Kiss the Sky

by Ritchie, Krista

  Everyone is happy.

  I imagined today as a brutal one. Yelling. Screaming. Tugging Lily down the aisle, praying both her and Loren would say yes. “But…” I stammer as I glance at both my mother and father. I haven’t processed what’s happening to me yet. “…Lily’s inheritance. You said she couldn’t get it back until she married Loren.”

  “We’re still engaged,” Lily says, she sidles next to Loren and he wraps an arm around her waist. “We’re just waiting to get married like we wanted to.”

  “And it’s okay,” my dad says with a nod. “We’re not making their marriage a stipulation to anything. They can do that on their own time.”

  I look to my mother. She reaches to her collar where her pearls would sit, but without them present, she touches the hollowness of her bone. It’s her only tell, her only giveaway that she may not be one-hundred percent satisfied with this outcome for my sister. But her lips stay pressed in a thin line, not arguing. She’s accepting it now, and that’s a start. The reality show did repair more of Lily’s image than this wedding could have. People were given six months of footage to fall in love with her and Loren instead of a dozen pictures.

  “It’s okay,” Lily says again. “This day is yours.”

  “What?” My voice is lost to shock.

  Connor takes my hand, and I face him. It’s quiet. The only noise from the fountain beside us and the birds flapping in the sky. The helicopters sound far away from the courtyard, like little insects in the distance.

  “Rose,” Connor breathes. And then he drops to one knee. He takes the black box from his pocket and flips it open. “Will you spend the rest of your life with me?”

  I don’t even look at the diamond. “Yes,” I say, not hesitating, not thinking. I just say the one word that makes the most sense because my heart tells me so. I’m in such a fog that I only realize he’s standing and kissing me when everyone claps around us.

  I smile and hold onto his face, not wanting my lips to part from his yet.

  He grins into the kiss.

  I’m getting married.

  Today.

  Holy shit. He breaks apart, and Daisy approaches me first with a dress box. She opens it, and I see the gown I sewed folded neatly underneath plastic wrapping. “We had the bust altered so you’d fit in it and not Lily,” she admits. “I stole the gown from your closet.”

  I run my fingers over the plastic. I designed my own wedding dress. I smile. The dress I know I’ll love. The material is delicate, as thin as a ballet recital outfit that’ll reach my collarbone, how I like my clothes. Connor, I realize, found better bridesmaids gowns to match what I had created for Lily.

  “It’s perfect,” I say. I glance back at Connor and I shake my head. “I can’t believe you did all of this for me.”

  “I know what you love,” he says, “I was happy to make this day ours.”

  I breathe out slowly so I don’t start crying all over again. My sisters begin to trickle inside to get ready for the wedding…my wedding. Loren and Ryke follow suit. With Poppy’s husband and my father in tow.

  Connor and my mother are the only two who linger in the courtyard.

  My mother takes my hands in hers. “Rose,” she says with glassy eyes. “I love you, and I never thought you’d get married…”

  I can’t help but laugh because I never thought I would either.

  “So this day is a dream for me as much as I know it is for you.”

  I’ll take it. “Thank you,” I say, kissing her cheek. She kisses mine back.

  “I’ll see you inside.” She pats Connor’s arm before she disappears into the palace.

  Connor tilts his head, and he wears that arrogant, conceited smile I know so well. He edges forward and wraps his arms around my waist. “I love you,” he says. I love you.

  The words fill me more than anything else. His lips touch my forehead, and he holds me so close, and I sway with him a little, as though we’re dancing at our reception. As though we’ve already said I do.

  “One day,” he breathes, “we’re going to look back and recount all that we’ve done together. And we’re going to think, goddamn we were only twenty-four.”

  My eyes well. “We’re the responsible pair.”

  “The ones who clean everyone’s messes.”

  “The ones everyone turns to,” I add.

  “The most adult, even though we’re fairly new at this.”

  I laugh into a tearful smile. This is about to happen. We’re going to be together. It feels like the start of a lifetime. Any fears I ever had, any reservations, are gone. I trust that he’ll stay here, for me.

  That I am more than just a chase.

  “Kiss the sky with me,” Connor whispers, a beautiful smile pulling his lips, “and don’t ever come down.”

  [ Epilogue ]

  CONNOR COBALT

  Three Months Later

  Hot, blinding spotlights bear down on me, my hands on either side of a glass podium. Three-hundred faces stare back. And I can’t see a single one. It’s like being supine on a hospital table, gazing at white fluorescents with no recognition of what lies beyond.

  I’m not nervous. My palms aren’t clammy. The only sweat that beads my forehead derive from these lights.

  The Cobalt Inc. logo rotates on a screen behind me, subsidiary names like MagNetic printed beneath. I already talked about my mother. How she had a vision for this company, the typical things everyone would expect to hear after the CEO passed, leaving her son everything.

  I step out of the podium, in a suit that embodies my confidence.

  One day, I’m at Penn, sitting in the front of class and turning in assignments about managerial theories. And in a flash of time, I’m here. Twenty-four-years-old. Addressing men and women twice my age about Cobalt Inc.’s newest undertaking, with no one else commanding the stage but me.

  I smile, not able to see a thing. And I don’t even care. “Galileo said, ‘All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered,’” I tell the crowd. “‘The point is to discover them.’” The only one who would know how apropos that is to my life would be the girl in the very first row.

  “Today, I’m going to tell you two truths.”

  I walk towards the edge of the stage with certainty.

  “I know women,” I say, which causes a wave of chuckling. The sex tapes are public knowledge by now. And instead of shying away from the publicity, both Rose and I have taken advantage of it—as business students would.

  “And I know diamonds.” My lips rise even higher.

  The Cobalt Inc. logo fades behind me.

  Cobalt Diamonds replaces it.

  Everyone claps, more loudly as they read the tagline: If there’s anything we know, it’s women and diamonds.

  The industry my mother built was always meant to interconnect to others. Magnets, paints, gemstones—we could have started a jewelry franchise years ago, but Cobalt wasn’t a well-known name before the reality show, and we would have had to buyout another company, something we didn’t want to do.

  The sex tapes have immortalized me as something far greater than I am—a dominant god that can fulfill a woman’s every fantasy—and belief has more power than anything I can ever construct myself.

  It’s given a face to my mother’s company and a much bigger future.

  I tell the crowd that our Director of Advertising will discuss marketing strategies. I thank them, and instead of heading backstage, I walk down the stairs to the convention floor.

  My eyes adjust slowly to the darkness, but the cheering has suddenly escalated. And when I blink a few times, I realize that everyone is on their feet.

  Rose included.

  She claps with them, her yellow-green eyes narrowed with passion and fire. I approach her, and without a word, I hold my wife’s hand and lead her down the aisle of businessmen and women. A few people pat my shoulder on the way out.

  “Diamonds,” she says with the shake of her head. I’ve been keeping this secr
et from her for months now. A smile lights up her face. “I’d say it’s genius, but I’m afraid of inflating your ego. It’s already hard living with Loren’s and yours together.”

  I grin and lower my head to whisper in her ear, “Ladies and gentlemen, she called me a genius, and she didn’t even glare when she said it.”

  She shoots me one now.

  I kiss her temple and stand up straight, pushing through the double doors into the quiet hallway. Several people in suits and nametags walk around with purpose, leather binders to their chests, paying attention to us only when they recognize our faces.

  I hold her by the waist and lift her hand, pointing out the large diamond on her finger, stones encased all around the band. “This was one of the first designs,” I say.

  “I have a Cobalt original?”

  “Yes.”

  She appraises the ring on her finger, her lips rising again. “When someone asks me who I’m wearing, I’m going to say me and my husband.”

  The strangeness of that appeals to me just as much as it does to her. I lift her chin so her eyes meet mine, her lipstick dark red, bolding her features. “How much time do I have left with you?” I ask her.

  “All day,” she says. “I cleared my schedule.”

  I frown. “You cleared your schedule?” I almost laugh. “I saw your to-do list this morning. It was five pages long.”

  “I’m trying something new,” she says, touching my chest with her hands and smoothing my suit.

  “And what’s that?”

  “Delegation,” she says. “I have a store manager. She’s taking care of the inventory and the mindless tasks.” Rose opened a boutique with her clothes in Philadelphia, no longer under the command of a department store. She could have accepted a couple offers from them. Many people were asking for a lingerie line from Rose, the demand increasing.

  She’s been designing one, but not for H&M or Saks. It’ll all go in her new store. And even though she’s given up millions of dollars in return for being a small business owner, she’s happy. I can see it in her eyes. The pressure of success and fear of failure is finally gone.

  “But we do have dinner plans,” she says.

  “We do?” My brows rise.

  “Loren and Lily are meeting us at a restaurant a few blocks over.” Rose tucks her hair behind her ear. “I think Lily is doing better.” She nods to herself.

  After the sex tapes, Rose’s name wasn’t tarnished the way Lily’s was. Women praised her for her openness and many wanted to ask her questions.

  Rose looks physically ill when we talk about the differences between this case and the sex addiction leak. Even now, her eyes tighten as she stares off in recollection of the past few months. Lily was quiet towards Rose for a while.

  “It’s not fair,” I heard Lily cry to Loren one day.

  She’s right.

  It’s not really fair.

  Rose hates that Lily was beaten down, especially since her sister was the one with the illness. But Rose had sex with her long-term boyfriend. Lily was with many different partners before Loren. Rose was the virgin. Lily was the slut. In the eyes of the world, one is right, one is wrong.

  And changing the world—if that’s in anyone’s power—time has to be on your side. One of the few things I can’t control.

  Rose’s eyes catch a newspaper on a nearby bench. I follow her gaze to see the headline New Connor and Rose Cobalt Sex Tape Sold for $35 Million. Scott just sold the rights to the footage of us in the bathroom. The one where Rose gives me head. It’s a reminder that he’s profiting off us even months after the reality show ended. We dropped the lawsuit about a month ago. The time and stress to battle him in court wasn’t worth what we have now.

  We surrendered. And Scott Van Wright won.

  But he didn’t win what matters.

  Though, I do take solace in the fact that he doesn’t have footage of us in the Alps, the night Rose lost her virginity, the night we slept together for the very first time. He can sell as many sex tapes as he wants, but that moment is ours, and only ours, forever.

  When I reroute my attention from the newspaper and back to Rose, I realize she’s already left the headline in the past. She’s studying me with an entranced, wistful gaze.

  “What is it?” I ask. My heart lightens and soars as I keep watching her look at me this way.

  She shakes her head with a smile, and tears crest her eyes as she says, “I love you more than anyone.”

  My mouth falls a little. I never thought I’d reach that place in her heart, above her sisters. It seemed unfathomable, for however much I wanted it to be true.

  When the shock passes, I smile deeply and grip the back of her head, my fingers sliding through her silky hair. “I love you more than I could ever love myself,” I whisper the words and lift Rose’s chin again, raising her gaze to mine, not to say anything else. I just smile as I watch her eyes churn with a familiar, unbridled emotion.

  I love knowing I’ll fall asleep and wake up to those impassioned eyes. I love that the most terrifying what if—the one without her—is the path that won’t ever come true. My new dreams are in the faraway future, filled with children. And love.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This book is about dreaming big. And we want to thank our parents for allowing us to dream the biggest dreams of all, for encouraging us to go after them and giving us support that we will never be able to repay. The most we can say is thank you, right here, for being the whisper in our ear that told us we could be anything and do anything. Thanks Mom and Dad. We owe you big time.

  Thanks to our brother. Even when you’re toiling over your own work, you constantly think about ways to help us further our careers. One day, big brother, we’re going to celebrate together, and we know you’ll be right by our side.

  And to the rest of our family and friends—the constant love is what keeps us going. And to our French translators, Violaine, Sarah, and Nieku, you girls rock. Thank you, Nieku, for all those Gossip Girl nights in our dorm room. We miss them dearly.

  To our readers, our fans, this book is for you. Like all great television, fandoms drive every scene, every word and they are the chorus to what could be a silent play.

  Thank you for giving music to our work.

  You are the impassioned spirits that paint our world with color. We will never forget that. We promise.

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