Marriage For One

I bent down at the waist and touched her lips with mine.

Her eyes were partly closed, her lips curved up. “By the way, I can’t believe the word Christmassy came out of your mouth.”

“It only came out of my mouth because I was repeating your words.”

“Sure, you keep telling yourself that.”

She managed to stay quiet for an hour and a half before she started talking to me, and she was asleep for eighty of the ninety minutes. Turned out, I could work just as well in the living room while listening and talking to Rose as I did in my office.

We spent another week cooped up in that apartment. I went to work, and she stayed home and, according to her, did a lot of planning for her coffee shop. She wanted wreaths up on the windows—big ones. Not just any wreath would work, apparently. I told her I’d take her there and put them up right in front of her eyes. I told her we could only do that the following week if she was feeling better, and we got into an argument about how she was going to go crazy cooped up inside and could handle going to work for just a few hours to check things out. I loved every second of it and if our kiss after the short argument was anything to go by, she loved it just as much. Soon after, she fell asleep, proving my point that she wasn’t ready to go anywhere.

The first few days we were back from the hospital, she would get dizzy and out of breath just from climbing the stairs. After that, she started to spend most of her time on the couch until I’d get done with work—which I was still playing catch up with—and then I’d carry her upstairs.

At the end of that first week, we went to the hospital and they cleaned out her nose. There was still blood coming down, but despite that, she was looking better and better every day.

Toward the end of the second week of her bed rest, she started crying at least once a day. “Jack. I want to go out, please.”

“Do you even realize how much you’re breaking my heart with all this crying you’ve been doing?”

She kissed me after that. She kissed me for a long time.

Georgie and Emma, two of her friends, came to visit and see how she was doing. I’d missed them at the hospital but met them when they came to the apartment. I felt like a lovesick idiot for hovering around her just in case she needed something and went to work while they stayed with her. Every day I would leave for work, I couldn’t wait to come back to her, knowing I’d get to see her smile as soon as she saw me and got up to greet me halfway into the living room.

As soon as her two weeks of bed rest were complete, she demanded to go and check on things at the coffee shop.

“You heard what the doctor said: two weeks of bed rest then I could go to work.”

“Rose, you still can’t go up the stairs on your own without getting dizzy—how do you think you’ll be able to work?”

“Maybe I just like you carrying me upstairs. Ever think of that?”

“Is that it?” I asked with a quirk in my eyebrow.

“I do like you carrying me…”

“But…”

“I’m not gonna overwork myself, Jack. Trust me. I’m not gonna risk going through the same stuff again. I’m just going to sit behind the counter, only for a few hours.”

“If you want to come back, call me and either I’ll come pick you up or I’ll send Raymond to get you.”

“Deal.”

She walked over to me, grabbed the lapels of my jacket, and did her best to pull me down. After giving me a quick peck that did nothing to quench the unending thirst I had for her, she whispered against my lips. “I think I like it when you worry about me. It’s really hot, Jack.”

With a new sparkle in her eyes, she bit her lip, and I realized she was both seducing me and backing away from me at the same time. Stopping that nonsense, I pulled her back against me and met her waiting lips with a better and longer kiss than she’d given me. We were both out of breath, and my cock had very different ideas about how we should spend the day. I forced myself to let her go and took her to her beloved coffee shop.

During lunch time, I found myself on her doorstep with three damn bouquets full of roses. She was sitting behind the register, chatting and laughing with Sally. The shop was full of people, both at the tables and at the bar. She came alive in this place, looked perfect with a smile on her face, and I was happy I’d had a part in giving it to her—no matter how I’d had a part in doing so.