“I’m fine.” He picked up her crutches from where they leaned against the sink and carried them around to her. “What are you up to today?”
“Nothing much.” She took the crutches and slid her arms into the cuffs. The jersey sleeves of her pajamas bunched up as she put her weight on the metal to stand. One leg of the pajama bottoms ended in a slipper. The other flapped empty from just below Ally’s knee. “Yoga this morning. This afternoon I’m going into the office to talk about when I’m going back.”
Nate frowned. “Isn’t that too soon? You’re barely back on your feet.”
“Foot.”
“Mum.”
She wrinkled her nose at him and wobbled sideways to jab him with her elbow. “Stop being so serious, sweetheart. I’m not dead, so all that’s left is getting on with living. After all, one of us has to.”
Last jab of the morning delivered, Ally hopped her way determinedly out of the room. Nate pulled a sour face at her back and raked his fingers through his hair. He cupped the back of his skull and looked up at the ceiling for a second.
“Your idea,” he reminded himself.
He let go of his hair and checked his reflection on the way down the hall. His haircut was expensive enough that he could do pretty much anything to it and come out the other end still looking expensively tousled. Even grabbing handfuls of it in frustration just took a quick ruffle to get the curls flopped the right way again.
“I’m going now, Mum.” He stopped outside her door. “Don’t push yourself too hard. Okay?”
The only answer he got was an inarticulate rude noise. He got his coat from the rack at the bottom of the stairs and shrugged it on as he headed out the front door.
Sometimes he wasn’t sure if his mother living with him was turning him into a fifteen-year-old version of himself or a forty-year-old version of her. He spent his time either rolling his eyes with teenage angst at her fussing, or nagging her while she threw herself into a second lease on life as though she were a girly version of Max.
The thought made him snort as he unlocked the car, and the noise earned him a suspicious glare from Mrs. Saunders next door as she stepped over the threshold in slippers and a housecoat to wrestle her bin over the threshold. He nodded to her politely, and she puffed herself up like an affronted pigeon and disappeared back inside. The door slammed behind her.
She’d never liked him. Nate wasn’t sure if it was because he was gay, because he was relatively young to own a house on Ceremony where property was sell-your-kidneys expensive, or because he worked at the Granshire. It could be all three, he supposed.
He folded himself into the car and was about to pull away from the curb when his phone rang. Nate sighed and grabbed it without even looking at the screen. He assumed it was Max with one of his usual last-minute plans that he wanted Nate to “just run by” his father.
Turned out, it wasn’t Max.
“I’ll play your bad boy,” Flynn said. In the background of the call Nate could hear gulls and the grate of metal. “On one condition.”
A very dirty scenario flashed through Nate’s mind—fairly dirty, anyhow. It was all sweat and aches and stickiness. He blinked and glanced out the window at Mrs. Saunders’s house, as though she might somehow sense the gay was rising. The curtains twitched closed as he watched, so maybe she could.
“What condition?” Hopefully the crack in his voice would pass unremarked due to the hour. “I’m not dressing up as a dirty mascot or dancing anywhere.”
The laugh that rattled down the line was rough as a stray cat’s purr. Nate shifted on the leather seat and tugged at the leg of his trousers.
“Maybe you need better friends. If I do this, you quit trying to get me to shill for the Granshire—no proposals, no links to Airbnb, no offers, nothing. If Teddy Saint John wants my lighthouse, he can come down and do his own begging. It will make it more fun to tell him to piss off.”
Nate considered his long-held idea of being able to offer couples the cliffside dwelling for romantic, storm-swept evenings. It would have been great, but he had to admit he didn’t have any real hope that Flynn was going to suddenly agree.
“I can do that,” he said. “So….”
“So I’ll pick you up for a date,” Flynn said. “Text me where and when.”
He hung up. Nate caught himself scowling at the disconnected phone and grimaced into a reluctant smile. Well, he said he wanted a bad boyfriend. It looked like Flynn was just getting a head start on that.
The window for getting to the Granshire in time for a coffee and recap of his notes was closing, but Nate just sat with his hands on the wheel and frowned out the windshield at the street.
It had just occurred to him that if it went wrong—
He shook his head impatiently and dislodged the thought before he could spiral into unrealistic disaster scenarios. The idea wasn’t going to go wrong. It was too simple to go wrong. He would go on a couple of dates, everyone would make dismayed noises, and then it would be over.
It was foolproof.
And he was going to be late. Or at least not as early as he’d like.
