Sophie (The Boss 8)

"Fuck." I covered my eyes. "It was the Long Islands, wasn't it?"

"It was absolutely the Long Islands," he said, not nearly sympathetic enough. "But in a broader sense, it was the fact that you refuse to take care of yourself at all. You’re not even wearing your glucose sensor. What on earth were you thinking?"

"I thought I wanted to avoid a lump in the dress." I really didn't like how parental he suddenly sounded.

"I’m sure you looked lovely on the floor." His increasingly scolding tone didn't help matters.

"Hey, can you back off a minute? I'm sitting in a hospital bed right now?" My throat burned. I was about to rip open whatever was on the IV pole and guzzle it down.

That immediately subdued him. "I'm sorry. I'm frightened, Sophie. I haven't been so frightened in a very long time."

My earlier nausea returned. I'd scared him.

I’d scared him because the last time he’d rushed to the hospital, it had been for Emma.

I fought my way upright enough to rise on my knees and put my arms around him, despite the inconvenient IV line. "I'm sorry. I am so sorry."

"You have to stop this," he gasped hoarsely against my cheek. "I can't live without you."

"Hey, hey." I sat back and took his face in mine. "Please don't talk like that. I promise, I promise. I will start managing this and stop pretending I don't have…"

"'Da sugar?'" he finished for me, quoting my grandma in a near-flawless Michigan accent.

I laughed, but my heart still fell. "Yeah. This is enough to snap me out of denial."

"Not getting to meet Lana?" Neil asked with a subdued half-smile.

"No. Putting that look on your face. I never want to see it again." I swallowed the lump in my throat and lightened the subject before I could break down and cry. "But that other thing, too. I didn't even get a glimpse of her."

Neil frowned and reached into his pocket for his phone. "Well, she got a glimpse of you. Holli thought it was important for you to know that El-Mudad carried you past her on his way out. She said…" Neil tapped the screen and read, "'How is somebody already that fucked up? How late are we?'"

The strangest mix of shame and pride washed through my brain but hit the other part of his sentence’s breaker wall. "Wait, El-Mudad carried me out?"

"He did." Neil pocketed his phone again and looked up at the ceiling. "Right past all of those paparazzi there to see your imaginary girlfriend."

My gut churned. "Why are people even interested? I mean, seriously. Because I accidentally talked to a celebrity, now I have to be one?"

"Not a celebrity. A socialite." He patted my arm. “I may not have been entirely...well, I wasn’t dishonest. But I wasn’t realistic about the life you were going to end up leading with me. My money has always come with visibility. My parents were visible in society. My ex-wife was.”

“You donated to all that landmine stuff and did charity things with Paul McCartney,” I added. “I googled you when we were first dating. Or when we were not dating. I googled you when we were fucking and pretending we weren’t dating.”

We both laughed at that. We’d been so deluded back then.

“But I knew you sometimes ended up in magazines. I guess I thought I was uninteresting enough that hiding in Sagaponack would be enough.” It had worked, for a while, even when I’d been writing books and getting interviewed by magazines. “I guess I didn’t help things by going to fashion week all the time.”

“And El-Mudad did have a higher profile than either of us. He is, after all, one of the most ‘eligible bachelors’ in New York now.” Neil grimaced at the term.

“We were never going to have a normal life, were we?”

A small smile touched his lips. “You were never going to have a normal life with or without me. You were always going to make an extraordinary place for yourself in the world. Some people can make billions of dollars and never get recognized on the street.”

“We don’t get recognized on the street,” I pointed out. “We get recognized when we go places where a lot of interesting people are. And they somehow infect us with their interestingness. So, maybe we just...stop. No more glamorous parties. No more fundraisers with rock legends.”

“No more Ascot,” he added morosely. “We’d be all right with that life of seclusion, but El-Mudad might be unwilling to give up going to clubs and flashy nights on the town. I suspect he might enjoy some of this attention.”

I shook my head. “Not anymore. We thought it was funny…”

“But it got out of hand,” Neil finished for me.

“Yeah.”

Both of us fell silent.

After a long moment, I said, “No more daring damsel rescues. I promise. And we’ll all keep a low profile for a while.”