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“I’m not firing you, Hedra,” Boone said.
“Why not?” she asked.
He stood and walked toward her, cupping her shoulders before pressing a gentle kiss against her forehead. “Go take some Advil for your head and have a hot shower. I’ll make you my guaranteed hangover cure breakfast.”
“I cannot eat,” she said, grimacing lightly, “and you’re supposed to be at work.”
“I don’t need to be at Abena’s until this afternoon, and I already told Coop I wouldn’t be in the office this morning.”
“Boone -”
He kissed her forehead again. “Do as I ask, little lamb.”
* * *
“You feel better, don’t you?” Boone said with a satisfied smile.
“Shockingly, yes.” Hedra drained her water glass before sipping at her coffee. “I had no idea that avocado toast, a poached egg, and strawberries are a good hangover breakfast.”
“People think they need to eat greasy foods to absorb the alcohol, but that’s bullshit,” Boone said. “The alcohol has long been digested and processed, and now you’re just feeling dehydration and low blood sugar. What you need to do is have some carbs to get that blood sugar back to normal, but balance it with protein and healthy fats.”
She blinked at him. “You don’t strike me as someone who drinks a lot.”
“I don’t, but I had my moments back in the day,” Boone said with a grin. He wiped the counter of toast crumbs and threw the avocado peel into the food waste bin. “But this is actually all Derek. He hated hangovers, so he did everything he could to mitigate the effects.”
His face went soft with the memories. “We’d drag our asses out of bed in the morning, both of us looking like shit and regretting every drop of beer we’d drank the night before. Derek poached the eggs and brewed the coffee, and I made the avocado toast.”
She smiled at him as he rinsed the dishcloth and laid it carefully over the sink before joining her at the table. “That sounds like a lovely memory.”
“The breakfast with him was almost worth the hangover,” he said. His happy grin - God, she loved how he looked when he talked about Derek - turned into a laugh. “Derek hated shaving and always used the hangover as an excuse not to do it. Except Cooper would have torn him a new one if he showed up without shaving. Lucky for Derek, I was more than happy to help him sha -
He cut himself off with a harsh cough before jumping up and taking her empty plate and cutlery. He loaded it in the dishwasher as Hedra sipped her coffee and watched him silently. He turned back to face her, a weird look of guilt on his face. “Do you want more coffee?”
“I’m good, thank you,” she said.
He filled her water glass and sat across from her again. Alfie pawed at his legs, and Boone picked him up and set him in his lap. “Will you tell me who texted you, Hedra?”
“First, I want to assure you that neither you nor Althea are in danger. He isn’t crazy or a stalker. He’s just… sad,” she said.
“Who?” he asked.
She blew out her breath. Thanks to the Advil and the caffeine, her headache had lessened, but she still wasn’t sure if she was up to talking about Dianne. But a small part of her wanted to tell Boone about Dianne. He, more than anyone, would understand Hedra’s grief and sorrow.
“My best friend was a woman named Dianne. She was a human in a family of shifters, like me, and when we met in high school, we instantly clicked. It was like we’d been friends our entire life.” She smiled at Boone. “It was like that for you with Derek, wasn’t it?”
Boone nodded. “Yeah.”
“We both knew we wanted to be nurses and went to nursing school together. After we graduated, we started working in the emergency department at Saint Mary’s Hospital. A couple of months later, Dianne started dating a cheetah shifter named Mateo. They got engaged a year later.”
“Did you like Mateo?” Boone asked.
“I didn’t dislike him, but he wasn’t my favourite person or anything, and I definitely wasn’t his,” she said. “He thought I was too loud, too opinionated, too… much.”
“Yeah, I know guys like him,” Boone said. “They’re always assholes.”
She shrugged. “Dianne loved him very much, and for all of his faults, Mateo was deeply in love with Dianne. He would have done anything for her.”
She traced the rim of her coffee mug, the hurt and the grief washing over her as keenly as it had those first few months after Dianne’s death. “I was working a shift at the ER. It was a Wednesday night, and a perfectly ordinary shift until a car accident victim came in.”
