Chapter 25
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
NELL
The shower was hot enough to qualify as a medical intervention.
I stood under the steaming spray until the tension in my shoulders dissolved and the last of the park dirt circled down the drain.
I stepped out and tested my ankle. It was a little sore, but totally ready to get back in the game.
The buckling episode back at the bottom of the drainage embankment was nothing more than a faint memory of discomfort.
This was not the first time my body had revised an injury downward faster than doctors or nurses had prognosticated it should have.
I had never had a cold. I had never had the flu.
I had broken two fingers in a car accident back in college when I'd trusted the frat guy I was fucking had been telling the truth about how many drinks he'd had.
The X-rays in the ER had said fracture. By the following morning my fingers had been tender but functional.
Now I padded barefoot from the bathroom, pulling the ties on my silk robe tight around me.
I eyed my reading chair and the novel I'd only gotten two chapters into.
That was a few months ago. The book would wait another night.
I was still too keyed up to sit. I didn't want to be still.
It was as if the run had never happened.
All the energy I'd spent doing loops and taking a tumble had resettled back into my blood.
On the kitchen island sat a small cardboard box I had not opened. It had arrived that morning while I was at the office and been left by the door. I crossed to it now and peeled back the tape.
Business cards. Cream stock, clean sans-serif font, a weight and quality that communicated seriousness.
Nell Odhiambo, Chief Executive Officer, Odhiambo, Blackwood I didn't doubt that. But she would likely have to leave her husband's embrace to do so.
I couldn't keep tearing her away from him — even though I still doubted he was good enough for her.
Running my fingers over the crack in my phone, I realized I didn't have anyone else to call. I didn't have any arms to open to me.
I sat down on the couch with the business card in my hand.
My mother had not put me first. She had loved me — I believed that — but she had been a woman who was waiting.
Waiting for me to be old enough. Waiting for the grief to become manageable, waiting for the right morning to simply not wake up.
She had gone to sleep one night when I was seventeen and left this world behind.
When I found her, she had been wearing an expression I had never seen on her face; a peace so complete it looked like arrival.
Like she had finally gotten somewhere she had been trying to go for a long time.
Her hand had been closed around the claw necklace. I touched it now at my throat; the smooth worn ivory of it. The base dark brown where it had pressed against my father's skin and then my mother's and now mine.
My father had died protecting us. That was all my mother had ever said about him. She had said it with a steadiness that didn't invite questions. I had learned not to ask them.
A man I had never met had died protecting me, and this was all I had of him. It was all I had of either of my parents. I closed my hand around the claw.
I wanted that. Not the dying for love bit — I was not romantic about sacrifice in the abstract.
I wanted to be someone's first, their most important, their non-negotiable thing.
I wanted to be chosen not because I was useful or competent or the best person available for the job, but because someone had looked at me and decided that the world without me in it was not a world they were willing to live in.
How I would get that devotion from someone when I wouldn't even make them breakfast the morning after?
That I was a problem my CEO brain had no idea how to solve.
This was the first time I realized I might want this kind of promotion.
And I had not one reference for it on my resume of one-night stands, fuck buddies, and boy toys.
I had the company. I had the nameplate and the business cards, and the corner office with the view. I had built everything I had set out to build. And I didn't feel in the least bit satisfied by it.
Don't get me wrong, I wasn't giving any of it up. I just wanted more. I inhaled deep, letting myself feel the want. The scent coming from the door filled my lungs and sent a tingle to my core.
There was something on the other side of the door. A scent. Cedar and heat and smoke.
I was already off the couch when the lock turned and the door opened.
Magnus filled the frame. His eyes went over me in the rapid, systematic way of someone conducting a damage assessment; face, arms, the ankle I was standing on. His expression shifted when he found nothing obviously wrong.
"How did you get past the lock?"
He didn't answer. He came in, which I had not technically invited him to do. I stepped back because the alternative was standing my ground in a bathrobe, and I was choosing my battles.
He looked me over again, closer now. Then he crossed to the couch, sat down, and looked at me with an expression that said, come here without using any words.
"I'm fine," I said.
He reached out. Took my hand. Pulled me toward him with a calm expression, and sat me on the table in front of him. His hands went to my ankle. He pressed along the joint with a careful attention. Not seductive. Clinical, focused.
"They said you twisted it."
I shrugged. "It's fine now."
He looked up at me. His hands were on my ankle. I had a horrible thought: what if he believed me and left.
I did not want him to stand up, nod, and leave me in my beautiful, empty residence. I wanted — just tonight, just this once, in this room where nobody was watching and nothing was being evaluated by a board — to be the thing I had been pretending all my life not to be.
I wanted to be needy. I wanted someone else to be in charge. I wanted someone else to make all the decisions. I wanted — for just a little while — for someone else to be the boss of me.
I knew with Magnus, I'd have to take the initiative to hand over the reins.
Before he could get up and leave because he believed I was fine. Or I was capable, I climbed into his lap.
I straddled him. I put my hands on his face. And I kissed him.