Sweet Romance12 min read
My Doctor-Next-Door: Tomatoes, Alarms, and a Lock-Out Love
ButterPicks11 views
1
"I will die in your bed someday," I told him without thinking.
"Then lie down. Take your pants off," he said, calm, hands already in gloves.
I blinked, surprised into obedience. "One foot out," he added, frowning like it was instruction in a recipe.
I pulled my trousers down to my knees. He paused, looked up, and then—"Put your pants back on."
"What?" I whispered. "I already—"
He shoved the speculum back into the tray and, with perfect professional deadpan, listed my check results. "Irregular menses. No abnormal discharge. B‑scan for a look. Sleep better. Eat less takeout."
"Especially takeout," he said again, a stiffness in the last syllable like he was lecturing a child and a fact at once.
I clutched my referral slip and left, telling myself I'd met a human efficiency machine and nothing more. I did not suspect then that I'd been given a simple prescription for how my life would start to rearrange.
2
The B‑scan turned out normal. The nurse at the ultrasound room, with a warmth I hadn't expected, escorted me, paid my registry, and walked me back to the quiet corridor outside his office. She smiled like sun.
"He's next door?" I asked the nurse, embarrassed.
She laughed. "He lives next door. Lucky you."
I rolled my eyes and told myself not to be ridiculous. The doctor who'd told me to put my pants back had probably tucked sincerity under a lab coat. But then, a week later, the elevator doors swung and a pale long-fingered hand slid in to press the close button.
He stood there: clean, clear-eyed, and peculiarly neutral. He smelled faintly of soap. I realized how easy it was for a face to become a map of story ideas. A burst of image-ideas hit me—seven pieces of art with him in them—and I smiled to myself like someone who'd struck gold without needing to dig.
"Eight-o-seven," he said when he got out.
He lived next door. Door to door. Same wall.
I swallowed an invitation that had no words. "Do you want some?" I blurted, holding up the box of late-night skewers I'd bought on the way home.
He glanced at them, faint distaste on his face. "Spicy. Unhealthy," he said.
I burned.
3
"You're ridiculous," my friend Finley Delgado scolded when I called in a panic. "You don't just 'lose' a doctor like a lost sock. Get his number. Get his name. Do not leave him to fate."
"I didn't get a number," I admitted. "He looked at me like I was a stray pigeon."
"Then we will stake out the corridor," Finley declared. "We will be efficient. Set eight alarms. You will be there before dawn."
I set eight alarms that night because the plan sounded epic, foolish, and absolutely like something Finley would write on a checklist. I fell asleep with cheeks hot from thinking of his clean jaw.
4
I got locked out of my apartment at three a.m.—classic. Rain, no keys, no phone, and the universe conspiring to teach me humility. When the neighbor's door opened and his silhouette filled the hallway, it might have been a movie.
"You're out?" he asked, eyebrows up.
"I left my keys," I said like an embarrassed child.
"Come in," he said.
He let me in without hesitation. He made me sit on his couch. He asked, "Are you hungry?"
"Yes," I admitted. "But not for his sarcasm."
He stood, walked to the kitchen, and announced, "Tomato-egg noodles, okay?"
I had seven alarms and a list of stalking locations in my head and somehow winded up eating in his kitchen.
5
"You look like you swallowed a beet," he said when he saw my face start to swell.
"I'm allergic to tomatoes," I protested weakly, trying to laugh it off.
He studied my face like a clinician. "Tomato allergy," he said flatly. "You should take antihistamines."
He disappeared into his bedroom and returned with tablets. He watched me take them. "Why didn't you go to the ER? You can get severe reactions."
"I thought it would pass," I said small.
He sighed. "You should come next time. I won't let you take risks."
He drove me to the hospital and, with a few clicks on the internal system, logged me in, prescribed me meds, and even paid—no fuss, no paperwork for me. He closed his shift and handed me his number on a pen and wrote, "Text me if worse."
"Your phone number," I said.
He shrugged. "I don't keep my phone off."
I walked home with his digits saved and my heart somehow more unsteady than my allergic skin.
6
He gave me a door-access card later—"For easier visits. For emergencies. For pajamas, if I'm not around," he said like it was nothing.
"Don't get ahead of yourself," I muttered, but I stuck the card to my keys like a talisman.
The next morning, at five a.m., an army of alarms woke me up. He was there on the balcony, answering mine.
"Your alarms woke me," he complained.
"You were supposed to be the one to watch," I whined.
"Then I will drive you to work," he answered.
I accepted. He made tea in my thermos. He timed my subway connections. He grew into an on-call guardian.
7
We were messy—awkward, kissing, professional, and intimate by turns. He said "Harrison" like it was my name too. He told me about the hospital, about the ward down the corridor where his cousin worked. He introduced me to staff as "Kylie's friend," and always watched for my allergies in menus.
"You're very hard to feed," he complained once at dinner. "You have a long list of things you can't have."
"It's because I'm a complicated person," I lied.
"Simple people like being simple," he said, smiling like he knew the inside of me.
8
There was a night Finley called, frantic. "Kylie, you must come rescue me from a bar. Now."
I drove, or rather Harrison drove, because when your neighbor is a doctor with a clean white coat temperament and an uncanny ability to read a room, and you are caffeinated with adrenaline, he volunteers.
In the alley outside the bar we found three men surrounding two women. My jaw clenched.
"Back off!" I shouted.
They turned. One stepped forward with a smirk. "What are you gonna do, little girl?"
I used to be on a middle school track team. I had a black belt in taekwondo. I had never been a superhero, but I knew how to move. I didn't think. I hit. They staggered. One shoved me back and I slid, then rolled and planted a heel to a knee. The trio scattered in a minute.
Harrison stood a few feet away, breathing, his palms clean, his expression like a clinical note: contained and precise. "Call the cops," he said.
I called. They took statements. Later, a detective came with a leaflet and told me the two men were known for snatching phone wallets in the area—small-time predators. He promised to follow up.
9
The next week the police brought Ervin Ferrell and Igor Colon to a community safety meeting in the plaza, escorted under bright noon sunlight, handcuffed and flanked by officers.
It turned into a public unmasking that I could never have imagined. A hundred neighbors formed a rough ring at the plaza, curiosity sharp. Phones lifted like laurel wreaths waiting for the moment. The mayor's aide read names and charges into a microphone that made their faces monumental and small at once.
"This is a community safety demonstration," the officer said. "There will be statements from victims."
I stood up, heart thudding. "This is Kylie Monteiro," the officer said, handing me the mic.
"These men, Ervin Ferrell and Igor Colon, have been targeting women leaving late-night venues," I said, voice steeled. "They tried to corner my friend and me. I defended myself. When they were arrested the police said there were more victims—two mothers, a courier, and one woman who went missing for several hours before she escaped."
The crowd stirred, murmurs like wind through an empty lot. Someone shouted, "Good for you!" In the front, a girl clutched her mother's hand like a rag.
Ervin's face, when it turned to me, had a mask of bluster that cracked in the bright light. "She hit first—" he barked.
Igor tried to look indifferent, chin stuck out. "I was just there, man. I didn't—"
"Look at them," the detective said into the mic, and the cameras panned. "Ervin Ferrell, thirty-two. Convictions for petty theft. Igor Colon, twenty-seven. Repeat offender for harassment." The announcer read from the docket like a funeral roll.
I described, in the plaza under midday, the smell of stale beer, the way one kept blocking the exit, how they spoke to my friend like she was a prize. I described the hit that flipped the balance: "I knew how to move, and I moved," I told them.
Ervin started with bravado. "You got lucky, that's all!" he spat. The crowd's mood shifted. A woman near me hissed, "Lucky? Brave, you mean."
Then the first crucial stage began: denial. Ervin denied his intent. Igor muttered about being misunderstood. They tried to make themselves common men trapped in a spectacle, laughter on their side. Their mouths worked; their color sank a few shades.
A woman who'd been missing for a night stepped forward. "They pushed me into a van," she said. "They said they'd give me a ride. I bit a hand and escaped. That's how I found the street." Her statement was steady, small and cold. People gasped and pointed.
Ervin's face went from bluster to something like panic. "No—no, she lies!" he pleaded, voice cracking.
"Really?" someone in the crowd shouted. "Then why did we find your van with the broken lock and another girl's phone in the trunk?"
The second stage was shock. They froze. Their eyes darted. They whispered to each other. The crowd butterflies hardened into knives. "Look at them," someone said. "They look like rats in a trap."
Then came the slow unravel. A neighbor who ran a night store swore he'd seen them loitering for months; another man offered a video where the men lurked near the alley, frames shaky but damning. The police handed the video into the microphone, and the plaza watched the shaky footage: Ervin tugging at a woman's sleeve, Igor circling like a shark.
Ervin reached for legal words—"misunderstanding," "rumor"—but they landed like pebbles. A kid filmed the scene on his phone and uploaded it. Comments exploded.
The real punishment began not in a courtroom but in the court of the street. The plaza turned into the theatre of shame. People who once crossed the alley with their heads down now formed a human wall around the municipal court steps on the day of the arraignment. Neighbors lined up to testify. Mothers who had once not seen each other now stood side by side, their faces set in an expression I recognized as the look a mother gives when she means business.
Ervin's denials shifted into a new stage—appeal and pleading. He shouted about losing his job if they were convicted. He begged for mercy. "I have kids," he said at one point, and a ripple of impatience went through the crowd. "You thought of us before you pushed?" I snapped at the open windows of his argument. "You thought of us when you circled someone who might be alone?"
Igor's face distorted, a mask of raw fear. He stopped trying to shout and instead mouthed a plea at the officers, then at the judge. The change was visible: from smugness to frantic negotiation to the hollow look of a man realizing he'd been counted out.
The crowd's behavior changed the men more than any legal document. People came forward to name and shame. A long-time shopkeeper told the judge, "If they walk free, I'll have to change hours. My daughters can't come out after dark." An old woman spat, "I raised my sons differently."
By the end of the morning, the plaza had sealed their fate differently than a mere docket could. The men were led into custody with their faces recording every whisper, every camera lens capturing their fall. Their appeal for mercy turned to "I didn't mean—" then to flailing denials, then to a brittle acceptance as the judge read bail conditions and the charges.
Ervin's reaction passed through phases before my eyes: the initial bravado, then denial, then shouting, then a stunned silence as he heard detailed accusations and saw the gallery of victims. Igor moved from arrogance to pale worry, and finally to a broken plea, "Please, I won't—"
"No." A hundred neighbors answered together.
Witnesses clapped when the judge ordered preventative detention. People filmed their exit. A young mother held up her baby and raised a thumb—public approval for a community that would not be preyed upon.
Later, at the precinct, I signed a bunch of papers, sat under fluorescent lights, and felt an odd flush of tired triumph. Finley hugged me and said, "You did it, Kyl. You didn't let them get away."
Harrison stood a little away, arms folded, looking like a man who had watched a wound close. He stepped over and murmured into my hair, "You were brave."
10
After that, life resumed its odd, sweet rhythm. Harrison repaired my lock when the locksmith had to change it; he taught me how to be less clumsy with portable heaters and told me when to take medicines and when to stop panicking.
He was full of small attentions—texting me to remind me to eat, tapping my shoulder when I was frantic at deadlines, showing up with soup when I had a fever. He also had a private life that spilled into mine: his family, his hospital stories, the way his sister Ellianna Tarasov teased him about being too proper.
He took me to the mountain on a Saturday. "Do you climb?" he asked.
"I walk briskly," I said.
We hiked, and my mother—Virginia Daniels—showed up with a golden retriever, apparently in perfect synchronization with the city's small world. Virginia launched into conversation with Harrison as if she had always known him.
"He's my daughter's boyfriend," Harrison said, surprise in his smile. "If she agrees."
"She agrees," my mother said, all decisiveness and love and a little theatricality.
I realized then I had slipped into something faster than I expected: a pair of hands linking across days and nights. We met parents in a blur of food and praise and stipulations about dates and dowries in jest that made both our fathers cough and laugh.
11
Harrison's family was no less warm. One evening, after a movie, he took me to his apartment and I met a bustle of people who made me feel both inspected and accepted. His sister Ellianna showed me dusty photo albums and said loud, "You must see his childhood in dresses!" and I laughed and learned to laugh at myself as she handed over a cringe photo of Harrison in an old floral shirt.
That night, things moved. We kissed—at first like two people reading the first page of a new book—tentative, electric, then like people who had been practicing the choreography of a private ritual. His hands remembered the places I liked to be held. I lost track of time. The door opened once, and we laughed, and the world returned, and then closed again.
12
We were reckless in small ways. We told family faster than friends. We called each other names in texts we wouldn't say in public. He watched me sleep once and told me, "You are the person I get used to wanting in the next room."
I thought it was a line, but later he kneaded the muscles in my calf like he was steadying a boat.
One day, a bureaucratic flurry happened: paperwork, pleasantries, and a tiny ring in a box. "I've been looking at you for a year and three months and four days," he said to me on our stairs. "Kylie Monteiro, will you let me keep looking at you forever? As my wife?"
I felt the world tilt in the nice direction. "Yes," I whispered. It was an answer that tasted like cinnamon and sleep and all the small kindnesses he'd stocked in my life.
13
The marriage paperwork was clinical and warm at once. We signed, and in the stairwell later—behind the curtains drawn and the apartment doors closed—Harrison said, "I didn't plan a lot, but I planned you. I don't want to plan you out of being surprised."
"Good," I said. "I hate being planned."
He laughed. Later, when we lay wrapped in sheets, he asked, "Do you remember when we met—my 'put your pants back on'?"
"Embarrassing," I said.
"It was the beginning of a string of honest moments," he said, kissing the top of my head. "I don't plan regrets."
14
Life settled into a rhythm as small as a warm patch I kept on my lower back after a night without heat. I kept the tiny award from the police—'Act of Bravery'—on my desk, ridiculous and heavy. I still had my sketchpad and my vivid, impulsive ideas. Harrison still said, "Don't eat too many takeout dumplings," and I would answer with a mouthful and a grin.
We had more fights than I expected. He could be infuriatingly careful. "You left your phone in the fridge," he'd say, mildly stunned. I could be infuriatingly impulsive. "I pushed the door closed on purpose," I'd say. We learned to forgive with tools both small and big—a bowl of hot noodles, a patch of honesty, a night where we simply sat and watched hospital dramas until our eyes dried up.
15
The plaza that summer still smelled of roasted chestnuts and diesel. Sometimes, on the way home, we would stop and look at the place where the city had once gathered to watch wrongs corrected in the open sun. I would reach for the small trophy on my desk and touch the engraved words. It was not a prop anymore. It was a line in the story where people had chosen not to let fear be a normal thing.
"You were brave," Harrison said one evening as we locked our doors.
"I was lucky," I answered.
He shook his head. "You fought."
I shrugged. "You stitched me back together."
He smiled and kissed my forehead. "Deal."
16
There are still things I can't help laughing about. Like the first time he brought me breakfast and I knocked the whole tray onto the pavement because I opened my door too fast. He dabbed my scraped knee and then kissed the ring on my left hand.
"Remember the warm patch?" I asked him once, late at night.
"What warm patch?"
"The one you taped on my belly when I was cold at two a.m."
He laughed. "I remember because you pretended not to like being fussed over."
"I still don't."
"Then I will keep fussing," he said softly. "Until you tell me to stop."
17
We became a small team. I drew, he medicated, we lived in the neat geometry of hospital shifts and laundry cycles. Finley teased me about my domesticated feelings. "Be careful," she said, "before you know it you'll be telling him to put his socks in the hamper."
"I already told him," I said.
"Of course you did," Finley said, as if this were an inevitable conclusion of my character.
18
The public punishment of Ervin and Igor was a ceremony in our neighborhood's collective memory. People told the story like a myth—how a woman with a sketchpad and a black belt and a pair of eight alarms interrupted a pattern of small crimes. I kept the heavy plastic trophy on my desk as a reminder: bravery is sometimes just being there.
And when people asked me how it felt to fall into someone's arms because they were next door and kind and long-suffering, I always answered the same way.
"It felt like being at the wrong side of a glass and then having someone open it," I would say. "Like the first time the door opened for me and I went inside."
He takes up so much of the small daily lines. He is my neighbor, my doctor, my husband, and my quiet permission to be ridiculous sometimes.
19
Once, after a year, I found an old scribble on a hospital form—the scrawl where he'd told me to go home and sleep, and the pen had left a blotch like a tiny star. I framed it.
"What's that?" he asked.
"My calendar of how we began," I said. "Tomato allergy, eight alarms, a lock-out, a plate of skewers, a trophy, and a ring."
He tapped the glass with one finger. "And a warm patch."
"And a warm patch," I echoed.
We laughed and kissed, and the little framed blotch captured the light of our hallway precisely.
The End
— Thank you for reading —