apartment was habitable, two great friends cared about me, and my debts were slowly, slowly decreasing.
And I had a nice employer.
No, no, nice didn’t cut it. I had an employer who treated me like a human being, even if I wasn’t convinced of his own mortality. If gods walked on Earth, Nick was surely one of them. My nipples hardened at the thought of him in a towel. The image of him opening the door to me that memorable morning may as well have been tattooed across the inside of my eyelids.
How I wished Momma really could see me now. She was the one person who’d always believed in me. She’d be smiling as I got my life back on track, but even as I thought of her face, tears leaked down my cheeks and I gave a decidedly unladylike sniff.
“What’s wrong?”
I jumped so violently I nearly fell off the lounge chair. Twisting around, I found Nick towering above me, concern etched across his face. Despite his size, he’d crept up on me as quietly as the sun in the morning. I hadn’t heard a single footstep.
“Freaking fudge, you nearly gave me a heart attack!”
His eyes softened as he offered a tentative smile. “Sorry, baby. Didn’t mean to scare you.”
Baby?
“What’s wrong?” he asked again.
“It’s nothing.” My nose started running, and I gave another sniff, trying to make it quieter this time.
“Crying on a sunlounger in the middle of the day isn’t nothing.”
“My momma died two years ago today.” I stared off into the distance, listening to the waves crashing against the shore. If I looked straight at him, the floodgates would open.
Nick perched on the edge of the seat and took my hand in his, squeezing it. “Lara, I’m so sorry. Were you close?”
“Very much. She was my best friend as well as my mom.”
He didn’t say anything, and I was grateful for that. Words would have been inadequate. He just held my hand, his thumb stroking slowly over my knuckles while I bit back tears. It was so soothing, so comforting sitting there with him. Nick made me feel safe, and for some reason I couldn’t consciously fathom, I started talking.
“She had cancer. She fought it for years, but eventually it won, and on the day she died, a part of me did too. I miss her so, so much.”
He simply sat there, squeezing, stroking, listening.
“She found a lump in her breast. First, she had chemotherapy. Seven sessions, each a fortnight apart. She’d come home tired, then the day after, she’d be in so much pain she could barely move, but she’d crawl to the bathroom on her hands and knees to be sick, and all that came up was bile because she couldn’t eat. She got so thin she didn’t even look like my momma anymore. Most of her hair came out, and she had to wear a wig. She joked about it being easier to style, but when her curls started falling out in clumps, I heard her crying at night. Then, one evening, she got really angry and shaved it all off.”
Squeezing, stroking, listening.
“Next she had radiotherapy for two months, and after that, she had a double mastectomy. She cried for weeks, and she couldn’t even bear to look at herself. I told her she was still beautiful, but she didn’t believe me. ‘You’re sweet, but I’ve got eyes you know’—that’s what she used to say. Then a couple of months later, she got a swelling under her arm, and it turned out the cancer had spread. It reached her bones, and there was nothing they could do. Goodness knows, they tried everything. I made them. But it was pointless.”
When I finished my rambling monologue, I burst into tears. I couldn’t help it. On a lounge chair, in LA, in front of my insanely good-looking boss. If I’d been capable of coherent thought at that point, I’d have wanted to die of embarrassment. But I wasn’t, so instead I bawled my eyes out as Nick pulled me onto his lap and wrapped me up in his arms. I clutched onto his shirt as sobs shook my body. A minute passed, two, and slowly my senses returned.
“I-I-I’m sorry. So sorry. Honestly, I don’t know what happened. I’ve never broken down like this before.” Not even right after Momma died. “Really, I don’t know what’s come over me. Oh my gosh, your shirt—it’s soaked! I’ll get you a fresh one.” I tried to scrabble away, but he held