The Boyfriend (The Boss 7)

Chapter One

The morning I’d been dreading my entire adult life started with my husband leaping from the bed and screaming, “Jesus bloody Christ!”

I startled awake and clutched the sheet to my chest because the duvet had apparently sprinted across the room with Neil. I couldn’t see if that was the case because a giant store-bought birthday cake with rapidly melting candles in the shape of a three and a zero took up my entire field of vision.

Trying not to expose myself, I scrambled backward. “What the fuck, Mom?”

“Oh, calm down,” my mother said, blowing out the candles. “You’re gonna set the bed on fire.”

“Sophie!” Olivia, Neil’s three-year-old granddaughter, flung herself against the bed and struggled to climb up. When she failed, she settled for jumping and slapping the mattress. “Happy birthday!”

“Rebecca, get out!” Neil barked.

My mother made a tsk-ing sound. “Oh, come on, guys. I knew you were asleep. I listened at the door.”

“Gross!” I shouted over the top of Neil’s, “Leave!”

She shook her head. “Fine. I’ll take this to the kitchen. There’s coffee on.”

Olivia toddled to my side of the bed and raised her arms. “Help me, Sophie.”

“What on earth was she thinking?” Neil fumed, holding the duvet around his waist as he stalked to the walk-in closet.

I lifted Olivia up and patted the happy panda on the butt of her footie pajamas as she crawled over my legs and toward the center of the bed.

“Thank god we didn’t leave anything interesting out last night,” I called to him, retrieving his discarded t-shirt from beneath the sheets and maneuvering it on. The thought of my mom finding freshly used sex toys or bondage gear in our bedroom was...ugh. No thank you.

Neil emerged in sleep pants, which gave him more mobility to toss his arms around as he complained. “Sophie, I am sorry for shouting at your mother but— No. No, I am not sorry. It is not unreasonable to have a basic expectation of privacy in one’s own bedroom. If she and Tony are going to continue to live in the guesthouse, she has to respect the fact that I don’t want her walking through our door, let alone our bedroom door, whenever she wishes!”

I understood where he was coming from, but I’d tried to explain, more than once, how hard that particular habit would die. My family didn’t have great boundaries when it came to stuff like not just bursting into each other’s homes. “You’re right. We’ve had more than a few close calls. But she knows how much I’m hating this birthday. She just wants to make me feel better.”

“She wants to make you feel better by sending your blood sugar through the roof?” he demanded. “Has she forgotten your diagnosis?”

I couldn’t blame her if she had. Sometimes, I forgot it. “Thanks for the reminder of my mortality. Is that my birthday present?”

Neil shook his head in frustration. “I still do not understand why thirty is such a terrible age.”

“Because that’s the age—” I began, preparing to repeat the reasoning I’d stated over and over for the past six weeks.

I didn’t have to, because Neil did it for me. “—‘when everything falls apart.’ Yes. I know. And as I’ve stated many, many times, that is ridiculous.”

“Is it really that ridiculous?” I asked, gesturing to my thighs. He couldn’t see them because the sheet covered them, but I’d had a massive crying jag just days before because I’d found the rising blue threat of a varicose vein on the outside of the left one. I didn’t want to bring it up too specifically in front of Olivia because she didn’t deserve to inherit the weird body hang-ups the women of my family had been passing down for generations.

“That’s not the issue here. The issue is your mother barging in whenever she pleases. If we’re going to continue discussing…” he hesitated, glancing at Olivia. “...What we’ve been discussing, then this must be addressed.”

That thing we’d been discussing was the possibility of our boyfriend, El-Mudad, moving in with us. We rarely talked about it when Olivia was around, but plans had hesitantly been forming over the past few visits. She loved El-Mudad, and we didn’t want her to become hopeful for something that might not happen.

She gave me a look copied directly from her late mother. It was eerie how many of Emma’s mannerisms the kid possessed, despite having been less than a year old when her parents died. “This is not in front of Olivia?”

Neil’s anger reluctantly faded to a fond smile. He sat on the edge of the bed. “Don’t worry about not-in-front-of-Olivia. It’s Sophie’s birthday today. And I love that you helped wake her up with such a beautiful cake. Did you and Rebecca pick it out?”

Olivia’s preschooler mind still didn’t follow conversations well, despite how mature her phrasing could sometimes be. “You were funny, Afí.”