My Perfect Fiance (Perfect Guy Book 2) Page 7

  “Are you okay?” I ask him.

  He winces as he puts weight on his right leg. “I’m fine,” he says, which is what he always says. Why do I bother asking?

  “Do you want to wait in the car?”

  “Uh…” He glances back at the car, considering it. “No, I’ll come with you. I need to get a few things.”

  “Do you want to grab your cane?”

  “No, that’s okay.” He takes another step and winces again. “I’ll just hold onto the shopping cart. It will be fine.”

  I don’t think there’s anything fine about the fact that he needs to lean on a shopping cart to make it through the grocery store, but he’s an adult and I’m not his mother, so he can do whatever the hell he wants. But I’m increasingly concerned when his limping intensifies as we enter the store.

  “Noah…”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Listen,” I say, “why don’t you use one of the motorized carts?”

  He looks down at the two scooters with baskets attached to the front and makes a disgusted noise. “Because I’m not eighty?”

  “Come on, you’re being silly.”

  “No. I’m not.”

  “You are.”

  “I’m really not.”

  “Listen, don’t you want to shop without being in pain?”

  His shoulders sag. He puts his hand on the handle of the motorized shopping cart. “How does this thing work anyway?”

  “Uh…” I look down at the controls. “It doesn’t look too hard.”

  He sighs. “Fine. Okay.”

  Wow, I never thought he’d agree. He must really be in agony.

  He gingerly settles into the seat of the cart. He looks up at me and rolls his eyes. “I feel like an idiot in this thing.”

  “Is it really that much worse than a wheelchair?”

  “Yeah, it really is.” He starts it up and it jerks forward about six inches then halts. “All right, let’s get this over with.”

  Noah complains so incessantly about the motorized cart while we’re shopping, I’m almost sorry I suggested he use it. He hates it. With a passion. It goes too slowly. The seat is uncomfortable. It beeps when he backs up and everyone turns to stare at him. Did I mention he hates it?

  “People probably think I’m not really disabled and I’m just using it for fun,” he says after the beeping draws some attention in the produce aisle. “I should tell them how not-fun this stupid cart is.”

  “Maybe you should roll up your pants legs. That would do the trick.”

  “It would, wouldn’t it?”

  When I shop, I like to browse the aisles for deals, and also for things that will spark meal ideas. But Noah is so unhappy in the motorized cart, I stick to getting only the things I need. I’ll make another trip tomorrow if I have to. Like him, I just want to get this over with.

  We’re so close to being done shopping when it happens.

  I’m not entirely sure how, but Noah manages to ram right into a display of grape juice bottles. Glass grape juice bottles. I could see them lined up on the ground, forming a small pyramid, but because of the groceries in his basket obscuring his line of sight, he missed it. He runs right into them and… bam. Glass shattering, purple juice everywhere—it’s not pretty.

  “Shiiiit,” Noah breathes.

  If he hadn’t attracted enough attention before, when his cart was beeping, we’ve done the job now. Half the store seems to have gathered around to see what the commotion is about. Noah mumbles apologies to one of the guys working at the store who comes over with a mop, but it really wasn’t his fault. I mean, who makes a precarious display of glass bottles on the ground? They got what was coming to them.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Noah mumbles to me.

  And then his motorized cart beeps loudly as he backs up.

  The checkout area is really busy—we picked the worst possible time to go shopping, apparently. Noah nudges me before I can get on one of the lines. “We should get in the accessible aisle over there.”

  I crane my neck to look. “What’s accessible about it? It looks like all the other aisles.”

  “The credit card reader is lower so I can reach it without standing.”

  “I can pay for the groceries, Noah.”

  “I’ll pay.”

  “They’re mostly for me and Lily, you know.”

  “I want to pay.”

  I fold my arms across my chest. “For God’s sake! We’re going to be married soon anyway, so what’s the damn difference?”

  He blinks a few times. After a moment though, the first smile I’ve seen since we got in here touches his lips. “Okay. Fine. You can pay.”

  Our final battle of the shopping trip is when Noah wants to carry the groceries from the store to his car. I get it. He doesn’t want a woman to be carrying groceries for him. But it’s obvious right now he’s in no condition to carry two heavy bags full of groceries. It’s obvious to me and it’s obvious to him. But he refuses to give in.”

  “It’s twenty feet,” he says. “Let me at least take one of them.”

  “I can manage two bags of groceries,” I insist. “I mean, what do you think I did before you came along?”

  “But I’m here. I can carry them.”

  “What is the big deal? I’m trying to help you!”

  “So you think I can’t manage a couple of bags of groceries?”

  “Noah, you could barely manage walking that distance without the groceries!”

  He stares at me for a moment, blinking his blue eyes. I went too far. I shouldn’t have said that. I should have let him fail, but I never should have told him he couldn’t do it. But I can’t take it back.

  “Fine,” he snaps at me. “Carry the groceries. Whatever you want.”

  I’m lucky it’s only twenty feet to the car, because those are a very tense twenty feet. I throw the groceries in the trunk of the 4Runner while Noah gets inside. When I get into the car next to him, his head is bowed, his eyes closed.

  “Noah? You okay?”

  He takes a shaky breath. “That sucked.”

  “I know. But it’s okay.”

  He lifts his head and turns to look at me. “It’s not okay, Bailey. You’re right—I can’t even walk short distances anymore.”

  I reach out to touch his arm, but he tenses up. “You should make an appointment to see your doctor.”

  “Yeah.” He rubs his face with his hands. “But he’s a doctor. Not a miracle-worker.”

  I don’t know what to say to that.

  “Bailey.” He lifts his blue eyes, which look really sad. “You know, there’s a very real chance that within the next few years, I might not be able to use my prosthetics anymore. At all.”

  “Come on. I’m sure that’s not true.”

  “Really? Where have you been the last few months?”

  “You probably just need… like, an adjustment or something.”

  He shakes his head. “I don’t know. An adjustment to the socket might help, but it’s not going to fix this entirely. The pain has gotten steadily worse for the last ten years. It’s inevitable that…”

  He lowers his eyes, unable to go on. I reach out to grab his hand in mine. “Hey. That’s not true. And even if it is, we’ll deal with it. It’s not the end of the world. So you’ll use a wheelchair fulltime. So what?”

  “You say that, but…”

  His eyes become glassy. I know what he’s thinking about. Six months after he was in the car accident that took his legs, I made the biggest mistake of my life: I broke up with Noah. It was less about him than it was about the fact that my mother was dying of cancer, but that’s not how he saw it.

  We’ve put it behind us, but not really. He’ll never forget what happened.

  “Noah.” I squeeze his hand. “Please don’t think that. I don’t care if you can walk or not. It doesn’t matter to me.” I squeeze his hand even tighter. “I swear.”

  “Yeah…” He rakes a hand through his dark blond hair.
“I guess… we’ll see, won’t we?”

  I frown at him. “Are you saying you don’t believe me?”

  His eyes meet mine. I can’t say if he believes me or not, but he clearly isn’t sure. It hurts, but maybe I deserve that. What I did to him all those years ago was horrible. My only excuse was that I was only twenty-two years old and my mother was dying. I wasn’t thinking straight. That’s the only reason I can think of to justify such a horrible mistake.

  “I love you,” I say. “No matter what, I love you.”

  He finally squeezes my hand back. “I love you too, Bailey.”

  But he still doesn’t believe me.

  Chapter 14: Noah

  It was a low point in my life when Bailey broke up with me after my accident.

  I had sustained a disability that was severe and permanent. My lifelong dream of becoming a surgeon now seemed impossible to achieve. And the woman I thought I would marry returned my ring.

  I started having some scary thoughts after that. It was enough that I finally allowed my mother to send me to the shrink she’d be pushing me to see since I got out of the hospital. I also started taking the antidepressants I’d fought against since my accident.

  Talk therapy didn’t do much for me. I’m not the sort of guy who can talk about my feelings with a complete stranger. Mostly, we talked about fishing. In retrospect, that was therapeutic in itself, because it made me remember things I loved doing that I could still do. Fishing is still therapeutic for me.

  I was self-conscious as hell when I went back to medical school. I still couldn’t walk very well, relying on a walker for balance, but at least I was on my feet. I was determined not to use my wheelchair outside of the house, even though the first thing I did when I got back to my dorm room was pull off my legs and collapse into it. My old classmates and friends were a year ahead of me now, and the lecture halls were filled with strangers. It was a mixed blessing—I would have preferred some familiar faces, but it was also nice to be around people who didn’t know me before and how I used to be.

  Eventually, things started to fall back into place. At the beginning of the school year, I threw myself into studying and physical therapy. My grades were at the top of the class, and my walking improved to the point where I could get around with just a cane. I also eventually found a group of students to study with (the main social activity in med school). I clicked with this group, and eventually we were socializing outside of school too. I had friends again.

  Julie was in this group.

  The year before, half my class had hooked up with the other half, but I had stayed away from that drama. I had Bailey, after all, and I was never even tempted to cheat. But now that Bailey was part of a different life, I was free to look around again. And wherever I looked, I saw Julie. Whenever my friends got together to study, I found myself sitting right next to her. When we hit the diner at midnight for eggs after a long study session, Julie and I were squeezed into the same side of the booth. And whenever our eyes met, she blushed and looked away.

  I’m going to be honest here. Julie was not as pretty as Bailey. Bailey was my ideal woman in every way, and nobody else could come close. Julie was smart. She was nice to talk to. She had a lot of good qualities, but she wasn’t Bailey. She wasn’t the love of my life, and I sensed she never would be. But I didn’t care, and I doubt Julie did either.

  Also, it was so long since I’d had sex, cold showers weren’t doing it anymore.

  One night when Julie and I were studying alone in the histology labs, we both looked up from our respective microscopes, and suddenly, we were making out. I don’t know who initiated it—it was fairy mutual. And it was just what I needed.

  The first time Julie and I had sex, I kept my legs on. I pulled my pants down best I could and we did it. I didn’t even take my shoes off. The second time was the same. And the third.

  Eventually, Julie felt compelled to comment: “It’s a little weird that I’m completely naked and you still have your pants and shoes on.”

  “Well, taking off my pants would involve taking my prosthetics off.”

  I lay next to her in her twin bed, waiting for her to give me permission to take my prosthetics off, not sure I even wanted it. But it obviously wasn’t realistic for me to go the rest of my life without ever taking my prosthetics off in front of a woman. I had to learn to suck it up.

  “You can take them off if you want,” she finally said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course.”

  So I did it. I wish I could say when I removed my legs, Julie embraced me tenderly, and we had wild monkey sex. Instead, when she saw my truncated limbs, her eyes got wide and all the color drained from her face.

  “Oh,” was her only comment.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  I found myself getting angry. “Well, what did you expect?”

  “I just thought…” She shook her head. “I don’t know. Nothing.”

  But the mood was officially killed. I made up an excuse and left her dorm room. And in a true act of maturity, the two of us never spoke again.

  Every encounter with women wasn’t like that for me, thank God. Some of them reacted like Julie did, but plenty of them had no problem when I took off my legs. Hey, some of them were into it. And then when I got into my thirties, I didn’t care quite as much what people thought of me. Not quite as much. It’s hard to turn it off completely.

  Bailey is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever known. When we’re in bed, she acts like she wants me as bad as I want her. I don’t believe that could be an act. She’s an artist—not an actress. But there are still times when I worry if my situation changed, her feelings might cool.

  When we get back to our apartment after shopping, she has to carry the groceries. I hate that, but what can I do? I’ll fall if I carry them myself.

  “It’s not that heavy,” she keeps telling me in the elevator.

  “Yeah, yeah,” I say.

  When we get inside, she drops the bags of groceries on the ground and swipes a strand of hair from her eyes. She looks so sexy right now. I want to prove to her I’m more than a guy who needs his girlfriend to carry the groceries and uses a motorized scooter to shop.

  I grab her and press her against the wall, lowering my lips onto hers. She squeals but then her body relaxes against mine. I feel her hands sliding up the length of my back.

  “Groceries,” she manages.

  “Fuck the groceries,” I growl.

  “No,” she says, “fuck me.”

  Chapter 15: Bailey

  I love it when he does that. Just grabs me right in the middle of trying to put away groceries. I protest, but I don’t really mean it. I want him to take me. Now.

  His hard body is pushed against mine, pinning me to the wall. I run my hands up and down his arms, shivering. Noah has muscles up the wazoo, because his stress-relief method involves going to the gym and lifting weights (or swimming). I never thought that was my thing. After all, Theo is not exactly a muscleman. But God, Noah’s rock-hard muscles really do it for me. So sexy.

  I know he’d love to go all caveman and carry me to the bedroom, but if he couldn’t carry the groceries, carrying a grown woman is probably out of the question.

  We barely make it to the bedroom, pulling our clothes off as we go. Noah topless—oh Lord. I practically drool eying his six-pack and chiseled pecks. He is just so incredibly sexy. I want to taste him… I want to feel him all over me.

  He unbuttons his pants and now I know he’s going to take his prosthetics off. The first few times we made love, he looked uncomfortable at this point in the action. He even freaking apologized a couple of times. I told him flat out to never apologize again. I know he feels self-conscious about it, but he shouldn’t.

  He pops his right prosthetic off first, and there’s relief on his face as it comes free—that’s his problem leg, the one they tried to save, resulting in surgery after surgery until he finally gave up and let th
em take it. He sits down to take the other one off, then rests them both against the bedside dresser. Under the prosthetics, he’s got silicone liners, and under that, a sock that covers his bare skin. He strips it all down as quickly as he can. I’ve offered to do it for him before, but he’s resisted. It’s not sexy, he would say.

  Except everything about him is sexy.

  Once he’s got the prosthetics off, he grabs me and pulls me close to him, pressing his lips to mine. We make out like we’ve got all the time in the world, which we really do now that we’ve got the apartment to ourselves. During our entire relationship spanning two decades, we never had the luxury of a place all to ourselves. Now we’ve got Lily, but before we had roommates to contend with. But at this moment, it’s just us. Alone together.

  Which means when his lips finally go south and he spreads my legs apart, I can be as loud as I want.

  And I want to be loud. Because, God, Noah knows exactly how to touch me. He is unparalleled.

  I’m so goddamn lucky.

  Chapter 16: Noah

  I still can’t stop grinning even the next day when I think about my night with Bailey. Even when my leg is throbbing, it’s enough to keep me going. And my leg feels like shit, so it’s a good thing.

  Whenever I walk into an examining room and see a puff of white hair, I know exactly what’s going to happen. Little old ladies love me. Mrs. Jacobson, my patient in Room 10, is not proving me wrong. She’s eighty-two years young, and she loves me. The first thing she did when I walked into the room and stood by her bed was clasp my hand in her own wrinkled ones and say, “Dr. Walsh. You are so handsome.”

  Cue eye roll.

  Mrs. Jacobson tripped on her living room rug and bumped her head. She has been in Room 10 for several hours now, I have stapled up the laceration on the back of her head, and verified that her head CT didn’t show any blood lighting up in her brain. She is, as far as I’m concerned, good to go home. But she isn’t interested in leaving any time soon.