She shook her head.
“He’s swimming, isn’t he? And after that he will be tired, and you might even get some more food in him before he showers and goes to bed.”
She shrugged. “You two yell a lot.”
“It’ll change.”
She did not look optimistic, but even though it was a vicious tug-of-war, there were minuscule changes, and the first one was that after that, Nick always ended his day with laps in the pool followed by a late-night snack, then reading, and then sleep. The mornings were a whole other ordeal.
“Good morning,” I greeted him cheerfully when I woke him every morning at seven, Saturday and Sunday included, yanking the covers off before I opened all the windows.
“Why do you have to be so loud first thing?” he snarled at me, sitting up in bed with his sleep mask on, not scary in the least.
“To make sure you actually rise,” I informed him. “You need to get up and have your smoothie so we can go for a walk before breakfast. You have five minutes.”
The first week of that routine, I watched things fly around the room aimlessly, since he couldn’t very well aim while wearing the sleep mask. I will admit that my cackling didn’t help anything, but I was, first and foremost, an ass, and no one I knew would have expected any less of me.
I ended up moving his nightstand one night so he wouldn’t have anything handy to throw at me the next morning. Unfortunately, when I woke him up, he reached out to find something to pitch, and stretched so far that he fell right out of bed.
“What the fuck,” he whined, sliding the mask up on his forehead and looking up at me from the floor.
“You’re not a child, so you can stop throwing tantrums, as well as whatever you can grab,” I warned him, pointing at his desk across the room where a brand-new Echo sat. “I’ll make you a deal; as long as you’re in the kitchen to eat by seven fifteen, I won’t come in here anymore.”
“You mean I won’t have to look at you first thing every morning?”
“That’s right,” I said, grinning at him.
“Do I have to walk with you?”
“Not if you don’t want to. You could walk with Callie instead.”
“Oh, thank God,” he announced dramatically.
“Aww, now you’re hurting my feelings.”
He was seething he was so mad.
“So…do we have a deal?”
“Do we have a deal? Fuck yes, we have a deal! I’ll do anything not to have to start my day looking at your smug-ass face!” he hissed at me, the venom in his voice impressive for him only having been awake for a few minutes.
The next morning, I was sitting at the table reading the paper when Nick stumbled out with his Wayfarers on—he wore them constantly—and took a seat at the counter, not joining me in the nook, and put his head down on his folded arms.
“Good morning,” Callie greeted him, putting a smoothie down in front of him. “How did you sleep, Nick?”
“It’s too early to tell,” he assured her.
“Well, you should drink your smoothie so we can go for our walk, and then we’ll have a yummy breakfast when we get back.”
“Sounds great,” he told her, thoroughly ignoring me and the fact that it was the exact same schedule that I had him on the previous week.
He thought it bothered me that he’d go with Callie without a fight, but the fact of the matter was I didn’t care what got him walking and eating on a regular schedule. I just wanted it done. If his reward was not having to interact with me, so be it. I did think that for what I was being paid, Mr. Cox was getting a raw deal.
I reported to my boss that my being there was a waste of my time, Torus’s resources, and of course, Mr. Cox’s bank account was being flat-out abused. What Nick Madison truly needed was a live-in life coach with a loud-ass gym whistle.
“Nope,” Jared told me over the phone. “Mr. Cox says he’s never seen Mr. Madison so furious, as well as determined to show him how much you’re not needed.”
“What does that even mean?”
“It means that you’re a catalyst for change, Loc. There’s finally someone in his life he can’t buy, bribe, or get around.”
“Anyone who had the backbone to tell him no, and then enforce it, would do,” I insisted.
“But everyone who’s ever been in your role has succumbed to temptation of one kind or another.”
Apparently, Nick had a playbook he ran.
He started with bribery, lavishing vast sums of money and expensive gifts, like cars and jewelry, on people, which, unsurprisingly, had succeeded more often than not. He’d already tried it on me, leaving iPads lying around the house open to splash pages meant to tempt me, magazines with dogeared pages advertising various luxury items, or the TV tuned to the Travel Channel. It was impressive that, despite his philanthropy, which included music scholarships, a homeless shelter for LGBTQIA+ kids, his horse refuge that cared for aging thoroughbreds, and his Clean Up the Coast campaign that was working to get the trash out of the ocean, he still had money to burn. I got sucked into watching the show where people buy houses in foreign countries, and when he walked by and commented on it, I reminded him that he’d been the one watching the show in the first place.