Marriage For One

I smiled and let him put me down back on my feet. “I’ll go see what Sally wants and then I’ll get my bag so we can leave.”

“I’m sorry, Rose.”

Something in his voice made me turn back to him. “Sorry? For what?”

“I know you don’t want the MRI, but they need to see if everything looks okay. I need to know if everything is okay.”

I walked back to him and rose up on my toes so I could press what was my version of a quick and hard kiss on his lips, and I melted a little when he put his hand on the small of my back and pulled me against his body.

“You’ll stay with me again?”

“Always.”

“Then it’ll be okay. I know I’m being stupid about it. It helps that you’ll be there when it’s over to carry me away.”

The car ride was fun, and I tried my best to look as if I wasn’t freaking out about the fact that I was going back in that casket again. We sat hand in hand the entire time, and Jack even made a comment or two about Raymond’s love life when we were having a very serious talk on that very subject. Too bad I was too anxious to enjoy it all.

But then the MRI scan…it was no better than the first time. Even though I was required to lie on my back this time, they still put the cage thing on my head, and this time around I got much dizzier than the first time. I had to keep my eyes closed the entire time as I tried to focus only on Jack’s touch on my ankle. As soon as they took me out and I got rid of the thing on my head, he carried me off to the small room, and just like the previous time, he let me cry on him for a good two minutes. The last time I’d done that, we hadn’t been real. This time, we were, and it made me feel better because he kissed every drop of my tears away, stealing more pieces of my heart in the process.

“Where do you want me to take you?” Jack asked once we were back in the car.

The needle part hadn’t been fun either; it had hurt like hell, which you could easily tell from my ashen face and the hand I kept pressing on my arm. Since my brain had been kind of exposed with the tear, preventing infection was important. That’d been what they kept telling me, so I knew there was no way to get out of it—not that I had tried to get out of it or anything. I’d never.

“Rose?”

This time, we weren’t sitting so close.

I looked at him. “Home. I want to go home. I’ll text Sally and Owen. I don’t feel like I’d be any help there, and I don’t want to bring the energy down.”

“Okay,” he said simply and then told Raymond where to take us.

Back in the building, Jack said hello to Steve and asked him how he was doing. I couldn’t help it—I cracked my first post-MRI smile. To think I’d been the one to tell him what his own doorman’s name was.

“How is the kid doing?” I asked, wrapping my arm around Jack’s and standing in front of Steve.

“She’s good, back at the new school.”

“No more problems I hope.”

“So far it’s been okay.”

“That’s good.”

Steve’s daughter, Bella, was this beautiful and smart fifteen-year-old who had been bullied at her old school and ended up changing schools midyear.

“Please tell her I’m looking forward to seeing her again.”

“She’ll love hearing that. She adores you.”

Even though I had heard about her situation from the heartbroken Steve and obviously already knew some about her, we’d only met twice when she had come to visit her father for a few hours. We’d bonded over our love of baking and rain, of all things, because it had been pouring in New York both days. We’d come up with over twenty-five reasons why we loved rain and rainy days when I had wandered down from Jack’s apartment because I’d been bored out of my mind just sitting, sitting, sitting.

Jack had found me on the floor with Bella and had taken me back upstairs because it was ‘cold’ and I wasn’t healthy enough to sit my ass on cold floors. That had been original, especially hearing the word ass coming from his mouth.

“And I adore her. She is a smart cookie. If it’s okay with you, I’d love it if she could come to my coffee shop. Maybe we could bake together if she feels up to it? Then I’d bring her back here, of course.”

“You don’t have to do that. I know how busy you are.”

“Of course I don’t have to do it. I want to. We’ll bake and spend a few hours together. It’ll be fun.”