Page 19 of Bully's Second Chance
I waved at her from over my head. “Goodnight, Lilyanna.”
As I left her in my office, it took all I had to keep booking it to my car. I knew if I doubled back, Lily and I wouldn’t even make it home. I’d take her against every fucking surface of my office until I couldn’t see straight, and neither of us needed that in our lives. Not with our history, anyway.
I got what I needed, she got hers, and we needed to leave it at that.
Except, she was on my mind the entire way home.
Not only was she on my mind, but my fingers were itching to call her. Even as I pulled up to my house at two-thirty in the morning, I had thoughts of calling her and demanding that she come over and keep my bed warm next to me.
But, those thoughts dissipated the instant I opened the front door.
“No, please. It hurts too much.” The sound of my father’s wailing haunted me as I rushed up the steps.
“What’s going on?” I asked as I charged into his room. “What’s happening?”
His in-home nurse, Adelaide, looked up at me while she administered something into his IV. “Nothing’s happening.”
“Oh, God,” Dad choked out.
I held my arm out. “Obviously, something’s wrong. He’s up at two-thirty in the morning, screaming out in pain. I heard him all the way down at the front door!”
Adelaide glared at me. “And yelling at the top of your lungs to get over him won’t make things easier. We already talked about this, Mr. Levy. Several times now. As things with your father progress, this is how bad it’s going to get. This is why he needs to be in a hospital instead of—”
I pointed at her face. “If you attempt to use this as a moment to lecture me on letting him die in a hospital surrounded by strangers, then you can shut it. You’re not here to give me advice. You’re here to keep him pain-free. That’s your job.”
She shrugged. “Do you hear him hollering anymore? Because all I hear is you.”
She was right, and when I looked down at my father, he was already passed back out and completely asleep.
“I need your approval to up his pain medication if he’s going to keep getting through the night,” Adelaide said softly.
I flopped into a chair next to my father’s bedside. “Do whatever you have to do. You have my approval.”
The nurse kept talking to me, but all I did was take my father’s frail, limp hand into mine. His skin had become so translucent that I could see most of his major veins. The liver spots had completely taken over up and down his arm, showcasing his age in a way that pissed me off all over again. My father was better than this. He was one of the most reputable and most powerful men I’d ever known.
But, I guess cancer didn’t care that my father was a reputable or respectable man.
And sometimes, during my worst moments in the middle of the night, I prayed for the cancer to simply take him already so we could all be done with the hellscape that was his weathered existence.
8
Lily
As the first two weeks of my job came and went, only one thing stood out in my mind.
“I slept with him,” I whispered to myself.
As I stared at my computer screen during my lunch break, mindlessly dipping carrots into some ranch dressing, I couldn’t put it out of my mind. For the past two weeks, I’d resolved myself to replaying that scene over and over in my head. And sometimes, I had such vivid dreams about how he felt while he filled me up that I had to wake up, take a shower, and rub one out just to get back to sleep.
I hated myself for it, but I’d be damned if I let it affect my work.
The good news was that I quickly got the hang of things. I memorized most of the extension numbers to transfer calls that made their way up to me, and I had become very good at toggling Jax’s work schedule while avoiding things like 2 A.M. video conferences. Jax didn’t do well when he was tired, and quite frankly, neither did I. So, I danced around it as much as I could.
And at least for now, I was succeeding.
I’d gotten used to Jax’s mood swings, too. Some mornings, he came in with coffee and a muffin to share. But, other mornings? He came in cursing to himself and barking out orders for the entire building to hear as he made his way into his office. On those days, he usually slammed his door and didn’t emerge until the day was over.
Though thankfully, we hadn’t had a day like that in about a week.
