“Why not?” he frowned. His lower lip was jutting out just a little bit. I briefly thought about sucking on it, before my own prediction came back to my mind.
He was about to be upset, and I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to take the pity.
“I had an operation,” I said. At Rafael’s sharp intake of breath, I carried on. “I had to. They said I was going to lose the hand, otherwise. But I can’t do anything with it. It’s useless for at least a few months, and after that, I’ll be on less than full mobility for a year. The doctor said basically that if I keep cooking, I’ll fuck it up so badly that it won’t ever work again.”
There was a long silence. Finally, I dared to lift my eyes from the table and look at Rafael.
His eyes shone with unsplit tears. I cleared my throat and looked away.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. He cleared his throat, a mirror of the noise I’d made, and spoke again at normal volume. “I’m sorry that happened to you. But that doesn’t have to mean the end of your career forever, does it?”
I looked at him, sullen and stupid from the anger I felt. Not at Rafael, but at the world in general. At God, if He was up there.At myself for letting it get this far. “How am I supposed to live in the meantime? On fairy dust and hope? I need to earn. Not only to pay rent and eat, but I’ve got medical bills to pay off and more to come, and I’ve got to keep getting pain pills. I’m broke. I’ve got to start again and find a new career – one that I can do without moving my right wrist very much, which believe me, is turning out to be quite the fucking challenge.”
There was another pause. I looked up, impatient at how many we were having. If he wasn’t going to speak, he could justgo. But the heartbroken way in which Rafael bit his lip had me pausing, and I found myself ashamed of the way I’d spoken to him.
I looked, far from the first time, away.
Rafael shifted in his seat. “I, um,” he said. “I may have a solution.”
I snorted.Thiswas going to be good. Everything had happened just like I predicted, landing us back at square one, and now he was asking if we could go around on the ride again. Fine. “What solution could there possibly be?” I asked.
“Do you trust me?”
I stared at Rafael.
There were so many possible answers to that question.
Did I trust him?
We’d had the best sex of my life, and in the morning, he’d disappeared. Maybe he’d spent the last couple of weeks trying to track me down, but he hadn’t tried hard enough to find me right away. That was probably unfair. I hadn’t made it easy for him.
Taking matters of the heart out of it, before we’d fucked, what had we been? Rivals for the same job. We hadn’t been friends or lovers. We’d had no reason to build trust between us. It wasalways going to be me or him, and we’d known that from the start. No reason to get attached.
But what had he ever actually done?
He’d never lied or cheated. Never done something underhanded to trick me out of the job. He’d stood up for his team and showed his loyalty to them even when it put his own job at risk. He’d never put himself above me or shown me any reason to think he was anything but sincere.
So, did I trust him?
Yeah. Maybe more than anyone else in the world, I did.
“I do,” I said, trying to ignore the way my voice cracked, and Rafael launched into a smile of such brilliance that the room seemed to light up from within.
Rafael
“This is so stupid,” Drake hissed under his breath, and I deliberately bumped him with my hip.
“Shut up and just try it,” I said.
He sighed heavily and started working, almost immediately grunting with frustration when he tried to do something with his right hand. Since the risk of him giving into temptation was so high, we’d made sure to do something that would prevent him from doing it by choice or by accident: his hand was strapped to his chest with a sling. He couldn’t move it if he tried. It was only a flexing of his shoulder muscle and that grunt that told me he’d attempted it automatically.
“Just focus,” I said. “It’s going to be really hard at first, but you’ll get used to it.”
“Easy for you to say,” he muttered.
I shook my head. “Not at all,” I shot back. “I have to get used to having this idiot on my right-hand side.”
He glared at me.
