‘No. The point-scoring.’
She looked up at me.
‘I don’t want to compete with you, Lily,’ I said. ‘We never competed when we were partners, not really. And if we’re going to be…’
‘Partners?’ She raised her eyebrows suggestively.
‘—then I don’t want it to be like that either. If you and I are going to work, we need to work with each other, not against each other. We need to be a team.’
She leaned up and kissed me gently on the lips. ‘I can agree to that.’
‘And we’re going to couple’s therapy.’ I threaded my fingers through her hair. ‘I want to be with you. I’m terrible at being without you. But we clearly have some work to do on being together, if we’re not going to cut ourselves to pieces on each other.’
She sighed. ‘I’m going to hate it.’
‘So am I. But that probably means we need it even more.’
‘I know.’ She ran a hand over her eyes. ‘Ugh. Thuong’s going to be so fucking smug about this.’
Then she sighed again. ‘I wish I was as brave as you, Murray. You knew when to end things with Julia. I’m going to be carrying around this guilt about Jeff for the rest of my life. I loved him, but not like I love you. I was always going to cross the Rubicon eventually, but I owed him an ending, and I ran out of time to give it to him.’
I kissed her temple. ‘Sometimes things are just really fucking unfair.’
‘Our therapist is going to have a field day with us.’
She looked up at me suddenly. ‘We’re not going to anyone we’ve ever had on the show. Promise me that.’
‘Are you kidding? Of course we’re not going to anyone we’ve ever had on the show. We’re going to a real therapist, not an Instagram therapist.’
‘Good. If I have to talk about my feelings, I want it to actually achieve something.’
I rested my forehead against hers and closed my eyes. We still had so much farther to go, so many more things to work out, but just sitting with her, just being with her, felt so fuckingright.
‘Coming back to the thing about competing with each other, though,’ she said, ‘I’d like to propose a caveat.’
I opened one eye. ‘Hmmm?’
‘Could we, perhaps,’ she said, fingers tangling in the patch of chest hair above the open neck of my polo shirt, ‘occasionally compete in bed? Because I don’t know about you, but I thought some of our little battles there were pretty hot.’
‘Oh, did you now?’
Gently, I pulled her hair, drawing her head back so I could press my open mouth into her neck. ‘I’ll win.’
‘You keep telling yourself that.’ Her fingers traced a line down my shirt to my zipper.
The score was about even when we were interrupted by my stomach growling. ‘God damn it, Murray,’ Lily said, shoving me in the shoulder to push me off. ‘When was the last time you ate something?’
‘Hey, I did all right today. I had breakfast. But then I had a bunch of meetings, and…’
She shook her head. ‘Where’s the room service menu?’
I found it on the bedside table and handed it to her. ‘Now that you’re a fancy development exec, what’s your per diem like?’ she asked. ‘Because if the network’s paying, I’m going to order one of everything.’
‘Maybe temper that ambition a little. I’m notthatfancy an exec.’
‘Fine, fine. I’ll just order half, then.’
‘Can I ask you something?’
