For the next few days, she keeps to herself and tries to avoid all contact with Fletch. She doesn't ask if Evie can look after Emma. She doesn't collect Emma from the creche and sends Frieda to pick her up instead. She doesn't answer his pages. She doesn't answer his texts.
Fletch is thoroughly considerate. He gives her the space she needs, and he doesn't push her to let him back in because not pushing Jac Naylor is a lesson he learnt a long time ago.
When he tried to speak to her about a deadline for some funding applications, she literally pretended he wasn't there. Even though the entire ward was already aware of the fresh tension between the two of them, he tried to make it less obvious and instead asked Frieda to communicate with her about it.
"Just tell her that they need to be in next Friday or the ward will get absolutely nothing in the way of grants," Fletch relayed to the impatient Slav. Frieda was glaring at him as though he was a complete and utter idiot for not sticking it out and forcing Jac to speak to him, but Frieda didn't know Jac like he did.
She was acting like a child. She was being everything that she hated in other people but all she wanted to do right now was pretend that it had never happened.
He is in a bad mood for the time being. The kids notice but he tells them it is work stress and they seem to accept it. It is only when Serena invites him out for a drink that he starts to wonder whether his poker face is what it used to be.
"Fletch!" Serena greeted with a smile as he approached their table in Albie's. "I went to the liberty of getting you a pint."
He offered a warm grin in return and sat down, sipping the foam from the top of his glass.
"How's Ms. Wolfe? How's Jason? How's acting CEO?" She can see straight through him, she always has.
"Everything is just as well as it was when you asked me this morning, Fletch. You know why we're here. You've been moping around like a complete sap and I would like to know why," Serena demanded in a no-nonsense tone. "It's not the kids, is it? Evie hasn't mentioned anything being off at home, not to me at least."
"Serena, everything's okay. Stop worrying about me, I know you think that I'm still struggling with Raf and I'm letting things get on top of me but I'm not, I promise," he offered in a sincere tone, and he was almost ashamed of himself for having dealt with Raf's death so well.
The conversation shifted and things were somewhat casual for the first couple of drinks, it was only when the room started to sway a little that Serena got up the nerve to ask again.
Luckily, it was a quiet night so there was no chance of anybody overhearing what was said, not that it would really go anywhere. In the rumour mill that is Holby City Hospital, Albie's in a safe zone. What is said within these walls will not escape them.
"It's Naylor, okay?" Fletch admitted with a huff. "I thought things were going okay and we were mates and she started to trust me. Then she kissed me, please note who kissed who. And now, she's pretending that I don't exist and avoiding me at all costs."
"Wait, you went from 'mates' to Jac kissing you, that's a bit of a jump. Do you want mates or do you want kissing? They're quite different things, Fletcher," Serena pointed out, words slightly slurred and she finished off her fourth glass of Shiraz.
"She's Jac Naylor, I don't know a person alive who doesn't want to be kissing her, present company included. I never expected it to happen though, she's Jac, she's attracted to big powerful men with money, not nurses who are fathers-of-four," Fletch exclaimed, smacking his forehead against the table with a thud. "I don't know how to fix it, Serena. What did Bernie do after she ruined everything and moved to Ukraine?"
Serena scoffed. Nobody quite knew the details of how Bernie and Serena came to be, simply because everything from that part of their lives was a little messy. Nobody knew that Serena had made the first move, and then run. Fletch certainly didn't have a clue that in this scenario, she was Jac.
"Talk to her. It is all I can recommend, tell her how you feel, tell her you want her back in your life. Stop being a coward about it and expecting her to come and apologise for being scared. She's Jac Naylor, if she isn't being her confident self then she needs someone to talk to her."
Serena, especially drunk Serena, was queen of giving advice whether it be good or bad. Fletch accepted her words gratefully before diverting the topic to something less serious. The two ended up falling into a taxi just after midnight and heading first to Serena's, then to Fletch's.
It was Saturday night. Tomorrow was his day off. Jac was working 6-4.
Tomorrow afternoon, he would go to her house. He would speak to her in a place where she couldn't just walk away from him and he would fix whatever was going on between them.
It didn't matter if she wanted to forget the kiss, he could live with that. It didn't matter if she wanted them to get married now, he could very much live with that. The one and only scenario with which he could not live, was one without her in it.
He was almost ashamed that he had fallen for her charm so easily, she was the woman that everyone in Holby wished they could have and here he was, falling for her like all the poor souls who came before him.
Jac wouldn't be able to avoid him forever, he knew full well that somewhere underneath it all, she needed him too. Tomorrow would settle things one way or another. It couldn't go that badly, right?
