Neutral Zone

by Amber Lynn

There wasn’t any particular inflection on the sound, which made it hard to figure out how she took the news. She was sure to deal with lawyers all the time, so it was probably only natural to her that he’d been to his. Until Nina, he’d only had to see Luke in person maybe once or twice a year.

  Brady still had a scroll of paper in his hand, which he was surprised she hadn’t commented on. He’d tucked it behind his leg slightly when he saw her in the elevator, and he kept it there as much as he could. It dawned on him he really should’ve stopped by his car, but he wasn’t thinking.

  The elevator door opened, and Nina stepped out. Brady quickly followed and found another hallway in need of redecorating. If Nina spent any time in the place, it was surprising to see she hadn’t made improvements.

  “Are you going to tell me why I’m here?”

  Nina looked over her shoulder at him and smiled. Reaching back, she grabbed his free hand and pulled him along.

  “I told you. I found a way to make you believe me. It was so obvious. She mentioned I should ask you to come in with me some time, but that was weeks ago. You weren’t talking to me, so I knew there’d be no way you’d be willing to come.”

  They briefly stopped in front of an open door, where Brady finally got an inkling of where he was. Next to the door was a name, one he was familiar with.

  “Dr. Emily Barnes, as in the Dr. Barnes?”

  “My reputation precedes me, I take it.”

  The woman Brady had seen in the window stood up from behind a desk. The arrangement of the room seemed a little weird. In front to the desk there was a large black lounger kind of couch that was out of place. A big open space on the opposite side of the room next to a chair had indentations in the carpet that appeared to be from the couch.

  “You want me to talk to your shrink?”

  “Psychiatrist,” both women said in unison.

  Brady shrugged. He’d heard Nina say shrink before, so apparently, she didn’t want to get on the doctor’s bad side.

  “Why don’t you come in and sit down, Brady. Nina has told me things have potentially hit a turning point between you and that you need some kind of assurances that she’s committed to a relationship.”

  The woman directed them to sit on the couch, which Nina immediately took a seat on. The woman looked at the action with a slightly perplexed look. Nina patted the empty part of the couch next her, and Brady decided to go ahead and sit. He was more than a little interested in what exactly Nina was sharing.

  “So, what exactly has Nina told you about this ‘relationship?’”

  Dr. Barnes smiled as she sat down. She had a thick manila folder in front of her on the desk. She opened it up and flipped through the pages. Brady leaned forward to try to get a little peek at what was on the papers. The doctor noticed and gave him a stink eye as she pulled them closer to her.

  “I’m sure you are aware that Nina often doesn’t have a filter, so I know everything she wants me to know about you. Up to a point,” she quickly qualified.

  “She won’t let me tell her specifics about the sex, which I’ve come to agree is probably for the best,” Nina added.

  “But everything else is fair game?”

  Brady had to think about how that news felt. He knew Nina spent time with the shrink, so he already knew he was probably a topic of conversation, but there were parts of his life he preferred weren’t shared with the world.

  “Nina has told me she wants me to tell you anything you ask, but I’m not sure that’s the best idea. That’s why I wanted to assure you there are places I try to steer away from in our conversations. As long as you two are happy with how things are in those regards and no one is getting hurt or abused, I try to move the conversation to other topics.”

  “She’s kind of a prude,” Nina whispered in his ear.

  Brady rolled his eyes. The comments from the doctor made it pretty clear Nina had overshared at least some. There had to be a reason the doctor mentioned hurt or abused.

  “I don’t abuse Nina.”

  That needed to be absolutely clear before anything else was said. Taken out of context, some of the things they did were on the risqué side, but she never once told him to stop and she sought him out for more. She reached over and gripped his hand tightly, possibly to reassure him.

  “She has made it clear that is the case. What she mainly wanted to bring you here for is to share something personal that she thinks will help you understand where she stands as far as the relationship goes.”

  “And you being here will make it more believable?”

  The doctor shrugged a little. Brady was pretty sure he’d walked into some kind of trap. Something definitely felt off.

  “As I told Nina when we started our sessions, they only work if she tells me the truth. Sometimes, that truth can be in the eye of the beholder, but for what she wants to talk about today, I think you’ll understand it is in fact a truth.”

  “I can’t sleep with people.”

  Brady was still making sense of what the doctor said when Nina blurted the statement out. Brady raised his free hand up to his face and massaged his temple. The day had started off so good, and somewhere things were going off a cliff.

  Chapter 23

  Brady sat there stupefied by Nina’s comment. She didn’t blame the poor guy. To him, it couldn’t make much sense.

  His mouth moved a couple times, but it took until the third time for words to come out. Nina hadn’t thought about what letting him in on her secrets might mean for the relationship. He’d said she needed to find a way to make him believe her by dinner that night, and she’d panicked. Seeing that she had an appointment set for the day, a light bulb had gone off, but she was starting to think she’d made the wrong decision.

  “I’m taking it we’re talking about the actual act of sleeping and not sex.”

  At least Brady’s brain hadn’t exploded from working overtime to try to catch up with what was going on. He didn’t even rip his hand from Nina’s, but she was pretty sure that was just because he was too confused.

  “Yes, I’m talking about sleeping.”

  She scooted closer to him and put her head down on his shoulder. She wanted to gauge if and when he decided to pull away. His hand could get too warm at some point, but if she was leaning on him, it added another level to see how and when he disengaged.

  “Are you telling me you were pretending to sleep when I woke up and jumped in the shower this morning. If that’s true, you are a great actress, because I tried for almost a minute to coax a kiss out of you, and you didn’t so much as lick your lips.”

  Brady pushed his shoulder out to get her head off it. At first, Nina’s stomach sank, but he reached over and turned her face so he could look at her. She gave him a small smile and shook her head. She wished she would’ve felt the wake-up he’d attempted. The fact that she didn’t just proved how tired she was.

  “No, I was fast asleep.”

  His brow furrowed and his mouth moved to the left as he thought about it. It felt a little reassuring that he was as confused as she was.

  “You’re the first person I’ve ever been able to sleep with. I can’t fall asleep with someone else in bed with me.”

  Tilting his head to the side, the cocky smile she was used to seeing reappeared, which helped the butterflies in her stomach calm down a little. The man should be proud of the development. At the same time, he had to think she was a complete ninny for her admission.

  “Are we talking ever?”

  Nina was almost thirty, so she understood why he’d ask the question. He didn’t get into serious relationships, but he had short-term bed buddies that probably slept over a few times. On the road, it was sure to happen all the time in hotels.

  “As I told Dr. Barnes already, I may have crashed in Hannah’s bed after getting really drunk, but never with a guy. I’ve always left immediately after sex or tried to kick them out as fast as possible.”

  “But you’ve slept with me twice.”


  The cocky smile really hadn’t left his face. A part of Nina wanted to smack it off him, but he deserved to revel in the honor.

  “You wanted truth from me. That’s it.”

  “What’s it?”

  The smile faded a little as he tried to follow Nina’s line of thinking. She thought it was obvious and scrunched her face slightly, trying to will him to figure it out. It was asking a lot, because most people didn’t follow her line of thinking. Brady had been fairly good about reading in between the lines.

  He’d been the only person to figure out there were times she needed to give up total control. Everyone else was too afraid of her and how easily she could crush them like bugs.

  “I like hearing you snore.”

  Brady tilted his head to the side and raised his brows. It was an interesting way to put it on Nina’s side, but that was one of the biggest aspects of it.

  “So I snore?”

  Nina nodded. “I’m sure you already knew that. You share rooms with guys all the time on the road.”

  “I’m sure not a single one of them has ever told me that they like it. So, my snoring is like a lullaby or something for you?”

  He’d been staring at Nina, but glanced over to Dr. Barnes as he asked the question. It wasn’t clear if he was looking for a second opinion or trying to figure out how much they are going to talk about in front of a third party. Nina was used to airing her business in front of the doctor, but she knew how hard it was in the beginning.

  She thought there would come a time where he wanted some kind of evidence that what she said was true. That’s why it made sense to have Dr. Barnes there. She had notes from their sessions that would prove Nina had brought up this stuff before.

  “Sort of. It lets me know you’re still breathing and that soothes me. You remember the night I first brought up the bet with you?”

  Nina waited for him to turn back to her and slowly nod before she continued. She tried to reassure him with a smile, but she wasn’t sure how well she pulled it off. Any smile on his face had disappeared as confusion took over.

  “I called that drinking marathon to order because a guy tried to fall asleep in my bed the night before. I wanted to prove to everyone that I’d changed, so I laid there for what felt like an hour and tried to fall asleep instead of smothering him with a pillow, but I couldn’t do it. His snoring shook the walls of the apartment and drove me crazy.”

  “This is also the guy who was the last straw in a long line of boredom that finally made you want to take a chance on me?”

  Nina nodded quickly. A throat clearing from the other side of the desk caused her to sigh. What he’d said was sort of true, but Nina liked to cover up the other part of it.

  “You promised that if I was involved, you would tell the full truth so I’m not uncomfortable sitting here listening.”

  Obviously, Nina should have thought a little longer about getting the other woman involved. The goal was the truth, so Nina had to get it all out. That didn’t stop her from glaring over at the doctor.

  “Okay,” Nina said as she looked back to Brady. “I’m pretty sure I’ve already told you this, but I had decided I wanted to give you a chance at the beginning of the year, but by then I was seriously thinking about buying the team. I’d put feelers out and had Smitty looking into things. With that in play, and in the hopes of keeping peace with Hannah and her crazy husband, I decided I had to wait until everything was clear to make sure things didn’t get messed up.”

  She stopped for a second and rolled her eyes up, so she wasn’t looking directly at Brady. The next part was the hard part. The part she wasn’t sure how he’d react to.

  “I didn’t expect to feel like I do about you. You promised a lot in those early months after Hannah and Curtis’ wedding, and it all came with the understanding it was a short-term fling that satisfied both of us.”

  Nina didn’t really enjoy rehashing things and reminding Brady of why he got pissed off at her. The whole thing was sure to come back and bite her in the ass hard. Through it all, though, he didn’t let go of her hand.

  “How exactly do you feel about me, Nina? You seem to enjoy listening to me snore, but you’ve made it clear that what you want is more important than me. Whether you’re just fuck buddies for a weekend or a married couple, there is a certain level of respect you give your partner, and you haven’t given me that.”

  Her eyes widened a little when Brady went so far as saying the M word. She understood that he despised the word as much as she did, but maybe he just brought it up because she’d mentioned a wedding. She hoped they were somewhere between those two ends of the spectrums. If she was sleeping in the same bed as him, they had to be more than just fuck buddies.

  She squeezed his hand and nodded her head. She seemed to be doing that a lot.

  “I know. That’s why I started getting help. Not because of you exactly, but Dr. Barnes can tell you that I talk about you all the time. She’s been trying to help me realize when the usual way my brain works is wrong.”

  “I hate to badmouth the woman while she’s in the room, but if she helped you with the decision to not tell me you were buying the team, she’s a shitty doctor.”

  Brady didn’t bother looking apologetic as he spoke. He wasn’t ever going to get over the team thing. Even if they did for some reason get married, they would be sitting on their porch swing with gray hair and he’d bring it up again.

  “She wasn’t aware until after the fact that I’d made that decision. I don’t sit in here and go over my business deals, just like I don’t go over them with someone I think I’ll have a fun weekend with. I went what I thought was the extra mile with you and there weren’t legal issues.”

  “I must have really gotten you hot and bothered if you went the extra mile.”

  He sounded disappointed, and somewhat resigned. He didn’t seem to understand that it was a good thing every last detail was coming out. It was the only way for him to understand.

  “Shut up, okay. We got off topic. You already know most of that stuff, so quit sounding so wounded. You asked how I feel about you. For me, it’s more about how you make me feel, and that is safe and secure. No one has ever made me feel that way. That’s why I think I can sleep with you.”

  “So, it’s not just because you like the sound of my snores. I was starting to get worried that if someone hit me in the nose wrong while I was playing, I might need to worry about being smothered while I sleep.”

  The smirk was back on his face. That was a good sign, so was the fact he was joking around.

  “I wouldn’t go that far. I’d probably pay to have your nose fixed rather than smother you, though.”

  Brady flexed his hand to free it from her grip. Before she could worry about what it meant, the hand reached up and engulfed the left side of her face. She rubbed her head into it for a second, but was stopped when he leaned forward and did some smothering of his own, his lips against hers.

  His mouth opened as he slanted his head and coaxed her mouth open. She wasted no time following his lead and returning the sloppy kiss, which sadly barely got a chance to start before a throat cleared to get their attention.

  When it came to the sex they’d had, kissing wasn’t generally a big part of it, at least not with their lips. They’d kissed all sorts of other body parts, but a more traditional kiss hadn’t really happened. Nina wanted to enjoy the experience a little longer, but Brady pushed her back and turned to face the doctor.

  “I don’t do much couples’ counseling, but I’ve already mentioned to Nina that I’d be open to try some sessions.”

  Brady looked a little skeptical about the idea as he glanced over at Nina. She wasn’t sure they were to a point that really needed couples' counseling. She thought of them as a couple, but he might not have been to that point.

  “I think we’ll get back to you on that one, Doc. Are we done here?”

  The question was directed at Nina, even though he’d mentioned the doctor just before i
t. It was something Nina wasn’t sure she had the right answer to. He was the one who needed to be able to trust her, and she couldn’t read his mind to know for sure whether that had been accomplished.

  Nina always forgot to put her phone on vibrate during a session. Whenever it went off, she reiterated to the doctor that she was a very important person who had to be reachable at all times. That being said, it wasn’t surprising to hear the sound of a text message loudly ring out from her phone, annoying but not surprising. She had been getting ready t0 ask Brady whether he was ready to leave, and instead was forced to give him an apologetic look.

  He was busy fishing his phone out of his pocket, so he didn’t see the look. The reason her ring had seemed so loud was because his had gone off at the same time. Nina had to dig through her purse to fish hers out, which meant Brady was faster to read the message.

  “The babies are coming,” Brady said and promptly stood.

  Nina was still using her finger to slide down the message from Hannah to see the same exact thing. She could’ve just taken his word, but she wanted to verify she got the same message and hadn’t been forgotten. If Curtis was the one sending them out because Hannah was too lost trying to push the watermelons out of her, Nina sort of expected to be the last person to know.

  “What are we supposed to do?”

  Nina joined Brady standing as she asked the question. Their hands were still clutching each other, and as much as Nina wanted to stay and keep talking, she figured they should do something. Since she’d never had anyone in her life have a kid, protocol was a little new to her.

  Brady shrugged his shoulders. Nina thought for sure he had the game plan figured out. He’d stood up like he was ready for some kind of action.

  “I’d suggest heading to the hospital.”

  The doctor’s suggestion was a logical one. If Nina’s head was thinking clearly, she was sure she’d have come to the same conclusion. The thought of being in a hospital was not her idea of fun, but it was undoubtedly expected.

  “I’ve got my car just down the street. Let’s go.”