After a somber dinner with Chris’s parents, we’d gone home to Chris’s apartment near Union Station where I’d assumed I’d spend the night on the sofa the way I always did when I stayed over. But Chris had taken my hand and led me into his bedroom, pulling me into another hug and rubbing his hands up and down my back. When he’d pulled away, he’d pressed a long kiss to my cheek. “Stay with me in here tonight? Please?”
I’d nodded in surprise and stripped down to my T-shirt and boxer briefs before climbing into the luxurious queen-sized bed with its fancy sheets and fluffy pillows. There I’d been in one of my lifelong fantasies of climbing into Chris Banks’ bed, yet I’d been so tired, I’d fallen right to sleep before he’d even crawled in beside me.
But this morning, I’d jolted awake when I began to snuggle into the hard body and harder dick pressed against me before realizing it was not Jack Snyder.
I slapped a hand over my mouth to keep from yelping at the same time my brain provided the explanation by reminding me I’d shared a bed with Chris the night before.
Chris’s arms tightened around me and pulled me closer to him. “Mm, you feel good,” he murmured, pushing a leg between mine. I felt the brush of his hard-on against my ass, and it cause me to leap out of bed for an “emergency” visit to the bathroom.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
What had just happened, and how did I feel about it?
I used the toilet and washed my hands before rifling through his cabinet in search of a spare toothbrush. As I brushed the hell out of my teeth, I lectured myself.
This is not how this is going to go down. You will not take advantage of someone going through grief.
My heart thundered. None of this felt right, and that was enough to remind me to put the brakes on it. Besides, he’d practically still been asleep. He hadn’t meant anything by it. Had he? No.
I finished up and made my way back to the bedroom as nonchalantly as possible, expecting an awkward encounter in which I’d be forced to decline his advances and explain that he was under a tremendous amount of emotional stress at the moment.
He was snoring.
I sighed and made my way out to the kitchen to put on some coffee. When he finally came shuffling out of the bedroom an hour later, there was no acknowledgement of either his snuggle hold or the semi-rutting. Fine. Good. That was good.
But, after a long day of dealing with family and funeral details, Chris asked me to stay over again. And the rutting and snuggling happened again.
And again the next night.
I would have been confused by the mixed messages except they weren’t mixed. During the day, Chris was just as affectionate as he was in bed. He reached for my hand when crossing the street or making a hard decision, he leaned his head on my shoulder when he was overwhelmed, and he’d even kissed me on the cheek a few times. One of those times, I could have sworn he was aiming for my lips, but my phone buzzed at the last minute, causing me to turn my head before I realized what he was doing.
It was like… suddenly we were more than just friends, but I didn’t know what the hell we were.
Meanwhile, Jack kept checking in on me making sure I was okay. He asked if I was remembering to eat and getting enough sleep. When he texted on Thursday to see if he could arrange to have dinner delivered to me that night, I burst into tears.
I was at Wilton Manor checking in on Hattie when I received the text. I’d just come out of helping her put a necklace back in her little jewelry box when the words she’d said hit me full force.
“I should give this to Chris to give to his wife one day.”
I remembered all the times Chris’s mother had talked about Chris’s “future wife” and how that phrase had always been like a knife to the heart. This time it was too much.
“What in the world?” my friend Trinity said under her breath, coming out from behind the nurses’ station to pull me down the hall and into the break room. “You poor thing. You must be worn full out. Sit down.”
She’d always been the “mom” of the shift when I’d worked there, so I let her fuss over me. It felt good to finally be the one receiving comfort rather than giving it.
“There’s this guy,” I said stupidly. My voice was cracked and pathetic.
She tsk’d. “Mm. There always is.”
“And—” I sniffed and took the tissue she handed me. “—and he’s the nicest person in the entire world.”
She sat down across the break table from me and took one of my hands in hers. “That is not the direction I thought this was gonna go in.”
My words were broken up with sniffs and hiccups as I tried to explain my problem. “He… he… he cares about me, Trinity. He’s… been looking out for me like… I can’t even tell you. He asks if I’ve eaten, if I’d slept. He even asked if I needed him to dry-clean my suit for the funeral service. This man…” When she let go to grab the tissue box from the counter behind her, I folded my arms on the table and buried my face in them. The tears came even harder when I replayed Jack’s text over and over in my mind.
She rubbed my back and shushed me in that wonderful caring way some of the best nurses do, but the empathy only made me feel more emotional.
“Sorry, Trin. I’m just tired, you know? It’s been a long week.”
I used more of the tissues to dry my face, and I tried to concentrate on slowing down my breathing. She sat down next to me and continued rubbing my back with one hand while leaning her head on the other with her elbow on the table.
“Tell me this. Since when is Chris the kind of guy who looks after you this way?”
She didn’t really say it in a bitchy way, more like… she was surprised and confused.
“It’s not Chris,” I admitted in a whisper, as if somehow the Fates would hear me and fuck everything up even more than they’d already done. Not that it was anyone else’s fault than mine. Now that Chris was finally coming around, my fickle heart was having second thoughts.
I wasn’t sure what I was expecting Trinity’s reaction to be, but it certainly wasn’t laughter. She cackled like a madwoman.
“Oh, honey.” She laughed some more even though she was trying to hide it behind her hand. “Sorry. It’s just… you spent years pining for that boy. I’m so happy you found someone else.”
I stared at her. “Really? Are you kidding me right now?”
“What? Don’t act like everyone here didn’t know what a hard-on you had for Hattie’s grandson. That boy was like fancy damned chocolate coming up in here right when you were dying for something sweet.”
“He’s her great-nephew,” I corrected under my breath. As if it mattered. “Besides, I don’t even like chocolate.”
“Liar. Every damned time you pulled a double night-shift weekend, you snuck a giant box of Milk Duds in here. I know this because I used to swipe one or twelve of them when you did it.”
I let out a breath. “I like the caramel.”
“Yeah, well, who doesn’t? The point is, it’s a good thing you moved on to greener pastures. That Banks kid wasn’t ever good enough for you.”
I thought of the man who’d been holding me every night in bed this week, the boy who’d shown up first at the hospital the night I’d sprained my ankle slipping on ice in a parking lot in high school. The friend who’d screamed with excitement when I’d told him I’d gotten into nursing school, and the person who’d bought me my first official drink when I’d turned twenty-one. Chris had been there for so many important moments in my life that his love for me in the past was hard to pick apart from the potential of his love in the future.