In a Rush

Chapter 16

chapter sixteen

Emme

Today’s Learning Objective:

Students will have a quick little breakdown in the bath.

It wasn’t enough to fake sleeping through the last hour of the flight.

No, I had to take this game of avoidance to the most unhinged level possible.

I sat up with a theatrical stretch and yawn and “Oh wow, we’re already landing?” when the plane hit the runway. As if I hadn’t been counting down the seconds during the descent. When Ryan caught me staring at his change of clothes, I decided to ramble for a solid twenty minutes about needing to work on my lesson plans tonight and how I liked our curriculum well enough but still felt the need to unpack and adapt everything to my preferences.

There were a few moments when he glanced at me, his brows pitched high and his flat expression asking, Are you listening to yourself?

The answer was yes, I was listening to every mortifying bit, but it was also no, and neither should you.

In the car, I talked at excruciating speed and length about Ben and Grace’s upcoming housewarming party. The work they’d done on the house, the wedding plans, the people who would be there along with extended personal histories. I went so far as to rattle off every item I was planning for the charcuterie board I’d bring, where I’d buy it all, and how I’d arrange the cheese into a cute B and G.

I kind of wanted to throw myself down a well and stay there for six to eight years until I’d shifted into some kind of watery goblin and forgotten all about my human shame.

“Audrey always brings a dessert or two,” I went on, staring out the car window at the gray skies and pouring rain. “She got started with gluten-free baking because her doctors thought she was intolerant but it turned out she was just in a really toxic marriage and once she got rid of that guy and all the stress that came with him, her body slowly healed. Crazy how that can happen.”

“Crazy,” he murmured.

“She actually had a whole gluten-free baking site for a while and she’d test out her recipes on us and?—”

Ryan dropped a hand on my thigh and leaned over, pointing out my window. “Is that Ines?”

“What? No. Where? I mean—what? I don’t think—where? No. Probably not.” I stopped flailing for a second and realized he was right. And she was wearing my yellow satin cape. “Oh. Yeah. That’s her. That’s Ines.”

“What the hell is she carrying?” he asked. “Bowen, can you slow down up here?”

Ryan’s hand was still on my thigh, his index finger busy tracing the seam of my leggings as if I was capable of enduring such things in these circumstances. I was not.

Bowen cut across North End traffic and pulled to the side as he approached a waterlogged Ines, her glasses bleary from the rain and the cape soaked through.

“Ines,” I called, though she didn’t seem to hear me. “I’ll get out and talk to her.”

“Please don’t,” Ryan said before switching on his deep, commanding QB voice. “Ines.”

That did the trick. He was good like that. She whirled around, half blind from the rain and struggling to carry—I didn’t even know what.

“Ines, it’s me, Emme. And Ryan.” I added, “And Bowen too. Hurry, get in here. Get out of the rain.”

“The rain is part of the problem,” she said, stepping up to the SUV. “That’s why I needed all the rice.”

“What do you mean, you needed rice?” I pushed the door open and shuffled closer to Ryan. He only gripped my thigh tighter, as if that would help anything.

“To save your laptop.” She heaved a twenty-pound bag of basmati rice onto the seat. “Because it’s raining inside too.”

Ryan surveyed my room with his fists propped on his hips. Chunks of ceiling plaster covered my desk, my bed, the floor, and a steady stream of water poured in through two or three spots. My bookshelf and everything on it was destroyed. There was nothing to be saved on my desk. School papers, books, bills—all of it wet to the point of disintegration. My closet took the worst of it with a whole waterfall coursing down one wall and soaking just about every piece of clothing I owned. My shoes floated and bobbed in the flood.

With a nod, Ryan said, “Time to go.” Pulled out his phone and swiped through a few screens. “Grab anything you can salvage. I’ll have Bowen pull around in a few minutes.”

I picked up a shirt I’d left on the bed, now caked with plaster and other debris I couldn’t identify. I didn’t even know how to clean something that’d drowned in gross ceiling water. It smelled like an old basement. Was there a special detergent for that or was it more like fifty washes with the regular stuff?

Another chunk of ceiling hit the floor with a squelch and I glanced at Ryan. “I’m sorry, what did you say?”

Phone pressed to his ear, Ryan said, “Get whatever you need so you can leave in the next five minutes. I’m taking you home with me.”

I motioned to the ruptures in the ceiling. “But?—”

“You can’t stay here, Muggsy. You know that.” He gave me a look that begged me to stop fucking around and get moving. “Ines has already talked to the landlord and warned your downstairs neighbors too. There’s nothing else we can do here, and standing around and waiting for the rest of the ceiling to give out isn’t a great idea.”

“I can’t leave Ines.”

Her room was as dry as a bone. She only discovered the flood in mine when the water started spreading out into the kitchen.

“She’s coming with us,” he said, holding up a hand when a voice boomed through his phone. “Jakobi, hey. No, we’ll deal with that later. I need you to hop in your truck and get over to the North End. No. No, Em’s apartment is underwater and I need a hand getting her roommate moved out.”

Ryan gave me a hurry up hand gesture and paced into the kitchen, still talking to his manager, Jakobi.

I stared at my room for a long moment, still too stunned to process any of it. This weird little place I’d called home for the past few years couldn’t be mine anymore. Not now, maybe not ever again.

I toyed with the band of my ring, still slightly foreign against my skin. If I was being honest with myself, it hadn’t been home since Grace moved out. It was still my place but it wasn’t our place anymore, and that part mattered more than I ever thought it would.

From the other side of the apartment, I heard Ryan say, “Okay, Ines. We need to make some decisions. What are we packing right now?”

I pressed a fist to my mouth to smother a manic laugh. Not twenty minutes ago I was busy wringing the oxygen out of every molecule in reach in the daft hope of suffocating that interaction on the plane from memory. All I’d wanted was to climb into bed and hide under the covers for a minimum of sixteen hours. Alone .

And here we were, waiting on Jakobi’s truck and figuring out if there was anything, even one tiny thing from this place, that I could take with me to Ryan’s condo.

Where I wouldn’t be able to hide at all.

“Did you buy or lease?”

Ryan set eight reusable grocery bags on the marble island, all of which he’d insisted on carrying into the high-rise condo himself, and cut a glance toward Ines. “Buy.”

“How much did you pay?”

“Ines,” I whisper-yelled.

She held up her hands. “What?”

“It’s rude to ask those things,” I said.

Ryan shook his head. “It’s fine. Reporters write about it all the time. My grandmother gives me a ton of shit about it too.” To Ines, he said, “About fifteen million.”

“Dollars?”

He shrugged as he unpacked a bag. We’d cleared out the fridge and cupboards before leaving. “The seller wasn’t willing to take jelly beans.”

She pushed her glasses up. “What’s the square footage?”

“A little over four thousand inside, another thousand on the deck.”

I glanced past the comfortable living room and dining room with a table to seat eight, toward the deck. The clouds pressed in close, heavy and dense. The city all but disappeared.

If it wasn’t still raining like the end of days and my uterus wasn’t clawing its wallpaper off, I’d disappear too. I just needed to figure a few things out and I couldn’t do that during Ines’s interrogation of Ryan or his wildly precise approach to shelving peanut butter and black beans.

I had a tote bag loaded with vitamins, hair stuff, and any random thing that wasn’t wet. My heating pad, which came as a huge relief seeing as my period decided to visit five whole days early. A few bras, some t-shirts, jeans that fit only sometimes. But that was it. I needed to wash my clothes from the weekend so I had something to wear to work tomorrow and—god help me—my lesson plans were still a mystery. And the laptop I needed to access my instructional materials was chilling in twenty pounds of rice.

“When are you and Emme getting married?”

“Ines, my sunshine,” I whispered, pressing fingertips to my eyelids. “It’s a good question, one I’ve asked several times myself, but can we put a pin in this chat until after I have a cute little panic attack because I have no computer, no underwear, and no idea how I’m supposed to function tomorrow?”

“That’s cool,” she said as she turned a curious eye to the barista-quality espresso machine on the countertop.

“You’re not having a panic attack,” Ryan said, moving on to the cheeses. I noted a bit of judgment in his eyes when he had them all laid out on the counter. “We’re going to get everything fixed, and replace anything you lost.”

“Yeah, but how? How does that happen? My landlord is a guy in a bodega. We’re not talking about responsive property management here.”

“You’re not saying anything I don’t already know,” he said, eyeing the wedges of gouda and brie. “That kind of damage takes time to fix. It’s not going to be resolved this week. Probably not this month.” He shrugged like this was fine. “So, stay here.”

I glanced down the long line of the kitchen island to Ines. She was entertaining herself with the espresso machine. “But this is your place.”

“Legally, it’ll be yours soon enough.”

I searched and searched but found no adequate response to that. I just…I hadn’t even thought of it that way.

“Listen. You have two options,” Ryan said to me, taking real care to organize the cheddars. “One, we leave now to pick up a new laptop for you and then swing by some shops for your—for whatever you need.”

“And the second option?” I asked.

He closed the fridge and turned, meeting my gaze. “Or I call Marcie and Wren right now and tell them to have everything you need delivered tonight. It might take Wren a few days to replace your entire wardrobe but she can get you taken care of for tomorrow.”

“I can’t let you do that,” I said. It was enough that he and Jakobi had made quick work of packing Ines’s room and then hauling her into her new—though much more temporary—accommodations. Even if Ryan said she was welcome here indefinitely, I couldn’t imagine he wanted her taking apart his oven. Or that espresso machine.

“Yes, you can.” He folded his arms over his chest as he stared at me. “You can argue with me about it all you want but that’s not going to solve any of these problems and it won’t make you feel better so don’t.” He turned, opened a drawer. He pulled out a small bottle and shook two tablets into his hand. “Come here. It’s time for another dose. You need to stay ahead of the pain.”

I shuffled over and accepted the pills while he filled a glass of water. “Thanks,” I mumbled.

He watched me swallow before asking, “What’ll it be? Are we going out or am I making a call?”

I knew the money was nothing to him. Some clothes, a laptop—it was pocket change. And I knew that if our roles were reversed—if I was famous and outrageously wealthy and he was a refugee of his flooded apartment—I’d haunt the shit out of him until he let me help. I’d be so fucking mad if he tried to put on a brave, self-sufficient face about it.

And that was why I stopped fighting him. Why I didn’t pull out my pride and let it be the only thing keeping me warm while I suffered.

“I guess you can call them.”

“That’s my girl,” he said, a slight smile pulling at his lips.

“When you do get married,” Ines started, “can I play the harp at the ceremony?”

We shared a glance before turning to her. Ryan asked, “You play the harp?”

“No, but it’s not realistic to assume you’ll be able to coordinate a large wedding with less than twelve months of lead time and I’ve always wanted to take lessons.”

We shared another glance. He shrugged. I gave a quiet laugh as I rubbed at the band of my ring.

“Will you learn ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’’?”

Ines squinted at him. “What’s that?”

I snorted out a laugh. “It’s the song from Top Gun .” Shaking my head at him, I said, “You can’t be serious.”

“I never joke about Top Gun .” He had the audacity to look offended. “It’s a great song. The best song.”

“It’s about falling out of love,” I argued.

“It’s about putting it all on the line before it’s lost,” he replied. “It’s about fighting right to the end, even when you can’t get a single point on the board.”

“A football song, then. Gotcha.” I gave him a cheeky thumbs-up that had him muttering about my willful misunderstanding. “You can have your sad song if I can walk down the aisle to ‘Maneater.’”

He slapped a hand over his heart. “Muggs, I’d require it.”

“Okay so that’s ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’’ and”—Ines eyed me, a brow quirked over the rim of her glasses—“‘Maneater.’ Do I have that right?”

“What? Would you prefer something from Les Mis ?”

“Yeah, I don’t know much about weddings,” she started, “but is the French Revolution’s death opera really the vibe you’re going for?”

“It is not a death opera ,” I cried. “And it’s set several decades after the French Revolution, thank you kindly.”

Ryan leaned against the island and crossed his arms. “‘On My Own’ is not the soundtrack to a happy marriage. And I know because I’ve listened to it with you no fewer than six thousand times.”

“That seems like an exaggeration,” I said. “If we take lonely little Eponine from ‘On My Own’ and the guy who knows his gal won’t be getting the lovin’ feelin’ back anytime soon, and toss them together, there’s a chance they’ll be very happy. Or much worse off. Who are we to tell?”

Ryan stared at me like he had something to say but he shook his head and turned to Ines. “Take those lessons.”

“Awesome. Thanks.” Ines pumped a fist and grabbed her backpack from the floor. “Am I allowed to use the gym? Don’t worry, I won’t touch anything and I won’t get in your way. It would just be cool to practice without taking two buses to do it.”

He nodded. “Yeah, anytime.”

Another fist pump. “This place is great.” Giving me a baleful look, she added, “Our place was great too. Just great in a primitive, cave-dwelling kind of way.”

I tried to laugh but I ended up sounding like a bullfrog.

“I’m going to take apart your laptop now and see if any of it can be saved,” Ines continued. “In case it wasn’t clear enough, I’m gonna close my door and mind my own business for the rest of the night. You two can do whatever lovey cringey woo-woo stuff you want.”

She wandered down the hall in the direction of the home gym, den, and spare bedroom where Ryan and Jakobi had unloaded her things.

All I had was my luggage from the weekend and the tote bag of despair, and both of those things still sat at the edge of the kitchen. There was one very obvious answer as to where I’d be sleeping though I still expected to hear something about a pull-out couch in the den or a daybed in the gym. If the topic didn’t come up soon enough, I was going to have to do the awkward thing and ask.

“Is she really going to learn the harp?” he asked, back to organizing the cheese.

I banded an arm across my torso. My body was trying to kill me today. “Probably.”

Ryan glanced over his shoulder at me, clocked my hunched stance with a scowl. “Just so you know, there’s a soaking tub the size of a swimming pool in my bathroom and it has eighty-four jets. It’s brought me back from the dead more than a few times.”

That was an opening if I’d ever seen one.

“If that’s your way of asking me to get naked in your room, you should’ve said something a lot sooner.”

Several wedges of cheese tumbled out of his hands and hit the floor. He dropped his head as a raspy breath rattled out of him. “Emmeline.”

“It was always going to be weird,” I said. “I just kicked it in the ass to get it moving. Now we can get it over with.”

He scooped up the cheese and dumped it into a drawer, abandoning all organizational schemes. Closing the fridge, he said, “I can leave. If you’d be more comfortable.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “Where would you even go?”

“I have a place near the stadium. I usually stay there unless I have a reason to be in the city.”

I shook my head. “I don’t want you to leave.”

“Why?”

A moment passed and then another while I searched for the words. He turned his attention to another bag and I got the distinct sense he didn’t want to look at me right now. I laced my fingers together, aware all over again of my ring—and the lines we’d crossed today.

In all these years, we’d never done anything like that.

Although.

Although…

We’d kissed—a lot. And not only when there were eyes on us.

We’d shared a bed—a few times. And we always ended up climbing each other in the night like vines.

Then there was everything else. Massaging his jaw. Flashing him the other night. Asking him to unzip my dress after the charity event. Letting him carry me down the stairs. Jumping into his arms when we met for dinner. Hugging every time we parted like we were about to be separated for years.

And there was no forgetting that I’d let him pick up the soggy tatters of my life, move me into his penthouse, and replace everything I owned with a few quick calls.

Maybe…maybe we’d never crossed this line before but there were a lot of other lines leading up to it.

Maybe this wasn’t weird or awkward or a reason to become a well-water goblin. Maybe this—and by this , I did mean dry humping my oldest friend on a private jet—was the next logical step.

If that was the case, that meant I had to take another step, cross another line.

“How many—” Ryan scowled as he pulled another two jars of jam from the bag and added them to the others gathered on his countertop. “Why do you have so much jam?”

“Because Shay’s husband’s a jam farmer and he always sends us home with a bunch when we visit. I swear, he grows the best jam in the entire world.”

“I’m aware that you’re fucking with me,” he said, folding the reusable bags into crisp squares, “because I know that you know that jam isn’t something one farms. I know what you’re doing and I know why you’re doing it and I love you but can you stop and have a real conversation with me for one fucking minute?”

I crossed to the island, grabbed a bag from his hands and tossed it aside. I reached for him, a hand on the back of his neck, the other cupping his granite jaw. Pushing up on my toes, I touched my lips to his. It wasn’t really a kiss, it was a gentle brush and Hi. I’m here.

He sucked in a sudden breath and he lifted the arms that’d been frozen at his sides to my waist, holding me tight against him. His teeth grazed my bottom lip and it felt like Good. I’ve been waiting.

We stared at each other for a moment, the silence tight around us until I said, “Stay. I want you here.”

His jaw softened under my palm. I pressed one kiss to his lips before he picked me up and deposited me on the countertop. He stepped between my legs, saying, “Did you really think I’d leave?”

I shrugged. He slipped a hand under my sweater and stroked small circles low on my back. “You would though. If I said it was what I wanted.”

“But you don’t want that.”

I shook my head. He left a line of kisses from my jaw to the tender spot where my neck met my shoulder. “Who would yell at me about jam farming if you left?”

He dropped his head to my shoulder with a sigh. “Jam doesn’t grow on trees, Muggsy.”

“But peaches do and they make really nice preserves.”

We stayed there for a minute, his palm warm on my back and my fingers raking up his nape, and I didn’t trouble myself with questions about what this was or what it meant or where it would go. I didn’t have to spend my time worrying about how this would end or what we’d be like when we were friends who’d been married.

Trouble would come and find me when it was time. It always did.

Eventually, Ryan said, “I wasn’t expecting you to stay in my room. There’s another suite upstairs.”

I glanced around. I didn’t see a staircase anywhere. “There’s an upstairs?”

“Yeah, on the other side of the gym. It’s bigger and more private. It has a sauna and a cold plunge. Oh, and another deck, some storage, and a family room.”

“I’m going to need a map to get around this place.”

“I’ll draw you one after I make some calls,” he said. “I mean it though. Stay wherever you want. Take my room. Kick me out for all I care.”

“I’m not kicking you out of your bedroom, you incorrigible man.”

“I’m on the road most of this week anyway and I do have the better bathtub.”

With a breath, I put some space between us. “Where are you going?”

“Minnesota.” He rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. “I’m meeting with a group of strength and conditioning coaches. Trying to get my arm in shape.”

“Oh, that’s a relief,” I murmured. “I thought I was the only one who’d noticed your pass completion rate had dipped.”

He dropped his hands on either side of me and stared straight into my eyes. “I love how hard you ride me.” His tongue peeked out, just a bit, and ran along the line of his teeth. “About my stats.”

My loud gulp seemed to bounce off the walls in this wide, spacious room. My cheeks were rosy red and it would’ve been safer to take this in a different direction but I said, “Someone has to.”

We went on watching each other, leaning in by inches as the moments passed. We could’ve stayed there until we closed the distance and crashed into each other again but a brutal stab of pain shot through my back, between my hips, and down my legs. The only way to withstand this was to curl in on myself and breathe like I could exhale the hellcat currently possessing my uterus.

I couldn’t, but it was better than screaming or accidentally tearing a towel bar off the wall. The towel bar thing only happened once and it was when I was sixteen. It was the one time my stepdad had been notably impressed with me.

Ryan pulled me into him and stroked a hand down my back. “I’m going to get the bath started,” he said, his lips on my temple. “I’ll bring your things in there so you can change. You can keep everything there—if you want.”

A breath shuddered out of me and I nodded. “Give me some time to think about it.”

“Can I watch while you think?”

“In the bath? No.” I brought my hand to his solid chest, experimented with touching him this way simply because I liked it. “Good try but no. I don’t have a spare minute for anything like that. I’m positively overbooked at bath time. I need to cry, panic about what I’m going to teach this week, and then zone out while obsessing about pointless things. I couldn’t squeeze you in even if I wanted to.”

“And you don’t want to?”

He asked this in a plain, unassuming way. There was no heat, no innuendo. No expectation. And I loved that so much because I knew my response wouldn’t change anything between us. There wouldn’t be pressure or disappointment. There wouldn’t be any loaded comments about the weekend ahead or the next time we traveled for one of his events.

We’d be okay if we never crossed another line together—and that was everything I needed. We could only cross these lines if we could turn around and walk back to the start at any point.

“Not right now.” I motioned to my abdomen. “There’s a teardown project taking place in my uterus. Authorized personnel only.”

He reached between us, pressed a hand to my belly. He was so deliciously warm, I couldn’t help but lean deeper into his touch. “Is there something you need? Supplies or anything else?”

I shook my head. “No, but…thanks. For everything. You really didn’t have to do all of this for me and Ines.”

“It wasn’t like I was going to leave you two there.” He kissed my temple, my forehead. “At least not without a canoe.”

“That would’ve solved many problems though invented a few others.”

“Couldn’t have that.” He scooped me off the counter, set me on my feet. “Come on. Let me introduce you to all the different pain-relief bath soaks I keep on hand.”

“No hotter words have ever been spoken,” I said, lacing my fingers with his.