What Maude didn’t know was that Don still hadn’t called her by her first name because Dr. Keating, his employer, had forbid it. Wyatt knew it too. That was why they shared a knowing glance.
Then they just sat there. Maude wanted to ask what were they waiting on, but she didn’t go there. She was hopeful, but she didn’t go there. “So,” she said, “how long have you guys worked for Edmund?”
Edmund? They glanced at each other again. They couldn’t even fix their mouths to call that always-official man by his first name. Teri and Shannon and the other ladies he sometimes entertained called him that, but they were more in the boss’s league than this waif of a girl.
“For me,” said Wyatt, “it’s been about ten years now.”
“Really?”
“And for me,” said Don, “it’s been close to sixteen.”
“Sixteen years? You’ve been his bodyguard for sixteen years?”
Don nodded. “His father originally hired me because I was a young guy too. His son was five years older than I was, but we were still pretty much the same age and therefore he figured we’d get along swimmingly.”
“Did you?”
“Originally? Nope. He was so quiet and into his own head that it was just boring working for him. He was so guarded. Even back then.”
“You considered him guarded?”
“Oh yeah,” said Don.
“So did I when I came onboard,” said Wyatt. “He’s a very private man.”
“But I paid attention,” said Don. “He was just a rich kid trying to figure it out too. And he had a lot of responsibility on his shoulders. He was like his father’s right hand man eventhough he had an older sister, and he was tasked with keeping that sister out of trouble. Which she always got into anyway.”
Maude was surprised. “He had to look out for Natasha?”
Don nodded. “It was his old man’s insistence even though he was younger than she was. But she was like his child the way she got in trouble and his parents expected him to handle it. I used to call him her handler until she went too far and he gave up.”
“What did she do?”
Don wasn’t about to go there. “That’s not my business to tell,” he said.
But you told all his other business, Maude wanted to say, but she didn’t go there. She wanted answers and for the most part he was giving her answers. “Since both of you have been with him for so long, he must be a nice guy to work for,” she said.
But her comment only got crickets from both men.
“He’s not nice?”
More crickets.
“Well okay then,” she said. And they laughed.
But as she sat back still waiting at that hospital, she didn’t know what to make of Don’s comments. Edmund was Natasha’s handler once upon a time? But she went too far and he gave up on her? What was that about, she wondered?
But before she could wonder long, Don suddenly hopped out of the car, Wyatt sat erect, and the back passenger door opened. And before Maude could move from the middle of the backseat, Edmund, dressed in another one of his fancy suits, got on the backseat right beside her. They were so close that her arm was overlapping his arm.
But there was an awkwardness there too. Because there was a great difference now. This man had been inside of her. Very deep inside of her. They had been in bedtogether, wrapped into each other’s arms. They had literally and figuratively slept together. They weren’t strangers anymore.
Or were they?
Don closed the back door, got back in on the front passenger seat, and then Wyatt drove away.
“Sorry I’m late,” Edmund said to Maude as they finally left that hospital.
“What happened this time? Another surgery?”
