Sleeping With the Help (Toyboy Lover) (2 page)

Around me nurses scurried back and forth, between beds, seeing to the sick and wounded. A couple nearly knocked me over as they rushed to their crying patients. It was my worst nightmare realized; I couldn't imagine how awful it was for them.

“Lu,” I said when I reached her bed.

She opened her eyes, removing the oxygen mask with a pale, shaky hand. “Miss Victoria, you didn't have to come.”

“Have you been properly seen to?” I asked, gulping back my worry. She had always been a slim woman, but in the bed she looked thinner than I'd ever seen her. In fact, she'd been looking thinner for a while, now that I thought about it.

“The nurses, they're very busy. I'm, I'm fine.”

No, she wasn't. She was far from fine. Something fierce and angry came over me, welling inside me threatening to explode. I didn't know where it came from, but I knew what I wanted to do. It was as if the lawyer in me took over. I'd never protected anyone's human rights before – it had never paid particularly well – but I thought now was a good time to start.

“This is unacceptable!” I roared, peering around the filthy, understaffed ward, disgusted by the conditions. “I'm getting you moved to a private room.”

I heard Lupita try to protest in a weak voice, even trying to reach for my hand to stop me, but I was already halfway to the nurses station. With a clenched fist I stopped in front of the two nurses behind the desk.

“I want that lady moved to a private room. Right now,” I demanded, pointing at Lupita, who'd now raised a weak hand to stop me.

“Look, Miss, the patient doesn't even have medical insurance. She doesn't get a private room.” The nurse, who was chewing gum, spoke with such an attitude I wanted to reach over the desk and slap her right across her pock-marked face.

“Well, I'll take care of that. But I want her moved.” I bit back my rage, trying to keep calm.

“Are you family?” the nurse questioned, still chewing. Now she even had the audacity to blow a bubble with her gum.

“Does it matter?” I said, more furious than I wanted to be.

She shoved a clipboard and form at me, and slapped a pen on top, which had a severely chewed bottom. She was probably the culprit, seeing as she couldn't stop chewing long enough to have a conversation.

“Fill this out.”

“Then you'll move her?”

“If there's a spare room, then yes.”

I returned to Lupita's side, form in hand. She sat up.

“Miss Victoria, you don't have to worry about me. You should get to work.
Mis ni
ñ
os
will be back soon to look after me.'

“I'll go once they've moved you to your own room. And don't worry about the bill – I've got it covered.”

She started to protest, and tears welled in her eyes, but all I heard was jumbled Spanish.

“What's going on here?”

A man's voice, deep and sinister, crept up behind me, freezing me in place, pen suspended above the form. When I spun around I didn't know who I expected to find there, but it definitely wasn't him. In that setting, surrounded by invalids and rundown nurses and doctors, he looked like an apparition. Not really there. But even in my wildest imagination I never could have imagined someone as beautiful as he was; someone even half as perfect.

It took a while for me to pick my jaw up off the ground and stop mentally drooling, but when I did it took even longer for me to avert my gaze. To say he was striking was an understatement. His jet black hair contrasted against his radiant, honey-olive skin. With the deepest brown eyes – so devilish and daring, squared at me giving them an almost black hue – he looked like the love interest of many a telenovela's dames. Beneath his tight black attire – jeans and a Tee – thick muscles bulged, golden arms so strong, so powerful I didn't doubt that he could lift me with one arm.

I gulped, my mouth suddenly dry. I went to speak, or to stutter, to be more accurate, having no idea what I would say, but Lupita spoke first.

“
Hijo
, this is Miss Victoria. Look, she came all the way from work to see me.”

Now, I'd always been useless with languages, and had never taken the time to learn more than a few words in Spanish, but with my limited knowledge I was sure
hijo
meant
son
. And when the realization hit me, once again I let my jaw hang. I was sure I looked brain dead.

“Ah, so this is the woman responsible for you being in here?” he spat, narrowing his eyes even further at me. He crossed his arms, shooting me an unblinking look that could kill.

I went to speak once again, to defend myself, or to question what he was insinuating, but once again his mother jumped in.

“Eduardo, don't be rude,
hijo
.” From the grimace she gave then it was as if his accusatory words had physically pained her. She looked at me. “I'm sorry for my son, Miss Victoria. He gets wound up sometimes. He's nineteen, so everything bothers him.” She tried to laugh but started coughing shortly after.

Nineteen!
Only nineteen!
What the heck was she feeding him?

“That's fine,” I said in a quiet voice. “He's just looking out for you.”

It could have been all in my head, but I was sure I saw his eyes quickly, stealthily scan me from head to toe. And I could have been imagining the faintest scowl crease his mouth, that perfectly shaped mouth, as though my very existence insulted him. Was it the suit? My hair? My shoes?

I'd never worried about how other people perceived me physically – my reputation in the legal field was more important to me – but here, beneath his stare, I suddenly felt like my looks were on trial. I suddenly felt conscious, so much so that I made a feeble attempt to fix my hair, catching a glimpse of my reflection in the window.

“Miss Victoria is getting me moved to my own room. And look,
hijo
, she's taking care of my medical bill.”

With the fire in his eyes and the way his arms swung loose, I thought he was going to strike me.

“We're not a charity!” he growled, first to his mother, then turning his rage on me. “We don't accept handouts.”

“Eduardo, with all due respect, it's not a hando–” I started. I didn't know why, or even how, my voice had become so timid. No one in that ward would have ever believed I'd earned the nickname the Steel Woman. How could that quiet as a mouse, submissive woman be the same one who brought a billionaire oil magnate to tears with her cross examination? Or the same woman who battled it out in the courtroom, winning the unwinnable case against a tobacco company?

“You people are all the same,” Eduardo said, shaking his head with a sarcastic smile. “Poor little Latinos, can't afford healthcare.”

“Now hang on a minute.” Outraged, I pointed an accusatory finger at him. “I'm an employer paying for my employee's healthcare. This has nothing to do with charity.”

“Yeah, right,” he scoffed. “Keep your private room. She doesn't need it.”

Now we were squared up, and I was peering up at him, all six foot two and bulging muscles. It was as though I'd finally met my match, in a nineteen-year-old boy. Who would have thought it?

Lupita had become a part of the background, as everyone else around us had.

“That's your call. She stays out here, she'll be seen in maybe four or five hours...” I said it with feigned apathy, then watched closely as his brooding face softened slightly. For all his pride, all his hang ups, he knew the healthcare system and he wasn't prepared to play with his mother's life.

He grumbled. “I'm going to get some cocoa. Mama, you want anything?” He purposefully turned his back on me when he spoke, and although my throat was as dry as cloth, I knew I wouldn't get a drink out of him.

He whisked off, but not before shooting me another hateful look, which I was sure he'd been perfecting for years.

“Please forgive him, Miss Victoria,” Lupita said. “He doesn't like me working and thinks every boss is the Antichrist.”    

“It's okay, really. He's worried about you, as he should be.” I waved a hand as if dismissing her son's insolence, whilst deep down wanting to throttle the boy. I wondered how he'd gone through life being so angry, because his fiery temper clearly wasn't something new. And at his size, with those massive arms and legs, he'd probably been every troublemaker's nightmare. He didn't look like one to concede in an argument. How I'd managed to get him to was beyond me. But hey, I did that for a living.

“In an ideal world he would want me to sit at home with my feet up watching Las Amores de Nuestro Mundo.” She laughed. “I would die of boredom.”

Although the name wasn't familiar to me, I suspected that she was referring to a telenovela – the
amores
part gave it away. I had to agree with her on that; who wanted to waste away watching TV when they could be out there doing something, anything?

Her face suddenly became serious. “I don't know when I'll be out of here, Miss Victoria. I think my body does need to rest–”

“Of course,” I said sincerely. “Take as long as you need.” I didn't know what sort of life I'd fashion without her there cleaning up after me, telling me funny stories about the women in her pottery class, teaching me how to be efficient in my house – a job my mother had been too busy to do when I was a child. I'd have to contact the agency to send a replacement when I got home.

She seemed to read my mind. “I know you will need someone to fill in for me. I was thinking
mi hijo
...”

No amount of poker face practice could have prepared me for that. I gave her an unblinking, wide-eyed look of astonishment, utterly speechless.

“He's a good boy, Miss Victoria,” Lupita added quickly. “And he works hard. You can trust him.”

“Lu, I–”

“He needs a job while he's in night school, and my wage is the only money we have coming in.”   

“But has he ever done this kind of thing before?” It was the only question I could manage, though I had a million others.

“At home, yes. He is very reliable.”

She sounded sincere, but then so would I about my own child. She would be blind to his faults like most mothers, imagining that he could do anything he put his mind to, when in reality he was probably no more helpful than any other boy his age.

“What makes you think he'd even want to work for me?” was my next question, and one I could only ask once I'd temporarily silenced the screaming, doubtful voice of reason telling me how fucking absurd this suggestion was.

“Because I will ask him to.”

Oh, so it was as simple as that, was it? Well, I didn't buy it for a second. After witnessing Eduardo's resolve, his unwillingness to let up, I had a hard time believing he'd do anything asked of him if he didn't want to. Thus, it was on that basis and reasoning that I took one long, pitiful look at Lupita and said with a sigh, “Fine. If he wants a job, he's got one.”
And good luck getting him to turn up for it.
 

My cellphone's ring-tone infuriated the crap out of me; I'd never gotten around to changing the default tone and had been stuck with a silly, high-frequency chirping sound, like a thousand birds being choked to death. It wasn't especially displeasing, but at half six in the morning when you knew you still had an hour's sleep left before rising time, and when you'd only managed four hours of sleep to begin with, any tone, especially fucking strangled birds, sounded loathsome.

“I'll be over the moon when you nomads finally return to the States,” I answered, pressing loud speaker and setting my cell on the pillow beside my head. I closed my eyes again, my voice groggy with sleep. I didn't try to clear it; I wanted them to hear just how much they'd inconvenienced me.

“Victoria says she misses us, Bobby.”

That was my mother's usual practice: paraphrasing to the point that she lost the point altogether.

“Not what I said, Mom, and certainly not what I meant. I can't wait for you to get the heck back out of Oz so I don't keep getting calls at these ungodly hours.”

“You should be up now anyway. Don't you have any criminals to keep out of jail?”

My groan thundered so loudly it rattled my bed frame, like an earthquake. I usually counted the amount of times my mother made me do that in one conversation. The most I'd managed was five times, back when I first dropped the news that I wasn't going to take over the family business but become a lawyer instead.

“You know I'm a corporate attorney; I don't handle criminal law.”

“Yeah, yeah,” she said dismissively. To her, all law was the same, and pretty black and white, and almost anyone who needed my help to defend them was a criminal. Her world was a simple one. “We sent you a postcard from Adelaide. Specially made. It's got your father on the front holding a koala.”

“I hope he was gentle with it. You know what he's like with his grip – he holds everything like he's clutching iron!”

I fumbled out of bed, but not before shooting a wistful look at my wall clock, watching the hands creep ever closer to doom hour, the moment when I'd have to get ready for the daily grind. I knew I'd never get back to sleep after one of my mother's phone calls.

I threw open the door of my walk-in closet, rubbed sleep from my eyes and avoided looking at my reflection in the wall-length mirror, knowing how puffy and red my eyes would be from lack of sleep. Suits on the left, everything else on the right. I was pretty OCD about my closet. Lupita had gotten the hang of things almost immediately, and had never batted an eyelid at my little eccentricities. My work suits were always where I could find them.

Not today.

“You've got to be kidding me!” I had to stifle back a curse-word, remembering that my mother was still on the line, on speaker.

“Vic, what is it?”

She couldn't see what I could see – a practically empty left side, or the overflowing laundry basket on the other side of my room.

“All my work clothes are dirty.”

Well, one solitary white pant suit – disco-esque, complete with bell bottoms – hung on the left. It would have been perfect... if I was going to court in the seventies! That was Lupita's oversight; it clearly shouldn't have been on the left.