“I avoided anything that might make me feel worse,” she said. “I was afraid.” No inflection. No emotion. As if she was reading someone else’s story from a sheet of paper. “I quit netball. I quit my postgrad degree. I stopped going out with my friends. I didn’t stay up late because sleep was too precious. I refused to make plans because I never knew when my body might force me to change them. My friends disappeared one by one. I suppose my problems made them feel guilty.”
“And your fiancé?” Red asked softly.
“Oh, Henry,” she laughed. “He lost patience almost immediately. He didn’t believe me.”
“What?” Red had been trying to stay calm throughout this story, to avoid showing his own reactions in case they affected what she chose to share. But he couldn’t have hidden his disgust in that moment, not even if he’d pulled out his own fucking tongue.
She shrugged, but a smile teased the edges of her mouth, as if she found his obvious horror amusing. “There was no blood test or scan or injury to prove that I was really in pain. He was very logical, you see. He needed evidence and I had none.”
“Your word isn’t evidence? Your feelings aren’t evidence?” Red demanded, his tone harsher than he’d intended. But he couldn’t help it. He’d seen the change in Chloe when her pain got too serious to handle. Fuck, he saw her now, when she was trying to seem fine but was clearly exhausted. Black circles under her beautiful eyes, weariness clinging to her like a shadow. How the fuck could someone who planned to marry her just ignore all that?
“Henry thought I was malingering,” she told him. “That I was being pathetic, I was too demanding, I needed too much support.” Her lip curled, displaying a flash of anger that had been absent so far, one he was actually relieved to see now. “He disappeared on me without much remorse, but I consider that a lucky escape.”
So did Red. “He doesn’t sound like marriage material.”
Her eyes slid to his, sparkling with humor. “No.”
“He sounds like the type of guy who finds out his wife has cancer and starts screwing his secretary to relieve the stress.”
“Yes,” she said, smiling now.
“Fuck him.”
“I pity whoever is,” she smirked. Then she waved a hand and the moment of camaraderie passed. “I’ve learned how to manage my symptoms, now, of course. I have medication, physiotherapy, cognitive therapy. I’m fine, really. But I feel like a part of me hasn’t caught up with that. Like I’m still afraid of myself. That’s what the list is for. To help me get my bravery back.”
She began that speech sounding like her usual self, but toward the end she started to mumble, her voice growing smaller, her eyes skating away from his. Like she was embarrassed to say the most badass thing he’d ever heard.
He couldn’t let that stand. “Hey.”
She pursed her lips and glared at him without much heat. “What?”
“If this list is supposed to make you braver, you’re gonna be fucking Wonder Woman by the time we’re done.”
She snorted, rolling her eyes, but he could tell she was pleased. It oozed out of her like jam from a layer cake, and he was lapping the sweetness up, desperate for more.
“Also,” he added, “just to make it really clear: your fiancé was a fucking donkey cock for leaving you.”
He liked the way she laughed at that, not her usual, low chuckle, but a gasping, breathless giggle that she clearly hadn’t meant to show him. She pressed her hands to her plumped-up cheeks as if she could push the laughter back inside, but it didn’t work. She just kept going, and his grin grew wider and wider.
“Your friends were fucking useless and all,” he told her. “Load of twats, the lot of them.”
She pressed a hand to her chest, over the ridiculous, furry all-in-one thing she was wearing. “True,” she managed between giggles. “Very true. Although, I don’t know why I told you about that. It’s not the point. It’s incidental.”
Did she really believe that, when he could see her pain a mile off? When her eyes shuttered with sadness as she talked about the people who hadn’t stuck by her? His voice softened. “You should make new friends now. You shouldn’t be lonely.”
That wiped the smile off her face, though not from her eyes. She scowled at him, trying to look outraged. For some twisted reason, he liked it. “I don’t need new friends,” she said, “and I am not lonely.”
“You are,” he insisted, partly because it was true, mostly because he enjoyed pissing her off almost as much as he enjoyed making her laugh.
Stubborn as fuck, she shot back, “I am not.”
“You are.”
“Redford Morgan, I will throw you out of my flat.”
He grinned. “But I have a key.”
“Which you would never use without due cause,” she countered, “because you are a very good superintendent.”
There was that flash of dizzying sweetness, the one she kept teasing him with. The one that made his grin turn wicked and his voice dip low, even as his logical brain screamed that flirting was a shitty idea. “Oh yeah? How good?”
She blinked rapidly, and he could’ve sworn she was blushing. “Well, I . . . I don’t know,” she muttered awkwardly. “I don’t actually have much experience with superintendents.”
“So I’m your first. Good to know.”
She was definitely blushing now. “Red.”
“I’m just teasing you, Button.” He was, wasn’t he? Teasing her, and enjoying it way too much. “Don’t faint on me now.”
“Right,” she said dryly. “Excuse me while I swoon.”
She looked hot enough to, in that outfit. The fluffy, gray pajamas swallowed her whole, and even though she’d opened a window earlier, he could see a bead of sweat creeping down the line of her throat. His eyes followed that tiny drop’s path like he was a wolf and it was lunch. Now he’d noticed it, he couldn’t look away. Couldn’t drag his thoughts away. Couldn’t remember what, exactly, they’d been talking about—only that he’d made her blush and he’d enjoyed it.
The drop had reached the hollow between her collarbones now, exposed by her slightly lowered zipper. He wanted to lick it away.
Wait—no he didn’t. No. He. Didn’t.
Oh, for fuck’s sake. Yes he did.
“Red?” she said, her voice a little bit shaky. But not the way it had been earlier. This time, it shook the way his muscles did when he was pushing it at the gym. Like she was aching with adrenaline.
“You should really take that off,” he said, his throat dry, his mouth moving like it belonged to someone else.
Her tongue darted out to wet her lips. She patted nervously at her hair. “Take what off?”
“Your clothes,” he said, because he was concerned for her health, obviously. “Whatever that thing is you’re wearing. You should take it off.”
*
Chloe replied, rather intelligently, “Eep.”
“You’re sweating,” Red went on, his gaze oddly fixated at the base of her throat. Probably staring in mild disgust at the aforementioned sweat.
For approximately the thousandth time that day, she cursed her numb-footed, sleepless night and all that it had led to. There he sat, devastatingly handsome, and she was sweating in a lemur outfit like a child who didn’t know how to dress herself.
She tangled her fingers in the fabric, scrabbled for the last scraps of her dignity, and said firmly, “I’m fine.”