Page 15 of Midnight Kisses (Spicy Fat Cinderella Retelling)

MILES

I wasn’t a patient man, but I tried. Perry had walked out of my home, and I had to respect that. Other than the small detail of helping her career as much as I could and chewing out my oldest business contact when I thought he’d cancelled a meeting with her— other than that, I was giving her space.

But when her voice was nearly unrecognisable on the phone with Sadie, then she stopped taking calls altogether and no one heard from her for a couple of days, I started to get a little agitated.

It was Friday morning, and Sadie was going to courier some boilerplate contracts to Perry so she could build hers off of them.

Of course, we couldn’t actually give her any of our boilerplates, it was all proprietary and unrelated to her field—so I’d engaged one of my personal lawyers to draw up some things I could pass off as templates.

I was sick of hearing nothing from her, sick of sitting on my fucking thumbs in my office, so I took the envelopes and the post-it with her address off Sadie’s desk and made for the door with them.

Sadie didn’t try to stop me. She’d been subtly (or as subtly as she knew how) pushing me to do this all week.

Perry lived across town and traffic was a bitch.

When I finally walked up her drive and rapped at the door, there was no answer.

I rang the bell. Still nothing. Eventually, I leaned off the porch and knocked on a window.

There was a shuffling sound from inside as a shadowy figure behind the frosted panes of the door shuffled down the hallway.

The door swung open and there she was.

Her nose was red, her eyes were watery, and her mouth hung open as she sucked air through it. Objectively, she’d never looked worse. Yet to my eyes, starved for the sight of her, consoled by only memories, she’d never looked better.

That’s how I knew I was in way over my head.

Retaining a lawyer to draw up contracts and driving them across the city to her house was the absolute least of what I would do to insert myself in this woman’s life and stay there.

“Miles?”

“Contracts.” I pushed them into her arms and stepped over the threshold. “Why didn’t you tell me you were on death’s door?”

“I’m not on deaf’s dawwh.”

Her protest wouldn’t have impressed me even without the snot.

“Have you eaten?” I looked around for the kitchen and went through the door I guessed led there. The house was small but tidy, although the unmistakable 70s decor that didn’t fit Perry marked it as a rental.

“I have soup.” She trailed into her kitchen behind me. “Miles, I don’t know what you think you’re doing?—”

“Looking after you,” I announced, and it didn’t matter that I’d never done anything like this before and wasn’t much of a caregiver. I knew I could at least improve upon her current situation.

I took off my jacket and laid it over the back of an armchair, then flinched when I turned back to the kitchen and saw the sad little takeout container, sitting on the bench with a spoon next to it. “Don’t tell me that’s your lunch.”

“I like chicken soup.”

“That’s not soup, that’s congealed slop.”

“I was going to heat it.”

“Hot slop, then. Go to bed, Perry. I’ll see if I can salvage your slop.” If I couldn’t, I’d throw it out and order a replacement, taking my chances that she’d be too jacked on cold medicine to notice.

She looked at me like she was going to argue some more, but then her shoulders sank. “Okay. My room’s the third door on the left. Thank you. Just the soup and then I’ll be totally fine. Thank you, Miles.”

“Bed, blondie.”

When I took the salvaged hot soup to Perry’s room, she was propped up on a mountain of pillows, watching something on her laptop.

She barely resembled the bombshell on the chaise I’d first met, yet that stupid muscle —Nerve?

Tumour?—in my chest throbbed at the sight of her sitting there, looking all trusting and vulnerable.

Her hair was held back with a thick grey band, and she was wrapped in a fluffy dressing gown that might have once been blue, but it had been washed so many times the colour could only be described as pallid.

Like her. She wiggled further up the bed, making room for the tray I placed on her lap.

Soup procured, contracts delivered, the job was done. I could go. Instead, I lingered.

“What are you watching?”

“Derry Girls.”

“Girls who work in a dairy? Like, a corner store?”

“No, girls from Londonderry. In Ireland. It’s a comedy set in the 90s. Have you never seen it?”

I shook my head.

She gasped. “That’s a travesty! It’s really funny, you’ll like it.”

“Move over then.”

“Miles!” She looked at me like I was a three-headed dog. “I’m sick . I’ve got chills. And sweats. And snot. So much snot.”

“So? Your bed’s huge and I’m warm. Like a human hot water bottle.”

“You’ll get sick. I’ll give you my bugs.”

I snorted. “You can try. I’ve got the constitution of an ox. I never get sick.”

She rolled her eyes but shuffled over and made space for me next to her. I sat on the covers and leaned back against the headboard, and we watched an episode together. When that finished and the next one autoplayed, I didn’t move. Eventually, she put her laptop on me and curled into my side.

We watched her show all afternoon, and eventually I heated the rest of her soup for her dinner, even stealing a bit for myself.

She was too zonked to notice. I didn’t say anything about leaving, and she didn’t ask.

Eventually, she fell asleep half on my chest, my arm around her shoulder.

She woke once, too hot in her gown and pressed against me as a human-heater, and went to take a shower.

When she came back, she still didn’t say anything about being here, just flopped back into bed and threw an arm around me like she’d never left.

After a few cryptic messages, my mum agreed to go to my house and put together an overnight bag for me, which she dropped off without saying anything too smug about my current situation—her shit-eating expression did that for her.

I changed as quickly as I could, disliking being away from Perry for the few minutes it took to do that, and to scarf down some of her leftover soup.

We spent the whole night together.

Perry slept in fits and starts. I went back and started watching Derry Girls from the very beginning.

I didn’t sleep, which wasn’t unusual, but tonight it was because I was too obsessed with monitoring her for any signs that she was getting worse, or there was something I could do for her.

At about one in the morning, when she grumbled something and started rubbing her feet together like a fucking cricket, I realised she was annoyed by her socks and peeled them off for her.

Just past three, when she fumbled in the air over her nightstand for an empty glass, I went and refilled it.

At some point I caught a few minutes of sleep myself, perhaps even an hour. That was fine for me—I’d often done more with less. But I was wide-awake at four when Perry woke and reached for me, pressing her body to mine.

“Thanks for staying,” she whispered into the darkness.

“My pleasure.”

“You’re very thoughtful for a fuckboy.”

I told her the truth. “I like thinking about you.”

And truth was a lovely thing, because she nuzzled in closer.

In the morning, her cold seemed marginally better, although she still wasn’t quite fighting fit. So it made sense for me to stay the next night, too.

Then when I caught her bug and got taken out by the worst cold I’d had in years, she came to my place and stayed there with me.

It just made sense. We made sense.