“When I do ask you to marry me— or you ask me to marry you— I’d like it to happen in a happier time, so there isn’t any doubt. I don’t want it to be because I’m so relieved to have a few weeks of normalcy that I’m in a rush to make them count.”
“Ah. I see.” Thinking of it that way, it was quite romantic. And there was certainty there. Not “If I ask you to marry me.” He’d said, “When.” And even though I was terrified beyond reason of the idea of a legal commitment based entirely on emotion, I could see myself married to Neil. For the right reasons, as he said. Not because I was knocked up or he was dying. “For what it’s worth, if you had proposed tonight, I would have said no.”
He lifted an eyebrow. “Would you have?”
I dabbed the corners of my mouth with my napkin, careful not to smudge my lipstick. I couldn’t lie to him. “No.”
After dinner, we rode back to the house in the back of the Maybach. In the comfortable silence, Neil reached his foot out and brushed his ankle against mine. I reached across the center console and took his hand. The casual touching hit me as a welcome shock; somewhere, in the past few months, we’d lost that. All the touching I’d done had been to fuss over him, adjusting blankets or lines or to feel for a fever. Everything that hadn’t been expressly sexual had been about the sickness. I should write that down.
We went through the gate and up the steps to the door, and I waited in silence as he unlocked it. Inside, the house was dark and quiet. The staff would have already gone home. Even Josh was gone. He wouldn’t be back until the high dose chemo started.
“Hey,” I said quietly, my voice too loud in the silence. I dropped my words to a whisper. “I think we’re actually alone.”
Almost before I’d finished the last word, Neil pressed me against the door. The ridges of ornamentation cut into my back, and my mouth opened, startled, under his.
His hands slid up my thighs, under my dress, to find my panties and pull them down.
“Right here?” I gasped as I stepped carefully out of the scrap of black satin.
“Call me boring and traditional,” he murmured against my neck. “But I want you in our bed.”
We made it to the bedroom somehow, pawing each other all the way. By the time we got to the bedroom, I was shoeless in addition to the missing panties, and Neil’s jacket and shirt were discarded on the stairs. He turned on the lights and dimmed them to a warm glow. I shimmied my dress down and stepped into his arms. I needed skin-to-skin contact like I was a premature baby or something. I almost cried at the relief when he was finally holding me.
Chemotherapy had changed his body. His skin felt different, dry and kind of fragile. He was a little thinner than before, and he had no body hair. I giggled and brushed my fingers over his bare chest, and he smacked my bottom.
“Don’t tease me. I’m a very sick man.” There was no actual recrimination in his voice. I laughed with him and reached between us to unbuckle his belt. He pushed me back to land on the bed, and I giggled breathlessly as I bounced on the mattress. I was so ready for him.
“I want you so bad,” I moaned, my clenched fist pressed against my mound to relieve some of the ache there.
He stepped out of his pants and knelt on the bed between my spread legs. “It has been far too long.”
“I think it was just two days ago, wasn’t it?” I teased. But it had been too long, before that. My body ached for him. Not just my cunt, which throbbed and flooded as he brushed his hands down my sides to grip my hips, but every part of me. My arms wanted to hold him, my legs needed to wrap around him. I needed Neil, healthy— as healthy as a man just off of chemotherapy could possibly be.
“No, I think it was three days ago. Or four. Ten days ago, I’m sure,” he joked as he kissed his way down my body. His teeth sank lightly into my nipple, and I hissed.
“Weeks,” I chided along with him, my fingers curling against his shoulders.
“Three months.”
“To a year,” I agreed, breathless from laughter at our exaggerations and from the path of his tongue down the curve of my breast.
He mumbled a shocked, “Two years?” against my navel, and I squirmed.
“I said ‘to a year’.” My sentenced ended on a groan as he settled between my legs and gave me a long, slow lick.
“Oh god!” I found fistfuls of duvet and held on. I felt his appreciative chuckle more than I heard it, and that was a fine trade.
“There. I’ve missed you,” He cooed to my clit as he pushed the hood back and stroked a finger over the bare, sensitive organ.
I squirmed and giggled at the over-stimulating contact. He leaned down, still pinching and exposing that sensitive organ, and thrummed his tongue over it.
“Oh, fuck,” I whispered, raising my hips against his face. “Don’t stop.”
He lifted his head. “You know that eventually I will stop.”
“Not right now, though!” I begged. “Just keep going!”
He laughed and dipped his head. Usually, he made me wait, intensifying my longing until my orgasm was almost painful in its intensity. Tonight, though, he let me have it, let me ride wave after wave of pleasure under his mouth. And when I was wrung out, sweating and panting, he got a condom from the nightstand, rolled it on, and fell between my legs, sinking into me with a groan I echoed. My legs locked around his hips, and I pushed against him, my face buried in his shoulder as he pumped into me.
“I love you,” I panted against his ear. I tasted the perspiration on his neck, inhaled the scent of his cologne— I’d missed that so much.
He leaned his forehead against mine, still moving within me and gasped, “I love you, I love you,” like a mantra as he pushed hard and deep and stilled inside me.
I clung to him, desperate to hold him as tightly as I could. As if that were enough to hold him here. Even if things weren’t exactly like they used to be, at least we could have the tantalizing promise that everything could be the same as it had been.
I knew we could never really be the way we had been. He was right, this had changed us. I knew him better than I had ever known a lover. I loved him more than I’d ever loved anyone. And in five months, he had become such a huge part of my life, I couldn’t imagine being with anyone else.
“I’m so sorry. I had intended that to last much longer.” He fell heavily on me, the sticky latex condom on his flagging erection pressed against my thigh when he withdrew.
I kissed his cheek and laughed, breathless. I reached up in the darkness to run my fingers through his hair, forgetting for a moment that it was gone. I dropped my hand to his back, as if I’d intended to do that all along.
As much as I would have liked to drift off to blissful sleep in his arms, I’d jacked up my sleep schedule enough that it wasn’t possible. So, I let him doze and disentangled myself when I felt too sweaty and warm.
Being on the other side of the induction chemotherapy was exhilarating. It meant we were almost done— or at least, that’s what I let myself believe. I knew that after the transplant, we had up to a year of recovery. But right now, it felt like Neil had reached the crest of a particularly bad hill, and even if it weren’t all downhill from here, at least it plateaued for a moment.
I settled down at my computer in the library. My piece about Neil’s cancer was still open in the word processor, as it had been for days now. Somehow, news of his remission pulled some kind of plug in me, letting words pour out onto the page. I’d intended to write a brief personal essay on the subject, but soon it had sprawled out to five-thousand words, then six, and no signs of stopping.
There was too much I wanted to include. I went to Neil’s office. I’d spent a little time trying to contain some of the horrific clutter, but I’d barely made a dent. Still, I knew where I’d put legal pads and pens, and I grabbed one of the former and handful of the latter before racing back to the library.
By the time the sun came up, I had outlined a book. A memoir about the past five months of our relationsh
ip, with room to add more after the stem cell transplant.
I blinked in time with the cursor on the screen. Could I do this? Could I write a book about how my life had changed since I’d gotten together with Neil?
Who the hell would want to read that? I scolded myself. Look at me, I have a rich boyfriend and I lost my job in the stupidest way possible, and now all I do is sit around his house in my pajamas most days.
But I wasn’t going to write it for anyone else. I would write it for me, because I needed to. If anyone else wanted to read it— or pay me for it— that would be an added bonus.
Neil had told me that the details of his life that had gotten mixed in with mine were fair game. So I decided not to tell him about the book. I could see so many ways that my motives could be misconstrued, if he mentioned it to anyone. I didn’t need Valerie or Emma thinking I’d stuck it out with Neil just for an opportunity to flex my journalist muscles and reap a big payday.
Bleary-eyed and in sore need of coffee, I promised myself I would do just one last thing and then go straight to bed.
I opened up my email and typed out a message to India Vaughn.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The stem cell collection process was a walk in the park compared to the chemotherapy Neil had just gone through. After his initial two weeks off from pretty much anything medical, he started on a ten day regimen of injections that boosted stem cell growth. Neil had learned to give himself the shots at home, and aside from the occasional stabbing femur pain, they didn’t seem to bother him.
During that ten-day course, he went into the hospital for another minor outpatient procedure to install an apheresis catheter. The port he’d had for chemo had been convenient, but it wouldn’t work for the transplant.
After he’d taken all the cell-growth serum and his catheter incision site was healing properly, they started sucking out his cells. He went into the hospital every morning for four days and napped while they pumped his blood into a machine that separated his stem cells and returned the rest. Then we’d come home, rest, and spend the evening together. It was nice. It felt normal. At least, more normal than we’d been in a long time, and about as normal as visiting a hospital every day can feel.
“I’ve asked Emma to come by tonight,” he told me on the way home from the hospital on the fifth and last collection day. “I hope you don’t mind that I didn’t check with you first. It was a spur of the moment idea.”
“That’s fine.” Emma had been staying with Valerie to placate her after the blow up we’d had, but she’d been visiting her dad more than she had when he’d been going through chemotherapy.
“I wanted to discuss something with the two of you,” he continued. “I thought about what you said before, about involving you in important decisions, and I want to respect that.”
“Do you have an important decision to make?” I couldn’t imagine any that would involve both Emma and myself.
“Not a decision so much as planning. We can discuss it tonight.”
Neil being cryptic. That was always a good sign.
When Emma arrived that night, she was just as wary as I was. I was getting dressed for dinner when she knocked on the bedroom door.
“Come in,” I called, leaning my head to one side to fasten my earring.
“Oh good, you’re not naked,” she said, with her characteristic Emma bluntness.
“I could be, for the right price,” I quipped. “Do you have any idea what Neil wants to talk to us about?”
“None at all. And that makes me nervous.”
“Yes! He’s such a pain in the ass sometimes. Why doesn’t he just tell me what he wants?” I turned to face her and smoothed my skirt. I was wearing a lovely navy-blue dress that hugged my body and ended in a very high hemline. As long as Neil’s libido was still checked in, I was going to take advantage of it. I’d been dressing to impress him every night.
“Wow,” Emma said, then made a face as she looked down at her jeans and sweater. “Am I underdressed for this?”
“No, this is all for your dad’s benefit, while he can still enjoy it,” I admitted, then added, “Sorry.”
“If you guys are happy, I’m happy. Just as long as I don’t have to hear you two being ‘happy.’” She made finger quotes around the word. “I’m a little afraid he might be wanting us to discuss... arrangements.”
I frowned. “Arrangements?”
“You know. For a memorial?” She shrugged. “I used his iPad to check my email the other day. His browser history was like, porn, porn, porn, caskets, porn, porn, cremation urns, porn.”
“That’s grim.” I didn’t want to talk about that kind of thing with Neil. We were so happy lately. We both knew that his transplant and the high dose chemotherapy he would have to endure came with the potential for fatal complications, but right now, we were taking things a day at a time. I wanted to keep doing that.
“What’s grim?” Neil asked as he came into the bedroom, startling both Emma and I. I’m sure we looked completely guilty.
“Oh, I was telling Sophie about my soon-to-be-sister-in-law and her insane suggestion that my bridesmaids wear all black.” Emma had spent more time lying to Neil than I had, and she handled the response like a pro.
“Ah.” It was a masterful move on Emma’s part, because Neil wouldn’t want to discuss anything having to do with his daughter’s wedding to Horrible Michael. Neil turned to me and said, “Wow, darling. You look fantastic.”
I’d heard that nearly every day, but I still preened ridiculously. “Thank you. I’m trying to impress a guy.”
“Well done.” He clapped his hands together. “Shall we have dinner? I’m terribly excited to discuss something with both of you.”
I shot Emma a glance. “Yeah, let’s go.”
Would funeral arrangements qualify as something to be excited about?
Because the weather had been so nice lately, Neil had asked the staff to serve us dinner on the terrace. The outdoor heaters were on, chasing away the twilight chill.
“It was like, nineteen today,” Emma commented on the weather, and I laughed.
“I don’t think I’m ever going to get used to Celsius. Where I come from, ninteen degrees is a hell of a lot colder than this.” I scooted in my chair. “What are we having tonight?”
“Black bean burgers,” he said happily. “I thought eating burgers outside would remind you of home.”
“Are you going to make us plan your funeral tonight?” Emma blurted.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen Neil look so startled. I’m sure my eyes had never opened as wide as they were at that moment, as I stared at Emma in mute horror.
“Um. No...” He looked at me. “Is that what you thought?”
“Not until Emma mentioned it.” Why did I sound so defensive? Was I tattling on Emma?
“You said you wanted to discuss something important with us. And I looked at your browser history when I was using your iPad the other day—”
“Good lord.” Neil grabbed for the pitcher of water on the table. “Please, don’t ever do that again.”
“I was checking to see if you were still obsessively Googling Michael.” She rolled her eyes.
“Well, I’m glad you’re both so confident about my chances, but no. We won’t be picking out casket lining tonight.” He gave me a look that warned we would be talking about this later. “I wanted to discuss a party.”
“A party?” I began uncertainly. “Right now?”
He nodded. “Yes. A party. Before I go in for the high dose chemotherapy. I wanted to discuss it with the two of you because we only have six days. The idea didn’t occur to me earlier, otherwise I would have started planning sooner.”
“Oh. Well, what do you need us to do?” I asked, looking to Emma. I hoped she wasn’t mad at me for my outburst of snitchery.
“I don’t want it to be an insanely large gathering. Twenty to thirty people, at most.” He sat back as one of the kitchen staff slid a plate onto the table in
front of him. Emma and I did the same, murmuring our thanks. Neil continued, “Emma, you know most of my friends. I’d like to put you in charge of the guest list. Go over it with your mother, to make sure I haven’t left anyone out.”
Emma’s eyes flicked to me.
“I don’t know many of Neil’s friends,” I said with a shrug. “This will be a good opportunity to get to know them, though.”
“And, of course, go over the guest list with Sophie, as well, so she’ll handle that sort of thing in the future, I assume,” Neil added, not meeting my gaze. He knew he’d done it again. This time, I could forgive him, since at least there was a practical reason behind it. “But in the meantime, darling, I’d like you to work with the kitchen on the food. Our staff has the number of a very good caterer.”
“That’s not fair,” Emma piped up. “That’s the bulk of the work, and you’re dumping it on poor Sophie. Why? Because it’s kitchen related and therefore a woman’s work?”
“I’m dumping it on Sophie because she was once assistant to the most notoriously picky boss in New York City,” he said dryly.
“He’s talking about Gabriella, not himself,” I quipped.
“And I know she can handle it,” he finished. “I’m not sure I like the two of you getting along, by the way. I feel rather ganged up on.”
“Well, tough. I like her.” Emma frowned and lifted a piece of dehydrated green from her plate. “Kale chips instead of fries? Dad, even I am not this vegan.”
Neil caught my eye, and his pleased smile warmed me all over. He’d told me before that it didn’t matter to him if his daughter didn’t like me. I’d known it was bullshit even back when we were casually dating; his daughter was the most important person in his life, and he wanted desperately for her to think well of me and vice versa.
“So,” he began cautiously. “What is all this funeral nonsense you wanted to talk about?”
“Well, it does strike me as a bit odd that you haven’t mentioned your wishes on the subject,” Emma said, swallowing a bite of burger. “Unless you’ve spoken about it with Sophie. And I’m fine with that, really, I would just like to know what will happen to you, should you die from all this.”
The Girlfriend (The Boss) Page 34