Stranger in my Bed

Chapter6

Erica's POV

After the whole Maverick debacle, I locked myself in my room, mostly to avoid Heather. I did not want to discuss Malcolm Vale with her. I definitely did not want to discuss whatever that had been with the neighbor. So I did the mature, responsible thing and hid, willing myself into a nap I was fairly certain I wouldn't actually get.

I put my phone on silent first. No Priya with her endless vendor questions, no Claire calling to grovel or explain or whatever she was planning to do now that her fiancé had personally fired me, and absolutely no other brides. The world could wait a few hours. It would have to.

By five o'clock I woke up feeling human again. Energized, even - the particular kind of energy that only ever showed up right before a shift into my other life. Tonight's Saturday client was Naya, sixteen years old, the youngest of my seven clients. She'd started calling me her therapist within the first month, which technically wasn't accurate, but I never corrected her. She preferred me to her actual therapist, she'd said once, because the mask meant she never had to see anyone's face judging her while she talked, and because nothing she said ever left that room.

Kids' problems, I'd learned quickly, were somehow endless. Bigger than their small bodies had any right to hold.

But first, food. I needed fuel before I could pour myself into someone else's crisis for an hour.

I walked into the kitchen, relieved to find it empty - Heather, gloriously, nowhere in sight - and started humming to myself as I pulled ingredients together for something quick and light.

I didn't get very far before a voice floated in from the sitting room.

"Are you done avoiding me?"

I jumped in surprise, but regained control immediately.

Heather's face popped up over the back of the couch like a very smug groundhog. "Because you can come out of hiding now, you know. I don't bite."

I rolled my eyes. "I wasn't hiding. I was sleeping. There's a difference. And now I need to eat before work."

"Work." She said the word like it tasted bad. "Or, as I like to call it, your ongoing death sentence."

I dropped the spatula onto the counter with a clatter loud enough to make my point. "We are not doing this again, Heather. I love that job. Both of them. You can accept it or you can keep losing this argument, but either way I'm not stopping."

She came around the couch and into the kitchen, arms crossed, but softer now, less combative than usual. "I don't actually love having this fight every night either, for what it's worth. I've been looking for a job, you know. Actively. Once I'm bringing something into this house - helping with bills, groceries, whatever - maybe you won't feel like you need the second income so badly."

"It was never about the money," I said.

"Then what is it about?"

I opened my mouth, closed it again, and settled on, "You wouldn't understand."

She studied me for a second - not hurt, just thinking - and nodded slowly, letting it go without pushing. That was one of the things I loved most about Heather, underneath all the teasing. She knew when to actually stop.

Except the silence didn't last. She kept looking at me, that particular look she got right before she said something she knew would detonate, and I stared right back, daring her.

"So," she started, entirely too casually, "speaking of things you don't want to talk about - Malcolm Vale and Maverick…"

She didn't get to finish the sentence. I had the spatula in hand and was chasing her out of the kitchen before she'd even cleared the word "and."

She was screaming and shrieking with laughter the whole sprint down the hallway, shouting for help from absolutely no one, until she slammed her bedroom door shut between us.

"If you want to survive in this house," I called through the door, breathless, "you will not say either of those names again."

Her muffled laugh was the only reply I got.

After dinner and a quick shower, I grabbed my keys and headed out to meet Naya.

I got to the hotel with time to spare and arranged the room the way I always did - candle lit, blanket ready, though with Naya I never quite knew what "ready" meant until she walked in. She was unpredictable in the most teenage way possible: obsessed with something one week, completely over it the next. Last session we'd played cards for an hour just to pull her out of a slump. Tonight could be anything.

She arrived ten minutes late, dropped her bag by the door without ceremony, and collapsed face-down onto the couch like the day had physically defeated her.

"Everything okay?" I asked, settling beside her.

She shook her head into the cushion, then turned enough to speak. "My parents are actually going through with it. The divorce." Her voice cracked on the word. "And my mom wants to take me to London. With the guy she's been seeing. I don't want to go. My whole life is here. I tried so hard to get them to work it out, I really did, and they wouldn't even…"

She broke off into tears before she could finish - the tears literally pouring through her mask.

I quickly pulled her into a hug, one hand smoothing slow circles against her back, murmuring the things you say when there's nothing actually true and comforting to say. "I'm so sorry, baby. It's going to be okay."

It wasn't a lie, exactly. It just wasn't the whole truth either. Divorce was messy under the best circumstances, and it was almost never survivable without leaving some kind of mark on the kids caught in the middle of it. I knew that better than she did, even at sixteen.

My own parents had split when I was in high school. My mother left to build a new life somewhere else entirely, and my father remarried fast, to a woman who made it very clear I wasn't part of the family she was building with him. By the time I left for college, going home didn't feel like going anywhere at all. I stopped trying. Lost contact with both of them, eventually, without either side particularly fighting to keep it. Most days I didn't let myself think about it. Some days, like tonight, holding someone else's grief, it crept back in anyway.

"Do you need anything?" I asked eventually, once her crying had quieted into something smaller. "Water? I can find you a snack, if…"

"No." Naya shook her head, burrowing deeper into my side, small and exhausted. "I just want this. The comfort thing. Please."

So I stayed exactly like that, arms around her, letting her breathing slow against my shoulder, the candle burning low on the table beside us.

Then, so quietly I almost missed it, she asked, "Could you marry my dad? Like… could you be my new mom?"

I froze completely, arms still around her, heart lodged somewhere painfully high in my throat.