The pillow moved under his face as he frowned. “I thought you left to start your own company.”
“In other words, I quit. The reason is irrelevant to her, only that I did.” Valerie pressed down. “There. I think we’re done here.”
She ended the conversation with a feathery brushing of her fingertips across his shoulders that would have made him shiver, had his muscles not been so lax he could barely move. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt so physically content, although he was concerned about her attitude toward Ad Astra. Giving up on something she loved didn’t seem like Valerie, but how well did he know her, really? Perhaps her mother was right.
However, even if that were true, it seemed less than supportive to point it out to your child.
“How do you feel?” she asked.
He kept his answer safe. “You might have added another inch to my height.”
“Anytime. I took a few shiatsu classes as well,” she said. “It’s nice to be able to fix people, don’t you think?”
He turned to look at her, feeling his neck fully rotate for the first time in years. “I do.”
She was lovely in the dim bunkie, and Nico wished he could run his hands over her as she’d done to him and make her feel the same kind of peace. Then she moved and the moment whispered away from him. He would have braved a thousand coyotes to get it back.
Fifteen
Later that day, Valerie was on the patio following along with her tai chi tutorial—she’d only taken a couple classes and could never remember what came after White Stork Cools Wings—and trying not to pause every two seconds to see if she could catch sight of Nico. The massage earlier had been part selfish, and she’d been a little surprised he hadn’t laughed at her obvious gambit. That had backfired spectacularly on her though, and it had taken all of her willpower to not let her hands wander as he lay on her bed.
A fuming Fernie arrived to prevent Valerie from reliving a montage of the morning’s most sublime moments for the twelfth time. “I can’t believe this.”
“What’s up?” Valerie stopped her video.
“Brayden’s protein juice got more engagement than my last three posts put together.”
Valerie checked her phone to find Fernie was right, with a shocking number of people commenting—positively—on his recipe. “Will you look at that,” she said. It truly was the end of civilization.
“God, I know. I hate this family. What are you doing?”
“Tai chi.”
Fernie took Valerie’s phone to watch a bit. “Ugh, boring. So slow. It needs a refresh.”
“The point isn’t to be fast,” Valerie said. “That’s, like, the anti-point. It’s good for meditation and keeping limber.”
“I bet no one knows about this.”
“A lot of people know about it. You see older people doing it in parks all the time.”
“I’ve never seen that, and anyway, a bunch of grandmas aren’t going to have the vision to level this up. I know what I’m talking about. I have almost two thousand followers.”
“I thought it was one thousand.”
“Overone thousand. That’s basically two.” Fernie sounded thoughtful as she fast-forwarded the tutorial. “Obviously those sad, saggy pajama things have to go. Is it Korean? Korean stuff is hot.”
“Chinese.”
“Oh.”
Fernie left and Valerie finished off the first twenty-four forms before checking her phone to find a text from her mother, this time wanting advice on how Erica should ask her bridesmaids to be part of her wedding party.
I know you expected to join in her special day, and we thought you’d prefer to be free to help out at the wedding and the reception,she wrote.
Valerie took three breaths before she replied with a link to Poshy Picnics, a service she’d used for Blair’s engagement. She waited for her mom to ask Valerie how her trip up north was, but all she got was a thumbs-up.
Maybe she needed three more breaths. Then she took three more and decided to get a snack. On the way, she took a detour to casually walk by the office, for no particular reason. What a surprise… Nicowas there, talking to Roger. He paused when he caught sight of her and waved. It was a tiny gesture, and done mid-conversation, but it was just for her. With a lift in her step, she made her way to the downstairs kitchen.
