40. Chapter Forty
Everything hits me at once.
The memory of that night and that kiss had grown fuzzy, blurring around the edges as I got further from it and closer to Oliver. Now it snaps into sharp focus.
The feel of his chest that night and this morning.
The fluttering in my stomach that started with Oliver the next day at Sami’s movie party.
All the moments in between when I felt a tug toward him but ignored it because I’d been distracted by the perfection of that kiss.
Ruby catches my eye. She’s watching closely, and she nods. An acknowledgment: Now you know what I know.
I move to step out of Oliver’s hold, but he strengthens his grip, a silent request to stay, as he lowers his head next to mine.
“I’m sorry, Mads.”
His voice is low, the vibration of it conducting through bone, straight down my spine, out to every nerve ending, and I shiver. This time when I step away, he lets me go.
“Inside.” I point to the house and turn.
We walk through the kitchen and down the short hall to the living room, where Mrs. Lipsky looks up from kitten duty. She stays quiet and just watches as we round the corner to the stairs.
What does she see on my face? I don’t even know what I’m feeling right this second. Confusion and clarity. Relief and anger. Embarrassment as I try to remember how many times I mentioned that kiss in front of the guy who gave it to me, going on about how it was the kiss, talking about how I’d only date if I found him. Or he found me.
And why hadn’t he?
I walk into my room and spot Tabitha on my windowsill, surveying the courtyard and pool.
“Shut it,” I tell Oliver.
“I haven’t even—”
“The door.”
He shuts the door.
I wrap my arms around myself, needing a hug. “You’ve had so many opportunities to tell me.”
“I should have told you that night.”
“Why didn’t you?” I’m not mad. I’m not . . . I don’t know how I feel. Overwhelmed, more than anything. Trying to put so many things together, but it’s like trying to catch bubbles, each fact I grab onto popping before I can study it, make sense of it.
He sighs. “Shock? I don’t know about you, but for me, that blew my mind. All of my circuits. My common sense? My system overloaded.”
“But you did know about me. About what I thought. You’ve heard me say it more times than I want to remember because it will get humiliating.”
“It shouldn’t,” he says. “Or at least, I wish it wouldn’t. Anytime I heard you say anything like that, you were technically talking about me, but not really. I know that.”
I draw my head back, even more confused. “What does that mean?”
“That night, was there any part of you that thought the guy in the mask was me?”
I shake my head. “Not really.” His eyebrow goes up. “Not at all.”
“Would you have kissed me if you knew it was me?”
“No.”
“And that’s what I feel the worst about. It wasn’t intentional, but I didn’t give you a choice. I’m so sorry, Madison.” He sits on the end of my bed, slumped.
“If I’m going to go around kissing strange dudes in masks, I probably get what I deserve for not asking questions first.”
His eyes meet mine, trying to read me.
“Why didn’t you tell me later? The next day, even?”
“I meant to. That’s why I came over. But Ruby was borderline teary at first, and . . .”
“We were all hands on deck.” All of us rushing around trying to keep Ruby from sinking into her funk. “I was distracted. But you still could have told me.”
“I know. But I took the delay and promised myself I’d tell you the next time I saw you. But that’s the day your dad came to the club. And then I got the marriage idea, and I decided telling you was the worst thing I could do at that point.”
“Wouldn’t it be the most important thing you should have told me?”
“Would you have agreed to the marriage if I had?”
Now I feel my anger starting to surface. “No. But that was my choice to make.”
I walk to the window and scratch the top of Tabitha’s head. The more I think about it, the angrier I begin to feel. He needed the money too much to tell me the truth. That’s what it always came down to. Money. Money and the way people who are supposed to care about me use it as a lever, button, or string depending on what they want me to do.
Oliver lets the silence stretch, but at last he says my name. “Mads? You okay?”
“I thought if I ever found out who the masked guy was that I would be ready to think about life past a third date. A relationship. Something. I’m not even sure what. And for a minute down there, when I realized it was you, I was . . .”
“Angry?”
I turn to stare at him. “Happy. For a split second, I was happy.” It almost physically hurts to spit the word out.
The stress lines around his mouth ease. “You were?”
“Past tense. Not now.”
The lines deepen again. “Is there anything I can do to take us back to that split second and keep us there? The split second when you were happy it was me? Because I’m so happy it’s you.”
I lean against the windowsill. “I had a meltdown this morning. Went to the club, danced it out like I was fighting an army by myself. Then I had an epiphany. I hate epiphanies.”
“Would it help if I told you mine?”
“I don’t know.”
He studies me and his body language shifts. He stands and slides his hands into his pockets. His shoulders are back, his feet braced slightly apart, chin up, his eyes not leaving mine. He is claiming all his space, and everything about his stance says he’s comfortable in it. “Here it is, Madison. I’m so into you, and I don’t want to hide it anymore. I was so into you before that night ever happened, and I fall harder every day. I didn’t want you to feel responsible for that, so I avoided you to keep from making it your problem. But here’s what I know. I can’t hide from you anymore, and I don’t want to. I was coming over tonight to tell you. I don’t need you to do anything about it. I just wanted you to know.”
It’s so Oliver. So him to keep it from me because he’s trying to make my life easier. And as mad as I am about that, I can also see how he’s tried hard to make sure he never put me in the same position again.
That, as it turns out, was all me.
“Epiphanies always end up being so much work,” I say. “By the time I left the club, I’d put in my notice. Then I had to come home and have a long heart-to-heart with Ruby. I had to tell her that I had fallen for you.”
His gaze sharpens.
“You, Oliver. Not the guy in the mask. All without kissing you.”
“You almost did this morning,” he says. “And I almost died.”
I almost smile. “I felt pretty bad about that for a while. But in hindsight, you deserved it.”
“Sorry, no,” he says, his voice stripped of humor. “Having you wrapped around me, offering me everything I could ever want from you in a whiskey voice, knowing I had no right to take it? It’s a special kind of hell. Is that what any kitten rescuer deserves?”
I don’t answer. I have no words. Also, I suddenly have a strong need to climb him like a tree.
He senses the energy shift, and sweet, biddable Oliver gets a gleam in his eye that I have never seen before. He prowls a few steps forward.
“Stop,” I say. He does, but I sense his coiled energy. “We married each other for money, Oliver. We’ll never be able to tell if these feelings are real or circumstance. That’s the other thing I told Ruby. I will always have that doubt.”
Oliver stands there, quiet for several long moments. “The split second of happiness you had, is it because you got access to your trust when we exchanged our Slurpee keychains?”
“No.”
“Could anyone convince you otherwise?”
Could anyone convince me this sense of being home anytime I’m with him is about a legal contract? I meet his eyes. “No.”
“Then why can’t that be true for me too? Because it is. I’m pretty sure I fell the second you corrected me about that volcano.”
I smile in spite of myself, but then it fades. “I want to believe you.”
He pulls a hand from his pocket and holds it out, palm up, empty. “If you have a choice, and this hand is proof by kiss”—he holds out the other one—“and this one is actual evidence that I did not marry you for money, which do you take?”
He’s asking for a leap of faith. He’s asking me to trust the friendship we built. He’s asking me to trust the kiss that happened before my dad yelled at me and Oliver’s startup funding fell apart.
I do know friendship. I have three of the best friends anyone could ask for outside, wishing as hard as they can for my happiness. And Oliver gave me true friendship before he ever needed my money. He gave me that mind-bending kiss before he ever needed my money.
I point to the hand representing the kiss.
He smiles and slides his hands back into his pockets. “About three days after I presented you with my idea, we got our funding. Turns out two of our employees have been sitting on nest eggs, and they believe in what we’re doing so much that they decided to invest. We have what we need to get to our finish line.”
I wrinkle my forehead, trying to process that. “That means . . .”
“That means I never needed to marry you. I told Josh that before the wedding. Showed him the paperwork.”
I feel dizzy. “But . . . why marry me at all if you never needed the money?”
“Because you did, Madison. And I always want you to have what you need.”
“Enough to give up a year of your life when you didn’t have to.” I let the full weight of that sink in.
He gives a tiny shrug. “It actually screwed up the plan I’d been putting together to tell you about the mask and win you over as me. I knew I’d have to wait until the divorce because otherwise, how could either of us know what was real and what was circumstance? I thought if I could wait out the year, you might have enough time to decide you like me.”
That’s it. I’m in his arms, and he wastes no time kissing me in the sweetest welcome . . . but only for a moment. Within a single breath, heat flares between us. I slide my fingers into the back of his hair, needing him closer, and he takes the kiss deeper until . . .
My eyes fly open. “Oliver.”
“What,” he murmurs, pulling his mouth away with extreme reluctance. “I’m working on payback.” He drops kisses down the line of my jaw, but I’m still in a state of shock.
“Oliver.” I push against his chest.
He lifts his head and looks down at me, his eyes hazy with the wanting I feel all the way down to my soles. “What’s wrong?”
“My knees went weak.”
“Oh.” He gives a serious nod. “Kissing me made your knees go weak?”
“Yes.”
“That’s bad,” he says. “Do you know what it means?”
“Tell me.”
“That you’re in danger of falling for me as deeply as I’ve fallen for you.”
A thousand kittens tumble in my belly. Angelic bells ring. I have developed an incurable addiction to his kisses, and nothing about it—not one thing—scares me.
“How deep, Oliver? Show me.”
And he does.