CHAPTER FOUR
(Charlotte)
The alarm went off at five-thirty.
Five-thirty in the fucking morning.
I groaned and sat up, rubbing my eyes before checking the time on my phone. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
Matt was already on his feet, cane in hand, headed to the bathroom. And not dragging his feet like a zombie, somehow.
“I get up early, princess,” he tossed over his shoulder as he headed into the bathroom.
I flopped onto my back and stared up at the impossibly high ceiling. This had to be a joke.
When he emerged again, he was whistling.
“Since when do you get up early?” I demanded. “The whole time I’ve been with you—”
“The whole time you’ve been with me, I’ve been on a vacation from life,” he pointed out. “I’m ready to get back to normal.”
“Normal being...” There had been a lot of not-normal in his life that year so far.
“Before the bear,” he clarified.
I scrubbed my eyes again and slowly peeled myself off the mattress. His t-shirt from the night before was still on the floor. I picked it up and pulled it on. “What were your days like before the bear, then? So I can be prepared.”
“Usually, I went to bed early. Last night was an exception; I like to be asleep by eleven.”
I counted off the hours in my head. “You only sleep six-and-a-half hours a night?”
“Only?” He scoffed. “It’s all I need.”
I’d had no idea that Matt was such a morning person. Or a not-sleeping person. What the hell had I gotten myself into?
“To be clear, you do not expect me to get up this early every day, right?” Because that was going to be one of those limits he would need to respect.
“No. I get up this early to work out.” He grimaced. “Okay, these days, it’s for physical therapy. But that’s a workout in and of itself.”
“Physical therapy? For your leg?” I had no idea he was still trying to fix it. I thought the cane was a part of his life, now.
He sat on his side of the bed and opened the nightstand drawer.
There was a distinct rattle of pill bottles as he pulled them out.
“My hope is that within a couple of years, I’ll be back to my old self.
But that’s going to take a lot of work, considering the damage to my muscles from that blood clot. ”
He popped the tops off the bottles and counted out what he needed, while I watched like I was intruding on a sacred ritual.
“I didn’t realize you took so many pills.” I didn’t know why I said it; it made it sound like I thought it was a bad thing.
He must have worried about that perception as well, because he responded, “I kept it to myself. But now that you live with me, I don’t see why I should sneak around.”
“Now that I...” I guessed I never thought of what we were doing as serious cohabitation. I came back to New York, but it never occurred to me to call this what it was: we were moving in together.
He glanced over his shoulder. “Were you planning on getting your own place? Because I can do that for you, if it’s what you need.”
“No. No, I want to move in with you.” That shocked the hell out of me.
“Good.” He grabbed a bottle of water from the nightstand, took a big drink, tipped his head back and popped the handful of pills in, all at once.
“So, are those for pain or...” The number of medications concerned me. Of course, I wasn’t a doctor. I should have minded my own business.
“Pain, inflammation, neuropathy—that’s fun—, blood thinners because I’m more prone to clots now, a cocktail of various psych meds to deal with the PTSD of almost dying, and an anti-convulsant for the epilepsy I’ve had since childhood.
” He half-turned to watch my reaction. “And erectile dysfunction meds, due to all of the above.”
“You never mentioned epilepsy.” Why would he have? We’d been fuck buddies in a whirlwind romance. There hadn’t been time or a reason to discuss our medical histories.
“I haven’t had a seizure in over a decade.” He paused. “Well... I’m not counting the ones I had in the hospital. I think bear attacks and blood clots and tons of surgery gave the epilepsy and unfair advantage.”
“These are the kinds of things we need to know about each other.” I padded toward the bathroom. “What would happen if you had a seizure, and I didn’t know to expect it?”
“You would call the ambulance, and it would be a big-ass hassle.” He stood and stretched. “Don’t walk around worrying about me like I’m a gun about to go off, okay? Like I said, a decade.”
“Are you supposed to be drinking as much as you do on all those pills?” I highly doubted the answer was yes.
“No, I am not,” he admitted, but in a tone that suggested it wasn’t up for debate.
I circled back around to the original question I’d posed. “All right, so you get up earlier than God, have a hearty breakfast of pharmaceuticals, do your physical therapy, and then what?”
“Then I have breakfast, usually while simultaneously watching and reading the news, check my schedule, shower, get dressed, do whatever I want before work.” He eyed me suggestively. “For example, I could incorporate waking up my girlfriend with my head between her thighs into my routine.”
“I would be fine with that,” I said with a sly smile. “Then, you go to work?”
“I like to get there at around ten or eleven. There aren’t any meetings until lunch time, usually.”
“Why’s that?”
“Clients like a free lunch.”
That made sense enough to me. “Is that what you do all day? Meetings?”
“Meetings, paperwork, reading reports.” He paused, as if he never thought through his day before. “My job is super boring.”
“Honestly, I’m surprised you have a job at all.
If I had thirty-billion dollars, I wouldn’t do shit.
” There was no reason to pretend I was some kind of go-getter.
I had nothing in the way of career aspirations, and I didn’t want to give him the accidental impression that I was about to climb the corporate ladder.
“As long as you’re with me, you do have thirty billion,” he reminded me. “And if all you want to do is spend my money and enjoy yourself, I’m not going to judge you.”
“It seems weird, that you have everything in your life taken care of, and you still want to get up early and go to work.” Not going to work was the dream of every person I knew.
“I mean, I do get to take a lot of time off, pretty much whenever I want,” he said, a little sheepishly.
“But the thing about having a fortune is, you’re afraid you’re going to lose it.
While I’m fully cognizant of the fact that I’m not about to blow through thirty-billion dollars, that it would be pretty much impossible to do so in my lifetime unless I did things spectacularly wrong, I still want to work for it. To protect it.”
“Because you can’t imagine a totally different life for yourself where you don’t have money.” It made perfect sense to me. I hoped the reverse would make perfect sense to him . “Now, think about it this way: a totally different life for yourself, where you suddenly do have that kind of money.”
He froze, then said, “I think I know what you’re getting at.”
There you go.
“You want a job.”
Wait. “What?”
“You suddenly have access to all my money, but you haven’t worked for it like everyone else you know has,” he began, so obviously proud of himself for the conclusion he’d come to.
“Let’s not be too hasty,” I said quickly.
“I own a company,” he went on. “I can give you a job.”
“A job doing what? What, at your company, am I so qualified to do?” I demanded.
There. That stumped him.
Or didn’t. “You had the idea for an Ascend property in New York. You could work on that.”
“I’m not an architect. Or a hospitality industry person,” I reminded him. “Until a few weeks ago, I worked at a weed shop after a long string of unemployment.”
“I’m not suggesting that you design the building from the ground up,” he said. “You can be a consultant. I have other people who can make your vision become a reality.”
“And I would… consult?” I didn’t even know how to do that .
“Think about it,” he suggested. “In the meantime, I know exactly the friend you’re talking about and trust me, she can help you with the ‘suddenly rich’ thing.”
“Yeah, I got the impression that it was something of a sugar daddy situation.” I didn’t mean it in a bad way; I was, if not in the exact same pair of shoes, very much wearing a knock-off of the style.
“Give her a call,” he said. Then, at my incredulous look, rolled his eyes and said, “Give her a text.”
“Thank you, Gen X daddy.” I batted my eyelashes at him.
“Elder Millennial, thank you very much.” He jostled his cane. “Feeling very elder. So, I’m going to go get dressed and into the gym for physical therapy.”
“Wait, your home gym?” When he nodded, looking for all the world like it was an asinine question, I added, “It’s a peasant thing. We have to leave to get our medical care. You wouldn’t get it.”
He looked so confused as he left.
* * * *
“I’m so glad you caught me on a day when I was in the city!”
I wasn’t sure if I’d spoken a word since we’d entered the restaurant, easily the fanciest place I’d ever eaten. Sunlight blasted us through the tall windows overlooking the gardens behind the Museum of Modern Art.
It was surreal, being in a city where I could casually stroll past places I’d seen on TV and in the movies.
Sophie was still talking, and I was content to listen to her. She acted like we’d known each other for years and hadn’t been apart for a day. It would have been a red flag, if it had come off like love bombing, but it felt as though it was just a part of her personality.
“Neil and El-Mudad won’t come here. There’s no steak on the menu.” She rolled her eyes. “We should do the six course. A little birdy told me they have morrells right now.”
“What’s a morrell?”
She pressed a hand to her chest. “You poor thing.”
A server came over and Sophie smoothly ordered for both of us. “The six courses. And whatever beverage pairing the chef suggests.”
I had to make sure my mouth wasn’t hanging open.