Chapter 69

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“I was about to confess, Dolly!”

The shrill cry echoed through the SUV as it pulled away from the seaside neighborhood. Cherriot’s voice, raw with anguish, spilled out through the open windows, loud enough for nearby pedestrians to hear. Dressed in his impeccable suit, he pulled to a stop at a red light, let his reddish-gold head drop forward against the steering wheel, and let out another wail.

“I was right on the verge of confessing. Couldn’t you have waited a little longer? Why did you have to ring the doorbell?”

The long-haired woman in the passenger seat kept her gaze fixed on the passing scenery, the corner of her mouth curling into a wry smile. With one elbow propped on the door frame and a hand trailing in the breeze, Dolly offered a laughably insincere apology. “My mistake.”

Cherriot gripped the steering wheel until his knuckles whitened, a long, tormented groan escaping his throat. “Aaagh!”

The light shifted. Dolly rapped her knuckles twice against the dashboard. “Light’s green, idiot.”

Cherriot raised his head with agonizing slowness and pressed on the gas. Dolly wondered briefly if a man in his emotional state was fit to drive them into the city, but Cherriot had been adamant. He had insisted that forcing an elderly woman to drive while he sat comfortably beside her wouldn’t be gentlemanly.

Since Dolly was the one who had instilled those very manners in him, she simply let him have his way.

“You don’t sound sorry at all,” Cherriot pouted, his lower lip protruding.

Dark sunglasses hid most of Dolly’s expression, but the curve of her mouth betrayed her total lack of remorse. If anything, she looked thoroughly entertained.

“I was just remembering someone who swore he’d confess the instant that man got out of the hospital,” Dolly countered, her tone warm and indulgent, like a grandmother reprimanding a foolish child. “You’ve had all the time in the world, yet somehow you waited until moments before an appointment to create the perfect mood. Tsk, tsk.”

The criticism hit him square in the chest, leaving Cherriot with no retort.

He had styled his hair with meticulous care that morning, hoping Yuri might finally call him handsome. A few miserable shakes of his head had undone all that effort; reddish-gold strands now spilled softly over his forehead, dancing in the breeze against his eyebrows.

Dolly was right. Cherriot had possessed more than enough time to confess.

Counting from the day Yuri woke, he had been given over a month—thirty days and thirty nights spent entirely together. Had Cherriot properly cultivated the right atmosphere even once, Yuri might already have been his lover.

But that damned atmosphere. Cherriot simply hadn’t possessed the nerve to create it.

While Yuri had lay asleep, Cherriot had wanted nothing more than for him to open his eyes so he could express his deep regret for refusing to be his boyfriend. Yet when Yuri finally awoke, Cherriot’s petty regrets and sentimental confessions had suddenly felt hollow.

Yuri had slipped back into sleep almost the moment he regained consciousness. Cherriot spent the following hours arranging his hospital transfer, securing a private room, and coordinating a battery of examinations. Through it all, he thought of only one thing: Please let nothing be wrong with him. Please let him recover and stand on his own two feet again.

Fortunately, as early examinations predicted, Yuri suffered no lasting complications. The doctors confirmed this while monitoring his post-surgery recovery. His failure to wake had been the only serious hurdle, and once that cleared, he improved rapidly. The weeks during which Yuri had lain as still as a breathing corpse soon seemed almost unreal; his rehabilitation advanced with astonishing speed.

Perhaps it helped that Cherriot had hired a private caregiver and physical therapist to keep Yuri’s body moving and prevent muscle atrophy even while he remained unconscious. Within days of being moved to the private facility, Yuri was discharged. Once he began attending a rehabilitation center, he faced no real difficulty moving on his own.

The therapist praised Yuri’s recovery, calling him remarkably resilient and fiercely determined. He worked twice as hard as most patients and endured the most agonizing stages of physical therapy without a single word of complaint. Hearing that, Cherriot felt a rush of profound relief. Yuri was working hard because he intended to live.

To protect the precious life that had nearly been snuffed out because of him, Cherriot dedicated himself entirely to Yuri’s recovery.

First, he removed his mother and Dolly from the house. He had no desire to rent another property or move into a hotel, so he told his mother plainly that he wanted to remain alone with Yuri. She might reasonably have resented her son asking her to leave the home where she and his father had lived as newlyweds—even if the title was in Cherriot’s name—but instead, she merely nodded.

Next, he asked Dolly to visit as little as possible. Dolly had never tried to push Yuri away the way Benji had, but Cherriot wanted to shut out every outsider who might cause Yuri a shred of stress. Benjamin was naturally barred from approaching entirely, and Cherriot asked the household staff to take a temporary leave of absence.

As a result, Cherriot spent several weeks entirely alone with Yuri. From the moment Yuri left the hospital, Cherriot postponed his own schedule to focus solely on the recovery. They had certainly possessed plenty of time together.

There were mornings when Yuri gently shook him awake. There were meals Cherriot prepared himself, using menus taught to him by a professional nutritionist. There were evenings when he helped the freshly bathed Yuri into bed, read aloud to him, and wished him a soft good night. Cherriot always drove him to the rehabilitation center, leaving their afternoons often empty. Lately, Cherriot used that time to catch up on neglected training, prepare for the upcoming criminal trial, or deal with family affairs. Before that, however, he had spent entire afternoons simply watching Yuri slowly drift into a nap.

Looking back, they had possessed more time than they knew what to do with. Yet Cherriot had never found the proper moment to confess.

There were several reasons for his hesitation. To begin with, Cherriot had never confessed his feelings to anyone in his life. This would be his first time, and because the person was Yuri, he wanted to craft a memory neither of them would ever forget. He asked for advice and scoured films and books, only to conclude that atmosphere was everything. Determined not to offer some dreadful, commonplace confession like, “Hey, want to date?”, Cherriot spent countless hours obsessing over exactly how to reveal his heart.

There was something even more important than atmosphere, though: Cherriot did not know whether Yuri still wanted to be with him. He had no idea whether Yuri continued to feel what he had felt before taking the bullet.

Would a man who had nearly died because of him truly welcome his confession? Cherriot could not presume to know. While Yuri slept, Cherriot had sustained himself with fantasies that Yuri would be delighted once he awakened. But since waking, Yuri had not shown him that beautiful smile even once.

Of course he’s exhausted, Cherriot reasoned with himself. Anyone feels stiff after lying still for days. After a month in bed, rebuilding all that muscle must be brutally tiring.

Until recently, Yuri had spent nearly half of every day asleep. Cherriot decided that the man simply lacked the energy to concern himself with another person’s feelings. And it wasn’t as though Yuri never smiled at all. Whenever Cherriot read aloud, Yuri listened quietly with the faintest lift at the corners of his mouth. Cherriot watched that subtle curve with aching hunger and became obsessed with finding books that might make him smile more. Because he did not know what sort of literature Yuri liked, he gathered everything from dense nonfiction to children’s stories and cycled through them.

The smiles Cherriot saw in the morning were precious, too. When Cherriot fell asleep with his head resting beside the mattress after watching Yuri through the night, Yuri would gently stroke his back to wake him. Cherriot loved waking that way so much that he willingly endured the physical discomfort of sleeping in an awkward chair every single night. His body suffered, but the reward was indisputable. The moment Cherriot opened his eyes and saw Yuri gazing down at him with those deep blue eyes, pleasure stole his breath.

If Cherriot remained there, endlessly admiring the blue gaze he had yearned for so desperately, Yuri would sometimes raise the corners of his mouth and look upon him with quiet affection. Lately, it would not have been an exaggeration to say that Cherriot lived entirely for those mornings.

But those moments ended the second they left the bedroom.

Once they began the ordinary business of the day, Yuri rarely smiled. Cherriot understood that grueling rehabilitation offered little reason for happiness, but before the shooting, Yuri had smiled merely from looking at him—a smile no one could have expected from that cold, indifferent face. It was a secret paradise hidden behind winter. It was the exact smile that had made Cherriot fall in love at first sight.

Since Yuri had awakened, Cherriot had not seen it once. Perhaps Yuri no longer smiled that way because he no longer loved him. Cherriot did not mean to presume he understood Yuri’s heart, but people sometimes changed after surviving something as terrible as a gunshot wound.

Had Cherriot Goodnight never hired him, Yuri would never have been shot. Benjamin claimed Yuri already belonged to a dangerous world, but it was Cherriot who had dragged a man living quietly into this insanity. I wish we could have met some other way.

Whenever Cherriot followed that useless regret to its bleak conclusion, he remembered that without the job, he would never have met Yuri at all, and he would sigh. Had none of this happened, Cherriot might have continued foolishly protecting the trust and allowed Yuri to walk out of his life forever.

Some events left scars so terrible that one never wished to endure them again. Yet after enough time passed, a person sometimes discovered that the wound had not left only ruin behind. The family’s division over the inheritance had forced Cherriot to reconsider many things. Even if he protected his father’s estate and inherited the trust, it would never compare to the happiness Yuri had given him. And if preserving that inheritance demanded so high a price, perhaps it did not deserve to be preserved at all.

Cherriot could not know what his deceased father would have wanted. Still, the father Cherriot remembered would surely have told him to abandon even an immense fortune if doing so protected his family—after ensuring, naturally, that none of it fell into the hands of a bastard like Jackson Goodnight, who had gone mad with greed and attempted to murder them all.

“Before today, it never felt like the right moment,” Cherriot finally answered in a dispirited voice, sinking back into reality after his long train of thought.

Dolly, who had waited quietly beside him, glanced toward the driver’s seat. She studied his dejected profile, pushed her sunglasses higher with one finger, and spoke. “Then let’s hear what this miraculous atmosphere is supposed to be.”

“I don’t want to explain Wolfie’s private side to you…” Cherriot mumbled.

To describe the atmosphere that morning, Cherriot would have to tell Dolly that Yuri had smiled after seeing the dog. Inevitably, he would then have to explain how beautiful Yuri looked when he smiled. Dolly might not have cared, but Cherriot did not want anyone else knowing Yuri’s hidden side. That smile should belong only to him. Alexei knows about it, I suppose, but that can’t be helped. He knew Yuri before I did, and I owe him an enormous debt now.

In any case, that morning had felt promising. The mood had begun improving the moment Yuri smiled after talking about the dog. They had nearly kissed, and Yuri had neither avoided him nor appeared uncomfortable. As though that were not enough, Cherriot had dressed up and received the exact compliment he had wanted: Yuri had called him handsome.

The praise left Cherriot so elated that he eventually called Yuri adorable. He had not intended to flirt so openly when their relationship remained, at least on the surface, one of mere friendship after Cherriot had previously rejected Yuri’s request to date.

But Yuri truly was adorable. Becoming embarrassed by his own terrible handwriting was practically the same as asking Cherriot to call him cute. Cherriot remembered Yuri clutching his arm to prevent him from taking the notebook, and then he recalled the exact moment the pleasant atmosphere had shifted. Yuri had looked confused.

“You’re a fucking train wreck, Cherry.” Dolly’s vicious judgment fell without warning.

Cherriot shrugged defensively. “I just… needed to be certain Yuri didn’t resent me. He might remember the day he was shot every time he looks at me. What if I confess to someone who’s still recovering and only cause him more stress?”

Dolly clicked her tongue. “You’re young. Painfully young.”

“I’ll be thirty the year after next, Dolly. I’m quite grown-up now.”

“To my aging eyes, you look not merely young but downright pathetic.” After scolding him, Dolly folded her arms. She remained lost in thought until the car approached central Boston. Then, she spoke slowly. “That man… seems like the sort who would consider everything worthwhile merely because you survived.”

Cherriot glanced toward the passenger seat. He had assumed Dolly had lost interest after falling silent, but she was watching him intently. Her translucent blue eyes, markedly paler than Yuri’s, regarded him with grave intensity.

“There are men like that,” Dolly continued. “Stubborn, foolish bastards who don’t give a damn about their own lives. I saw plenty of them in the military. Before their minds can even make a decision, their bodies throw themselves forward. Then they disappear without a word, leaving the people who survived to deal with what comes after. Infuriating bastards.”

Although Dolly’s gaze rested on Cherriot, her spirit seemed to be wandering somewhere deep in the past. Cherriot had heard from his father that Dolly served in the military when she was young, but she had never spoken about those years. He listened quietly without interrupting.

“He probably wasn’t hoping for some grand reward,” she murmured, her voice softening. “He wanted you to live, so he took the bullet with that one single thought in his mind. If you’re standing here alive and whole, then he already received what he wanted. Of course, the moment he was shot may return to him sometimes. The wound may ache on certain days even after it’s fully healed. When that happens, he’ll endure it and let it pass. That’s all.”

Cherriot had never considered it that way. He desperately, fiercely wanted her to be right.

“…Do you think Yuri will accept me?”