“Liv, I’m so sorry, I need to ask you for a favor.”
I spun in my office chair, coming face to face with a stressed-looking, poorly-dressed Damien and a smaller, curlier-haired version of himself carrying a little toy car. The smaller one waved at me.
Well, that’s certainly one way to start the morning.
“What… the fu—”
“Come with me and I’ll explain,” he said, anxiously checking his watch before grabbing for my hand.
I let him take it, let him lead me out of the cubicles and down the hall toward the elevators. Those fucking elevators. I’d only just got to work less than thirty minutes ago, had barely had time to down a coffee from the cafe downstairs, and now instead of being able to get on with my work, I was being thrown into… something.
The elevator doors closed behind us, and a panicked Damien started rambling. “I’m so sorry. I’ll pay you extra. Overtime or something. I have a board meeting in twenty and his aunt dropped him off a week early,” he explained, motioning toward the wholly unbothered child beside him. “My sister’s away and Ethan’s a part of the meeting. I have no one else to watch him. It’ll be an hour, maybe two at the most. I didn’t know what else to do—”
“Calm down,” I sighed. “It’s fine. I can watch him.”
“Thank you. Thank you. Just… hang out with him in my office, or take him somewhere, I don’t know.” He pushed his barely styled hair back as he tried to breathe. “I’d reschedule, but it’s about the financials—”
“Take a deep breath. It’s okay.”
The elevator dinged for his floor and we stepped out, rounding the long corridor. The smaller version of Damien ran ahead, his footsteps heavy on the tile floor, his eyes scanning the names on each private office. He stopped immediately in front of his dad’s, looking up at the plastered letters that spelled Damien M. Blackwood, Owner and CEO with wide, wondrous eyes.
Damien opened the door for him and the little one bolted in.
I grabbed his wrist before he could follow, checking down the hall for any prying eyes. It was completely empty this early — no one who had a private office up here worked on any specific schedule.
“I’m sorry,” he offered again.
“Stop apologizing. It’s okay.” I took a deep breath and gave myself a moment to catch up — the kid was dropped off early. Damien was panicking. This was fine, I could help, I could do the right thing. I could be his saving grace for now. “You look like a mess, Damien.”
He looked down at himself, and before he could start fidgeting with the mismatched buttons, I let myself reach out to him. I didn’t think about it, didn’t question it, just helped. My fingers brushed against the bare skin of his chest as I unbuttoned and rebutted the ones that were slotted in the wrong holes. I unfastened and retied his tie. I fixed his stupid little pocket square. “It’s been a long morning,” he offered, and I shook my head.
“It’s fine. You said he was dropped off early?”
“She showed up at six,” he said quietly, low enough that his son couldn’t hear from where he climbed across the wingback chairs inside the office. “She wasn’t supposed to come until next Saturday, Liv. I have nothing. Nothing.”
“Why did she do that?” I asked. Auto-pilot was taking over, and instinctually, I reached up, fiddling with his hair. He didn’t even blink at it.
“I don’t know. I think she’s upset that her sister didn’t give her custody of him. She called my lawyer to change the date last night, and Ethan called me, but I missed it.” He took a deep breath, in through his nose and out through his mouth. “I nearly had a fucking heart attack when I opened the door. I wasn’t ready. I’m not ready.”
“You’re doing great,” I said, and surprisingly even to myself, I meant it. “I’m sorry she caught you off guard like that.”
“She wants custody,” he breathed. “She’s going to file for it.”
“Okay, Damien, you’ve got to calm down,” I urged, placing my hands on either side of his suit jacket. “I don’t mean to belittle that because that is horrifying and I’m so sorry, but you’ve got a meeting. Have you reviewed anything for it?”
“No,” he croaked. “I’m screwed.”
I looked up at him. He looked better than he did before I’d fixed him — a lot better. But not nearly his normal, well-groomed, calm self. It was harrowing seeing him like this, seeing him panicked and stressed and overwhelmed to the point of almost breaking.
It made my chest ache for him, made me want to do what I could to fix it.
“You’re not screwed,” I said. “I’ve got him, okay? I’ll watch him for however long you need, just make sure my manager knows that you’ve asked me to do, uh, something, I guess. I’ll handle this so you can handle that. You’ve got, what, fifteen minutes? Ten? Use that to go over what you need to go over.”
He nodded. “Thank you.”
“Is there anything I need to know?”
He glanced into his office nervously, checking up on the little guy. “He’s five. His name is Noah, if you forgot. He’s pretty calm as far as I can tell, but I’ve only known him for… fuck, three hours? He might talk about his mom being dead but he seems very unperturbed by the whole thing, but the internet says that can flip-flop, so be careful with that. Otherwise… you know about as much as I do.”
I nodded. “Five. Noah. Calm. Dead mom. Got it.”
He cracked a grin, and finally, he looked a little more normal. “I owe you, princess.”
“You do.”
In a fleeting second of what was likely the leftover adrenaline fueling him, he took my face in his hands, pressing his lips to the center of my forehead. I froze. “Thank you,” he said.
Leaving me there, stuck in position with far too many thoughts racing through my mind, he stuck his head into his office and called out a quick goodbye to Noah before disappearing down the hall.
————
Most of my experience with children came from my brief stint of babysitting when I turned twelve, and my experience being a child, so I didn’t have much to go on. But going for ice cream seemed like the best idea, and meant I wouldn’t need to worry about someone coming into Damien’s office unannounced and asking questions.
I hadn’t been expecting Noah’s never-ending stream of questions, though.
“How old are you?” he asked, his fist gripping the bottom of his ice cream cone, liquid sugar dripping over his fingers.
“Twenty-four.”
“That’s old. How old is Damien?”
It shouldn’t have weirded me out that he was calling him by his first name, but in fairness, the kid barely knew him. “Forty-five, I’m pretty sure.”
His mouth popped open into a circle. “That’s like, really, really old,” he said. His free, not-sticky hand gripped mine as we crossed the road, the high-rise office in sight. His fingers twitched as I held them, his eyes focusing in on our joined hands. “That’s… nine.”
“Nine?” I glanced down at him, making sure his ice cream wasn’t leaning too far to fall off onto the busy sidewalk.
“Yeah. My age nine times.”
Damien said he was five, right? Five times nine… Math wasn’t my strongest subject by any means, but my God, the kid was right. Was that normal? “You know multiplication?”
He nodded. “Mmhmm. Mom taught me my times tables before she died.”
Well, there was the dead-mom-thing Damien said to look out for.
“Where’s Damien?”
“In a meeting,” I said, scanning my keycard at the side staff entrance. I hoped that if we came in through there and not the main entrance, we’d avoid some of the looks we’d gotten on our way out. “He should be out soon.”
“What kind of meeting?”
“A board meeting. They’re really important.”
“Have you ever been to a meeting?”
I shook my head as I ushered him toward the elevator. “Not one like that.”
“I wonder if I’ll ever go to a meeting.” His head cocked as he watched himself in the reflective surface of the elevator, his ice cream still dripping, splattering his shoe. He’d barely touched it.
In my head, I’d imagined this going a lot worse than it did. But the kid was insanely calm about everything, and although he’d been ever so slightly rambunctious when we’d stopped off at the park briefly and he chased a pigeon, I couldn’t help but wonder if dealing with the death of his mother and the overwhelming shift of gaining a new parent and leaving behind everything else had matured him prematurely.
My brother had gone through something similar when one of his friends broke his neck falling off a bike in front of him. It was as though he was someone new, someone intensely mature and reliable, overnight.
“You know, for being thrust into a whole new life and a weird situation, you’re handling it really well for a five-year-old,” I said.
“Thanks.” He full-on bit the top of his ice cream, stuffing so much into his mouth that his cheeks blew up like a chipmunk. Okay. Maybe not wildly mature. “Is Damien nice?”
“What do you mean?”
“He was nice to me this morning, but he wasn’t very nice to Auntie Grace. I don’t want him to not be nice to me.”
I took a deep breath and dropped down to his level, watching in the corner of my eye as the number on the elevator rose. “Your dad is…” He doesn’t need to know about my situation with Damien. “He’ll be so nice to you, Noah. He just didn’t know you were coming this morning, that’s all. It caught him off guard, you know? Surprised him. He was only upset with your aunt because he didn’t have enough time to get the house all ready for you. He wanted it to be perfect when you came.”
The elevator dinged one floor below the one I’d pressed. The doors opened, and there was Damien, his eyes fixed on something far to his right as he called out an overtly poised goodbye to someone I couldn’t see. But then he looked at me, squatting on the ground in front of his child, and everything about him softened.
“Speak of the devil,” I chuckled.
Noah’s eyes flicked between me and Damien. “Huh? What does that mean?”
I shook my head as I stood up. “Nothing. Just a turn of phrase for when someone you were just speaking about shows up.”
“Are you saying that he’s the devil?”
“She better not be,” Damien said, stepping across the threshold and letting the doors close behind him. “Mint chocolate chip, huh? Good choice.”
Noah held up the half-eaten scoop on the disintegrating cone with pride.
————
“Did you know he can do multiplication?” I asked, keeping my voice down as I leaned against the edge of Damien’s desk. Noah sat on the leather sofa on the other side of the office, a tablet in front of his face as he tapped aimlessly at the screen.
Damien’s brows knit as he looked down at me. “Is that normal?”
“No clue. I wasn’t expecting it, though. I told him you were forty-five and after a few seconds, he said that was nine times more than him.” I looked across the office at Noah, studying him. Part of me wondered if Damien even needed to worry about him adjusting — but I figured the breakdown would come at some point, along with the inevitable questions of why his life was changing so drastically.
“Add that to the list of things I need to google,” Damien chuckled. “Listen, I know I’ve said it a million times already, but—”
“You don’t need to thank me again.”
“I know. But I’m going to. So, thank you,” he said. “I wouldn’t have been able to make it through that without your help.”
“It’s fine,” I insisted, pushing off the desk. “Anytime.”
“That’s, uh…” He swallowed, his eyes shifting nervously from his son to me. “That’s something I wanted to speak to you about, actually.”
“What?”
“Anytime.”
A sound played from Noah’s tablet and an excited yes! stole our attention for half of a second.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said, turning back to him.
He sucked his teeth, the gears in his head visibly turning. “Is there any chance you’d be able to help me out with this until I can figure out what I’m doing in terms of childcare?”
I narrowed my gaze at him. “I mean… I can help where I can, but I do have a job, Damien.”
“I’ll clear it with your manager,” he offered. “I’ll pay you double your salary for every second you’re at work or helping with him. More than that, if you want.”
That was… excessive. A lot. More than I’d expected when I’d agreed to watch him for a couple of hours. It wasn’t like I had kids of my own or was exceptionally good with them — it didn’t make sense. “Why me?”
He chewed his lip as he watched me. “I don’t have that many people in my life, Liv. My sister works more than the average person, but she can help out occasionally. Ethan can too, but he’s not exactly the most reliable person in the world, and he’s working day and night on the annulment and the four lawsuits the business is having to file. And my parents live in Hawaii,” he sighed. The more he spoke, the more that stress from this morning filtered back in. “It wouldn’t be for long. Just until I can find a good school for him.”
I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to help, truly, but this felt messy, felt like I was stepping back into a situation I didn’t belong in again, a situation he’d made it clear already that he didn’t want me involved with. “But you wanted me out of the picture.”
He winced. Genuinely, physically winced. “I know. And I know it’s not fair of me to ask this of you after that.”
I took a deep breath. I wasn’t exactly against the idea, but more time around him wasn’t ideal for either of us, not after what seemed to keep happening when we were around each other. “What kind of help are you expecting?”
“Watching him during the day when I can’t,” he said. “I can get you set up to work remotely. We can tag team it when we both need to be here. I sometimes work in the evenings, as well, so I’ll need some help there, too.”
Jesus. “Damien, as much as I want to help, my apartment isn’t exactly set up to have a kid in it, even if he’s well-behaved. It’s cramped and I wouldn’t be able to focus if I was working from home—”
“Watch him at my place,” he said. His eyes met mine, and there was a vulnerability to them, a plea that was hard to back down from. “You can work there, too. I can set it all up there so you wouldn’t need to haul your stuff back and forth.”
“That’s—”
“I know you don’t have a car,” he added, and a burst of shame bubbled up in my chest. I didn’t technically need one here, not with public transport, but it felt like a dig even if he didn’t mean it as one. “I’ll have my driver pick you up and take you home. I’ll make sure someone’s on standby if there’s an emergency. I can hire whatever you need.”
“But not a nanny?”
His mouth formed a hard line. “I’d rather not hire someone hastily to watch him. Background checks and all that.”
I took a deep breath, in through my nose, out through my mouth like he had been doing this morning.
“Please, Liv. Please.”
“That’s a lot of back and forth—”
“Then move in.”
I locked eyes with him, expecting to find a hint of humor in them, a nudge that told me he was joking. But I found nothing but steady sincerity. “You saying that feels a lot like the first time you asked me to marry you in Vegas.”
His lips formed a hard line for a moment as my quiet statement hung heavy in the air between us. “I know.”
“And you wanted me out of your life as much as possible days ago.”
“I know that, too.”
“This is a massive one-eighty,” I added.
“I’ll make it as worth your while as I possibly can,” he offered. “You want more than double pay? Fine. Triple. Quadruple. Name your price. I’ll pay for your rent while you stay with me. I’ll buy you a fucking car. I’ll… I don’t know, Liv, I’ll pay off your student loans or something. Just, please, help me with this. As my employee, as my wife, as my friend, just… please?”
That crease along his forehead came back tenfold, and even without the extravagant offers that tempted me, my chest ached for him. He was desperate, that much was clear, and he had far too much on his plate — and my people-pleasing tendencies were rearing their fucking head.
Maybe I could keep to myself in his house. It was big enough for that.
“You’d genuinely pay off my student loans?”
“Yes.”
“You can’t be serious,” I breathed.
He took a step toward me. “I’ll pay them today.”
“I owe, like, fifty-eight grand.” I blinked up at him. The idea sounded impossible, improbable, far too good to be true. Especially when I was considering taking his offer without that. “You said Blackwood’s having financial troubles.”
“That’s the company. Not me personally,” he explained. “I’ll pay it.”
I shook my head, searching for the right words, the ones that evaded my tongue. They swelled in the back of my throat, catching behind my teeth, that angry part of me that hated myself for what we’d done nights ago telling me to keep this to myself. Don’t do it. You know what will happen. You know how this will end. “I’ll do it, Damien, but you don’t need to do that.”
