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  The door to his shower opened, and then closed.

  Nina’s wet arms came around him from behind.

  “This is a good shower.”

  “I rented the apartment for this shower,” he said. He kept his eyes closed and in the spray.

  “You know, you’re messy, but you’re also really, really clean.”

  “No one notices that.”

  “Like, you could perform surgery on your kitchen counter. Store human organs in the fridge.”

  “I know.”

  “There are six towels on your bathroom floor, and I would lick the floor of this shower and not worry.”

  “I like to scrub things when I’m freaking out, but the other stuff is overwhelming.” He could feel Nina’s breasts against him, and he couldn’t help it. The day had been long and awful and he was trashed from his run and everything he was feeling, but her softness along his skin was having its predictable effect.

  “When I’m freaking out I call meetings and make everyone go through everything with me, again, ten times. I micromanage.”

  “I yell.”

  “I open my online banking app and expand every line item.”

  “I wake up in the middle of the night, drive to the hospital, and audit all my charts.”

  “I eat.”

  “I lift.”

  “I write long emails to Tay or Adam or Rachel or the administrator for the farmhands program or my producers with bulleted lists about everything I am thinking about.”

  “I write my sister. Des.”

  “Yeah?”

  “But that’s a new thing. Probably helps more than the other things.”

  “Did you write her about all of this?”

  “Yeah. Didn’t help.”

  “Maybe she’ll write back with something that will.”

  “Maybe.”

  “What’s this ledge along the side?”

  Sam opened his eyes and turned around. Nina was looking at him, water in her long eyelashes, her skin shiny, her hair completely wet and plastered along her breasts, her shoulders, her arms. It made her face seem totally exposed and young.

  Water was dripping from the ends of her nipples, sluicing between her breasts.

  “Not sure. It’s a little high to sit on comfortably, but that must be what it’s for, it’s so long and deep.”

  “Maybe something’s behind it? That’s bumping into the shower space?”

  “I’ve thought of that. Could be.”

  Nina put her hands on his upper arms and turned him. “Sit there.”

  He did. The tile was cold under his ass, but not cold enough to keep him from reacting to the intensity in her face.

  “I’ve told you about the other things I’ve done, when I’m feeling freaked out and lost.”

  “Yeah,” he said. She looked at him steadily. Comfortable. She was a woman, careworn, beautiful, sure of herself. She looked sure of him.

  When his mom had told him stories about her early marriage to his dad, their road trips, her gaffes as a new Catholic, how he saved his fares from driving a taxi so he could have his own chauffeur’s license someday, all of it—he had loved those stories because they made him feel he had come from love. That no matter how frustrated he became, how fucked-up, how much effort it just took him to fucking live, it was never hard for him to love.

  He could love, even if he couldn’t show it the right way.

  He didn’t need anything but to have the people he loved near.

  So he could see them and know they were okay.

  If he thought about Nina when she was young, when she was hurting, he wished he could have done something to make it easier for her. He didn’t know how that worked, exactly, because it wasn’t possible, but he wanted that.

  He wanted her to be happy now, and he wanted her to have always been happy, and if there was anything she ever told him that made her happy or made her less sad, ever, in her whole life, he would be for that thing.

  That’s a thing he would be for.

  No matter what it was.

  And if there was ever anything she told him that he could do now that would make her happy, that was a thing that he would do for as long as she would let him.

  Even if that thing was to not be with her.

  “Did it help? Help you feel better?” he asked her.

  “I don’t—regret it. I don’t regret my life after I lost Russ. I can’t, because it gave me so many things. Everything that life did to me, it gave me so many things.

  “If I hadn’t lost Russ, I don’t think I would have taken a chance on Tay. She wrote me this letter, with her résumé, telling me all the reasons she wanted to be my farm manager, and all the reasons I might not consider it, because she had been in prison. It was a long letter. If I’d still had Russ and was hiring, all those things she told me would have been reasons to find her story sad, to feel for her, to hope for her, to maybe even mention her to someone else, but they also would have been reasons to look for someone else, because Russ and I and our families had too much at stake.”

  Nina put her hands over his knees, which were at her waist, sitting on the ledge. He felt a little vulnerable, turned on.

  His body was tired. His brain was tired.

  This, right here, though, was everything.

  She was telling him where she had been, all this time she wasn’t with him.

  “I think …” she said. “I think that sometimes it’s better if there aren’t any stakes, if you’ve lost so much that you don’t look at your life, you look at people. You just look at people. You don’t even look at what they’ve done. You just see the people. Dios, this is hard to say.”

  “It’s okay,” Sam said. It was. It always seemed like no matter what Nina said, it made sense.

  She made sense.

  “Tay gave me everything. I didn’t even read her letter closely after she told me that she had found me and my tiny little farm on the internet, printed out a page from my first little website, and hung it on her kitchen wall. All that time I was giving her all that hope, and it made me so happy to find out. It made me happy that all the time she was in prison, and I was hurting and working, all that time she was thinking about me and what I was doing and believed it was good.”

  Sam put his hands around her face.

  Kissed her, and it was wet and soft.

  “I’m glad,” he said. “I’m glad you’ve had her to work with and to be your friend.”

  “I think what you and Lacey are doing is good, too.”

  “Right now, I don’t know what to say about that.”

  “I know.”

  She kissed him, and it was better. He gripped her waist with his knees and he kissed her, sloppy, all of his muscles tired and loose, finally.

  His hard-on pressed against her breasts.

  She looked at him and smiled, and now it was a wicked smile. That’s the only way he could describe it. Her brown eyes looked huge with about a hundred years of wisdom, and her mouth was pink.

  She reached just past him, and this time, she rubbed her breasts against his erection and he closed his eyes, put his hand at her neck, then over her breast. Her dark nipple was so hard and bunched, it made his fingers ache to press it hard, to pinch and roll it, but he kept his touch light because that made her throat go flushed.

  She leaned back again and had his shampoo in her hand.

  She opened it, and then held it up high. He watched it drip over her chest, her breasts, some of it starting to lather in swirls of sopping bubbles, most of it just syrupy and glistening and somehow obscene-looking.

  She smiled, and he would have smiled back but she grabbed his dick, pumped it with her soapy hands, and then pressed her chest into him, slippery with shampoo between the full curves of her breasts, lathering his cock with firm strokes and both hands.

  She brought her hands up and squeezed her tits, closing her eyes.

  She squeezed them around his dick.

  Fuck.

  “Nina.�
�� He wasn’t sure if he had actually spoken but he couldn’t unscramble his brain to check. He just looked her all over, wet and hot and gorgeous, and then before he could ask her, ask her what, he didn’t know, he felt like he should just ask her something, she grinned again, and bit her fucking lip and arched, arched so that his cock slid between her breasts, her skin hot from the water, and it was too much and not enough.

  Which was what he wanted. He wanted too much, the way it looked, the way he looked against her, how much it was, how intense it was, and also how she was so soft it wasn’t enough pressure, would never be enough pressure, and so this would go on and on and on, her smile, her wickedness, her ass thrust out with shower spray bouncing off it.

  “Kiss me,” she said.

  Their kiss made everything better, made him harder, and every time she arched back and down to slide him through her breasts, their mouths would pull away a little from the other’s and they would have to start kissing again.

  Then, over the sound of the water, when their tongues were rubbing together, he heard her moaning softly, and so he brought her closer with his knees and reached up to hold her jaw, feel the vibrations from her throat, and knowing she thought this was hot, too, that she was starting to pant while looking down where they were sliding together between their kisses—that made everything get full and throbbing, the pressure so intense he clenched his hands into fists to keep from grabbing her shoulders and slowing down.

  Too much.

  Not enough.

  “Nina,” he tried again, and she looked at him, right at him, her face close, and then his mind was finally washed clean. His lower back went warm and buzzing, his body unhinged, went loose, while his chest got tight.

  “I love you,” he said, because his love was this excess, of feeling, of sex, of skin, of Nina. All of it.

  She closed her eyes, reached to kiss him again, the steam from the shower everywhere.

  They kissed for what seemed like forever, and he came, came all over her, and while he came she moved her hands from her breasts to press him and stroke him, and he caressed her all over, her beautiful body, her heavy wet hair, and it felt so good. He hadn’t realized that his muscles had all gone tight, so tight, while he was coming, until they unspooled and released against his bones after the pleasure she gave him, and he shuddered.

  He slid from the bench when he thought he could stand, and put his arms completely around her.

  She put her arms around him.

  The water grew cool and he reached over to turn it off, and then it was so quiet.

  “Come on,” she said.

  He dried her off, watching her skin rough up with goose bumps, looking at everything. Every mole, every place she dipped or rounded, the soft hairs from her navel to the shiny black hairs between her legs, where she was pink, where the sun had divided her up into rainbows and patches of golds and browns.

  “I don’t know how to dry your hair. There’s so much of it.”

  He watched her twist it in the towel, her breasts lift and her armpits hollow out, and it was so beautiful.

  He thought about when he first saw her, cataloged her muscles in her legs, laughed because she laughed, because her laugh was so surprised.

  “You’re tired,” she said.

  He was. He was what she told him he was.

  He was what she believed him to be.

  They got into his bed, even though it was early and they hadn’t eaten. It felt amazing. His body was starting to get stiff from his run, and stretching out with her against the cool sheets made him yawn and shiver with how good it felt. She pushed her ass against his hips, and he put his arms around her..

  He’d remember this for the rest of his life.

  He’d tell himself this memory if he ever believed he had lost everything to remind himself that he couldn’t. No loss could take Nina from his arms in this moment.

  He’d lived his life to arrive here, no matter what else came after.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “How’d it go?”

  PJ and Mike were leaning over his kitchen counter as he walked into his apartment, both of them with forks over the pink bakery box that Nina had left in his fridge two days ago.

  “What the fuck are you guys doing here?”

  “Support,” PJ said, his mouth full of pie.

  “Fuckin’ solidarity,” said Mike, and PJ and Mike clinked forks.

  “How is breaking into my apartment and eating my pie supportive?” Sam pulled off his tie and jacket, throwing them across the back of the sofa.

  “Us bein’ here is supportive, pie eating is because we got bored and hungry.”

  Sam pulled up a stool next to PJ and took his fork. He lifted out a piece of the sour cherry cream pie, his favorite of Rachel’s, and shoved half of it in his mouth.

  “Not good, huh?”

  “I don’t even know. I met with the investigator with the file of every single piece of paper I’d ever given the hospital credentialing office, as well as the Board of Medicine and the Board of Pharmacy. I sat there on my ass while the guy looked through everything for six hundred years. The hospital attorney did stuff on his phone. While this was going on I sweated through my suit.”

  “Alright. So far that sounds like they’re not barring you from practice. Or sending you out of town on a rail.”

  “Then the investigator started asking me questions, but none of them seemed to really mean anything. Sometimes the attorney would tell me not to answer, but it wasn’t like it is on TV. No one yelled. No one seemed to care. Then the investigator asked my attorney if I would be willing to sign a Consent Agreement, which basically means I say, Yeah, I made a filing error, I’m remorseful, when it’s ratified I will do some continuing education about rule of law for practice in my state, and when I finish it this will be the extent of what the board will seek in reprimand.”

  “Okay,” said Mike, “I don’t know what the fuck any of that means, but all that sounds pretty reasonable.”

  “I thought so, but then the attorney asked the investigator to demonstrate intent and any harm to the public, and requested a dismissal and a back date for some fucking reason, I don’t know. Then they talked about the consent thing some more and spent an hour going back and forth on the language. At one point, the attorney spent fifteen minutes on the wording of a sentence that sounded the same all eight ways he suggested it.”

  “So it sounds like this meeting was actually your punishment,” PJ said.

  “No shit.”

  “Then what?” Mike said.

  “Then fucking nothing.” Sam ate another huge mouthful of pie, needing fortification.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, fucking nothing. I’m just sitting there, forever, while they talk about this agreement thing, not arguing or anything, just talking about it. At some point they call up to the credentialing office and ask a bunch of questions. Then the attorney stands up and says we’re done for the day, meanwhile, this whole time, Lacey is sending me ten thousand text messages.”

  “So now what?”

  “I wait until the attorney calls me. At the end of the day, it is a filing error. On my part and on the part of the hospital credentialing office. I’ve been so busy working, taking care of everything at the clinic and pulling all those shifts with the hospital, a routine filing date went by. For once, it wasn’t all me.”

  “What did Lacey say?” PJ asked.

  “Nothing yet. I haven’t gotten back to her because I assumed she’s been stalking the street for when she sees my car.”

  Then they all looked at the door as someone knocked three times before turning the knob and walking in.

  “What happened? I’ve texted you about ten thousand times.” Lacey hung her purse on the knob behind her. She was wearing scrubs so she must have been at the hospital during his meeting. Sam was shocked she hadn’t waited outside the conference room door.

  “I waited outside the conference room door forever, trying to
see if I could hear something, but that asshole Carla Forner made me move out of the hallway.”

  “Jesus, Lace. Carla’s probably eighty years old. She’s a hospital institution.”

  “No, the hospital’s an institution, Carla’s an asshole.”

  “I like your hair,” PJ said, and took a bite of pie.

  Everyone looked at PJ. “What?” he asked. “She got it cut.”

  “Like half an inch. I got it trimmed.”

  “I can tell, and it looks nice.”

  Lacey ran her hands through her hair and kept an eye on PJ while she sat down next to Mike and took his fork. “DeeDee know you’re eating pie? She told me you got your cholesterol numbers back from your physical.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ, is there nowhere I can go in this neighborhood without getting nagged? I was at the diner this morning and Jackie wouldn’t serve me eggs.”

  “Your numbers aren’t good, Mike.”

  Sam looked at Mike, concerned. “What’s your total?”

  “Seriously, cease and desist. You were just with an attorney, you know what that means.”

  “Two hundred forty-four,” said Lacey, starting in on the pie.

  “What the fuck, Mike? Your doc put you on statins?”

  “Is nothing sacred? What happened to doctor-patient confidentiality?”

  “I’m not your doctor,” Sam said.

  “DeeDee told me, she’s really freaked. She reminded me your dad had his first heart attack when he was forty-five. That’s six years, Mike.”

  “This is like dinner and a show,” said PJ.

  “We could talk about my impending death, or we could talk about our boy’s legal troubles that are endangering your clinic and your livelihood.”

  “Thanks for that, Mike. You’re a pal,” Sam said.

  “What happened?” Lacey gave her fork to PJ to keep it away from Mike.

  Sam told her.

  “That’s it? Did you tell them the clinic’s credentialing is waiting for your license to get cleared up? That we have our first audit coming up? That if we miss the audit, we’ll have to wait another three months? I’m not sure we can work the lease another three months without the grant release before we start billing. I got the accountant to donate some pro bono hours to see, but …”