There was a knock on my window, and I jumped, letting out a little yelp until I recognized the face in the window. Bishop. I wanted to let out a deep sigh, but he would see me do it. The last thing I wanted to do was hurt his feelings. It was nothing against him, anyway. The fact that I was overwhelmed wasn’t his problem. It was mine.
I waved and opened the door, thinking hard about how I was going to swing my left leg out the door of my Subaru. “Hey, Bishop,” I said without moving.
“Hi, Amber. Sorry if I scared you. I was concerned when I realized you’d been sitting in your car for ten minutes. It’s going to get warm in there.”
“I’ve been sitting here for ten minutes?” I asked, glancing at the clock on the dashboard.
“I think you fell asleep,” he said, his gaze sweeping across me. It drew heat and fire to my gut and made me swallow hard when I recognized the desire in his eyes. After what I had just gone through, I had a way to make sure that disappeared and never returned.
“I may have. I didn’t get much sleep last night. I was at the bakery bright and early and then the clinic. How are you?” I asked, just to stop the diarrhea of my mouth. “Why were you watching me sleep?”
He laughed and pointed at his yard. “I was finishing up the deck demo. I’m having it replaced, and my handyman was here helping me get the old one gone. He just hauled all the old wood away, so now I’m looking for wayward nails. He’ll start building the new one in a few days.” He held up his hand before I could say anything. “Don’t worry, though. There won’t be any pounding. I bought a modular deck, so all he does is snap it together after he levels the ground.”
I tipped my head in confusion. “They make prefab decks now?”
“Yes! I didn’t know it either. I was doing a little research online and found them. I can’t wait to show you. You’ll love it.” He held the door all the way open and stepped back. “I should let you get out.”
I nodded, but my head just kept bobbing because I wasn’t sure how to accomplish that simple task.
He knelt next to me and turned my chin until I made eye contact. “Can I help you get out?”
“I wish I could tell you how,” I said on a sigh. “The clinic brought me out to the car in a wheelchair and now,” I paused to take a breath when he interrupted.
“Can you swing your legs out or not?”
“Only if I lift the left one out. It’s in bad shape,” I said, biting my lip.
He bent over, gently lifting the left leg out and lowering it to the ground, giving me the freedom to swing my right leg out and sit on the edge of the seat. I grabbed my purse, but before I could get my crutches, he scooped me out of the car and strode toward my apartment.
“You’re going to hurt yourself, Bishop,” I scolded, hanging on tightly to his t-shirt.
“You weigh nothing, my little tart,” he teased, his voice full of laughter.
His little tart? Were we back to that?
“Shows what you know,” I said, shaking my head. He waited while I unlocked the door to my apartment before he strode in and lowered me to the couch. “Thanks for the ride, but now I’m in the apartment, and I don’t have my crutches.” It was my turn to laugh when he held up his finger then jogged back out the door. When he returned, he had my crutches and the pharmacy bag. He set the bag down on the table by me and the crutches on the floor. “Let me get a pillow for that leg.”
I pointed down the hallway. “On the bed,” I said, ready to say more when he disappeared to get it.
“Holy hell!” His words were distant, but I snickered at the tone. When he reappeared, he was holding the pillow and shaking his head. “It looks like an office store exploded in there. What the hell?”
“I was going to explain,” I said, still laughing. Bishop handed me the pillow and sat opposite me in the chair by the doors. “You didn’t give me time.”
“I wasn’t expecting,” he motioned his hands around, “that.”
“Stop being dramatic. There aren’t that many boxes.”
“I counted like ten or twelve,” he said, a brow raised. “I missed something over the last eighteen hours. What’s going on?”
I sighed and let my shoulders drop back after I fixed the pillow. “I am officially out of the bakery except for interviews and paperwork.”
He leaned forward and clasped his hands together. “What do you mean out of the bakery?”
I held up my hand to clarify. “Sorry, not out of the bakery. I’m no longer working at the front counter. I’ll be doing all the management and marketing work from here on out. All of the customer service work will be employees only. Those boxes hold the paperwork and filing that we haven’t had time to deal with for over a year. My job is to spend the next week here at home, sorting it all out. Then I have to devise a new computer filing system for us, set up some accounts to go digital, and hire several new workers.”
His eyes widened, and he shook his head slightly. “That sounds like it’s going to take a lot more than a week.”
I laughed, glad it was relaxed for the first time all day. “Oh, it will. I’m just saying that I’m not allowed back in the bakery for at least a week while my leg heals a little bit, so I’ll work here with my leg up. It’s not in good shape.”
“I would never have guessed that,” he said, winking. “Actually, the need for two crutches was a dead giveaway.”
I nodded, biting my lip while I did it, so I didn’t cry. “I’ve been at the clinic since eight o’clock this morning. Um, things didn’t go well.”
“How not well did they go?”
“I should just show you,” I said, “unless you’re squeamish.”
“I’m a physical education teacher for elementary kids. I’m not even a little bit squeamish.”
I laughed and nodded, letting my chest relax a little bit more. “Good point.” I hiked my dress up to show him the knee that now sported a bandage. The rest of the leg was fire engine red.
He stood up and walked over, dropping to his knees to get a closer look. “God, Amber,” he hissed, his words barely audible, “this looks worse than it did last night.”
“It is,” I said, letting my head fall back. He held the back of his hand to the skin and then grabbed my gaze with his. His hand went to my forehead, and he shook his head, his lips in a thin line.
“You have an infection. That fever is something else. You must be miserable.”
“I’ve had much better days,” I admitted. “The doctor said I have septic arthritis in my knee. I guess the leg is more susceptible to it because of the hardware. He did a needle aspiration, which surprisingly made it feel better. The skin is also infected. I had to stay at the clinic for I.V. antibiotics before they’d let me leave.”
“Do you need to go back for more?”
I pointed at the bag on the table. “No, I picked up oral ones to start today. I’ll have to take them for at least two weeks and possibly up to six weeks.”
“Did he do x-rays?”
I sighed and rubbed my forehead. The heat of the day mixed with the fever made me want to take a cold shower and curl up in a ball. “He did after draining all the fluid out of the knee. There was a new fracture that wasn’t there after the original accident. He thinks Rex fractured the femur again when he kicked me.”
“And you walked around on a broken leg?” he asked in shock.
I made the so-so hand. “Remember, there’s a rod in there already holding that bone together, and it was just a small crack in the bone, so not a fracture the way you’re thinking. I should have said it was relatively new, but healed. It was painful because he cracked the bone, but it was always stable.”
He fell to his butt and grasped his knees. “I’m so sorry. You must be miserable. I guess you do need to spend some time off it. Does he think once the infection is gone that you’ll be able to walk better again?”
I laughed, and the sound took him by surprise until he glanced up and noticed my face. He stood and lifted my legs carefully
, sitting on the couch and setting my legs over his lap. He pulled me into his arms and held me in a hug, not speaking or doing anything other than comforting me for a few moments. When he did finally speak, his cheek was resting on the top of my head, and my face was buried in his shirt.
“Maybe you should call your parents and have them come home? I’m sure they’d want to be here for you.”
I shook my head slightly. “Not unless I have to. My issues have ruined a lot of plans they’ve made over the years. I can handle this.”
He lowered me back to the pillows on the couch and held my hand in his. “Tell me what else happened. I can tell he gave you other news you don’t know how to process.”
I shrugged and leaned my head back on the pillow. “He was surprised to see how I just drag the leg around rather than have any kind of natural gait. When he took the brace off, and I couldn’t hold myself up at all, he was extremely unhappy that I’d waited so long to see him. I used to be able to walk on the leg without the brace. It wasn’t correctly, but it did hold me up. Since February, it hasn’t.”
“Don’t you think maybe that was a good reason to see the doctor before now?” he asked gently. He was concerned, which I understood, but he didn’t understand the life I’ve led up until now. I couldn’t get mad at him for that, but I also didn’t want to defend myself all the time.
“In the beginning, I thought it was from the injury and would improve. When it didn’t, I adjusted to it just like I always do when something changes. See, you’ve known me for less than two weeks, Bishop. You haven’t been part of the last seventeen years of constant changes with this leg. I know it’s easy for you to sit there and judge my decisions, but those decisions are never easy, cut, or dried.”
His fingers tightened on mine, and he shook his head. “I’m sorry if that came off as judging you. I should have worded it differently. I should have asked if that concerned you, but you answered the question in a roundabout way. You didn’t think anything of it because the leg is always changing.”
“At the beginning, that’s true,” I agreed. “It was when it didn’t start to improve again that I got worried. Then work got busy, and I kept pushing it day after day. As long as I wore the brace, I could walk, but I didn’t see the way I was walking. Haylee and Brady did. When I almost faceplanted on the bakery floor this morning, Haylee drove me to the clinic and deposited me there. Now it’s too late to fix it.”
“The doctor must have some kind of treatment, Amber,” he said gently. “What did he suggest?”
“In two weeks, he wants to do nerve conduction studies. He said the nerves aren’t firing correctly anymore. He suspects the damage is too great to reverse it. According to him, all that’s left for treatment is the current brace and both crutches all the time, a wheelchair, or the microprocessor brace he told me about before.”
“The nerve conduction study will give them more information, though, so that sounds like a good place to start, right?”
“It would be if it weren’t for,” I rubbed my fingers together to indicate money. “I don’t have it. I also don’t have seventy thousand dollars, so that brace is out. I can afford a wheelchair. Would you get me a drink of water? I’m not feeling so great.”
“Anything you need,” he said, lowering my legs back to the couch and disappearing into the kitchen.
What I needed was a few minutes to myself. I just told Bishop more than I’d told my best friend. It was hard to admit defeat, but I think I just did. When you’re up against a rock, all you can do is bend or break. I couldn’t bend because I was already broken.
I INHALED A BREATH of cold air from the freezer while I dug around inside it. I needed a moment to steady my nerves. Now was the time to bring up my idea, but I was terrified Amber would laugh at me. Then again, maybe she’d cry. Either way, I knew she was going to say no. I just wasn’t sure how I was going to convince her that this was the only way.
I grabbed the water, a washcloth wet with cold water, the bottle of Tylenol, and an ice pack, then carried it back to the living room. I handed her the glass of water and held up the ice pack. “Would this help at all?”
She reached for it and settled it across her knee. “Can’t hurt, right? My skin is burning as if someone lit it on fire. I was thinking about a cold shower, but that’s more effort than I can expend right now.” She swallowed two Tylenol with the cold water and smiled. “Thanks, I appreciate your help. You don’t have to stick around. I’m sure you have better things to do than sit around and nurse my sorry ass back to health.”
“It’s summer. I have nothing else to do,” I promised, rubbing the cloth around her face to cool her.
Her finger roved around my face in a circle. “That’s a lie. You’re the one who spent five minutes explaining all the things teachers do in the summer.”
I laughed, and it made the tension flow out of my chest in a way I was grateful for at the moment. It was hard to speak when my sternum was crushing my lungs. “I’ll give you that, but I enjoy your company, and I’m not in a hurry to get home. I wanted to talk to you about something.”
“Sure,” she said carefully, as though she was afraid that I was going to ask her out again. Little did she know.
“First, I have a question.” She motioned for me to ask, so I cleared my throat. “If you could afford the nerve test and the brace, would you do it?”
Her head tipped to the side, and she blinked twice. “That’s a ridiculous question. If I could afford it, then I would have done it already.”
“If that’s the case, then I might know how to help you get those things accomplished.”
“Did I win the lottery on a ticket I didn’t know I bought? If not, I don’t see how that’s going to work.”
“We get married,” I said in one breath.
The room remained deathly silent. I had to check to see if her chest was even rising and falling, or if she had just stopped breathing to avoid answering.
“This is like one of those fever-induced delirium dreams, right? Am I awake?” she finally asked, the words barely audible.
I swallowed and rubbed my hand on the couch to keep from making eye contact with her. “You are most definitely awake. Let me explain. I was thinking about all of this last night. I realized that if we get married, then I can add you to my insurance. My insurance will cover it all without deductibles or copays.”
“Um,” she said, the word hummed more than spoken. “I don’t think that’s legal, Bishop. Thanks for the offer, though.”
“It’s not illegal,” I said quickly.
She held up her hand. “Okay, maybe more like sketchy and not exactly ethical.”
“I’ll give you that,” I agreed, “but then again, there have been sketchier things done in the world. Listen, I already carry insurance on Athena, so I have the family plan regardless. Adding a spouse,” which I put in quotation marks, “isn’t going to change the premiums or raise any red flags.”
“Except we’ve only known each other for two weeks!” she exclaimed.
“They don’t know that. I’ve been employed in the district for six months. For all they know, I moved here for you.”
“And then after I have expensive tests and they pay for a ridiculously expensive brace, we what, just get divorced?”
“We cross that bridge when we get there,” I said hesitantly. I couldn’t say that I was already in love with her. I couldn’t say that I’d fight like hell to stay married to her if I ever convinced her to agree to this crazy scheme. What she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her. If, in the end, it didn’t work out between us, her quality of life improved in the process. There was no downside to the plan other than my broken heart, which I would keep to myself for right now.
She waved her hand in the air. “Wait, it’s a preexisting condition. That’s not going to work.”
“They can’t deny treatment because of preexisting conditions anymore, Amber. Is that why your insurance is refusing to pay for anything? If it is, you ha
ve a lawsuit on your hands.”
Her head shook instantly. “No, they would pay for the nerve conduction tests, but not until I meet the first ten grand. That said, I don’t have any coverage for durable medical equipment, so they aren’t going to pay for the braces no matter what.”
“My insurance doesn’t have that condition,” I explained. “We pay the first thousand dollars, and then everything else is paid after that. I’ve already spent that between Athena and me this year. Durable medical equipment is paid one hundred percent after the deductible, too.”
“Seriously? I thought it was always twenty percent.”
“Teachers don’t make a lot of money, but we do have decent benefits in most districts.”
She was quiet while she pondered the things I said. Her eyes remained focused across the room rather than meet mine.
Her cheeks were rosy from the fever she was still fighting, so I took the cold washcloth and held it to those cheeks for a moment. “Listen, Amber. I don’t have all the answers, okay? I just know that I have one answer. I can do one thing to help you over this hump right now. I can’t tell you what will happen in the future because I don’t have a crystal ball. All I can say is, if you marry me, we can get you the treatment you so desperately need to stay part of the bakery and living life the way you want to live. If you want to think of it as a business arrangement, that’s okay with me. Take some time to think about it, okay? I’ll let you rest and try to kick this fever, but if you need anything, you have my number, right?”
“Right,” she whispered, her voice soft and unsure. “I think I’ll go take that cold shower after all.”
“Do you need help getting to the bathroom?” I asked, brushing a piece of hair off her forehead.
“No, I’ll be okay. Thanks, though.”
“You bet. Maybe after that shower, you should take a nap. You look worn out.”
“Yeah, I’m kind of tired,” she said on a yawn, still avoiding eye contact.
“I’ll let myself out. We’ll talk soon,” I said, sliding the door open and letting myself out before she could say anything that would only make my heart hurt more. I had probably just blown my chance at ever marrying Amber Larson, for love or any other reason.
Tart (The Fluffy Cupcake Book 2) Page 11