The Girlfriend (The Boss) (42 page)

“To the end of chemotherapy,” he said with a broad smile. “I am so, so happy to be done with it for now.”

That “for now” would be over sooner than either of us wanted, but it didn’t matter. His cancer wouldn’t stay in remission forever, and the transplant process was going to move fast. But we had a glorious month of no chemotherapy, no puking, no late night sweating through his clothes or searing body pain.

“And to your birthday,” I reminded him. “Forty-nine, practically out to pasture.”

“Jest all you like, I’m thrilled to be forty-nine. It means I’m still alive.” We clinked glasses together.

“To the hottest forty-nine year old I know,” I purred at him over the rim of my flute and took a sip.

He smiled fondly. “You look beyond beautiful tonight. Your dress has been noted.”

I smoothed down the front of the black chiffon dress he’d bought me in France. I was easily the least clothed person in the restaurant, but I didn’t care. I hadn’t worn it for the other diners.

The place Neil had chosen was super fancy. As in, there were no prices on the menu or any signage out front to declare it was a restaurant. Just a little brass plaque beside the door. The light was low and the tables were spaced perfectly for intimate conversation. It was incredibly romantic, and I was surprised at how much I had missed doing normal couple things together.

It would also give us a chance to catch up on stuff. I hadn’t been bothering him with all my problems and daily bullshit, unless it was somewhat positive. We’d had enough troubles. But I could at least let him know what was going on with me.

Our food arrived, a gorgeous pesto and eggless pasta for Neil and a beautifully presented red tai curry and grilled tofu for me. The vegan thing was surprisingly easy to live with, and it hadn’t occurred to me to order meat in the first place.

I kinda wanted to call Emma and tell her.

“So,” Neil said, spreading his napkin in his lap. “I have barely heard anything about what’s happening in your life these days, Sophie.”

“You’re my life these days,” I said with a sweet smile he would know was partially me pulling his leg.

“That’s very sad, if it’s true.” He lifted his fork. “Something is happening. I know it is. You’ve been a bit moody, and I know it’s not still about my will.”

It wasn’t still about the will, he was right. We’d worked that out between me and him and Emma. If anything happened to Neil, I would receive ten million, all my jewelry, and Neil’s New York apartment. I’d fought him a little, until I’d realized that to Emma and Neil, it was practically pocket change.

My biggest problem lately had been missing Holli, and my bizarre unwillingness to speak to her in spite of it. I believe the exact word Lauren, my therapist, had used to describe the situation was “avoidance.”

I swallowed a bite. “Actually, something has been kind of bothering me. But I don’t want to bring you down.”

“Sophie, I just found out I don’t have to have chemotherapy tomorrow. You couldn’t possibly bring me down.” He lifted his fork to his mouth.

For a minute, I was paralyzed by the sight of his lips closing over the tines.

When we got home, he was in such trouble.

I cleared my throat. “Well... Holli and Deja are moving in together.”

“Congratulations to Holli and Deja. That’s wonderful news. Are they going to live in your old apartment?”

Old apartment?
“Um, no. Holli is moving into Deja’s place.”

He nodded, like he understood something. “You’re worried about what will happen to your things? We can have them shipped here, or moved to my apartment—”

“No, I’m not worried about my stuff. I’m worried what will happen to the place where I live.”

He frowned slightly. “Why is that?”

I tilted my head, sensing the beginnings of a misunderstanding. “Well... we haven’t really discussed what’s going to happen after your treatment is over.”

His frown deepened. “I assumed we would continue living together. Was that a wrong assumption?”

I guess I had never thought about it before. Well, I’d thought about it, I’d just never brought it up to him. “I suppose that’s something we need to figure out. I have to get a job. I can’t do that here, I don’t have a work visa.”

“We could always get you one,” Neil said easily, as though it were just a matter of making a phone call. For him, it probably was. He had lawyers and stuff who took care of all of that. “Or we could go back to New York.”

“Your company is here, though. I thought the only reason you were in New York was because of
Porteras
. If Valerie is taking that over, what would be the point?”

“The point would be,” Neil began slowly, interrupting himself with a small, awkward laugh, “to be with you.”

“But how would you run your company?” I asked. “It’s not that I don’t appreciate the idea that you would uproot your life and move to New York for me—”
 

“As you’ve done by moving to London with me,” he pointed out.

I nodded patiently. “I just didn’t want to be presumptuous. I said I would move in with you while you had treatment. I didn’t know if this was something you wanted to be more permanent.”

He swallowed the bite he’d taken and paused thoughtfully. “I would be willing to live in New York and expand the American office, if you want to go back to the States. I would have to come back to London on occasion. And I’d still like to retire at Langhurst court—”

“I don’t think we have to prepare for retirement yet, do we?” I laughed. “I know it’s your birthday and you get weird about that stuff, but come on.”

“If I plan to retire at sixty-five, that’s... Christ, that’s only sixteen years away.” He began rapidly swallowing from his champagne flute.

I rolled my eyes. “That’s a really long time. I mean, it’s nice to
think
that we’ll still be together then, but we haven’t even been dating for a year yet. Do you think you’ll even want to still be with me in fifteen years?”

“Yes,” he answered automatically. “You don’t have to answer that question for yourself. I know that our concept of time is quite different at the moment.”

“How so?” Not that I minded talking about the future. I’d been so careful to avoid the subject lately, since we had no idea how long Neil’s future would actually be.

“Right now, to you, fifteen years seems like a terribly long time. But you’ll get to a point where a year passes so much faster than it did before. And that feeling of accelerating time only gets worse the older you get.” He dug his fork into his food, then added, “I think it starts in your thirties, and it’s really all downhill from there.”

“Yikes.” I slid a bite of curry into my mouth and chewed.

I was incredibly glad that I’d swallowed by the time Neil said, suddenly, “I was actually thinking of proposing tonight, but I didn’t know how you would take it.”

I lunged for my water glass and drained it in six huge gulps. I’m sure I looked the picture of sophistication at that moment; judging from the expression on the face of the man at the table next to ours, I could have only been more disgusting if I’d birthed an alien baby at the table.

A faint smile crossed Neil’s lips. “Not well, then, I see.”

“You can’t do that,” I gasped, shaking my head. “You can’t just casually drop marriage into the conversation.”

“Why not?” he asked pleasantly, as though we were discussing the concept of marriage in the abstract and not as it pertained to the two of us. “If I were going to get married again, it would be to you. I carried a torch for you for six years without any guarantee we’d ever see each other again. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that I’m certain about my feelings for you.”

“That’s true,” I said cautiously, a little out of breath from the water. “I just had no idea marriage would ever be an option.”

“Only if you wanted to get married,” he clarified. “I could just as happily go on living in sin with you.”

Neil was talking about this like there was really a chance for the future. He hadn’t done that in ages. It had to be because of the good news he’d gotten today. He saw light at the end of the tunnel.

I wasn’t going to point out that between him and the tunnel-light was a big, scary monster of a transplant that could still kill him. He wasn’t stupid. The fact that he’d been considering proposing to me was proof that he felt this happiness could be fleeting.

I just needed to know that he knew that. “So, you were going to propose tonight. Why did you change your mind?”

He gave me a shrewd smile. He knew I’d picked up on his mental state. “You’re in the wrong business. You shouldn’t be a journalist, you should be a psychologist.”

“You should answer the question,” I said with prim sweetness as I put another bite into my mouth.

He sighed and sat back in his chair. He regarded me for a long moment before he answered. “Because it’s not the right time. It’s not fair to ask you to marry me now, when you might feel you had to say yes because of my health. That, and I already have what I suspect will be an atrociously expensive wedding to pay for.”

“Emma is going to bankrupt you,” I laughed.

“When I do ask you to marry me... I don’t want it to be out of desperation. That’s what it would have been, tonight. That’s how it was when I proposed to Elizabeth. I made a mistake there.”

“Proposing to me would be a mistake?” I was only half teasing. I wanted to know that Neil found the idea of living without me just as impossible as I found the idea of living without him.

“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.