Exiled for Saying No, I Came Back and Took the Boss's Chair novel · Chapter 16 of 24

Chapter 16: The Claw-Foot Tub

Lotta's POV

The water was hot enough to turn my skin red to the collarbone.

My mother's claw-foot tub stood at the end of the upstairs hall.

I had not been in it since I was nineteen.

Ronan knelt on the tile beside it with his shirtsleeves rolled and a cake of Nonna's lavender soap in his hands.

He had come to the front door at nine.

He had climbed the front stairs, which never creak, and he had not said a word since.

"Lean forward," he said.

I leaned forward and wrapped my arms around my knees.

He lathered the soap in his palms, and he put both hands flat on my back.

They were big and slow and warm, and they moved up my spine in long strokes.

He washed my shoulders and the blades of my back, and the muscles that had hauled frozen cases for six years.

He washed the pale scar low on my ribs, and then he stopped there and let his thumb rest on it.

"Who did that?"

"A hook on the dock. Duluth. I was twenty-three," I said.

"Did anyone sit with you?"

"My aunt. Once."

His palm flattened against the scar.

"Keep going," I said, and my voice was not steady.

He kept going.

He washed down the side of my ribs and around my waist.

He washed across the front of me, below my breasts, with the same patient pressure.

Nobody had washed me since I was a child.

My mother had done it, in this tub, with the same lavender soap, and I had forgotten until the smell came up in the steam.

My throat closed.

I put my forehead on my knees.

The first sound I made was small, and I thought I could hold it.

I could not.

I cried with my whole body, in great ugly gulps that shook the water and slopped it over the rim onto the tile.

I cried for the room and the quilt and the clean dresser.

I cried for eleven tickets in a drawer and not one in a mailbox.

I had not cried since the night bus to Duluth.

Ronan did not say a word.

He put the soap down.

He leaned over the side of the tub, wet to the shoulders.

He wrapped both arms around me and held me against his chest, and the water soaked through his shirt.

I wept into his collar.

He rocked me a little, back and forth.

"There," he said into my hair. "There. I've got you."

"He could have sent one."

"I know," he said.

"One ticket, Ronan."

"I know, love."

It was the first time he had called me that.

He kept holding me until the shaking stopped, and then he took the tin pitcher from the sill and filled it.

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