He sipped it, feeling his breathing regularize under the effort of coordinating the muscles in his mouth and throat. Darcy’s fingers slipped around his free wrist, and he knewshe was taking his pulse again, but he savored the point of contact. That irrational part of his brain whispered that she wouldn’t let him die.
Someone else knocked on the bathroom door. Soft and tentative, unlike Darcy.
“Go away,” Darcy yelled.
“Is everything okay?” Rose’s voice came through the wood.
At the idea that anyone else would come in and see him like this, his anxiety crested again.
“We’re fine,” Darcy said.
“What’s wrong?” Rose pressed. “Teagan?”
“Nothing’s wrong. We’re fucking in here,” Darcy said. “Go away. We’ll be out in half an hour.”
Teagan made a small noise of objection as the other side of the door went silent. Jesus. If he hadn’t been fired yet, he was going to get fired soon.
Darcy looked over at him, and he realized that he had straightened and opened his eyes.
“Not enough time?” she asked. “Forty-five minutes?”
“Workplace,” he said.
“Oh, right,” she said. She looked back at the door. “Just kidding!” she called.
Teagan managed a very small laugh, even though it hurt more than gasping for breath had. She patted his shoulder in approval, then wrapped her hand around the inside of his bicep and leaned into him. She minutely rocked back and forth against him at the tempo of her slower breathing. When he’d matched it, her head settled against his shoulder, the braid she’d put her hair in today slipping down to dangle over his chest. Darcy turned her face briefly into his neck, her hot breath steaming on his skin.
“You scared me there, Bear Bait,” she said in a small, wobbly voice.
He nodded, feeling his eyes prickle again at the concern in her voice. Him too.
A few minutes passed, and the discomfort of sitting on a cold tile floor began to rise to the top of his list of unpleasant sensations. He could breathe. He could move. He could think. He couldn’t think of how he was going to explain this.
“Did you get fired?” Darcy asked. It was a reasonable assumption, given how he’d acted.
“No. Not yet, anyway. Nora’s got the majority of the board ready to let her sell off the art collection.”
“I see,” Darcy said, as though his reaction had made sense. It didn’t.
It made him feel dirty that Nora was skimming five percent after the taxpayers took a huge loss on the art donations. It made him feel at once ineffective and complicit in the whole scheme, because the foundation wouldn’t have had to sell assets at all if he’d been better at raising money. It made him feel like he’d been lying for years: first to cover for his mother, then to cover for himself, because hadn’t he told everyone that he’d fix this?
But a rational person did not sprint from the room in response to a business proposal.
“Well, I’ll go tell them you’re puking your guts up because you had all that lox at breakfast, and I’ll make them leave,” Darcy said, beginning to rise again.
“Don’t go,” he immediately blurted, and Darcy froze. She slid back down and put her arm back under his, fingers rubbing at the downy hairs on the back of his wrist.
They couldn’t just stay there forever, but he didn’t have a better plan yet.
“You’re going to blame the fish?” was all he could come up with, but Darcy gamely went along with it.
“Well, Pacific salmon stocks are down ninety percent in some places, and even the farmed varieties are spreading sea lice parasites to the wild population—”
She gave the impression that she was willing to sit in the men’s restroom with him and discuss the environmental impact of salmon aquaculture for as long as was necessary.
God, he loved her. He wanted to listen politely until she was done, then promise that he would never eat another creature with a central nervous system if she’d stay with him after this. He wished he could think of a single other thing he had to offer her.
That wasn’t the kind of worry that sent his heart rate spiking. It was the kind that felt like it would break his heart.
