“Yeah. But I think she might be sick. She’s really not eating. Before, she ate anything and everything. But since she’s gotten here, it’s only been rice and oatmeal and dry cereal.”
Rook’s brow furrowed. “And you think she’s having a digestive issue?”
“Yeah. Or maybe it’s related to stress? I don’t know. But she’s not running either. She walks on the treadmill, but before she was going on hour-long runs. And now she’s scaled that back too.”
Rook watched Sequence carefully. “Noted. I’ll see what I can do.”
Sequence stood up immediately. “And I made a breakthrough on her case yesterday. I found out who her tail is. Bobby Ringwell.”
Rook’s brow furrowed. “Blue Eyes?”
Sequence nodded. They personally knew Bobby “Blue Eyes” Ringwell. He used to work for a security firm in Manhattan. He’d gotten busted for embezzling and did some time upstate. They hadn’t heard that he was out. But apparently he was. And hired by Bastone to track down Naomi.
“Why would Blue Eyes take a job with Bastone? He’d know just as well as we do what kind of man he was.”
“I’ll look into it,” Sequence said and was gone out the door.
Twenty minutes later, Rook found Naomi in the gym. She was chatting to Moreau while she walked on the treadmill. Moreau was lifting weights shirtless.
Rook attempted not to roll his eyes. Moreau had been shamelessly flirting with Naomi since the moment he’d met her. Rook wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about it except for the fact that Rook was fairly certain that Naomi was not the woman whose eyes Moreau was attempting to catch with all his antics.
“Naomi,” Rook called. “When you get a minute, do you mind coming to my office?”
“I’m free now!” Naomi called back, jumping off the treadmill so fast that Rook wondered if she’d been looking for an excuse to get away from Moreau. She said a quick goodbye, grabbed a water bottle and a towel, and followed Rook out into the hallway. “Everything all right?”
“You tell me,” Rook said, leading her into his office. He took a seat around the other side of the desk.
“Sorry?” She lowered herself into a chair.
“Look. Naomi, this could very well be none of our business, but part of our job here is to make sure you’re safe and healthy. We’ve noticed that you’re not eating very much and that you’re exercise has changed. You seem tired. Of course, all of those things are perfectly fine, but I wanted to offer you the chance to get a doctor in here if you wanted.”
Naomi was quiet for a long time. When she looked up, her face was pale and she was biting her lip again. It took her a long time to answer. “Well, I actually wanted to talk to you about something. I, um, already have a doctor’s appointment in the books.”
Rook nodded. “All right. Give me the name and information of the doctor and I’ll work on getting them properly cleared so that they can come meet you here.”
“No. I’ll have to go in to the office.”
Rook frowned. “Naomi, I’m not sure it’s a good idea to have you out and about right now. We’ve made some strides on your case, but we don’t want Bastone to be able to track you. Right now, he doesn’t know where you are. We’d like to keep it that way.”
A stubborn look came into her eye. It was an expression that he hadn’t ever seen Naomi make before and Rook somehow got the impression that it was new to her. “I need to go to the office.”
“Can I ask why?”
She shifted, biting her lip again. “Because there’s certain equipment that the doctor has to use.”
Rook blinked. “All right. When is the appointment?”
“End of next week.”
He frowned. “Naomi, next week might not be enough time for us to clear the doctor and all the workers at the office. If the appointment is in your name, there’s a chance that Bastone will know you’re planning to be there. Is it possible to move the appointment to a different time?”
“No,” she said and adamantly shook her head. “The doctor said the appointment has to be at sixteen wee—” Her eyes widened as she immediately cut herself off.
Rook, usually the consummate professional, gaped at her. She’d cut herself off, but he’d heard enough. He was a father himself. He knew what it meant when a woman had to have a sixteen-week doctor’s appointment. He did some quick mental math. If she was somewhere around fifteen weeks at that very moment, then that put her point of conception somewhere around… Oh, Jesus.
Luckily, Rook’s professionalism kicked in just in time for him to swallow those particular words. His gaze clashed with Naomi’s.
She groaned and buried her face in her hands. “I can see from the look on your face that you’ve put the pieces together.”
“Sorry about that.”
“Sorry that I’m pregnant?”
“No. For the look on my face. I’m surprised is all.” He stood up. Don’t ask her if it’s Sequence’s baby. Don’t ask her if it’s Sequence’s baby. “But this isn’t about me. In the least.”
He came around the desk and leaned against it.
“Naomi, you can tell me to mind my own business, you can ask me for help, you can talk to me. Whatever you want to do here, it’s your call.”
She let out a long breath and gave him a smile, it was a little weak, a little watery, but it was a smile nonetheless. “You’re the first person who knows. Besides Dr. Grieves, of course.”
“Okay. Well, it should go without saying that I won’t be discussing this with anyone.”
“It doesn’t change the way you organize my security?”
“It might, eventually. But for now, if I make changes to our procedures, the team doesn’t have to know why.”
“Okay.” She let out another long breath. In through her nose, out through her mouth. “Can I really not go see Dr. Grieves for my appointment?”
“I’m going to look into it. Best case scenario, we’ll rent some portable equipment and we can convince Dr. Grieves to come here. I’ll keep you posted.”
“That sounds all right.” Naomi rose up from her chair.
“Naomi, one more thing. We’ll do whatever we can to keep you healthy and happy, okay? My wife—my ex-wife, had all sorts of cravings when she was pregnant. She did all these prenatal classes too. And yoga. And had all sorts of special lotions and stuff. So… if you need anything, please just let me know and I’ll make sure you get it.”
Naomi’s eyes did that faucet thing again. Tears were just pouring out. “That’s so sweet of you. And thank you. For now, I’m good, I think. I want to… keep a low profile. But if anything changes I’ll let you know.”
Rook’s expression tightened a little bit. Keeping her pregnancy secret was any woman’s prerogative, he supposed. But wanting to keep a low profile in this case made Rook almost a hundred percent certain that the baby was Sequence’s and she had no earthly clue how to tell him.
On a whim, Rook offered one more thing. “And if you wanted, I’m sure May, my wife—ex wife—would be happy to talk to you about it all.”
Naomi’s eyes, still pouring tears, shut for a moment. And the next second, Rook found himself getting the heck squeezed out of him by his client. Careful to keep the contact above the waist, Rook gently patted her back as she squeezed him.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
The door to his office opened and Atlas and Sequence stood in the doorway, blinking at Rook with his arms around a client. Atlas’s eyebrows rocketed upward. Sequence’s eyebrows battened down. Sequence could have peeled the paint off a tank with that expression.
Naomi, sensing the company, pulled away from Rook and dashed at her tears. “Hi, guys!” she squeaked, and then zipped out of the room.
Sequence’s eyes followed her and Rook couldn’t help but note how much his expression had visibly softened. He could also see the questions in Sequence’s eyes about Naomi, but his men knew better than to ask about something Rook was not telling them. And he was not about to e
xplain why Naomi was hugging him a second ago.
The meeting with the three men went quickly and Rook dismissed them. Sequence however, lingered at the door. “Is she all right?” he appeared to ask the doorjamb.
“Ask her, not me.”
And that was all he was going to say on the matter.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Sequence’s second therapy session passed much the same way as the first, but his third one, they actually started to get down to the nitty-gritty.
Dr. Waters, sitting in her lavender muumuu-looking-dress thingy, with her hair spiking in a million directions and a lollipop in her mouth, asked Sequence a question that changed the way he’d view the rest of his life.
“How come you haven’t apologized to Naomi yet, when you obviously want to apologize very badly?”
And just like that, with a few simple words, he finally identified what this feeling was that he’d been battling. He wanted to apologize to her. He truly felt as if he couldn’t, as if it was completely out of the question. But still, that didn’t keep him from wanting it.
Sequence fiddled with the slinky that she forced into his hands at the beginning of every session. He’d fought down his childhood urges to fidget for the better part of his life, but his therapist seemed to think that unnatural stillness was bad for him. And she seemed to think that having something to play with in his hands was going to magically make him a better communicator.
He didn’t know what to think about that. But he had to admit that he liked the slinky. He weighed it between his two hands, making the coils waterfall from one end to the other while he thought about his answer. Dr. Waters waited patiently.
“Because… I don’t want to have to explain why I left like that.”
He still hadn’t even explained that to Dr. Waters. He wasn’t about to attempt to explain about his shitty father and shitty childhood and shitty commitment problems to Naomi. That was like, Olympic-level communication. Sequence was still at peewee level.
“So, in the mind of Sequence Bone, an apology isn’t worth anything if it doesn’t come with an explanation?”
“Um.” He had to think about that. He wasn’t sure.
“And because you don’t have the words to explain, you can’t apologize to her. And because you can’t apologize, you can’t move on or forward. You’re just stuck.”
“I guess?”
“Man,” she shook her head. “You need therapy.”
Used to Dr. Waters’s droll sense of humor, Sequence cracked half a smile as she burst out laughing at her own joke.
He let the slinky dangle from one finger, bouncing it like a bungee cord. “You’re saying that I should apologize even if I can’t explain.”
“As long as you mean it.”
Two days later, Sequence was still mulling over that idea. He was starting to think it was a good one. He owed Naomi an apology. He wasn’t good at them. He almost never made them. But his guilt over the way he had left things was like a two-hundred-pound coat that he was wearing whenever he was in the same room with her.
Seeing her crying in Rook’s arms the other day had shredded him. He’d known, somewhere in his gut, that he’d been the cause of those tears. That just wrecked him.
So, that was why Rook was knocking on Naomi’s door at 8:45 at night, a tray of food in his hands. And the apology he’d practiced on an endless rotating banner in his head.
She didn’t answer the door.
He knocked again.
Nothing.
Unwilling to open her door unless she invited him in, Sequence considered leaving the food in the hallway. But a small thought alighted in his brain out of nowhere. He turned on his heel and headed back down the staircase from her room. Balancing the tray, he made his way through the third floor.
Sure enough, when he pushed open the door to the TV room, Naomi was sprawled across the couch, her ruby hair spilling over the arm, a blanket up to her chin. Some chick flick played on the big screen.
She lifted her head as he opened the door. “Hi!” she said in surprise, pausing the movie.
“Hey.”
He walked around the couch and set the tray of food on the coffee table in front of her. He stood, looking down at her, his hands in his pockets. It wasn’t good for his blood pressure to see her sprawled on a couch. It only made him think of the other time he’d seen her sprawled on a couch. AKA the hottest moments of his life.
“I don’t expect you to bring me dinner, you know,” she told him, sitting up and sniffing at a piece of dry toast that he’d brought.
His hands still in his pockets, Sequence channeled Dr. Waters and said the first thing that came to his mind. “I like to do it.”
Naomi’s eyes flicked up to Sequence, a light blush on her cheeks. “You like to make sure everybody’s fed.”
He nodded. Took a deep breath. “Can I sit down for a sec?”
“Sure.” She scrambled to the side, making room on the couch.
Sequence elected to sit on the coffee table instead, sliding the tray down a few inches. It was awkward to sit with his hands in his pockets though, so he drew them out. Naomi’s eyes instantly flashed to the two steel marbles in his left hand. Of course she’d immediately spot them.
“What’re those?” she asked curiously.
Sequence hesitated for a moment and then handed them to her. “Supposedly they’re supposed to make it easier for me to say what I want to say. If I play with them.”
Naomi tipped them from one hand to the other, tested their weight, let them roll over the small dips and valleys of her fingers. “I like them. They kind of remind me of you.”
“Of me?” He accepted them back as she handed them over.
She waved her hand through the air. “I’ll explain it someday.”
He nodded and looked down at the marbles. It made him feel like a kid to be playing with something while he spoke, to be avoiding her sapphire eyes, but Dr. Waters was right. It made what he had to say a lot easier.
“Naomi, I want to apologize to you. No. I am apologizing to you. Right now.”
She held very still, like she was scared of spooking him. “For… leaving that day?”
“Yes. For leaving that abruptly. But also, mostly, for ignoring you afterward. That was such a shitty thing to do. I freaked out. And then I thought that the best thing to do for you was a clean break. So, when you texted me, I…”
“Blocked me.”
He looked up in surprise.
She shrugged. “It wasn’t hard to figure out.”
“You tried to contact me again after that first text?”
“Yeah.” She looked down at her hands, obviously unwilling to say more.
Sequence’s heart was heavy and banging weirdly hard. He hated this. “Naomi, I’m so sorry. I can’t explain why I did all that. And you deserve an explanation. But you also deserve an apology. So… I thought I’d give what I could. Maybe someday you’ll get an explanation.”
“I don’t need an explanation, Sequence. It’s enough to know that you don’t hate me.”
He was appalled. “You thought… God. No. Naomi, I could never, ever hate you. This is my shit. This is all my shit, not yours.”
She nodded but didn’t say anything in response. Sequence almost reached out for her but kept his hands on the marbles instead. “Are you all right?”
“Right now?”
He nodded. “And in general.”
“Um. Right now I’m emotional. In general I’m all right. And also I’m mad at you. In general, I’m still mad at you.” Her eyes were bright and trained on him. But after a moment the bright emotion faded away to something else. “But I’ve never been very good at staying mad. Your apology helps. It’s okay that you didn’t want to move things forward, Sequence. You don’t have to apologize for that. But thanks for apologizing about ghosting me.”
Her words sounded strange in his ears, like she was speaking a version of English he couldn’t quite understand. He stared at
her. Apparently she was sitting there thinking that all of this had happened because he didn’t want things to go further with her. When the reality was that he wanted things to go way, way further with her and he had absolutely no idea how to ask for it or make it happen. And god forbid he get what he wanted. Then he’d actually have to figure out what to do with it.
Yeah. He had no chance of being able to successfully explain all that to her. Better just to leave things as they were. With her accepting his apology.
“Can I watch with you?”
The line between her eyebrows appeared. “This movie?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh. It’s a chick flick.”
He didn’t say anything, just continued to watch her face, waiting for permission to sit with her.
Slowly her face went from confused to intrigued, a smile played with her lips. “Sure. If you think you can handle the cheesiness.”
He stood up and went to sit at the far end of the couch where her feet had been when he’d come in.
“I’m not afraid of cheese.”
She laughed like his words had been the funniest of jokes. Pressing play on the movie, Naomi nibbled at the toast and eventually worked her way through the bowl of dry cheerios. Sequence silently watched the terrible movie and tried not to move too much on the couch. He noticed that every time he shifted his body, she did too, like she couldn’t quite get comfortable with him sitting there.
He desperately wanted her to get comfortable. After a little while, he figured that sitting there, watching her out of the corner of his eye and all but holding his breath was probably not the way to get her relaxed. He put his booted feet up on the coffee table and sunk into the couch.
She, on the other end of the couch, curled on her side like a snail. It might have been his imagination, but he thought she might have stretched out another few inches once he spread himself out.
“I really don’t get this,” he said after a while.
She jumped when his voice rang out but she relaxed back into the couch. “Don’t get what?”
“This woman truly doesn’t know that the man she’s been emailing with is the same guy she’s been flirting with? How could she not know that?”
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