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I wanted Brian back. Badly.
After spending so much time collaborating on keeping me alive, I felt an attachment to him that had become a secondhand, background emotion during the past month. Something about banishing the threat of being killed made me more appreciative of life and everything I’d taken for granted before my relationship with Brian began falling apart. Finally realizing my husband wasn’t cheating on me or secretly siphoning money out of our savings didn’t hurt either.
While restocking the kitchen with the protein flakes and wheat germ I’d purchased earlier, I reviewed my plan. Once I got him home, I’d rationalize why it was a bad idea to divorce. I’d tell him we were a perfect match. He took pleasure in burning calories; I took pleasure in consuming calories. He exercised regularly; I avoided exercising regularly. He ate protein flakes; I consumed enough fat and carbohydrates to cover the rest of our joint nutritional needs. He’d have no choice but to see how logical it was for us to remain married; I had no choice but to make him see.
I’d crawl around on the carpet and beg if I had to. After all, what good was the approach of my sexual peak if I didn’t have a man to appreciate it with?
Once I finished in the kitchen, I struggled into the negligee I’d unearthed a mere eleven days ago, remembering to remove the price tag this time. As I shoved one leg through a scratchy hole barely wide enough to envelop a femur, I cursed the sadistic bastards who had invented such a garment. By the time I got the blasted thing stretched over my body and concealed with a turtleneck sweater, I was ready to firebomb the lingerie manufacturing plant.
I made sure to drape the toilet paper in the wrong direction before slipping outside.
Although I took the bus from the condo to the hospital, when I made it to Brian’s room I called a cab to take us back. “My arms hurt from holding the poles,” I lied. I feared if I told Brian he was in no condition to be riding public transportation, he’d try to prove his manhood by covering the entire city armed only with a plastic fare card. The freaks would have a field day.
After he got dressed, the cute nurse brought him a wheelchair. “Your leg’s too weak to walk on, and your arm’s too weak to use crutches,” she told Brian. “You shouldn’t even be going home at all.” She shot me a glare as if I were responsible for this madness.
I ignored her to focus on more important things, like my burning skin. Insects swarming over my torso would be less uncomfortable than this negligee.
“I’m fine,” Brian assured the nurse as she wheeled him down the corridor, today’s copy of the Wall Street Journal resting on his lap and me itching by his side. “I feel much better than I did this weekend.” He smiled up at me.
I tried to smile back but found I couldn’t with a rash spreading over my entire body.
I took a seat outside as we waited for the cab to arrive. I could barely keep myself from scratching where the unyielding bench pressed the negligee deeper into my skin. I wondered whether Brian’s nurse would fetch me a wheelchair if I explained my predicament. Judging from the way her lip curled up whenever she looked at me, I doubted it.
The nurse deposited Brian next to me, winking at him before slipping back inside.
“Did you hear?” Brian lifted the newspaper off his lap and slapped it against his thigh cast. “The man who broke into my apartment and stole the lab reports from your office confessed to having been hired by a PFEM employee.”
I didn’t say anything, too preoccupied by the lace digging into my butt.
“He said the PFEM employee had a printout of a shipping receipt with our address on it, which he’d cross-referenced against property records to access our names,” Brian went on. “Richard Preser must have convinced someone in the company to quietly mail a copy of the lab reports to me, but I guess he didn’t realize those aware of StaRipe’s dangers might use the tracking information to figure out I had them.”
Brian didn’t have to say that upper-level management was behind the cover-up. A mid-level employee wouldn’t have had the motivation or resources needed to secure the illegal services of a street thug.
It was really too bad PFEM hadn’t been an upstanding company. The people in charge sounded much more dedicated than their Safe Sound counterparts. Although, I supposed any company relying heavily on questionable products had to demand stronger involvement from their executives.
Brian carefully crossed his uninjured foot over his swollen ankle. God, his wheelchair looked comfortable. “The FDA has recalled StaRipe pending further safety testing,” he said. “Their initial investigation indicates your hunch about the pomegranate gene interaction was right.”
“Who knew pomegranates and apples should never mix?” I quipped.
“Synergy,” he said, shaking his head.
“What?”
“Synergy: the combination of two agents increasing the potency of either one alone. In this case, two harmless factors combining into one lethal entity.”
Like marriage, I thought.
“Nobody’s going to want to touch an apple, let alone a StaRipe apple, for a very long time,” Brian predicted.
I stared at him. What American ever wanted to touch an apple? The only reason apples hadn’t become extinct was because women had to eat them instead of chocolate in order to lose enough weight to prevent these damn lace contraptions from jabbing into major organs.
Fortunately, the cab pulled up then. The driver came around to open the back door for us.
I slid off the bench and grabbed Brian’s good arm, but he pulled back before I could sling it around my neck.
“I can get in myself,” he told me.
I shrugged and backed away, too itchy to argue.
Brian placed his hand on the wheelchair armrest and shifted his body weight to his unbroken arm until his leg cast stuck out straight behind him. Once he steadied his balance, he pushed himself backward and hobbled around on his good foot, its plastered twin smacking into the wheelchair.
The taxi driver leaned against his vehicle and watched as Brian spun in circles. I wanted to yell for him to help, but Brian would undoubtedly be upset if I thwarted his proud demonstration of manhood.
Brian whirled around for several more minutes as he inched toward the cab. When he made it within one yard of the driver, the cabbie stepped away and resumed his vigil from the safety of the sidewalk. Maybe it hadn’t occurred to him that his whole day could end up being a financial bust if Brian tripped and wedged himself near one of the tires.
Now that Brian was almost seated and didn’t need to worry about emasculating interference, I sidled up to the driver and whispered, “You could have helped him.”
The driver turned toward me. “I don’t touch the customers. Company policy.”
“What kind of policy is that?” I demanded. Any decent company would insist their employees touch the clients.
He spread his hands. “We risk too many lawsuits otherwise.”
Brian collapsed into the cab, a huge smile erupting on his face. My outrage faded, and I couldn’t help but grin back.
To give Brian more room for his casts, I piled into the front seat. During the ride home, I tried to scratch only minimally so the driver wouldn’t think I had fleas and toss us out on the side of the road.
Thankfully, Brian didn’t protest when I helped him from the curb to the inside of the condo building. And instead of trying to stagger up two flights of stairs, he stood patiently in the lobby as I summoned the elevator. His taxi display seemed to have drained him of all macho desires.
I watched Brian from under my eyelashes as we waited. I hoped he wasn’t questioning the merits of checking himself out of the hospital. Now that I had him here, I wanted him to stay. I had too much planned for him to leave now.
Once the elevator deposited us on the third floor, Brian leaned on me as I led him down the hallway. Unfortunately, acting as his crutch meant letting him grind the lingerie deeper into my skin.
I steered Brian into the condo and shut the front door. He lowered himself onto the couch, careful not to smack his leg cast into anything. Because of his limited range of motion, he had to adopt a position that nearly had him lying prone.
He pulled at the ragged hem of his trousers, which had been snipped to accommodate the cast. Brian looked so comfortable in his loose cotton pants that I yearned to rip them off his body and demand he stretch an orthodontia-sized elastic band over his thigh to share in my misery.
He glanced around, a glow warming his face. “I’d forgotten how much I love this place.”
“You only moved out three weeks ago,” I reminded him, although I knew exactly how he felt.
Brian experimented with different positions for his arm cast. He finally draped it down one side of the sofa, letting his fingers dangle on the carpet. “I saw on the news this morning that PFEM shares have lost ninety percent of their value.”
Since Brian’s bandaged body took up the whole couch, I remained standing. I could have circled the coffee table to reach the loveseat, but I didn’t want to be that far away from him.
Brian rubbed his temple with his uninjured hand. “StaRipe was PFEM’s major revenue producer. They spent years and millions developing it, and all their other products will be suspect by association. The company will likely go bankrupt now that their reputation’s ruined. Sure, they may qualify for a chapter eleven, but it will take them years to rebuild the corporation back to its former glory.”
I shifted my shoulders in a futile attempt to dislodge the bra trim burrowed two inches into the slats of my rib cage.
“But their customer base has been destroyed, so there’s a good chance PFEM will never get back on its feet,” Brian continued. “They’ll be lucky if they can market any future products, let alone salvage the StaRipe discovery. And there’s no doubt the people in charge will be fired, the chief officers replaced by reputable persons.”
Good grief. It felt as if I’d rolled over a colony of fire ants, and all Brian could talk about was corporate restructuring.
Brian finally stopped babbling when I bumped into a table lamp during another bout of scratching. “Ness, you okay?”
“Do you have to just sit there, for God’s sake?” I cursed, no longer surreptitiously scratching but resorting instead to full-blown pawing.
Brian tried to sit up. His body moved a centimeter.
I rubbed against a nearby wall. Brian watched but kept looking away, his face screwed up as if he wasn’t sure I might prefer to be alone with my wall.
“It’s not that I don’t appreciate the after-hours market update, but can’t I just read all this in the Wall Street Journal?” I said. Of course, I didn’t intend to actually purchase the Wall Street Journal, but Brian didn’t need to know that.
“I thought you’d want to know, having single-handedly brought about the downfall of a large-cap corporation,” he said. He pulled himself forward. “Do you even realize what you’ve achieved? We’re talking about a company with two-point-six billion in revenues last year—”
“Oh, for God’s sake!” I exploded. “We’re supposed to be reconciling, and all you can talk about is revenue!”
His forehead furrowed. “Reconciling?”
I took a step toward him and lowered myself to the floor in order to get down on one knee. I was determined to do this right.
Brian’s jaw fell to the carpet. Deciding he wouldn’t be any help, I scrabbled to catch his left hand in mine as it hung there like a sausage in a butcher’s window. Granted, it was in a cast, but couldn’t he have given some indication that it remained connected to his body?
I squeezed his hand, maybe a bit too hard judging from his wince. I eased up a little and took as deep a calming breath as I could while compressed inside this suffocating negligee. “Brian, will you stay married to me?”
My heart pounded as I waited for his answer. It took him so long to respond that my whole body started itching again.
“Vanessa, I thought we agreed to a divorce,” he said.
The living room reeled. I couldn’t breathe. My life was over. I felt as if I had lost more Ben and Jerry’s in the stock market, only this time I’d lost a whole truck’s worth of pints. And not just any flavor but the type with the chocolate and marshmallow swirled together into one delicious concoction . . .
But before I had a chance to properly hyperventilate, a smile crept across Brian’s face. He reached out with his good hand and dragged me closer. “But I think the exact term used was ‘amicable divorce.’ If there’s one thing I’ve learned during the past few weeks, it’s that there is no such thing, at least not for us. So really, we have no deal.” He eased his other hand out of my grasp. I figured he intended to cup my face, although he must have aimed wrong. His cast knocked me upside the head. But I didn’t even register the blow because at that same moment he said, “Vanessa, I’d be delighted to stay married to you.”
“Bastard!” I cried as I threw myself on him.
He grunted and fell against the couch.
I looked at him. “Did I hurt you?”
He managed a weak smile. “I don’t think it’s possible for me to feel pain at the moment.” He paused. “But could you move just a tad to the side?”
I obeyed, so overcome with joy that I barely noticed when my sweater disappeared. Brian leered at the exposed lingerie as if he’d never walked by a Victoria’s Secret or flipped to the HBO channel. Still itching, I squirmed out of the garment. Before I had a chance to inspect my skin rash, Brian pounced, strangely agile for a man with half his limbs encased in plaster.
My breath caught, the final thing remembered being my last coherent thought for the evening. Amicable divorce be damned.
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THE END
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Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this novel, please check out my mystery/crime thriller Never Go Back.
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