Chapter 7

Emberlyn:

The room was nothing like the one before it. The former room had smelled like antiseptic and shared, stale air and the specific kind of noise that came from too many sick people in too small a space, that noise that came from numerous monitor machine beeping at the same time and one or two occasional continuous when someone flatline.

That also came with wailing and chaos in the desperate attempts to call a nurse or a doctor to save them. With the amount of time I had spent in this hospital, I had grown to recognize and dread the moment hoping it was never going to be me turn to experience it.

But this new room smelled like fresh linen. The curtains were cream and actually blocked the light instead of giving the illusion of a curtain. There was a chair that wasn't a folding plastic cheap chair that was more uncomfortable than actually comfortable and a window with a view that wasn't a wall.

How does a college professor afford to get a random girl access to a VIP room in Manhattan general hospital?

The story just didn’t add up, not with the house I saw or the lifestyle he lived. There was no way he was just a college professor, but I didn’t care much instead I was feeling grateful with a pang of guilt.

Mila was sitting up in the bed with a colouring book open on her lap with her tongue tucked in the corner of her mouth the way it always was when she was concentrating. She looked better like genuinely, measurably better, and something in my chest disappeared quietly at the sight of it.

Could just a change of room do this much difference?

My mother stood from her chair when I walked in, her eyes moving over the room before they moved to me, which told me everything about where her head was.

"They moved her this morning," she said.

"There was no explanation a man just came and said the bill had been settled and that Mila was being transferred."

"Okay." I set my jacket on the back of the chair.

"Emberlyn." Her voice dropped to that particular tone she saved for when she needed the truth and knew she probably wasn't going to get it but tried to anyway.

"Do you know anything about this?" I looked at Mila's colouring book. Pink outside the lines on a butterfly wing.

"How would I know anything about it, Mom?"

“Mila, you’ve been writing out to those make-a-wish foundations, haven’t you?” Mila nodded in reply.

“There you have it, it could have been one of them that came through, I don’t know how and honestly I don’t care how this happened, I am just grateful and you should too.” I said to my mum lying through my teeth.

How could I tell her it was my college professor who called me his personal whore and fucked me this morning making me cum four time was the one that was paying for all this?

She watched me for a long moment, long enough that I had to work to keep my face still, keep my eyes from going to the pendant at my throat and to keep my hands loose at my sides instead of folded across my chest where they wanted to be.

"Someone paid for a private ward in Manhattan General," she said slowly.

"This doesn't come from the billing office, or any Make-a-wish foundation Emberlyn. This comes from somewhere with money."

"Those Make-a-wish foundations have donations and are usually like loaded and maybe the insurance finally processed something."

"Our insurance." She said it flatly.

"I don't know, Mom." I pulled the chair out and sat beside Mila's bed.

"Can we just be grateful she's better?"

Can you stop pulling on my guilt?

She paused and sat, finally backing down. The subject was closed not because she believed me, but because she chose, for now, not to press. My mother could always catch up on the difference between a lie and a secret and right now, she was deciding which one this was.

I reached over and tucked a loose curl behind Mila's ear. She looked up briefly to give me that smile she reserved for when she was too focused to fully stop what she was doing, and went back to her butterfly.

My mother's eyes were still on me.

"You look tired," she said.

"I'm fine."

"How's work? Both of them." She folded her hands in her lap.

"You're never here before noon on a Saturday. You're always at the

restaurant or studying or, "

"I'm managing."

"You're always managing." She said it like the word exhausted her.

"Emberlyn, you're twenty . You should not be managing. You should be, "

"Please, I'm fine, Mom." I kept my voice gentle.

"Mila's better. That's what matters right now."

She looked at me for a long moment, and I saw it the thing she carried that she never said out loud.

The guilt, the weight of knowing that her daughter was holding a life together that she couldn't hold herself.

I could recognize it because I was carrying guilt of my own, my dirty job that paid some of the bills and that sleeping with a random man at a club and his house had cleared the rest.

She smoothed her skirt with both palms and looked at the window.

I stared at the pendant's small reflection in the dark screen of my phone.

Jaxon Sullivan. Who was just a college professor. Who lived in a penthouse with marble floors and a piano no one played and a bathroom bigger than our apartment. Who had a driver. Who put pendants around women's necks in the backseat of cars and said I'm not asking you if you want it with the casual authority of someone who had never once been told no and survived it.

Just a professor.

I almost laughed.

Now that I was thinking about it again, he definitely wasn’t just a professor.

The afternoon moved slowly the way hospital Saturdays do measured in cups of bad coffee you’ve had, the sound of the hallway and for me specifically, Mila asking me three times to colour the butterfly's other wing because she'd made it lopsided and it was bothering her.

By five o'clock, the light through the cream curtains had gone amber and soft, and I was reaching for my jacket.

"You have a shift?" my mother asked.

"DineHart." I stood.

"I'll come back tomorrow morning." She nodded. Mila grabbed my hand before I could move away.

"Will you bring me the cherry ones next time?" she asked. The lollipop kind. She always wanted the cherry ones.

"Always," I said. I kissed the top of her head and left before my mother could find extra question ask that I'd have to lie through.

DineHart on a Saturday night was its own particular kind of chaos every table full, the bar three deep, the kitchen loud with the sound of pans and the chef calling orders in a tone that suggested someone had personally offended him. I tied my apron at the back and dove straight into it.

For an hour, it worked. The noise was big enough to crowd everything else out. I moved from table to table, took orders, carried plates, smiled at the man at table nine who always ordered the salmon and always tipped badly, and didn't think about Jaxon Sullivan or backseat conversations or the word mine delivered without apology.

Then I reached into my collar to pull the pendant free and decided maybe I should remove it before it caught on my apron string. Minus that, it was also a beautiful reminder that I almost got kidnapped and that man that came to rescue me, decided to make me his personal whore.

My fingers went to the back of my neck for the umpteenth time and found nothing.

No clasp, hook or break in the chain.

I stepped into the kitchen corridor and tried again, both hands now, working the full circumference of the chain in slow careful increments.

The metal was smooth all the way around. Uninterrupted like it had been made without a fastening, like it had been made to stay forever.

"Em." Kimberly appeared at my elbow with a tray balanced on one hand, eyeing me.

"What are you doing?"

"This necklace." I turned my back to her.

"Can you see a clasp?"

She set her tray down on the counter and peered at my neck. Her fingers moved over the chain, back and forth, slower when she thought she'd found something, then continuing.

"There's nothing here," she said.

"I know."

"Like nothing. How did you put it on?"

"I didn't." I dropped my hands and turned around.

Kimberly was looking at me with the particular expression she reserved for things that required careful handling.

"Someone put a necklace on you that doesn't come off?"

"It's fine." I smoothed my apron.

"Forget it."

She picked her tray back up but didn't move. Her eyes stayed on me.

"Kim." I leaned against the counter, keeping my voice even.

"If you had a way to fix everything, your family, money, all of it but what you had to do something wrong, yet it didn't hurt anyone it was just something you wouldn’t do. What would you do?" She didn't answer immediately. She considered it with the same seriousness she gave everything.

"Anything," she said finally and simply.

"I'd do anything for my family, Em. Wouldn't even take me long to decide." She disappeared back onto the diner.

I stood in the corridor with the pendant with a chain that had no clasp sitting against my sternum.

the question I had in my mind had no clean answer, and when I thought about Mila's lopsided butterfly, my mother's folded hands and a private ward in Manhattan General that someone had paid for without me asking for it, the answer leaned.

Give it a chance.

But then again, why would he give me a necklace I couldn't take off?

That was the part that frightened me most.

Did it mean that if I accepted his offer I was trapped forever?

Am I stuck as his whore forever?