Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
After breakfast, once Lovie’s in the living room, I jump up from the table. My leg aches with the movement. Damn, she got me good.
“You said she’d forget,” I say. “Why isn’t she forgetting?”
Adam’s hands shoot in front of him, defensive as I close the gap between us. “I don’t know! It’s different for everyone.”
I wield my now-empty smoothie glass at him. I want to throw it at his head. “There are no common threads? Why does someone normally forget someone versus remember someone else?”
He stares over me, probably at Lovie as she roots around in the living room for a new puzzle book. “It just … It really just … depends.”
“On what , Adam? How well she knows you? Because I’ve known her all my life, and she’s known you all of five minutes, and neither of those things is helping.”
He scrubs over the rough stubble on his jaw. “On so many things. Her specific disease progression, the areas of her brain that are affected. It usually starts in the hippocampus, moves through the lateral and parietal lobes, then to the frontal and whatever’s left. But that’s just usually, what’s most common. I’d have to view her latest scans to know for sure.”
Now it’s my turn to scrub my face. “So you really don’t know.”
“No.” He sighs. “I wish I did. Memory is so fickle. Have you ever smelled something completely random and been taken back to when you were four? It’s like that for the rest of our lives. We don’t outgrow it. It could be anything making her think this. A scent. A certain color. Hell, the way you style your hair.”
Something niggles in the back of my brain, Adam’s words having triggered a nearly-there memory. Before I can place it, Lovie’s soft chuckle floats over my shoulder as she steps back into the room. “A little dancing in the kitchen?”
I’m in the middle of hoping Lovie’s mood swings aren’t severe enough to give her whiplash when I realize Adam and I are standing far too close.
And before either of us can create distance, she speaks again. “Well, don’t stop on my account.”
The aptly named Adam’s apple in front of my eyes bobs, and when my gaze tracks up to his face, his eyebrow arches. An unspoken question. Are we confirming or redirecting?
Lovie’s stance is strong. Her words are not a request or a suggestion but a kindly worded order. She’s pleased with herself. What really does it for me is the smug, winning grin, ripening her cheeks into something rosy and plump. She’s the woman in all my best memories, the one who raised me. How can I say no, especially when there’s no telling how many more of these days she’ll have ahead of her?
I dip my chin in a reluctant nod. Our feet shuffle closer, and his hand finds my hip. To steady myself, I grab his shoulder, firm and unforgiving under my palm. He tenses under my touch, then relaxes into it. Settling in.
As we attempt to arrange ourselves, his littlest finger slips beneath the hem of my shirt, scraping my skin and turning it feverish.
Adam isn’t faring much better, his neck and ears flushed. His scrub top is a V-neck, giving him plenty of space, but he pulls at the collar anyway, bringing it back and forth a few times.
And yeah, now that he mentioned it, it is a little warm in here. Would Lovie really notice if we turned the heat down a degree or ten?
He throws her a complaisant grin, speaking out of the corner of his mouth. “We don’t have to do this.”
“Clearly we do.” I smile, more puppet than master.
Anything less than full participation is insulting to Lovie. That’s Hard Love Rule Number Four: Whatever you’re doing—cursing, kissing, punching, screwing up—you better make it count.
She has a lot of rules involving kissing.
If I’d ever stopped to imagine myself in this scenario, I would have thought it awkward, dancing with a virtual stranger under the guise of a matchmaking grandma who has no idea she isn’t matchmaking.
But it’s not awkward. Not exactly. We’re finding a rhythm, though the music can hardly be heard over our clumsy steps. Adam’s hands are tender on my hips but firm enough to let me know he’s trying his hardest too.
My socked foot catches a slick spot on the linoleum, right at the edge of the island. His grip sures up, fingers digging into me even as a few more of them find their way to my bare skin.
The corner of his mouth lifts, saying without words I’ve got you or maybe easy there . He guides us back into movement.
And suddenly, we are in sync.
Until—
“You stepped on my foot!” I gawk. “I’m not wearing shoes!”
“I’m not either.” His grip tightens, along with his jaw. “You can’t tell me you think I did that on purpose.”
“And you can’t tell me you’re a—wait, how old are you?” His birthday was on his license, but that was too much mental math after dark for my taste.
“Thirty-five.”
“You can’t tell me you’re a thirty-five-year-old man who doesn’t know how to slow-dance.”
The tops of his cheekbones go pink.
“It’s been a while,” he grits. “ Honey .”
Somewhere behind me, Lovie harrumphs, and a few seconds later the sofa squeaks.
I take back what I said earlier. She’s the one giving me whiplash.
He starts to pull away, but I tighten my grip on his shoulders.
“We should probably go for a few more minutes,” I murmur, in case her hearing is still as good as it was whenever I tried to sneak in past curfew. “Just in case she comes back.”
“Right.” He swallows. “Just in case.”
The music playing from Adam’s phone, now that our steps have quieted, is something melodic. Familiar. I let it wash over my fraying nerves, allow myself to relax in a way I haven’t since I showed up here not two days ago. It’s not the worst thing in the world to have to dance with an attractive man.
I give myself over to the moment, tucking my head so it lays tentatively on his shoulder. His heartbeat thuds under my cheek, slightly faster than the tempo of the music, and faster still when he pulls one of my hands into his and rests them on his chest.
I try not to think about it, what any of this means. This is what Lovie wants right now, and I’m giving it to her. It doesn’t mean I have to like the way my hand fits in his or enjoy his thumb brushing over mine, all the way down to my wrist. It just means she’s watching, probably.
“Since we’ve got each other’s undivided attention,” I murmur, “should we discuss what this means?”
He maneuvers us so my back is to the living room, giving himself a clear view over my head to Lovie’s exact location. “You mean, the small problem of her still thinking we’re in love.”
I wince. “That’d be the one.”
He’s quiet for a bit, and in that time, I can’t help but notice our dancing doesn’t quite match the beat of the song that just started. Adam’s not in a rush to correct it, though. “We still have the option for you to leave—”
This freezes me in place, and his foot skims mine again before he saves it. “ No ,” I say. “Absolutely not.”
“That’s fine.” His throat bobs, half of his mouth tilting up. “I knew you’d say that. I just thought I’d offer. Thought maybe seeing less of us together would give her brain more time to disconnect.”
I still don’t consider it. Going back home would mean giving up precious time with her I can’t recover.
She wouldn’t get to see how good she did with raising me. How strong I am, simply because she was strong first.
“I’m staying,” I say.
Adam nods, and there’s a glimmer in his eyes—it looks a bit like pride, but maybe it’s just seasonal allergies. Mine always get worse when I come home.
“In that case …” He pauses, top teeth sunk into his full bottom lip as he switches the hold of our hands. Now our fingers are entwined. “We should set some boundaries.”
I stare at them for a second. “Like touching.”
“I don’t think it’s necessary to get more intimate than this.” He squeezes my hand.
I squeeze his harder. “This, plus Jeopardy! cuddling. Washing dishes. You know. The usual fake-dating stuff.”
“Sure,” he says. He blows out a breathless laugh. “If any of this is usual.”
That pulls a reluctant grin to my face. “We should probably keep it up, like—all the time, I guess?” I wrinkle my nose. “I mean, she is fast as fuck .”
The scratch of Lovie’s pen in her word search book and her morning talk show almost drown out the music. His face softens when he looks at her.
I can’t imagine doing this for a living. I know how much my own heart hurts when I see my grandmother. Does his hurt as much as mine, or is it just bigger, with more capacity for the pain? How does he do this every single day, for so many people?
“It doesn’t have to be all the time.” Dark eyelashes dance along his cheek as he looks at me. “She goes to bed at eight, after all.”
There’s an undertone to his words I can’t quite decipher, more mischievous than usual. What does he imagine we’ll be doing after Lovie goes to sleep?
“So, when she’s up and active. That’s not too terrible.”
“Thank you so much,” he intones. “What a compliment. ‘Not too terrible.’ ”
Another glaring problem presents itself. “Will this affect your, um—I mean, you sort of work for me.”
Some of the color recedes from his cheeks, and he switches the hold of our hands back to how they were before. Takes a half step back. “I guess you’d be the one to decide that. If you want to hire someone else to replace me, I understand.”
This particular complication hasn’t been an issue with any of Lovie’s previous nurses, and I’ve been over more than once while they’ve been here. Granted, that was temporary, not this permanent, around-the-clock care.
Lovie’s comfortable with Adam, though. She trusts him, lets him dress, bathe, feed her. He listens to how she’s feeling; she takes the medications he proffers in response. I’m no longer na ? ve enough to believe I could do this completely on my own, but I’m hesitant to move on to someone else quickly, especially when things are working okay-ish as is.
“I won’t ask you to leave.” With how close we are, it’s impossible to miss the flash of relief on his features. “But if you wanted to—”
“I’d like to stay,” he says. “We’ll just figure out the rest later. But we should agree up front that if anything risks her health or safety, we drop the act. No matter how much it upsets her.”
Something warm and bright blooms in my chest. “Agreed.”
Our dance stretches another minute, to the end of the song. With one more infinitesimal squeeze, he drops my hand.
Maybe our rules should have been a bit more defined. Is it or is it not okay to stare at his ass as he walks away? The curve of those traps, which my hands rested on so nicely. His cute smile.
Wait. Cute?
I haven’t thought a man was cute since the tenth grade. Handsome? Sure. Sexy? Daily. Fuckable? On occasion. But cute? I can’t stop running my fingers over the sensation still lingering on my palm, where Adam’s coarse hair tickled. And if you gave me a marker, I could still trace the imprint of his hand on my waist.
There may not have been cayenne in my smoothie, but there’s definitely something in the water.