Chapter Twenty-Five
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
In the morning, I get ready for the day, turning to glare every thirty seconds at the silent adjoining door that bars me from Will. Just when I’m finished getting dressed, starting to panic that I haven’t heard a peep from him since his frosty exit yesterday, there’s a knock.
When I open the door that connects our rooms, I’m greeted by a clammy, pale face and brown hair that looks almost matted. Dark-purple rings beneath his glassy eyes. Will is dressed in gray sweatpants and the same T-shirt from yesterday. He leans a hand against the side of the doorframe.
“I believe,” he croaks, his voice working its way out of him with what sounds like quite a bit of effort, “that I have food poisoning.”
“Has this been happening all night?” I ask. “Why didn’t you wake me up?”
He huffs out a single, charged laugh. “The last thing I wanted was you witnessing that. ”
“Oh, Will.” I move to hug him, but he steps backward, eyes flashing with fear. “I haven’t showered yet, Josie. I just knocked to tell you I can’t make it to today’s site visit, but our driver is already waiting for you downstairs. Will you be able to handle it alone?”
I nod slowly. “Of course.”
“I should be better by tomorrow, for the next supplier,” he says.
“It doesn’t matter. What do you need?”
“Probably some more ceviche.” Will’s dimple flashes.
“How about crackers and ginger ale, if I can find it? I can look around for a grocery store on my way back.”
“That would be great. If it’s not too much trouble.”
“Not at all.” I bite on my lower lip, absorbing the state of him. He doesn’t look like he got an ounce of sleep, and that makes for two nights in a row. All I want is to go into that hotel room and start fussing over him, but Will is right. I need to handle this site visit first.
“I’ll be back soon,” I whisper.
“I’ll be here,” he whispers back.
Down at the hotel restaurant, the chef lets me know he can send up crackers and ginger ale to Will’s room. With that taken care of, I turn my focus to work.
I make it to the supplier and tour the property in a fugue state, though I’m present enough to ascertain it’s a viable option for Revenant. No glaring red flags, nice employee facilities, safe conditions, quality product. I can do this on my own, but for the first time in a long time, I realize maybe I don’t want to.
I wish Will was here with me. I wish I could consult with my consultant.
On this. On everything.
About halfway through a sit-down with the supplier to discuss samples and invoicing terms, my stomach twists.
It feels like someone is driving a dull screw into the lining of my insides. As the minutes pass, it only gets worse, and worse, and worse. By the time I leave the place at three in the afternoon, I’m forced to hunch over as I walk back to my ride in an effort to manage the pain.
I don’t think it’s food poisoning, I text him.
Shit. Are you feeling sick? Will replies right away. I’m already mostly better.
24-hour stomach virus? I guess.
Maybe. Are you on your way back?
I don’t reply. Will had the right idea.
When I get back to my hotel room, the last thing I want is him witnessing the fallout.
“Josephine Davis, open this door right fucking now.”
“Go away,” I moan.
“I will not.”
With herculean effort, I crawl from the bathroom across the carpeted floor of my hotel room, making my way toward the bed. My stomach is depleted at this point, nothing left in me to expel, but the virus isn’t done with me yet. It’s like a million tiny cactus pricks are combing my tummy. More horrid is the knowledge that there’s nothing I can do to ease the pain but wait it out. I’ve had the norovirus before, when I was a teenager on a cruise ship; I know how it works. You hate your life for twenty-four hours, and then you’re totally fine.
I can feel a fever setting in.
Will pounds on the door between our rooms again. “I can hear you moaning over there like a dying animal. Let me in!”
“You didn’t let me in!” I shout back. The effort makes my skull explode.
“Because I thought it was food poisoning!”
“How does that make a difference?”
“You didn’t ask to come in! I’m asking!”
“And I’m refusing!”
Will groans. The door shakes as his body probably slumps against it. “Please?” he tries, voice softening. “I’ve got mouthwash.”
“So do I. It came with the room.”
His voice slips under the door and into my bones. “I’m begging you to let me help you, Josephine. I can’t take this.”
Like a baby fawn that doesn’t have full control over their limbs, I pull myself onto my bed before collapsing into the fetal position. It’s the only way I’m able to lessen the pain in my stomach. “What help can you be?” I ask, unsure whether it’s loud enough for him to hear. “I’m better off on my own.”
It’s silent for a minute. Maybe Will is realizing I’m right.
There’s nothing for him in this room.
“I can get you water when you ask for it,” he says, finally. “Or mouthwash if you need it. I can share my crackers and ginger ale. I can find the best thing on TV while you rest your eyes, set it to the right volume. I can warm up the shower to the perfect temperature before you’re ready to stand up in it for five whole minutes.”
Sounds nice, I have to admit.
“And I can hold you,” he goes on.
I think I hear a gulp on his side of the door. On mine, my heart stutters.
“I know your fever’s about to hit. I can wrap you up in my arms. Get under the covers with you. Keep you warm. Make you feel not alone. I can let your head rest against my chest and that way, you’ll feel another person’s heartbeat, in sync with yours. That’s what kind of help I can be. Even though I can’t take away your… physical pain, I can make you feel good in a different way.”
It’s honestly a good thing my body has been waylaid by this vi rus. If I was healthy, and I’d just heard that speech, I think I might’ve had an on-cue orgasm.
Still, Will’s words settle, then rub against my skin like a promise. All of a sudden, I’m looking at that door between us not as a barrier, but as an obstacle that needs overcoming.
“It doesn’t have to mean anything,” he says, like a taunt. “If you let me in, I won’t turn it into anything more than exactly what you need it to be.”
I can take it. Use me. Please.
Part of me knows letting him into this room while I’m at my physical weakest would mean more than either of us is saying out loud. But yesterday might have been one of the best days of my entire life, and despite my best efforts, Will Grant has become one of my favorite people.
Earlier, at the supplier’s facility, I’d wanted him with me.
I want him with me now.
I just… want him with me, and I’m sick, and I’m tired. And I’m sick and fucking tired of trying to be such a perfect businesswoman with no life all the time because perfect I. Am. Not.
“I’m… really dizzy,” I say hoarsely. “I don’t know if I can make it to the door.”
“You make it to this door, sweetheart, and I will carry you back to bed.”
I take a deep breath, wincing as I shift, and slip off the edge of the mattress I just dragged myself onto. I try straightening, but that hurts too much, so I hobble to the door, almost tipping over once from dizziness. When I cross the full five feet of distance and spring the lock free, the knob immediately turns from the other side. Slowly, Will pushes the door in my direction while I back up enough for him to open it fully.
His hair is still damp from a shower, the locks thicker and darker than usual. He’s changed into fresh clothes, too.
“You look better,” I croak.
His face is nonnegotiable—if that’s a face a person can make. “You look as good as always.”
Without further ado, Will slips one of his arms along my side and the other behind the crook of my legs. Gravity deserts me as I’m hauled into his grip. I fall snugly against his chest.
It feels like the beginning and the end of something, like the turning point, the final give-up.
As he carries me back to bed, one step as sure as the next, I accept this inevitability: all it would take to make me forever beholden to Will Grant is him requesting it of me.
Carefully, he deposits me near the foot of the bed and whispers, “One minute,” before grabbing a glass off the coffee bar and bending to open the minifridge beneath. He unscrews a water bottle and pours, then places the glass on the bedside table. He closes my curtains, turns off the lights, and grabs the TV remote before coming back toward the king-sized bed.
I feel the mattress compress as he lands on it somewhere near the pillows above me. “Do you want the TV on? Food channel, maybe?” I can hear his smirk.
“Don’t make me regret this.”
“How about the nature channel?”
“How about the noise machine app on my phone?”
Will reaches over to grab it from my purse, which I flung to the ground near the bed as soon as I entered the hotel room. “What’s your passcode?”
“Three two eight three.”
After a pause, he says, “That’s Zoe’s passcode.”
I smile against the covers. “We made them matching back then. I guess neither of us ever changed it.”
Now that the room is dark, my eyelids fall heavy. Will locates the sound machine app, and fabricated noises from the rainforest flood my ears. Owls hooting, rain falling, trees rustling.
I’m folded against myself, horizontal on my right side and facing away from Will, but I can hear his every shift as the bedspread rustles. He rises to his knees, bending over me, and sets one hand in front of my face to steady himself. Hair flops down across his ocean eyes.
“Do you want to stay down here?” he asks.
“No. I’m cold.”
“Do you want to stay curled up in a little ball?” There’s a note of humor carrying through his tone, even as it’s mostly swallowed with concern.
“Yes. This is how it hurts the least.”
Will’s hands settle against my body, almost tentatively searching for the right spots to grip. Every touch is a soothing balm. It spreads from that one spot until I feel him everywhere. Eventually, he hauls me up the bed, somehow without disentangling me from my curled position.
It usually isn’t blatant how much bigger he is—it usually doesn’t matter to me, one way or the other—but I notice now, as Will cradles me against him and my head fits right into the crook where his arm meets his firm side.
He pulls the covers over both of us, letting his legs go long against the mattress, slumping down the headboard to create the perfect angle with his body for me to rest against. I’m practically perpendicular to him, but we fit together seamlessly.
“Are you comfortable?” he asks.
I nod up and down, unintentionally grazing the muscles of his upper arm. “If I had even a fraction more of my faculties right now,” I mumble, barely able to form words the way they’re supposed to sound, “I would be mortified by how helpless and desperate I appear.”
“Everyone needs help sometimes.”
My fever hits in full force. I’m desperately thankful for his warm body around mine while my skin erupts into shivers.
I doze in and out of sleep after that, no clue how many minutes or hours are passing. A slip of light is splayed against the far wall of the hotel room, and every time my eyes crack open, I watch the light shrink in direct correlation to the temperature of my body. The ache in my stomach eases as the fever peaks.
I dream of nothing. And then I wake up again to Will’s snoring.
My brain is still foggy. I come into consciousness slowly, then all at once, when the sound of his snoring wrecks my eardrums. It’s a consistent, greedy breath, in and out, in and out, and even though I don’t quite have enough oxygen to make it happen, my body attempts a laugh.
I’ve slipped down further. My head is in his lap. His hands are fisted in my hair. When I try sitting up, his deadweight grip keeps me down.
Carefully, I extricate his fingers from my hair and sit up, testing out the state of my head. The dizziness is gone, and so is most of my tummy ache, but I’m still oscillating between freezing and sweating.
I turn to look at Will, unobserved.
We’re in bed together.
Sure, we’re fully dressed, but the nakedness of this situation can’t be ignored. He’s snoring louder than a freight train, his lips parted, head resting against the headboard, hair dry now but impossibly messy. His eyelashes are brushing against his cheekbones. Kissing them.
I feel the full momentum of my affection for him approaching me in a tidal wave. In mere moments, it’s going to knock me out.
The wave arrives, and my affection crashes all around us both.
After an amount of time I don’t care to analyze in which all I do is watch him sleep upright, he snore-snorts himself awake on an inhale, eyes blinking rapidly.
“J? You okay?” His voice is almost nothing.
“Does that happen often?” I whisper.
Will’s focus readjusts. He licks his dry lips. “What?”
“You snoring yourself awake?”
“Oh.” He swallows. “Yeah, pretty often.”
I laugh softly, and Will cracks a sleepy smile. Instinctively, his hands lift up my sides, and I lean closer into the touch, my body humming even as it’s recovering.
“How’s your stomach?” he asks.
“Better.”
“Fever?”
“Been better.”
He grabs some medicine and water off the bedside table and offers it to me. I gulp it down. He puts the glass back and shifts against the pillows, his arms going back around me with the ease and familiarity of a lover.
“Do you want to…”
“Want to what?” I ask.
His face twists with adorable embarrassment. “Um, recline?” He taps his chest twice.
I’m still swimming in my tidal wave of affection for him, so I nod.
Without lifting his shoulders off the headboard, Will pulls me between his legs so my back is pressed against his chest, my head tucked beneath his chin. His heartbeat thudding against the back of my head starts rhythmic but eventually quickens.
After so long of wanting him to touch me—of wanting to touch him—giving in to our bodies’ magnetism is the best physical thing I’ve felt in years. Better than lying in the sun on a pool float. Better than the wind against my face on a ride. Better than cotton sheets, better than a strong buzz. This feeling—it’s the best one.
I sink fully against him until we create negative space. Nothing else matters beyond this room right now. Not our history, not our jobs. We’re just two people who want to be as close as possible in the dark, more than three thousand miles from home.
When I don’t hear his snoring restart, I assume Will isn’t falling asleep either. I wonder if his brain is emitting fireworks like mine.
“Why did you cheat on your final?” I whisper.
One of his arms circles my front loosely, and his fingers play with the cuffs of my silk blouse. His knuckles scrape the insides of my wrists, soft and soft and soft.
“Because I’d already interviewed for and accepted my first job out of college by that point,” he answers, voice hazy. “Failing wasn’t an option. I had too much school debt not to graduate on time. The culture around that career path—which I was fully aware of before I’d even entered into it—is that you’re supposed to do whatever it takes to come out on top.”
I chew on my bottom lip. “You had a bad grade in the class?”
Will’s head nods, rocking mine along with it. His arm moves from my shirt cuff to my opposite shoulder, and he pulls me flush. Flusher than flush. We find more space between us to shrink. A shift here. An exhale there.
“I’d had perfect grades all through high school and college. But I let that one class get away from me, and it was a required pass to graduate. I was taking an… elective… that semester, just for fun, so I could stay a full-time student.” His voice slips into my ear, his breath warming me through, dissipating my body’s chill. “I focused more on that class than the class for my major requirements, and it wasn’t until it was time for the final that I realized I needed a near perfect grade to pass the class.”
“What was the elective?” I ask.
A long pause. “What?”
“The elective you were enjoying that distracted you from your major,” I say, even though I know he understood me. “What was it?”
After a longer pause, he admits, “Nutrition.”
“Like, learning about food science?”
Another very long pause. “Yeah.”
My smile teases out into the dark. “How did you cheat?”
Will shifts. He’s obviously uncomfortable talking about this, but I appreciate that he didn’t hesitate getting into it when I first asked. “The professor was known for never re-creating a test, and there was a test bank at one of the fraternities. I knew someone in it, and I paid him to give me a copy.”
“I’m not asking about this because I’m judging you,” I hurry to explain. “Obviously, cheating is wrong. I know that, and I know you know that. I just… want to understand more about your five worst things.”
He hums. “I think I expected to come out on the other side of that test feeling the same way everyone around me felt at having the upper hand all the time. My classmates, the people at the company I interviewed with. Even some of the professors. Most of them had this sense of confidence, like every move they made was the right one, no matter how morally sideways it put them. And I just never got that feeling.”
“What happened next?” I ask. “Tell me about your life.”
Will clears his throat. “I was a fish out of water in my first job in investment banking. Cheating hadn’t numbed me to the point that I was comfortable taking advantage of the system. If anything, I regressed into more of a stickler for the rules than I’d been before. I couldn’t last that way in that industry. The way it’s built to operate. I got a new job at the Carlisle Group, which was better for a while. And Zoe was in the city, so we had each other as a support system.”
“I saw Zoe’s a book critic for The New York Times, ” I say. “That suits her.”
“It does suit her,” Will agrees. “So does New York. I think she might never leave.”
I hesitate to ask the natural next question: “Do you think you’ll leave?”
Will breathes deeply, his chest expanding and collapsing beneath me. “I never used to think I would. I fucking love New York. I think I always will. But the piece of that city I belonged to warped into something I wasn’t proud of.”
“What do you mean?”
It’s quiet for a moment aside from the rainforest noises. I find it comical we’re holding a conversation between croaking frogs and rustling leaves.
“You remember Kyle, the lead consultant you were going to hire before me?”
I nod, thinking back to the sleazy Manhattanite I’d cut loose the day Will asked me to.
“He was my boss for one year. Socializing after work was a requirement to get ahead with Kyle. He’d make us all go out together—two, sometimes three nights a week. It was only a couple of months into the formation of our new team that he started cheating on his wife openly, right in front of the rest of us. At clubs, in Ubers. Work trips were the worst, but he’d even do it in the same neighborhood where he and his wife lived.”
It’s not exactly surprising behavior to hear told from a perspective like Will’s. Though I still hate it when people live all the way down to their reputations.
“I had an especially negative reaction to Kyle’s behavior because of my father,” Will explains. “I couldn’t believe I was in that situation again—of needing to keep a cheater’s secret—especially with my actual career on the line. One day, I was out at dinner with Zoe, who read me like a book, all my misery right there, bare for her to see. She basically ordered me to find a new job, and I promised her I would.”
His voice is even-keeled and smooth. There’s no hesitancy. He wants to tell me all of this. The story is tumbling out of him.
“Kyle’s was the other marriage you ended?” I ask gently.
“Yes,” Will answers, voice low. “At a holiday party in mid-December, a few days before I was supposed to leave the company. I wanted to end my time there on good terms, but Kyle had other ideas.”
“Of course Kyle had other ideas,” I mumble, and Will laughs.
I am addicted to making him laugh.
“As usual, Kyle’d had too much to drink by the time the party was nearing its end. He came after me when I tried to leave and started shouting accusations about how I had no loyalty. His wife followed us out to the street. She was standing behind him, looking bewildered, and I couldn’t stop thinking of my mom, of how much I regretted all those months I spent not telling her the truth. I snapped,” Will says, his voice going gruff and nearly pained. “I pointed to her and said, Talk to your wife about loyalty, she could use some from you. It was clear from the expression on her face she knew exactly what I was talking about.” After a few seconds of quiet, Will adds, “I’ve never hated myself more, for doing that to her. The way I did it.”
I try to put myself in the wife’s shoes. In Will’s. It would have been embarrassing. But maybe she’d needed someone to just come out with it to give herself the courage to walk away.
“She left him?” I ask.
“They were divorced two months later.”
More silence.
“Kyle is the one who destroyed that marriage, Will. Not you. You know that, right?”
“Maybe,” Will agrees, voice tortured. “I still wish I hadn’t hurt her.”
“Because even though you keep finding yourself in lose-lose situations, you are a good man, at your core, who knows right from wrong.”
“Yeah, well, so are you,” he replies, in a tone that suggests we’re trading insults instead of compliments. “You’re not just good. You’re… very good.”
I snort, and Will exhales a breathy laugh.
“I’m serious, Josie. I think you might be the most hardworking person I’ve ever met. You also care more about employee happiness than raising venture capital. You care more about B Corp Certification than your profit margins. And somehow, you’ve managed to get Derrick Lovell to buy in. Do you even know how inspiring a person has to be to have achieved all that ?”
His praise is awakening a long-dormant part of me that hungers for this kind of approval.
“And you’re emotional, too,” Will goes on. “Not just some corporate robot. You feel remorse, and guilt, and you feel them deeply. You’re scared Camila might be leaving Revenant, and worried what it will mean for your friendship. You have empathy for the girl who sold you that overpriced vacuum. Everybody, including me, knows how good of a person you are.”
“Thank you,” I say, voice shaking.
His hold on me loosens, but only so he can push himself upright again and pull me back against him. I try and fail not to overthink our positioning. If my abdomen wasn’t sore from retching, I think every press of him against me would bolt straight to my core.
“You never answered my question,” I say.
“What question?”
“Do you think you’ll leave New York?”
He’s silent for eight seconds. I count them.
“I really like Austin.”
Dangerous, but I smile anyway, playing with a strand of hair hanging by my shoulder.
“You’re so fucking gorgeous when you smile like that.”
My head shoots up, and that’s when I notice our reflection in the blank TV screen. A slip of moonlight peeking through the window is illuminating us just right.
I look like a person who belongs to him, curled up between his legs, with his head above mine and his arms hooked around me underneath the supple bedspread. His lips hover by my ear, and I can see them, and I can feel them, too. The careful puffs of his breath warming the side of my face.
But his eyes are on mine in our reflection. His expression is hungry, like the sight of us woven together this way is an image Will is interested in expanding upon.
“Sorry,” he says immediately, voice breaking. “I’m sorry. I promised you this didn’t have to mean anything. And it won’t.”
“Will. It would be impossible for this night not to mean everything. ”
“To me, or to you?” he asks tenderly.
“To both of us.” I sigh, conflicted. “Maybe it’s time for me to give you my five worst things.”
He smirks. I watch him on the screen as he says, “If you want.”
I consider, then begin. “Number one. I’m vain about my appearance. I’m grumpy if my roots are showing, and insecure if someone meets me for the first time and I’m not wearing makeup. If I’m not put together.”
“As long as you’re doing it for yourself and no one else,” he says.
I nod, even though I’m not sure how true that is.
“Two. I come from a well-off family.”
After a beat, Will laughs lowly. “The horror.”
“I just mean I’m not self-made or anything. I started Revenant mostly with my own savings, which came from my father, and only a little bit from the boutique where I steamed everything.”
When I look at our reflection, he’s still smiling at me. “Okay. Don’t forget I already knew this about you, Josephine.”
“Number three, I’m a workaholic. I have terrible work-life balance. I’m obsessive about my company. It isn’t conducive to a relationship.”
“As you’ve explained previously,” Will says.
“I thought you might need reminding, considering my job is one of the reasons—possibly the main reason—my last relationship ended. Which brings me to the aptly titled number four. It’s been that many years since I’ve had sex. Since I’ve even wanted to have sex.”
I say it quick and dirty, blushing blushing blushing, and then snap my lips together.
His smile vanishes, and even though I’m looking at a murky reflection of him, something flickers in his eyes.
“Four years,” he repeats, tone husky, hoarse.
“Four years.”
It must be the fever that got me to admit that.
“And now?” he asks.
“Things are different now.”
I very quickly realize I miscalculated, adding this tidbit to my list of five worst things.
I thought it would stall Will. I thought my lack of sexual activity, sexual drive, sexual exploration might freak him out the same way it freaked me out. But given the storm on his face, I think it succeeded only in turning him on.
His arms retract from my body, and he shifts away from me.
“Fuck, Josie,” he all but growls. “Fuck. Did you seriously just tell me I’m the first person you’ve felt sexual about in four years?”
“Um, sorry, I didn’t think that one through.”
Silence. A deep breath.
“Just remind me why I’m here,” he says, looking at the ceiling. “The real reason, not the one in my head right now.”
I go for lighthearted, breezy. “What? You barging into my hotel room to keep me company because of the guilt you feel for forcing me to leave the hotel in the first place?”
Will laughs, though it still sounds strained. “I actually feel no guilt whatsoever for forcing you to leave the hotel yesterday. It was a near-perfect day. And more likely, we caught this virus in one of the four airports we traveled through the day before, not downtown Arequipa.”
“Believe what you want.”
“I will.”
“We should get some sleep.”
“We should.”
He slides to one side of the bed, and I crawl to the other. Neither of us suggests Will return to his own room. Under the covers, we take painstaking care not to touch, but his presence soothes me, distracts me from my fever.
I fall back asleep to a harmony of rainforest noises and snoring. And I wake up in the middle of the bed, cradled in his arms.