“I’m aware of the geography, thank you.”
She dissolved. Full-body, shoulder-shaking, silent-scream crying, the kind that happens when someone’s emotional capacity has been exceeded by approximately a thousand percent. She pressed a pillow against her face and made sounds that were either laughter or sobs or some previously undiscovered hybrid of both.
I sat beside her, shaking my head, trying very hard to maintain the illusion that my heart wasn’t hammering like a trapped bird, that my lips weren’t still tingling, that the green shoot in my chest wasn’t already, impossibly, reaching toward the light.
“I need to change,” I said, to no one in particular. “We have a date tonight.”
Sable emerged from behind the pillow, mascara-streaked and beaming. “I’ll pick the outfit.”
“Absolutely not.”
“I’m picking the outfit.”
“Sable-“
“I am PICKING the OUTFIT, Marlowe.”
I looked at her – this ridiculous, wonderful, catastrophically emotional girl who’d been in my life for two days and somehow felt like she’d been there forever – and I laughed. The kind of laugh that comes from a place that’s been empty for too long and is finally, cautiously, starting to fill.
“Fine,” I said. “Pick the outfit.”
She leapt off the bed like it was Christmas morning and dove into the closet, and I sat there in my red dress, on my expensive bed, in my gilded cage, and thought about the man at the end of the hallway who was probably standing in front of his own mirror right now, touching his cheek, wondering what just happened.
That makes two of us, I thought. That makes two of us.
Caelum closed his bedroom door and fell onto the bed like a man who’d just walked off a battlefield and couldn’t believe he still had all his limbs.
He stared at the ceiling. The ceiling stared back, indifferent as always, but for once Caelum didn’t care about its opinion. A grin – stupid, involuntary, the kind of grin that would have horrified the boards of his seven companies – spread across his face and refused to leave.
She’d kissed him. On the cheek. The same cheek she’d slapped with enough force to rearrange his dental work, but still – she’d kissed him. Her lips had been warm and impossibly soft, and the contact had lasted maybe two seconds, and those two seconds were currently replaying in his mind on an infinite loop, each repetition revealing some new detail he hadn’t noticed in real time: the catch of her breath before she leaned in, the slight tremble of her fingers on his shoulder, the scent of her – something floral, something clean, something that wasn’t perfume but was simply Marlowe.
He pressed his palm against the cheek in question. It still tingled. Both cheeks tingled, actually – one from the kiss and one from the slap – and the absurd symmetry of it struck him as the most accurate summary of his relationship with Marlowe he could possibly construct. Pain on one side. Promise on the other. Welcome to marriage.
He reached for his phone on the nightstand, fingers unsteady with a kind of energy he barely recognized. Not business energy. Not adrenaline. Something lighter, less controlled. Something that felt suspiciously like happiness.
He dialed his mother.
She picked up on the second ring, which meant she’d been holding the phone. Celeste always held the phone when she expected a call, and she always expected a call from Caelum, because mothers have a radar for sons in emotional crisis, and hers was military-grade.
“Hello, Caelum. Why have you called?” Curious. Cautious. The voice of a woman who’d learned to brace for news.
“Mom.” He couldn’t stop smiling. He could hear the smile in his own voice and it was ridiculous. “I’m happy. I’m really, really happy.”
A pause. Then: “What have you done?”
“Nothing bad. Something good, for once.”
“Caelum.” Her tone shifted – warmer now, but still guarded, the way you approach a fire that might be a campfire or might be an arson. “Tell me.”
“I can’t. If I tell you, it’ll spoil everything.” He was being childish and he knew it, and for once, he didn’t care. “But I’m coming home. A month from now. To the villa.”
“A month?” The excitement was immediate, then tampered. “That’s rather far. But – fine. I’ll wait. I’ve waited two years; what’s another month.” A pause weighted with the thing she really wanted to ask. “And your wife? Is she coming?”
“She’s coming, Mom.”
The silence that followed had texture – hope and fear and the fragile thing that exists between them.
New Book: Back Home to Marry Off Myself
Loredana’s father left the family for his mistress, leaving them to fend for themselves abroad. When life was at its toughest, her father showed up with “good news” after 8 years of absence: To marry off Loredana to a paralyzed son of the wealthy Mendelsohn family.