Chapter 5
NAUDI
Pain wakes me. Not acute enough to make me cry out, but enough to drag me out of sleep. For a moment, I stay still, staring at the ceiling, trying to decide if I can ignore it. I can’t. Pain isn’t all of my problem, though. There’s a more urgent message coming from my bladder. I have to pee.
My ribs throb with every breath, my wrist pulses, and my head is heavy with dull pressure creeping back in. I shift slightly, and I gasp.
That was a mistake.
A soft knock comes from the cracked door before I can even consider pretending I’m fine.
“Naudi?” His voice is low, as if he’s not sure he heard me.
I close my eyes briefly, then open them again. “I’m awake.”
The door opens a little more, enough for him to look in. “You okay?”
I could lie. But I’m in too much pain to pretend.
“No,” I admit. “It hurts.” I don’t want to tell him the second part. I’m too embarrassed.
He moves immediately. “I’ll get your meds.”
He disappears before I say anything else, and a minute later he’s back with a glass of water and the small bottle from the pharmacy. He hands me a pill, and I take it without an argument or stubborn refusal. That alone should tell him how bad it is.
I swallow it down and lean back against the pillows with a grimace and let out a slow breath.
“Give it a few minutes,” he says.
I nod, but I still have to pee. I try to will the feeling away. I shift and once again regret it when my ribs protest. The pressure doesn’t help either. Great. Perfect. This is exactly how I wanted this night to go.
Walker stands beside my bed watching me in that quiet way he has. I feel tears sting my eyes.
“Hey, hey, what’s wrong? Do I need to call the doctor?” His concern for me is the last straw.
“No. Not that. It’s just, I need…” I stop. I can’t.
He waits and his accepting patience makes it worse. “I need to use the bathroom, and I have no idea how to make that happen.”
His expression doesn’t change. I have to give him points for that. Most men I’ve known would have hightailed it out of my house.
“Okay,” is his only response. No smirk. No comment. No awkwardness thrown back at me. Just okay.
I push myself up slowly, bracing my good hand against the mattress as I swing my legs over the side. The room tilts slightly, not as bad as before, but enough to remind me I’m not exactly steady.
His hand comes out, hovering near my arm again.
“I’ve got it,” I say quickly.
“I didn’t say you didn’t.”
That line again. I shoot him a look. No reaction, but he doesn’t move closer either. He just stays there, ready if I need him. Which I don’t… except I kind of do. I take a step. Then another. But on the third, my balance wavers just enough that I have to reach for the dresser.
He’s there before I can fully lose it. Not grabbing, just steadying me with a hand at my elbow.
“Easy.”
“I’m fine,” I grumble, even as I lean into the support.
“I know.”
That makes me glance up at him. He isn’t arguing or correcting me. I’m beginning to notice a pattern with him.
We move the rest of the way like that. Slow.
Me pretending I’m doing it on my own. Him making sure I don’t fall on my face.
When we reach the bathroom door, I stop and take a breath.
The distance from my bed to the bathroom door is usually five steps.
Right now I would swear it was the length of a football field.
“I can take it from here.”
“I figured.”
Hmm, another minimal answer not calling me out on my BS. He steps back and turns slightly, giving me space without making a big deal out of it. That… helps more than I expected.
I close the door behind me and rest against it for a second. That wasn’t as bad as I’d feared, and I’m not talking about the body aches. He could have made things embarrassing. But he didn’t.
Pushing off the door, I take care of what I need to, moving in slow motion, aware of every pull and shift in my body.
When I open the door again, he’s exactly where I left him. Leaning against the wall beside the door with his arms crossed, just waiting. My face warms. Close enough that he could hear if I’d needed him. Also close enough to hear me pee. My cheeks have to be flaming red.
“You didn’t have to wait.”
“I know.”
Again with that. I step out, and this time I don’t argue when his hand comes back to my arm. It’s easier. We make it back to the bed without incident, which feels like a small victory.
I sit down gingerly, then ease myself back against the pillows. The pain is already starting to dull at the edges.
“Better?” he asks.
“Yeah, a little.”
He turns to leave and for the first time since he walked into my apartment, I don’t immediately feel the need to push him out of it. That should have concerned me, but it doesn’t. Not as much as it probably should anyway.
What really should concern me is when I ask, “Will you sit with me? Just until the meds kick in.”
There’s the briefest pause. Is he trying to come up with a good excuse to leave? I can’t blame him if he is.
Then he nods, and I’m surprised when he says, “Yeah.”
His eyes scan the room, probably trying to find a chair. There isn’t one. There’s not enough space to squeeze one in. I pat the bed beside me.
He glances at the door before joining me.
This close, everything about him seems different.
I was so caught up in myself, I hadn’t noticed he’d changed clothes.
His muscular thighs stretch the bottom of worn, gray gym shorts.
He has on a dark blue shirt with an image of a beehive and King Bee printed on the front.
It’s worn also, so I imagine it’s one of his favorites. “Cute shirt.”
He glances down and grins. “My sister Sophie gave it to me the year I started my hives.”
“You’ve done really well with your farm. I’m addicted to your honey. You could literally charge double and I would pay it. Especially your creamed honey. How did you get into beekeeping?”
“Not a whole lot to tell. I got a few hives, did well. I ended up getting a bunch more, and I sell the honey.”
Never in my life have I met a man who doesn’t want to talk about himself. Until this one. Curious. “I have a feeling there’s a lot more to it than that.”
A hint of a smile crosses his face. “It’s a lot of work, but I like it.”
“The first time I had it was at Uncommon Grounds. Now every time it’s restocked, I buy at least two bottles. It has a different taste. I can’t place it, but it’s good and, like I said, addictive.”
“It’s the island. Something about the air. The flowers. I don’t know. The bees just…do better here.”
I find that fascinating. “You take care of all of them?”
“Well, as much as bees will allow. Me and my dad mostly. I have six employees who help with the processing. During peak season, I have more than a dozen on call as needed.”
“How many hives do you have?”
“Enough to keep me busy.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“More than fifty, less than a thousand. We’re just a smalltime farm.”
That sounds far from small to me. I smile faintly, sinking a little deeper into the pillows as the severity of the pain continues to subside into something closer to discomfort.
“What made you stay?” I ask. “You could have left the island like so many people have done.”
He doesn’t answer right away. “I went to college on the mainland. All I ever wanted to do was come back home and work the farm. Everything I need is there.”
Simple. Direct. And for some reason, that makes sense more than any long explanation would have.
He glances my way. “What about you?”
“What about me?”
“How did you end up designing women’s underwear?”
I have to chuckle. “First of all, it’s called lingerie. And it wasn’t my original plan, but it’s what I fell into naturally.”
He listens. Really listens.
“From an early age, I was fascinated with clothing. Not just wearing it but making it. I wanted to understand how it was put together. Which caused my mother much grief when I’d take apart a favorite outfit to use as a pattern.
Most at the beginning were epic fails, but the more I did, the better I became. ”
“That sounds expensive.”
“It was,” I say with a grin. “My mother was very patient. Before I was ten, I started making my clothes and my sister’s.”
He nods with a slight smile at that.
“My dream was always New York. I wanted to attend design school and work at a real fashion house creating designs that mattered.”
“Did that happen?”
“Eventually. But not without many hardships. I got a full scholarship to FIT. That’s the Fashion Institute of Technology.”
Even now, saying I got in on my own merit seems surreal.
“What happened?”
“My father. He’d signed a marriage contract with a man I had never met. It’s the India way. He forbade me from leaving. He wanted me married and having children. He wanted that life for me. It wasn’t the life I wanted.”
“What did you do?”
“Something that is never done. I refused. I told him no. And he told me to leave and that I was no longer his daughter.”
The memory still cuts to this day. I can remember those few moments vividly. They totally changed my life.
“He thought I would come to my senses and run back home. Or that I would have no way to follow through.”
“But you called his bluff?”
“I don’t know what would have happened if my grandmother hadn’t come to me in secret. She gave me two thousand dollars she’d been saving and the address of an aunt I’d never heard about that lived in New York.”
“Even without your grandmother stepping in, you would have found a way.”
I like that he has such confidence in me. At the time, I was a scared young woman going against her father’s wishes and leaving everything I knew behind.
“I lived with my aunt while I went to school. I worked at a nearby restaurant to support myself, and I studied and graduated with honors.”
His gaze stays on me. “And then you got the job you’d always dreamed of?”
“I did.”