Chapter 26 #2
Her eyes shot up to his. “Did you cancel them?”
“No, I got all your classes covered.”
“Well, who’s covering tonight?”
“No one. You didn’t have any classes on the schedule.”
“The only nights I don’t have classes are Saturday and Sunday,” she argued.
He stared at her blankly. “Yeah.”
“What day is it?” she asked.
His brow furrowed, and she could see the concern on his face. “Sunday.”
“No, it’s not.” She picked up her phone, and seeing the date on it confirmed what Niko said. It was Sunday. “But the dinner… the dinner at The Cove—we just got home… on Tuesday. We just got home from the dinner.”
She was so confused, she thought she, might have slept a full twenty-four hours, but five days? How had she lost five days? She started to hyperventilate. She couldn’t breathe.
“Tiana, it’s okay.” Niko was suddenly at the table beside her. “It’s okay.”
She opened QuickBooks on her phone, but when she did, nothing had been updated since Tuesday afternoon, the last time any data was imported.
Of course it hadn’t. No one was going to do her QuickBooks, that was ridiculous.
So she didn’t know what she’d made last week.
She didn’t know if all her classes were covered. Or what if she’d had dropouts?
Tears began to fill her eyes. She couldn’t afford a week of no income or of decreased income.
Pops had his surgery in two weeks. He would be in recovery over Christmas, but there was a specialist surgeon who was going to be in Sacramento at that time.
They wouldn’t have another shot until June, and with Pops’ age, six months was a factor.
Niko reached across the table and placed his hand on hers. “It’s okay.”
“I need to go.” She stood and pulled her hand out from under his. “I need to go to the studio.”
“Okay, okay.” He stood as well. “Why? What do you need?”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s my studio. I need to go. Now.” She turned around to go down the hall and felt herself getting dizzy. The room was spinning.
“Okay, okay.” Niko spoke to her like she was a cornered wild animal. “Whatever you need, we will get it. You look really pale. Can you just sit?”
No. She didn’t want to sit down. But she didn’t really think she had a choice because everything was going blurry and then black.
“Tiana… Tiana… Tiana…”
She heard her name being called from far away. She didn’t want to answer it. She just wanted to stay asleep.
“Tiana…Tiana…”
Her eyes flapped open like bird wings, and she saw Niko’s face hovering above her.
“Hey.” He was smiling down at her, but he had his phone to his ear.
“Hi,” she said, but her voice sounded quiet.
She was really tired and not sure where she was.
“Yeah, she’s alert. Okay. Okay, okay, thanks, Liam.”
Niko disconnected the call, and he put his phone on the coffee table. That’s when she realized she was lying on the couch.
The couch? Why was she lying on the couch? Had she taken a nap?
Context clues would tell her no. Why would Niko be telling Liam she was alert if she was taking a nap?
Niko ran his finger along her forehead, and she felt him tuck a strand of loose curl behind her ear, his finger grazed the rim. Her eyes closed, and she sighed. She loved when he did that.
“Why am I on the couch?” she asked, the cuff of her ear still tingling from his touch.
“You stood up too fast. Liam said it’s normal after you’ve basically been in bed for five days.”
Five days. It all came back to her. She needed to get to her studio.
Her eyes flew open, and she sat up. As soon as she did, everything around her spun again. Her entire world felt like she was on the Tilt-A-Whirl carnival ride.
Niko, who was sitting on the edge of the couch, put his arms out, acting like the bumpers in a bowling alley lane. “I’ve already spotted you once today, Fainting Beauty, let’s just sit for a second.”
Her breath was starting to come in shorter and shorter pants.
She could feel herself starting to hyperventilate.
He must have noticed because his demeanor switched.
He moved so that he was on the coffee table in front of her.
She’d told him about her anxiety, that she used to hyperventilate and have panic attacks, and that was why she’d started yoga in the first place.
He took her hands in his and looked right into her eyes. “What’s going on? What is making you panic?”
“I need to see how much money the business made the past five days.”
“Okay, no problem.” He glanced back over his shoulder, then back at her. “Just…will you promise to stay there, sitting down, if I go grab my laptop?”
She nodded.
“Promise?”
“Yes.”
He got up and went down the hallway, she assumed to the room. He was back in less than a minute. When he sat down he pulled up the program on his computer. “Here you go.”
She glanced at the numbers and saw there’d been a huge jump in income for the weekend morning classes. “What…these numbers are wrong.”
They were very wrong. The class would have to be four times as big to get these numbers.
“No, they’re not, look.” Niko clicked on a window, and a video popped up on her studio website. She squinted, but it looked like Shayne Fox was teaching her class.
“Is that Shayne Fox?”
“Yes, the morning you got sick, I messaged Frankie to let her know that I was going to be teaching. She showed up with Shayne and Zion, who are both certified, and Shayne was going to ask if she could teach some classes because her next role is a yoga instructor.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah.” Niko nodded.
“But how did you get the video?”
“The day I was late to the dinner, I mentioned to AJ about you wanting to live stream. He had it set up in less than an hour. Frankie had the website and membership set up, including everything from the legal side, you know she was engaged to Tristan for seven years.”
Tristan was Liam’s younger brother and a lawyer.
“Oh, that’s right.”
“She helped him set up his law firm, so she got all that side of things worked out for you. She didn’t know what you wanted as far as pricing, but she did some market research and got it started.”
He clicked on the pricing page, then on the lead magnet page for newsletter sign-up. Then on the archived livestreams.
“AJ made some upgrades to your website.”
“Yeah, he did.” It was sleek and easy to navigate. It reflected what she wanted the studio to reflect. The studio was easy to design, she could see it tangibly. Her website was not easy, but AJ had killed it.
“You did all this?” She looked at Niko in disbelief.
Niko lifted up his hands in mock surrender. “No, I didn’t. It was Frankie, AJ, Shayne, and Zion. I was here with you.”
“Yeah, but you…” She felt herself tearing up.
Even if she didn’t pull in the numbers that Shayne Fox did for classes, just having online classes would help her pay for Pops’ surgery.
She sniffed, “You did this, and you just took care of me all those days. I can’t believe I don’t remember anything.
I feel like I was just asleep for a day. ”
“You had a super flu, that’s what Liam said. You didn’t really know what was going on. Your fever kept spiking to 102.”
Tiana didn’t really know how to handle the information she was getting.
She was trying to take it all in, but it was a lot.
Niko was a lot. Why was he doing this? The only other time a man had done things like this was Brock, and that had been love bombing.
Not that he’d done anything close to as special as this.
He’d just taken her on trips and bought her expensive gifts, it wasn’t the same.
It wasn’t personal, like this was. She’d never heard of love bombing then.
But that wasn’t Niko’s style. He sponsored foster kids and was a decent human being. So why did this feel like way too much?
Niko’s phone rang, and he stood up to go grab it from the kitchen. He answered it and walked farther into the kitchen.
Five days. She’d been out of commission for five days. Shit. She needed to call Pops. He’d be worried. She was sure that Niko had kept him updated, but…
She set the computer down and realized her phone was on the kitchen table. Her head was still a little hazy, so she figured she better wait for Niko to get off the phone.
“Great. Thanks, Lauren. I will. Okay, bye.”
Lauren. Tiana remembered Niko mentioning something about flipping houses when he first arrived. Her head was sort of cloudy, but she vaguely remembered that.
Niko’s smile was bright enough to illuminate Times Square.
“Did you get a house?” she asked.
“No.” He shook his head. “Not a house.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“Do you remember when I said I was looking at your building?”
Had he said that? She tried to think back, but her head was hurting. “Oh, wait, yeah, maybe.”
“Well, I’m the new owner.”
“Of the studio?”
“Not just the studio. All four units, the empty space next door, so if you wanted to expand.”
“I can’t afford to…wait, why did you… what is going on?”
She was so confused. She felt like she was getting Punk’d or something.
“I never got to tell you why I was late on Tuesday.”
“Oh, okay.”
“I found out there was another offer on your building, and it was Bartlett.”
Tiana’s body instantly went into fight or flight as adrenaline shot through it.
“Brock?” His name came out as a whisper of horror.
Niko nodded. “Lauren couldn’t tell me who the owner was, so I had to go to the county clerk’s office in Pine Ridge. When I was there, I ran into AJ and Poppy, who were eloping.”
“AJ and Poppy got married?!”
What the hell else had she missed?
“They did. I sort of fucked up their elopement.”
Tiana covered her mouth with her hand. “Oh no.”
“Yeah, I was walking out as they were walking in and literally bumped into them. I tried to leave, and I apologized, saying it wasn’t about me, it was their day.
But Poppy stopped me, she was already having second thoughts and really wanted Liam, Frankie, Yaya, and Arthur there too, so they invited them. ”