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Chad gives me a grin. He sure loves working me up. “You’re so beautiful when you’re mad at me. I oughta piss you off every day.”
“Chad …” I growl warningly.
“Shouldn’t it speak for itself? My being here?” His eyes drop to my lips. He looks anguished suddenly. “I had to see you, Lance.”
All the fight drops out of me like a ghost.
He meets my eyes. “You’re so fuckin’ beautiful.”
“Chad, I thought we said …” I sigh. “I thought we decided—”
“We didn’t decide nothin’,” he cuts me off. “Your ass went and decided what was gonna happen to us, and what did I say? I said no. I said I don’t accept that. So here I am, standin’ in front of you now, not acceptin’ it.”
I have never known a more stubborn, hard-headed, obstinate person in my whole life.
“I heard your show went well.”
I shrug. “It went alright.”
“Oh, is that so? I heard it was more than alright. Heard it was everything you wanted and more.”
He came all this way. He might as well hear the truth. “It went better than I could have ever dreamed. Everyone is impressed. I’m basically the top of my class, now. The envy of everyone in town. I rocked boats and built ships.”
“So why do you sound so dang sad?”
I let out a laugh that sounds like a sigh. “Because the thing I told you could happen next is happening. I’m going to be in high demand. I’m going to be working nonstop. I’m …” My eyes drop to my hands. I already feel them growing sore and raw from all the pin-pricking, tedious-threading, fabric-handling, pattern-cutting, and hard labor they’ll be enduring over the next several months.
He takes those hands gently into his. “And I wanna be with you every step of the way. Even still. Even if you’re busy all day being your brilliant self.”
“It was hard for me when I first came back because my boss had thrown me a curve ball. We both acknowledged that.” I bring my gaze up to his. I only make it to his soft, pillowy lips, unable to look him in the eye. “But now I know, it’s only going to get worse from here on out, not better. Just because this show is over doesn’t mean now I’m magically available to be your boyfriend.”
“So I’ll leave my ranch to Old Man Mitch. He can have it. I’ll move out here and be your man. I’ll—”
“You didn’t let me finish.”
He shuts up and gives me an impatient look.
Even his impatient looks are so fucking adorable and raw with sexual energy, it’s difficult to keep my mind straight.
Yet still, I maintain myself and continue my point. “I’ve also been giving this … this ‘life’ of mine … a lot of thought.” With that, I take my own glance at the crowded reception. No one is looking our way anymore. “I’ve been looking at the last ten years, bringing me to this point. And I’ve also considered what the road ahead of me might look like in another ten years.”
“What’re you saying, Goodwin?”
I eye him. “Are you going to let me finish? Or are you going to keep interrupting me?”
Chad bites his lip and glares at me. “I swear, that goddamned attitude of yours is makin’ me horny.”
“Really, Chad? You can’t contain it for a second?”
“I ain’t seen you in three and a half weeks. Can you blame me? You look like sex on a stick right now.”
I fight a smile for five seconds, then straighten up my face at once and focus on him. “What I was going to say was, in ten years from now, I might have established a huge name for myself. A big building with fifty skilled seamsters and seamstresses, floors upon floors of my apparel, hundreds of thousands of dollars rolling in each month, a big, expensive flat in the middle of the city. I could be neighbors with celebrities, dressing them for red carpet events, traveling the world, visiting Paris once a month—maybe I even have a fancy condo there.”
The smile Chad gives me is full of whimsy and longing. “That sounds like a pretty incredible life. Fancy condo in Paris …”
“Sure does,” I agree. Then I meet his gaze. “Trouble is, who’s going to visit me in that condo?”
He snorts. “I will be, obviously. I mean, maybe Paris and, uh, baguettes and scarves ain’t really my style, but …”
“No,” I cut him off. “You won’t be visiting me.”
His eyebrows pull together indignantly.
“Because we will have broken up years ago,” I tell him, like I am my own soothsayer, spreading out a map of my possible future with him. “We’ll try to make this work at first. Then I’ll grow sad and unsatisfied. We’ll get into fights. You’ll resent me for quitting your business on the ranch. Not at first, of course, but in time, you will resent your lack of freedom and your lack of choice in your own life. You’ll hate me for having everything in your life dictated and changed by whatever I choose to do with mine. You’ll follow my career and lose focus on who you were, on who you are. You’ll lose touch with everyone you love from Spruce. You’ll become Californicated in the worst way possible, you’ll struggle to make friends, you’ll nurture a deep pit of dissatisfaction inside you …”
