Staff looked up from her paperwork long enough to note that her star neurosurgeon hadn’t left the hospital for nearly a week, Reid usually found it easy enough to circumvent her orders and return to his office after little more than a quick meal or a few hours of sleep.
John Dixon, however, seemed to make it his personal mission to ensure that Oakdale Memorial’s staff worked no more than a six-day work week-even going so far as to patrol the building for the express purpose of sending home anyone whose name wasn’t on the duty roster for the day. While that was probably a sound idea for employees who were, at best, only marginally competent even at their most rested and refreshed, the enforced downtime only served to magnify Reid’s sense that his life’s work was being stripped away (again) by forces he couldn’t control.
And being forced to endure an endless stretch of hours in his hotel room with little more than a handful of cable channels and some fast food menus to entertain him was hardly improving his initial opinion of Oakdale, Illinois. He might even have been desperate enough call Katie, the closest thing he had to a friend in this town, to see if she had any interest in doing something-but Katie had not yet returned from the Christmas vacation she and her husband had taken in the Bahamas, so not even her amusingly scatterbrained conversation was available now as a distraction.
Finally deciding that his continued mental health required a change of scenery, however uninspiring the view might be, Reid headed out into the Illinois cold and made his way over to Al’s. It was nearly 10:30 a.m., that awkward time of the morning where it was late to have breakfast yet far too early to be thinking of lunch-but Reid was craving something greasy, and he was fairly sure he could bully the diner’s waitress into ordering him up a double serving of eggs, bacon, and sausage.
And if the potent combination of saturated fat and sodium should happen to send him into gastrointestinal distress, then at least he’d have a reason to head back to the hospital without the annoyance of being chased out again by an interfering administrator.
When he walked past the diner window and caught sight of Luke Snyder occupying one of the booths inside, Reid’s first instinct was to keep on walking right past the door. Since their encounter at Dixon’s office, Reid had done a fair job of avoiding the temperamental young man and ignoring his continuing effort to discredit him. Reid knew that Snyder’s team of goons was still around-the suspicious janitor had stopped shadowing him in the hospital, but suddenly a sturdy brunette woman had developed an uncanny knack for being at the hospital cafeteria whenever Reid entered, and he’d seen Grey Coat again on another outing with Katie as well as the last time he’d stopped for drinks at Yo’s-but given Reid’s characteristic daily schedule of work, sleep, eat, and TV, he knew he’d given Luke Snyder very little opportunity to learn anything of interest.
Still, Reid was by no means the type of man to avoid confrontation, especially when it stood in the way of a good meal-so, his shoulders set with termination, he pulled open the door and stepped inside, rubbing his hands over his arms to chase away the chill.
Luke was sitting at the booth with an unfamiliar companion-a thin, reasonably attractive young man with a shock of red, close-cut hair and stylish glasses perched on his nose. The two men were silent, both hunched over a chessboard on the table between them, and both seemed utterly unaware of their surroundings. It seemed a fair bet to Reid that, so long as he wasn’t too vocal in pestering the waitstaff for his late breakfast, he could get his meal to go without risking another encounter with the man who’d proved so unsettling to Reid in so many ways.
Why, then, Reid found himself passing the counter and approaching the very booth he was trying so hard to avoid was a mystery even to him.
“Chess, Mr. Snyder?” he said wryly as he reached the table. “How surprisingly tame of you. I would have thought you preferred your pawns to be of the human variety.”
Luke looked up from his game and blinked up at Reid in surprise, before his face twisted in his habitual scowl. “You’re the one who enjoys playing games with people,” he snapped. “When are you finally going to give up and move on?”
“You know, you’re fighting a losing battle on this one,” Reid said with an alligator smile.
Luke eyes widened and he glanced down at the chessboard with an overdone pout of dismay. “I’m afraid chess isn’t my best event,” he said, deliberately misunderstanding Reid’s meaning. “But I’d be happy to get lessons from a master. Why don’t you give us a demonstration of your legendary skill?”
“I don’t play chess,” Reid said tersely.
Luke’s mouth dropped open. “You-you don’t play chess?” he repeated blankly, seeming utterly confounded by the casual confession. “You… What would you say if I told you that Reid and I played chess all the time?”
Reid scoffed. “I’d say he was trying even harder to get in your pants than you realized.” Reid narrowed his eyes at the chessboard, as if eyeing a wild animal that was poised to strike, then his gaze returned to Luke. “My folks liked to brag about their little chess prodigy. My uncle liked the share he took from my prize winnings. No one really cared what I liked, and they certainly didn’t care when I stopped liking it. I finally found the nerve to walk away from the tournament circuit when I was 15, and I haven’t so much as touched a chess piece since then.” Except for once, he corrected mentally. A single chess piece, sent as a gesture of defiance to a man who never saw me as anything but the shiny object that enabled him to bask in reflected glory.
Luke studied him for a long moment, as if examining the sudden piece of insight, before a look of cold calculation stole across his expressive face. “That’s a shame,” he said, “because I was thinking this might be a good way for you to prove yourself. I’m not exactly a master at chess, but my friend Patrick here was president of the university chess club, even won the state chess championship a few years ago.”
Luke’s companion had been watching the exchange of words with a barely concealed fascination, but at this he finally piped up. “District championship,” he corrected Luke scrupulously; “third at state.”
Luke shrugged the information off as unimportant. “Anyway, he’s been helping me work on my chess game, but I’m sure he’d enjoy some real competition, for a change.”
Patrick’s grin had a bit of the wolf about it. “I do love a challenge…” he said, trailing off as he arched an eyebrow at Luke, prompting him for an introduction.
Luke was quick to oblige. ”Patrick, you remember me telling you about Reid Oliver, my… the man who died in the train crash? This man says he’s Reid Oliver too, and he’s traveled here from another dimension to take my Reid’s place.”
The redhead laughed brightly, shaking his head at the story. His grin lingered even as neither Luke nor Reid stepped in to amend the story to a more sensible explanation. “Seriously? Well, okay, Reid,” he went on, with the air of someone willing to go along with a joke he didn’t quite understand, “I’d love a game.”
“Sorry,” Reid answered, though he was anything but that. Realizing this conversation wasn’t getting him any closer to having breakfast, he turned to make his way back to the counter.
“Or maybe the stakes just aren’t high enough for you yet,” Luke put in quickly, halting Reid in his tracks. “How about this: You win this game, and I call off the team I have following you.”
Reid looked back at Luke over his shoulder. “Sounds promising,” he said speculatively. “And if I lose…?”
“You leave this town and don’t come back.”
Reid met Luke’s gaze thoughtfully, wondering how eyes of such a deep, chocolaty brown color, a color that seemed so perfectly designed to show warmth and consideration, could seem so icy as the younger man silently dared Reid to pick up the gauntlet. It was a ridiculous wager, and Reid knew he should mock the very idea that he would risk something so vital as his future in medicine on the outcome of a single board game. And yet… he still had another dozen or more hours to kill before he could go back to the hospital, didn’t he? And rusty skills or not-he was still very, very good at chess. How much of a gamble would it really be?
“You’ll stop everything?” Reid questioned, folding his arms across his chest. “No one following me, no one checking up on me… and no sending your lunatic family to chase me down and flog me with a bunch of asinine threats.”
Luke’s jaw tightened. “All right,” he conceded; “everything. Do we have a deal?”
Reid nodded. “It’s a deal.” He stepped back to the booth and plopped down next to Luke, nudging the blond rather ungently into the inside corner of the seat as he nodded a greeting to Patrick.
“Uh...great!” Patrick said, clapping his hands with a show of nervous enthusiasm. “I’ll let you choose white or black,” he added, reaching out to pick up two pawns of opposing colors.
“Hold on,” Luke said, his hand shooting out to prevent the young redhead from removing the pieces on the board. “No one said anything about starting a new game. The deal was, if he could win this game, in my place.” He lifted his chin and stared defiantly at Reid, once again daring him to refuse the challenge.
Patrick gave a murmur of shock. “Oh, but you can’t do that,” he protested. “No offense, Luke, you’re a pretty good player, but I… I captured your queen, you’re pretty much on the ropes here. There’s no way we can have a fair match like this.”
Luke shrugged. “If this guy’s as good as he claims to be, this should be no trouble at all. Right, Dr. Oliver?”
Reid met Luke’s gaze again, unable to decide whether he should applaud the younger man or just strangle him for his audacity. Again, refusing the wager seemed like the only intelligent course of action, and again as brown eyes captured blue, Reid found himself struggling to make that choice.
Don’t be a moron, Reid, he told himself. You’ve already lost so much this past year. Why risk this miraculous second chance over a pair of beautiful br… over your own foolish pride.
But somehow that thought failed to translate itself into movement.
There was just something about those eyes-the faint hint of turmoil in their depths, maybe even uncertainty-as if under all the bluster and the open expressions of mistrust, they were silently begging for Reid to prove the young man’s suspicions wrong. As if there was an answer they wanted so badly, they couldn’t accept it with anything less than perfect certainty.
Since his arrival and incarceration in Oakdale, every day, every action, every thought Reid had had was with the sole purpose of showing John Dixon that he was the person he claimed to be, and to hell with anyone else. But the goal that had seemed so vital to him in these past weeks suddenly seemed to pale into insignificance. Somehow, at this moment, looking into this pair of molten eyes, Reid found himself wanting to prove himself to an entirely different audience, one whose approval seemed every bit as precious as it was unreachable. Suddenly, Reid could imagine nothing else in this universe worth fighting for, nothing that he wanted more than to make Luke Snyder believe.
Reid turned his gaze down to study the board, his eyes scanning the captured pieces, the placement of those that remained. When he looked up at Luke again, his face was stiff with resolve.
“All right, then,” he said. “My move, is it?”
John Dixon, however, seemed to make it his personal mission to ensure that Oakdale Memorial’s staff worked no more than a six-day work week-even going so far as to patrol the building for the express purpose of sending home anyone whose name wasn’t on the duty roster for the day. While that was probably a sound idea for employees who were, at best, only marginally competent even at their most rested and refreshed, the enforced downtime only served to magnify Reid’s sense that his life’s work was being stripped away (again) by forces he couldn’t control.
And being forced to endure an endless stretch of hours in his hotel room with little more than a handful of cable channels and some fast food menus to entertain him was hardly improving his initial opinion of Oakdale, Illinois. He might even have been desperate enough call Katie, the closest thing he had to a friend in this town, to see if she had any interest in doing something-but Katie had not yet returned from the Christmas vacation she and her husband had taken in the Bahamas, so not even her amusingly scatterbrained conversation was available now as a distraction.
Finally deciding that his continued mental health required a change of scenery, however uninspiring the view might be, Reid headed out into the Illinois cold and made his way over to Al’s. It was nearly 10:30 a.m., that awkward time of the morning where it was late to have breakfast yet far too early to be thinking of lunch-but Reid was craving something greasy, and he was fairly sure he could bully the diner’s waitress into ordering him up a double serving of eggs, bacon, and sausage.
And if the potent combination of saturated fat and sodium should happen to send him into gastrointestinal distress, then at least he’d have a reason to head back to the hospital without the annoyance of being chased out again by an interfering administrator.
When he walked past the diner window and caught sight of Luke Snyder occupying one of the booths inside, Reid’s first instinct was to keep on walking right past the door. Since their encounter at Dixon’s office, Reid had done a fair job of avoiding the temperamental young man and ignoring his continuing effort to discredit him. Reid knew that Snyder’s team of goons was still around-the suspicious janitor had stopped shadowing him in the hospital, but suddenly a sturdy brunette woman had developed an uncanny knack for being at the hospital cafeteria whenever Reid entered, and he’d seen Grey Coat again on another outing with Katie as well as the last time he’d stopped for drinks at Yo’s-but given Reid’s characteristic daily schedule of work, sleep, eat, and TV, he knew he’d given Luke Snyder very little opportunity to learn anything of interest.
Still, Reid was by no means the type of man to avoid confrontation, especially when it stood in the way of a good meal-so, his shoulders set with termination, he pulled open the door and stepped inside, rubbing his hands over his arms to chase away the chill.
Luke was sitting at the booth with an unfamiliar companion-a thin, reasonably attractive young man with a shock of red, close-cut hair and stylish glasses perched on his nose. The two men were silent, both hunched over a chessboard on the table between them, and both seemed utterly unaware of their surroundings. It seemed a fair bet to Reid that, so long as he wasn’t too vocal in pestering the waitstaff for his late breakfast, he could get his meal to go without risking another encounter with the man who’d proved so unsettling to Reid in so many ways.
Why, then, Reid found himself passing the counter and approaching the very booth he was trying so hard to avoid was a mystery even to him.
“Chess, Mr. Snyder?” he said wryly as he reached the table. “How surprisingly tame of you. I would have thought you preferred your pawns to be of the human variety.”
Luke looked up from his game and blinked up at Reid in surprise, before his face twisted in his habitual scowl. “You’re the one who enjoys playing games with people,” he snapped. “When are you finally going to give up and move on?”
“You know, you’re fighting a losing battle on this one,” Reid said with an alligator smile.
Luke eyes widened and he glanced down at the chessboard with an overdone pout of dismay. “I’m afraid chess isn’t my best event,” he said, deliberately misunderstanding Reid’s meaning. “But I’d be happy to get lessons from a master. Why don’t you give us a demonstration of your legendary skill?”
“I don’t play chess,” Reid said tersely.
Luke’s mouth dropped open. “You-you don’t play chess?” he repeated blankly, seeming utterly confounded by the casual confession. “You… What would you say if I told you that Reid and I played chess all the time?”
Reid scoffed. “I’d say he was trying even harder to get in your pants than you realized.” Reid narrowed his eyes at the chessboard, as if eyeing a wild animal that was poised to strike, then his gaze returned to Luke. “My folks liked to brag about their little chess prodigy. My uncle liked the share he took from my prize winnings. No one really cared what I liked, and they certainly didn’t care when I stopped liking it. I finally found the nerve to walk away from the tournament circuit when I was 15, and I haven’t so much as touched a chess piece since then.” Except for once, he corrected mentally. A single chess piece, sent as a gesture of defiance to a man who never saw me as anything but the shiny object that enabled him to bask in reflected glory.
Luke studied him for a long moment, as if examining the sudden piece of insight, before a look of cold calculation stole across his expressive face. “That’s a shame,” he said, “because I was thinking this might be a good way for you to prove yourself. I’m not exactly a master at chess, but my friend Patrick here was president of the university chess club, even won the state chess championship a few years ago.”
Luke’s companion had been watching the exchange of words with a barely concealed fascination, but at this he finally piped up. “District championship,” he corrected Luke scrupulously; “third at state.”
Luke shrugged the information off as unimportant. “Anyway, he’s been helping me work on my chess game, but I’m sure he’d enjoy some real competition, for a change.”
Patrick’s grin had a bit of the wolf about it. “I do love a challenge…” he said, trailing off as he arched an eyebrow at Luke, prompting him for an introduction.
Luke was quick to oblige. ”Patrick, you remember me telling you about Reid Oliver, my… the man who died in the train crash? This man says he’s Reid Oliver too, and he’s traveled here from another dimension to take my Reid’s place.”
The redhead laughed brightly, shaking his head at the story. His grin lingered even as neither Luke nor Reid stepped in to amend the story to a more sensible explanation. “Seriously? Well, okay, Reid,” he went on, with the air of someone willing to go along with a joke he didn’t quite understand, “I’d love a game.”
“Sorry,” Reid answered, though he was anything but that. Realizing this conversation wasn’t getting him any closer to having breakfast, he turned to make his way back to the counter.
“Or maybe the stakes just aren’t high enough for you yet,” Luke put in quickly, halting Reid in his tracks. “How about this: You win this game, and I call off the team I have following you.”
Reid looked back at Luke over his shoulder. “Sounds promising,” he said speculatively. “And if I lose…?”
“You leave this town and don’t come back.”
Reid met Luke’s gaze thoughtfully, wondering how eyes of such a deep, chocolaty brown color, a color that seemed so perfectly designed to show warmth and consideration, could seem so icy as the younger man silently dared Reid to pick up the gauntlet. It was a ridiculous wager, and Reid knew he should mock the very idea that he would risk something so vital as his future in medicine on the outcome of a single board game. And yet… he still had another dozen or more hours to kill before he could go back to the hospital, didn’t he? And rusty skills or not-he was still very, very good at chess. How much of a gamble would it really be?
“You’ll stop everything?” Reid questioned, folding his arms across his chest. “No one following me, no one checking up on me… and no sending your lunatic family to chase me down and flog me with a bunch of asinine threats.”
Luke’s jaw tightened. “All right,” he conceded; “everything. Do we have a deal?”
Reid nodded. “It’s a deal.” He stepped back to the booth and plopped down next to Luke, nudging the blond rather ungently into the inside corner of the seat as he nodded a greeting to Patrick.
“Uh...great!” Patrick said, clapping his hands with a show of nervous enthusiasm. “I’ll let you choose white or black,” he added, reaching out to pick up two pawns of opposing colors.
“Hold on,” Luke said, his hand shooting out to prevent the young redhead from removing the pieces on the board. “No one said anything about starting a new game. The deal was, if he could win this game, in my place.” He lifted his chin and stared defiantly at Reid, once again daring him to refuse the challenge.
Patrick gave a murmur of shock. “Oh, but you can’t do that,” he protested. “No offense, Luke, you’re a pretty good player, but I… I captured your queen, you’re pretty much on the ropes here. There’s no way we can have a fair match like this.”
Luke shrugged. “If this guy’s as good as he claims to be, this should be no trouble at all. Right, Dr. Oliver?”
Reid met Luke’s gaze again, unable to decide whether he should applaud the younger man or just strangle him for his audacity. Again, refusing the wager seemed like the only intelligent course of action, and again as brown eyes captured blue, Reid found himself struggling to make that choice.
Don’t be a moron, Reid, he told himself. You’ve already lost so much this past year. Why risk this miraculous second chance over a pair of beautiful br… over your own foolish pride.
But somehow that thought failed to translate itself into movement.
There was just something about those eyes-the faint hint of turmoil in their depths, maybe even uncertainty-as if under all the bluster and the open expressions of mistrust, they were silently begging for Reid to prove the young man’s suspicions wrong. As if there was an answer they wanted so badly, they couldn’t accept it with anything less than perfect certainty.
Since his arrival and incarceration in Oakdale, every day, every action, every thought Reid had had was with the sole purpose of showing John Dixon that he was the person he claimed to be, and to hell with anyone else. But the goal that had seemed so vital to him in these past weeks suddenly seemed to pale into insignificance. Somehow, at this moment, looking into this pair of molten eyes, Reid found himself wanting to prove himself to an entirely different audience, one whose approval seemed every bit as precious as it was unreachable. Suddenly, Reid could imagine nothing else in this universe worth fighting for, nothing that he wanted more than to make Luke Snyder believe.
Reid turned his gaze down to study the board, his eyes scanning the captured pieces, the placement of those that remained. When he looked up at Luke again, his face was stiff with resolve.
“All right, then,” he said. “My move, is it?”