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“Shall we sleep here tonight?” He asked, coming to the bedroom with some of the fuzzy pajamas he kept in the aftercare room.
I didn’t want to sit up, as warm and snuggly as I was nestled in the thick duvet. Neil’s clothes would still be all wet, even though he’d hung them up in the bathroom and I wasn’t sure he’d be down with driving back to the house naked or getting the leather interior wet.
But I did want to be in our bed, snuggled up together in our place that was somehow more intimate than our playhouse.
“I think I’m going to pull the birthday girl card and be a pain in the ass,” I said, pushing myself up on my hands.
“Well, that will be a nice change of pace.” He smirked.
“Oh, shut up. I just want to get in bed with you and watch TV and drink all the water in the world.” I laughed and flopped back down. “And it’s a nice night. We could walk back, so you don’t have to get the seats wet.”
“The thought of putting those wet clothes back on chills me to my very marrow.” He sighed. “My brand new bone marrow.”
I raised an eyebrow. “It’s not brand new anymore.”
“Gently used,” he corrected himself. “But for you, I will risk consumption, rheumatic fever—“
“Oh, walk naked then,” I said with a laugh, and reluctantly hauled myself up.
I dressed in my pajamas and ran a comb through my hair and put it back in pigtail braids. There wasn’t much I could do about the mascara that still shadowed my eyes or the redness in my face from crying. Neil met me outside the doors, dressed miserably in his wet clothes. He turned the lights off from a master panel and set the alarm. He glanced over at me and did a double take.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Sophie.” He gestured at my hair with the hand that wasn’t holding his ruined shoes. “Are you trying to make me feel like—”
“Like a dirty old man?” I teased.
“That’s not funny.” For all Neil told me that I shouldn’t care about my age, he was incredibly sensitive about his, especially about our age gap.
“You have to stop doing that, you know.” I tried to slip my arm through his as we walked, but his wet, clammy shirt felt disgusting, even through my flannel. “I’m thirty now. I’m a real, live grown up.”
“That’s fair.”
I had a feeling he only agreed with me because it was my birthday.
We walked in silence for a short while, until the words came to me. “I wish I could love myself as much as you and El-Mudad love me.”
Neil took my hand and squeezed it. “I do, too.”
At that moment, gazing into the eyes of this man, with whom I’d survived a lifetime of tragedy and sorrow and come out stronger for it, I truly did.
Then Neil stumbled and cursed. “Oh, bloody...I’ve stubbed my fucking toe.”
I sputtered a laugh that I immediately covered with my hand. “Oh my god, I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t be...it’s not funny.”
He stopped and wriggled his feet into his wet shoes, grimacing. “Now they’ll be water-stained, two-sizes too small, and filled with a pint of my blood.”
That only made me laugh harder.
Then the wet shoes started making the most obscene squelching sound, and he couldn’t contain himself anymore, either. We laughed until we were both doubled over, gasping.
When I finally got myself under control, I said, “Even though today started out really shitty...This was a great birthday.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” he said, still out of breath. Just down the hill, the lights of the electric golf cart security used to drive around the compound winked into view. “Do you know what would make it even more special?”
“A ride on a golf cart?” I asked with a quirk of my lips.
“Just so.” Neil raised his arms and waved, calling, “Hello! Could we trouble you for a lift?”
I tilted my head back and looked up at the stars. I had two men who were madly in love with me. More friends and loved ones than I probably deserved.
Maybe thirty wouldn’t be such a terrible year, after all.
Chapter Three
A few weeks after my birthday, I got the best ever belated present.
“They found a kidney!” My half-sister, Molly, shouted over the phone the moment I said, “Hello?”
Seconds before, I’d been walking out of Hermès. Now, I stood in the door, my purchases on the ground beside me.
“Ma’am?” someone said behind me, snapping me back to reality. I picked up my shopping bag and hustled through the rest of the way out, into the crisp New York autumn.
“Sophie? Are you there?”
I juggled the phone to my other ear, my hands shaking. “Yes, I’m just stunned! Oh my god! When do you have the surgery?”
“Like, now,” she said excitedly. “I just got to Ann Arbor. They flew me here!”
