“Oh, Jesus.” Madison Lightman was a girl from my class. She always knew where the parties were, and I had no interest in her beyond the fact that she was fun to be around. For the evening, not a lifetime. “We must have been on the way somewhere.” All those summers blur into each other for me, but it’s not the same for Jenny.
“After your brother got out of the car, she said something to you, and the two of you just laughed and laughed.” She takes a deep breath. “After that, I never wanted to come back. Then the job offer came up, and what I had going on in New York was mostly a shambles....”
“So you decided to give Ruby Bay a second chance?” My heart warms at the thought. I’ve always loved this town and felt at home here, but to know that Jenny came back here for me...it makes me love it even more. Some people might find that pathetic. I might have once found it pathetic. Not anymore.
But the look on Jenny’s face doesn’t say heartwarming second chance. She bites her lip, looking down at her plate. “Not exactly.”
17
Jenny
The words stick on my tongue like I’ve taken a big bite of Bisquik, and I can’t force them out.
In a miracle move, the waitress steps back up to the table in time to make the pause less awkward. She sets down the glass of red wine in front of me and I pick it up and drink without tasting it. I should have ordered a white, but anything is better than the powdery feeling in my mouth. She saves me a second time when she asks for our orders. The one time my parents brought my sister and me here for dinner I had butternut ravioli and every bite melted on my tongue in a burst of flavor that I’ve never forgotten, so I stick with that. It’ll be a nice reward for making it through this conversation.
It’s only a momentary reprieve. Roman is waiting when the waitress steps away, leaving us with our bread and awkwardness. His expression doesn’t make him look awkward, only slightly confused. It’s me who probably looks like an idiot.
“What did you come back to Ruby Bay for, if not to give us a second chance?”
He says us, but the me is clear as day. How do I make him realize that I never had a first chance with him? Does it matter? It’s hard to think with him looking at me that way, with such intention. My freshman year of high school I would have given anything for him to look at me this way. Or any number of ways that he’s looked at me since I waltzed into his office.
My pulse hammers in my veins. Now’s the moment—it is the moment—when I should admit everything. The bonus from Connor. The plan for me to quit in a couple of weeks. All of it. But it hurts, a tight squeezing vise on my chest, to think that he might never look at me this way again.
I thought I’d grown out of being timid. I thought I’d grown into being brave. It turns out I’m not that brave.
“Okay.” I shift in my seat, trying to make it feel less like my ass is pressed to hot coals. “I’ll admit it.”
Roman is instantly on edge, sitting up, leaning in. His face is as closed off as I’ve seen it these last two weeks, but there’s still a chance. I can still see an opening. The words come slowly, because the more I think about it, the dumber it sounds, even in my head.
“I made some assumptions about...the things you were thinking the day of my open house.” He gives me one nod to continue. “And back then, I thought you’d ignored me purposefully, to hurt me. I guess I never sat down to think that it could have been something else entirely.”
“My parents had their flaws,” he says softly, “but they never tolerated cruelty. If you thought I was laughing at you—” He shakes his head decisively. “I wouldn’t have done it. I know a lot of guys say that type of shit, and I’ll admit to some pretty dumb things, but not that. I’m sorry that you saw it that way.” His face clouds over again. “And I’m sorry that it stayed with you for so long.”
“I guess it’s my turn to apologize.” I fold my hands on the tablecloth to keep them from shaking. “Because it’s true. I didn’t come back here because I thought Ruby Bay or anybody in it deserved a second chance.” I drag my eyes up from the tablecloth to meet his. “I came to get revenge.”
There’s a heartbeat of silence while my words sink in. Roman blinks. Then....
He throws his head back and laughs.
It’s such a gorgeous, easy sound that it calls to something in the pit of my gut, and I can’t help but laugh, too. Out in the open between us, I can see my plan for what it was—ridiculous.
Finally, he gets a grip and leans forward, his elbows on the table, hands folded beneath his chin. “All right,” he begins, his shoulders still shaking with the remnants of laughter. “You decided to take revenge on me by being so—” He hesitates, and all the things I used to tell myself in school come sprinting back into into the gap. Difficult. Weird. Ugly. Quiet. Poor. “—so gorgeous and confident and—” Roman digs his teeth into his bottom lip. “—unbearably fucking sexy that it’s all I can ever think about?”
There’s only one answer. “Yeah. That’s basically it.”
His face settles into an expression I can only describe as awe. “Well, you pulled it off. That’s a hell of a revenge.”
My chest aches in a strange, broad way. “I didn’t pull it off. The whole idea of the revenge was to show off my new and improved self and then leave again before I—” Now my throat has gone tight. This can’t happen. I cannot cry on this date, even if it feels like a lifetime of pain is barreling toward me at a breakneck pace. “—before I got attached.”
His blue eyes are level on mine. “I don’t know if anyone’s told you this before, Jenny, but it’s okay to get attached to things that you...” If he says love, I’m going to lose it. “...things that you like.”
I try to swallow the lump in my throat and fail. “That’s the thing.” Clearing my throat gets rid of it, but it comes back every time I open my mouth. “I didn’t like this place. I hated this place. Everything about Ruby Bay reminded me of—” In a classic stalling maneuver, I raise my napkin to my lips and dab at some nonexistent wine droplets. I’ve led myself down a path that I do not want to be on.
Roman looks like he’s struggling for the right words, and that’s when I know I have to go on. I can’t let him apologize for everything that happened, because he’s only a tiny part of it.
“It was hard, growing up here. My parents love my sister and me. I’ve never doubted that. But they....” I can’t throw them under the bus, not even when it would be so convenient. “They had their own ways of doing things. I don’t think they ever understood how much impact their way of life had on the way people saw us. Me in particular. Celestia, she was always...she was always happy in spite of it all. She was more like them than I was. My sister—” My sister. My sister will probably call me any moment now, needing me, and I’m the one who’s going to be there for her. “My sister let everything roll off her back. She never cared what other people thought.”
“And you did.” It’s not a question.
“I did.” Tears sting the corners of my eyes. “When I graduated, I decided that I was going to change everything. I saw how easy things were for people who had the right clothes and the right...look. The right attitude. I had no idea how to be like that, so I spent all my spare time researching it.”
Roman’s forehead wrinkles. “You researched how to be confident?”
“Outside of my college classes, it was my main project.” The memory of that exhaustion settles over my shoulders like the ghost of a cardigan. “I got up early. I stayed up late. I tore apart everything about myself that made me so invisible. I was ruthless.” I can’t look at him anymore. Even now, this all sounds so stupid. The memories are so immediate that I can’t escape them, but I want to. I want to forget it all. I want to forget how desperate I felt, and how guilty I felt about stripping away all the things my parents had given me to make way for a version of myself who effortlessly belonged instead of wanting it so badly it kept me awake at night. “I made binders. I kept notes.” All I can do is stare down at the
empty plate in front of me. A person like Roman Bliss isn’t going to understand this. What frame of reference would he have for something as shameful as researching things like how to be cool? It wasn’t only the research, either. I practiced. I had to practice. None of it came naturally, and even now, after all these years, it still mortifies me. “It took a long time to make myself into this. I wanted to finally get something out of it.”
I know I’m hanging my head like a person who has been utterly defeated, but I can’t for the life of me look into his eyes. It’s too late now. It’s too late to take back what I’ve said, and what I’ve done, and there’s no way Roman wants any part of that. I take in breath after breath and focus on surviving. At least I’m unlikely to be recognized.
He stands up from his seat and I brace myself.
He’s going to walk out. What else could he do?
18
Roman
Jenny has gone completely still except for a quiver in her chin that breaks my heart into a thousand pieces. She doesn’t lift her head when I stand up, doesn’t move as I come around the table, and doesn’t raise her eyes. I kneel down next to her chair.
“I look like a fucking idiot,” she whispers.
“Jenny.”
She still doesn’t look at me.
“First, you have nothing to feel stupid about.”
Her eyelashes move a fraction of an inch.
“People want to change things about themselves all the time, and they put a lot of work into it. They invest time and money and energy and everything else.” I put a hand above her knee. “People get emotionally invested in these kinds of things.”
I was so, so wrong about her. I was wrong about her in high school, though I’m willing to give my eighteen-year-old self a pass for that. But as a man with a fully grown brain, I have no excuse for the way I imagined some bullshit movie-montage transformation. She didn’t walk under some flowered archway and come out the other side like a Pantene model.
“Above all, you don’t look like an idiot. You look wonderful. And maybe you feel like you’re faking it, but to me it’s as real as anything else in the world. It’s not fucking fake that you’re witty and attractive and so over-the-top captivating that I’m breaking all my own workplace rules just to get close to you at every possible opportunity.”
Jenny sniffs, and for the first time she looks at me from beneath her eyelashes. “Don’t bullshit me, Roman Bliss. I don’t think my heart could take it.”
There are no words worthy enough to convince her of how badly I want her right now—all of her. All of her past, and so help me God, all of her future, too. I know that in some nebulous way that I could never phrase into something appropriate for another human to hear, and now is definitely not the time to be exploring it, so I do the only thing I can to prove I’m not bullshitting her.
I take her face in my hands and kiss her.
It starts out verging on innocent, a connection meant to comfort and reassure her, and then Jenny makes a sound into my mouth that can’t be audible to anyone else in the restaurant but is louder than a thunderclap to me. The gates of propriety that have been holding back a blaze of heat and want come crashing down. I slip a hand around to the back of her neck and pull her closer, tasting her, teasing her, battling her.
I don’t care that my family is one of the best known in the town of Ruby Bay. I don’t care that whenever I go out in public, I’m representing myself as well as my entire family and the Bliss Resort & Club. I don’t care. I can’t care, because in this moment I have been reduced to a bundle of nerves and testosterone kneeling at Jenny London’s feet.
Her hands grip the back of my shirt, nails digging in even through the fabric, and she spreads her knees apart so I can take up the remaining space between us. I pause to suck on her bottom lip and get a taste of salt—her tears. She lets out a throaty laugh and pulls back enough to say, “You have no idea how much I wanted this. I had no idea how much I wanted this. Some fucking revenge....”
Then her lips are back on mine, needing and wanting with a hint of tentativeness, as if every moment is a new opportunity for me to reveal that this has been a set-up all along. I feel it down to my very bones, that fear in her, and I’ll do whatever it takes to kiss it away.
There’s a sound behind me. It’s a very familiar sound, but I’m lost in Jenny’s lips, learning more about her than I ever have before, so I don’t register what it is for several small eternities.
It’s the sound of a tray sliding into place on a tray stand.
A tray stand.
The phrase echoes around in my mind, but it can’t find room to settle because I am on fire for her and with her and nothing else in the world matters at all except this woman.
Behind me, the waitress clears her throat.
Awareness comes back like a bucket of ice water being drenched on the back of my neck. I evolve several levels in the space of a heartbeat. We’re in a restaurant. A popular restaurant. On a Friday night.
The next thing to hit me is the dead silence around us.
It’s not a complete silence, naturally, because a restaurant is never completely silent. The clatter of silverware and dishes and cookware floats distantly in from the kitchen, and soft music plays. It’s vaguely Italian and I’ve never noticed it before. I’ve never noticed it because in all the times I’ve eaten here, no one has managed to get every diner to stop talking at once.
They’re sure as hell not talking now.
Jenny looks stricken, and I grin up at her, unable to wipe it off my face.
“That was some kiss,” I murmur into her ear.
“Yeah,” she whispers.
It’s an effort to stand up, what with the incredible erection I have to deal with and the knowledge that all of Ruby Bay is staring at us. Somehow, I manage. I’m the eldest of the Bliss brothers, and not even abject mortification can bring me down.
Or maybe it could. I don’t really know. I don’t feel mortified. I feel like I have to get out of here, that’s true, but not because I’m ashamed of kissing Jenny London. I could never be ashamed of kissing her like that, because I meant every second.
I pull my wallet out of my pocket as I turn around to face our waitress, who is standing stoically next to the tray and the tray stand, her face an entirely new shade of red.
The lack of conversation around us calls for a bigger response, so I raise one hand and break the fourth wall. “Thanks, everybody.”
Staring is not nearly on the level of what I just did with Jenny in full view of the public, but what we did could have been worse. I’m on the verge of making an announcement to that effect when the other patrons of Bellissima get hold of themselves and start up their conversations again.
“Sorry about that,” I say to the waitress, because what else is there to say? She might have already called the police to arrest us for being a fire hazard, but Bellissima couldn’t pay me to stay here for another five minutes. “Could you run the bill on this card, and add a hundred dollars for the tip?”
She doesn’t meet my eyes as she takes the credit card, only clears her throat. “And...your meals?”
I take one more look around the restaurant. Jenny is on the edge of her seat, eyeing the door.
“Yep,” I say, like this is just a day like any other. “We’re going to need a couple to-go boxes.”
*****
I take Jenny’s hand as soon as the waitress hands me the bagged food and lead the way outside. Out on the sidewalk, there’s a moment of tension when I try to go right, and Jenny tries to go left, toward the lot where I parked the car.
“Not that way.”
“Not that way?” There’s no more shame in her voice, only a giddy excitement. “Where are we going?”
“This way.”
I start walking quickly down the sidewalk, and Jenny can barely keep up. “I take it our destination is a surprise?”
“I don’t think you’ll be too surprised when we get there.”
“What am I doing?” I come to a stop in the middle of the sidewalk and wrap my arm around her waist, pulling her closer so I can speak directly into her ear. “That kiss....”
“They almost threw us out of the restaurant.” She seems shocked that such a thing could happen to her.
“Yes,” I agree. “Because they could see where it was going to lead.”
“Where’s that?”
“To you. Naked. In my bed.”
“In your bed? But....”
I take her hand and start walking again. “Do you think there’s any possible way I’m going to risk driving you back to the resort? Do you think there’s any possible way I could wait that long?” I steal a sidelong glance at her. Jenny’s beaming with an infectious pride. I’d stop again and celebrate it with her, only my need is becoming all-consuming.
I hesitate, slowing my pace a little. Maybe I should stop. Maybe I should check in with her, see how she’s feeling, see if—
“What are you doing?” Jenny tugs on my hand, the picture of impatience. “You mentioned a bed. Let’s go.”
19
Jenny
Roman shuts the hotel room door behind us and closes out the rest of the world.
Not that anything else has mattered since he kissed me in Bellissimo. I’m still buzzing from that kiss, still soaring high above the clouds, blinded by the unadulterated light from the sun. Sure, he kissed me on the balcony of the suite, but even that kiss was tame compared to the one that all the unsuspecting patrons of Bellissimo witnessed tonight.
I don’t care about those people anymore.
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