Need you Now (Top Shelf Romance Book 2)

by Laurelin Paige

  The old woman snorts, and I look over in surprise. “I’ll be obedient to those bishops the day I die and not a day sooner.” At my expression, she huffs again. “I’m obedient to God and to my conscience and to the poor. I’m obedient to my fellow sisters.”

  And then under her breath, she mutters, “Obedient to men. Hmph.”

  “But they’re the entire administrative structure of the Church.”

  “For now. But the Church belongs to us as much as it belongs to them.” And then she nods her head at her own words.

  I want to protest this—there’s still so much I can complain about, ways that the Church hasn’t changed since the abuse scandals for example—but then she adds, “We make a place for people to meet God and for God to meet Her people. A place that is safe and free of corruption.”

  And I can’t argue with that. In fact, it’s the perfect counterargument to my complaining about the evil hierarchy of the Church—the nuns have carved out a place separate from the bishops and the bullshit and the bureaucracy, a place where they can put their heads down and get on with the work of serving the sick and the poor.

  Of course, I understand that it’s not that simple—I’ve heard Tyler talk enough about the troubles between the nuns and the Vatican to know that the men still frequently try to take the women in hand. But the sisters, as the saying goes, persist.

  I notice the Reverend Mother shivering the slightest bit and turn down the AC. “So that sorts obedience,” I concede. “But what about chastity?”

  “I’ll admit, I’m less strict about it than many Reverend Mothers—as you well know. But we ask chastity of our vowed nuns not only as a trust and sacrifice to God, but also so that they live lives free of other obligations. Our sisters are free to serve the poor completely because they don’t have children and families of their own. Because they don’t have needy men taking up their time.”

  Well. Fair.

  “It just seems like so much to give up,” I say.

  “It is.” The prioress doesn’t argue with me. “It is.”

  We turn onto a street of large old houses; the monastery sprawls over a shady corner, marked only with a hand-painted wooden sign by the porch stairs and a Virgin Mary statue in the semi-neglected flower bed.

  When I park the car in the driveway, the Reverend Mother turns to me once more. “So you love Zenobia. Are you certain she does not love you back?”

  I think of her confession on the day she asked me to do this with her. That she’d always wanted me. And then I think of her laughter at the skating rink when I mentioned marrying her, of her troubled face when I told her she would be the only woman I cared about, of my messy and imperfect reaction the night those people were shitty to her at the gala.

  It’s only for a month. It’s not like we have to figure out how to raise children together.

  “I’m certain,” I say tiredly.

  “Have you told her?”

  I shake my head.

  “Tell her,” the old nun commands, unwinding her fingers from one another so that she can poke one in my direction. “She deserves to know.”

  “Isn’t it…kind of cheap to fling that at her now? She has so much to think about already, and it feels like I’m trying to sabotage her moment.”

  “I like your awareness, but in this case, you’re using it as an excuse.” She nods to herself again, the starched fabric of her wimple brushing roughly along her shoulders. “Are all those muscles just for show or are you actually strong, my son?”

  And with that, she unbuckles her seat belt. I scramble to help her out of the car, and we don’t say anything else as I walk her to the door, but the look she gives me before she goes inside is very loud with all the things she doesn’t say.

  Tell her, the look says above all else, and my heart gives a hopeful and ugly lurch at the very thought.

  Mom has a NG tube coming out of her nose, and she hates it. She can be patient about IVs and ports, but the moment there’s something on her face, she gets irritable—and in this case, the thing is in her face, not just on it.

  I do my Sean Bell thing when I get there, the Oldest Child thing, all the rituals and little sacrifices made to the Church of Cancer. I see first to Mom, then to Dad, who is, as always, a fraying shell of himself in these circumstances. After Mom is asleep, exhausted from the pain and the procedures, I manage to find the charge nurse and doctor on rotation, and avail myself of every detail of the day.

  All that sorted, I send Dad out to get us some real dinner—not cafeteria dinner—and sit in Mom’s room and try to work from my laptop.

  Aiden shows up a few minutes later, his suit and hair rumpled, like he spent the day sleeping (which I know for a fact he didn’t because he emailed me no less than three times this morning about a puppy he wants to adopt). He flings himself on the small, hard couch next to me.

  “She doing okay?” he asks, running his hand through his messy hair. He’s breathing hard too.

  “Yeah. I mean, for now. We don’t know yet what’s causing the blockage, and I guess the suction got messy and difficult, so that’s not great.”

  “Oh,” he says.

  “I texted like three hours ago. Where were you?”

  “I just got your message,” he says vaguely. “I was almost out to the farmhouse. Had to turn back.”

  Hmm.

  I give him a more careful once-over. His tie has been hastily re-knotted, the laces on his dress shoes are untied, and there’s something about his face, all flushed and swollen-mouthed.

  “You were having sex!” I accuse, sitting up.

  “Shh!” he hushes me frantically, glancing over at Mom, who’s still deep in a morphine nap.

  “Don’t shh me,” I say irritably. “You think Mom doesn’t know you’re a total fuckboy?”

  Aiden looks very annoyed at my lack of quiet. “That’s not true.”

  I roll my eyes. If Aiden were a Wakefield Saga character, there would be all kinds of words for him. Rakehell, scoundrel, cyprian, cad, libertine, lothario. He’s barely better than Double Condom Mike, and I know a lot of the trouble he’s gotten in because I was right there next to him. In fact, until he started acting weird last month, I would have put good money on him having more sex and with more women than me.

  “I don’t care that you were having sex, dummy,” I say. “Mom wouldn’t either. It’s just a dumb reason not to be here.”

  He sighs. “I know. I honestly didn’t look at my phone until after though. I came as soon as I saw your text.”

  “Fine. Was she good?”

  Aiden looks puzzled for a minute, like he can’t quite track this turn in conversation.

  “The fuck, Aiden,” I clarify, exasperated. “Was she good?”

  He opens his mouth. Closes it. And before he can ever make the words come out, Dad is walking in with Indian carryout, and we all fall on the plastic bags like a pack of starving wolves.

  The next five or six days pass in a blur. Between Zenny’s life and mine, all we get together are nights and mornings. Sometimes a phone call during the day if we’re lucky.

  I never do work up the courage to say what the Reverend Mother wants me to say, but also, it’s so hard to do when our quiet moments of snuggle and talk have been robbed from us, and all we have are stolen, sweaty hours in the dark and the ensuing bleary-eyed mornings.

  I’ll vow to do it tomorrow, and then tomorrow comes and I vow to do it the next day, and on and on it goes, until I almost feel like telling her is an impossible task, a Holy Grail-style quest that God has set before me and I’ll never be pure and brave enough to complete.

  It’s maddening.

  Towards the end of the week, Mom starts developing pneumonia. It makes a godawful wheezing when she breathes, and things start to change in the predictable comings and goings of the nurses and doctors. There’s more bustle around the bed, more bags being hung, more tests and X-rays. Conversations start taking a more somber tone. Mom is given a cannula and antibiotics. I
finish reading In the Arms of the Disgraced Duke, and we speculate about the next Wakefield novel, which comes out next week. We watch HGTV on the hospital television and make fun of the tiny house people.

  I tell Valdman I’ll be working remotely for the week. It doesn’t go badly, but it doesn’t go well. He’s annoyed with me, annoyed with how much I’m willing to let my family interfere with making him money. His displeasure is the kind of thing I would have cared about before, but now…

  Now, I couldn’t fucking care less.

  And then somehow this week is gone, this precious week, one of the two I have with Zenny, and I have nothing to show for it. Not a healthy mom, not a confession of love, not even a boss who likes me as much as he did at the beginning of the week. It’s hard not to feel like something is slipping away from me, time or something as vital as time, and the harder I try to grab onto it, the more elusive it gets. A quick fish in the water, a ribbon in the wind.

  At night, my dreams are of empty arms and white flowers propped against fresh dirt.

  I will myself to pray again, even if it’s just to scream obscenities at the ceiling, but nothing comes. Even my anger has ribboned away in the wind.

  Chapter 25

  One week left.

  Chapter 26

  There are clouds in my mother’s lungs.

  Dr. Nguyen and I are bent over his iPad in the hallway, looking at the X-rays, while my father paces behind us.

  “This was yesterday,” Dr. Nguyen says. “And this is today.” He swipes on the tablet, bringing up the most recent image, which shows a sprawling fog of white along my mother’s lower left lung. “My best guess is that there was some aspiration into her lungs when we were suctioning her stomach. It’s not an uncommon complication in these scenarios. Unfortunately, I’m not seeing the response I’d like after three days of antibiotics.”

  I run my hand over my mouth. Not seeing the response I’d like is a polite way to frame the state of the woman in the room behind us.

  “See, I’m looking at this effusion in the lungs and I’m looking at her respiratory rate and the oximetry readings, and I’m thinking that we need to move upstairs.” Dr. Nguyen looks up at me with apology in his eyes. “She needs the ICU.”

  My dad makes a noise from behind me, and the Sean Bell who Gets Shit Done, who’s a priest in the Church of Cancer, makes note of it, shelves the noise away as a reminder to touch base with him later. But for now I make myself talk through every step of this with Dr. Nguyen, every option, every variation. Steroids, different antibiotics, CPAP, BiPAP, draining, not draining, pain management—all of the puzzle pieces are laid out and considered. Dad distantly agrees to what the doctor and I decide on, and then Dr. Nguyen goes off to make it happen. Within an hour, Mom will be moved upstairs. I try to remind myself that people move back downstairs from the ICU all the time; this isn’t a one-way street, this isn’t a cascade of dominoes. The dominoes can be picked up again, straightened and reset. It will be fine.

  I still call all the other brothers and let them know.

  Back in the room, Mom is awake, blue-lipped and ashen. She looks staggeringly unbeautiful like this, frail and strangely flattened, every line and wrinkle in her face thrown into sharp relief. And yet, I can’t remember my chest ever stitching with so much love and pride for her.

  She tries to say something to me, and she can’t find the breath to do it. I touch her arm. “It’s okay, Mom,” I say. “You don’t have to say anything right now.”

  “Need…to,” she pants.

  “Okay,” I say, taking her hand. “What is it?”

  “You…” she manages “…look…like shit.”

  I burst out laughing and when I also start crying, she doesn’t say anything. Simply gives my hand a weak squeeze.

  “We’re going up to the ICU tonight,” I say after I can speak again. I wipe my face with my sleeve. “They need time to try some more antibiotics, and they’re going to give you an oxygen mask to help you breathe while they do that.”

  She doesn’t respond for a minute. Then she says, “Will it hurt?”

  “They said the mask might be uncomfortable, but otherwise, no.”

  She looks like she wants to say something more, but she can’t catch her breath. It’s only as the nurses come in to start readying her bed and IVs for the transfer that she gets it out.

  “Go…home…few hours,” she says. “Not going to die tonight.”

  I go home.

  I shower and I do some laundry and I consider shaving for about three seconds before I decide I don’t have the energy. I’ve gone from “sexy stubble” to actually scruffy over the course of the week, but there just hasn’t been time to do anything more than wash my body and brush my teeth in between the hospital and Zenny and trying to keep a handle on work.

  So instead I yank on an old henley and some jeans and crack open my laptop to get some shit done in the quiet of my kitchen before I go back to the hospital. Before I go up to my mom’s new room in the ICU.

  Except.

  Except now that I’m home and things are quiet, it’s really hard to drown out the lingering hospital feelings. I can hear the beeps and the murmurs, I can see Mom’s face, that uncomfortable combination of sick-sunken and steroid-swollen. I can hear Dad crying softly to himself in the lounge, see the steam curling off the free, oil-black coffee as the respiratory therapist talked us through how the BiPAP would work.

  And now that I’m alone, now that I don’t have to be strong for anyone or take notes or take charge or anything else—everything crashes into me like a train from nowhere.

  Not going to die tonight.

  But she is going to die, isn’t she? Maybe not tonight, maybe not even this time at the hospital, but she’s going to die and I failed her. I threw all my money in all the directions I could, I barely let her out of my sight, I spent every waking minute trying to get her well—and I failed.

  The knowledge of it rolls through me, those prairie storms I’m always thinking of, vast and charged and ready to tear through trees and chew through houses.

  You failed

  You failed

  You failed

  She’s going to die

  She’s going to die she’s going to die she’sgoingtodie—

  With a vicious gesture, I slam my laptop closed and grab my keys, trying to escape the clouds roiling black and electric in my mind.

  “Sean!” Zenny squeaks as I wrap my arms around her from behind. “You scared me!”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, nuzzling her neck. “I couldn’t wait until you were done with your shift. I needed you.”

  She’s in the shelter kitchen, finishing up with the dishes. Now that the meal is over and the supply pantry of fresh clothes and toiletries has closed, the shelter is emptied out. Zenny’s told me before that it’s common during the warm nights of summer; people will come in to shower and to eat, but prefer to be on their own afterwards.

  “Maybe some of them feel awkward about the charity,” she’d said when she was explaining it to me. “And some of them are suspicious of us, think that we’ll try to preach to them.”

  And in a way, I can understand. Sometimes freedom is worth the discomfort.

  My hands find the hem of Zenny’s jumper and gently ruck it up to her thighs, and I give a masculine noise of distress when I discover that what I thought were leggings are socks that end just above her knees—some kind of schoolgirl fantasy and nun fantasy fused together into one.

  “Fuck, baby,” I say, my fingertips playing with the edge of her socks. The skin above is soft and smooth and warm. It tickles her where I touch. “Are you trying to kill me?”

  She giggles, breathless and happy and also trying to protest. “Sean! We can’t do this here!”

  “There’s no guests at the shelter tonight,” I say, nipping at her ear. “And Sister Mary Theresa just left. It’s just us and the front door is locked.”

  “Oh,” she says, her tone of protest giving way to something
more…intrigued. “We’re alone?”

  “We’re alone. And I want to play a little game.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s called Sean Finally Gets to Fuck Zenny in her Nun Outfit.”

  She lets out a surprised laugh, which quickly turns into an intake of breath as I spin her around and crowd her against the counter, my cock pressing rough and needy into the soft stretch of her belly. I shape my hands to her pert little tits, moving my thumbs over her nipples, which are hard and budded even through the layers of shirt and jumper between us.

  “Remember our first kiss?” I ask, brushing my nose against hers. “Right here?”

  “Yes,” she breathes.

  “Let’s pretend we’re there again.”

  “Yes,” she agrees.

  And so I kiss her. I kiss her like I did that day, a hard, searing slant of lips and tongues. A bite on her lower lip, my hands around her waist, lifting my little nun doll up on the counter and stepping between her legs. And this time when I growl, “I want to see your cunt,” there’s nothing holding me back, nothing left to make me shy away.

  This time, I help her shove her skirt up to her waist, and I get to see those sweet cotton panties for real. She spreads her legs and I step back, my cock throbbing in time to my heartbeat.

  There’s those light blue knee socks, there’s those firm, curved thighs. There’s the innocent cotton of her panties and not-so-innocent rumple of her skirt around her waist. There’s that plain white headband holding her curls away from her face, throwing the high curves of her cheeks and the graceful sweep of her jaw into lovely relief. And there’s the cross around her neck and the rosary at her waist, and they dredge up every suppressed feeling in me—fear and anger and shame and still more fear—and yet there’s also a comfort at seeing them that I can’t name. Like familiarity, but more profound.

  I don’t pretend the cross away as I drink in her body. It’s here, just as we are here, and it’s a flickering, inconstant revelation to think that God could be here too, in the same way. That sex isn’t apart from God, it’s not separate, that somehow the God that’s prayed to and sung to and served by charity and love can also be a god that’s inside of sex and exists just as much inside fucking as He does inside a prayer or a nap or a meal or anything else a human might do in a human body.